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This case documents the history and development of philanthropic work in providing quality education by CARE (Cooperation for Advancement Rehabilitation and Education) under the leadership of its chairperson, Seema Aziz. Seema started CARE in 1988 as a small voluntary effort to help the flood victims of the Sheikhupura town, Lahore (Pakistan) and later directed the organization's focus towards providing quality education to underprivileged children. After over a decade of efforts which led to the establishment of 6 CARE owned schools and adoption of 20 schools from the Government of Punjab, Seema was faced with an important decision which would shape the future of CARE. In September 2002, the government of Punjab offered CARE to adopt another 140 government schools. The offer had left Seema at a crossroads as accepting the offer would achieve CARE's mission by accelerating the process of spreading education. However, it would invite challenges associated with managing a rapidly growing organization, providing for additional funds and other organizational resources, and establishing a professional and well motivated Human Resource base to support the expansion decision which would have to be taken within a few months. On the other hand, refusing the government's offer would enable Seema to take CARE through a gradual process of growth ensuring control over policymaking and implementation, minimizing risks related to financial sustainability, building organizational and human resource capacities and above all preparing leadership capabilities necessary for a growing organization. For Seema it was indeed a tough decision. She felt that as she contemplated the offer to prepare CARE to take up the challenge, thousands of children lost hope for basic education and an opportunity to live like the privileged part of the society. While Seema's heart was truly tempted to take up the government's offer, her mind was well aware that she must choose her options wisely.

Southwest Creations Collaborative (SCC) was a non-profit social enterprise dedicated to promoting the employability and financial independence of poor immigrant women in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It sought to accomplish its mission by providing part-time and later full-time sewing and handwork jobs in a contract manufacturing business. SCC also provided many social program activities for employees, including onsite childcare, English lessons, health education, and computer classes. The organization's financial support came from a combination of contract work and grant funding. The two cases stretch through the life of SCC, from its inception in 1994 through the middle of 2008. Case (A) covers the initial formation of the organization in 1994, from the perspective of the founder and executive director, and leads to a decision point regarding a possible relationship with a social venture consulting group in 2005. Case (B) begins where Case (A) ends and concludes with decisions in 2008 about whether or not to expand the business in order to become more economically self-sufficient and less reliant on grants and donations, and whether to increase its impact by marketing its approach to employee social programs to local companies and other organizations.

Southwest Creations Collaborative (SCC) was a non-profit social enterprise dedicated to promoting the employability and financial independence of poor immigrant women in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It sought to accomplish its mission by providing part-time and later full-time sewing and handwork jobs in a contract manufacturing business. SCC also provided many social program activities for employees, including onsite childcare, English lessons, health education, and computer classes. The organization's financial support came from a combination of contract work and grant funding. The two cases stretch through the life of SCC, from its inception in 1994 through the middle of 2008. Case (A) covers the initial formation of the organization in 1994, from the perspective of the founder and executive director, and leads to a decision point regarding a possible relationship with a social venture consulting group in 2005. Case (B) begins where Case (A) ends and concludes with decisions in 2008 about whether or not to expand the business in order to become more economically self-sufficient and less reliant on grants and donations, and whether to increase its impact by marketing its approach to employee social programs to local companies and other organizations.

John Parsons, a senior vice president with Mission Federal Credit Union in San Diego, needed to decide whether to advocate for an initiative from a member of the credit union's board of directors to open a student-run branch in an inner-city region of San Diego. Such a branch would be ground-breaking-the first student-run credit union branch in the country open to the general community-and it would fit with Mission Federal's general philanthropic outlook, would be an example of social entrepreneurship and strategic philanthropy, and would have other advantages. But it would be located in an area far from current members, would take money away from other philanthropic efforts supported by long-term board members and give it to an effort proposed by a new and aggressive board member, in addition to other problems. Furthermore, the branch would become financially profitable only in the long run, if ever. Parsons needed to decide just how much he believed in this project.

Seventh Generation is a leader in the niche market for "green" household cleaning products in the U.S. It enjoys a unique reputation, strong branding, and fast growth. In 2008, while Seventh Generation is looking for ways to expand its customer base, its executive management is approached by Marketside, a subsidiary of Walmart set up to tap into the "green" market. The potential market that Seventh Generation could access through this partnership is enormous. But so is the risk of being associated with a retailer that has been heavily condemned in the past for its poor environmental and social record, and which Jeffrey Hollander, cofounder and chairman of Seventh Generation, has been publicly criticizing for many years. He must weigh the pros and cons of this opportunity, evaluate the risks, and make a decision on whether to accept Marketside's offer.

When people think about innovation in customer service, they usually think about technological or process enhancements that make service delivery faster or more efficient. Restaurants have introduced hand-held devices that buzz customers when their table is ready, and supermarkets use self-service checkout lines. While such innovations can simplify matters for customers, service organizations rarely stop to consider the overall psychology that shapes service encounters. Indeed, many key psychological variables that influence customer perceptions-the subtle enhancements that help define a positive experience-have yet to be fully defined or articulated. Organizations often measure the outcomes of service encounters in concrete terms such as on-time flight arrivals or the time to resolve a customer's call. However, the subjective outcomes-the emotions and the feelings-are more difficult to describe: Did the passenger enjoy the flight? Did the customer who called the service center with a problem walk away feeling better about the provider? Just as having a deeper understanding of systems dynamics and process analysis has pushed companies to re-engineer their operations to achieve explicit outcomes, findings from behavioral decision-making, cognitive psychology, and social psychology can point service providers to ideas for redesigning the psychological or implicit aspects of service encounters. In this article, the authors examine how three factors-emotions, trust, and control-shape customer assessments of service experiences and their overall view of service providers. Drawing on research conducted at companies including Harrah's, MGM Grand, Dell, Farmers Insurance, the Seattle Supersonics, and McKinsey & Company, they argue that organizations seeking to excel in customer service need to attack the "soft side"of customer management with the same type of intensity they have previously used to reengineer workflow and supply chains.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. We are going about the way we measure the return on investment in social media completely backwards. Effective social media measurement should start by turning the traditional ROI approach on its head. That is, instead of emphasizing their own marketing investments and calculating the returns in terms of customer response, managers should begin by considering consumer motivations to use social media and then measure the social media investments customers make as they engage with the marketers' brands. Handling the measurements this way makes much more sense. It takes into account not only short term goals such as increasing sales in the next month via a social media marketing campaign, or reducing costs next quarter due to more responsive online support forums, but also the long-term returns of significant corporate investment in social media. The authors show how you can implement this new kind of measurement and point to the benefits of doing so.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Over the past decade, and especially over the past few years, a number of the world's most widely respected companies have collapsed. The authors believe that a major, though not often mentioned, factor was these companies' traditional approach to risk management, which tends to look for risk in all the wrong places. Two fundamentally different views have evolved over the years on how risk should be assessed. The first and prevailing view -- termed the frequentist view -- is based solely on repetitive historical data, such as weather patterns. The second, or Bayesian, view considers risk to be in part a judgment of the observer, or a property of the observation process; repetitive historical data thus are essentially complemented by other kinds of information. Where there is a great deal of relevant data, this information plays a dominant role, with the integration of judgment making a substantial improvement over the traditional approach. Where there is little or no relevant data, judgment plays a dominant role, providing value under conditions beyond the scope of the traditional approach. Either way, recognizing the important, sometimes central, role of judgment can lead to more reasonable and realistic behavior -- in large part because we realize that judgment is not perfect and can be refined as more experience is acquired. The key point is that risk under the Bayesian approach can be measured quantitatively, whatever the amount and quality of the data. And rather than focusing entirely on the observed world, Bayesian risk assessment also reflects the consistency, reliability and precision of the observer. Many measures are being deployed to recover from the collapses and to build a more robust system that prevents future crises -- a shift from frequentist risk management to Bayesian risk management should be a part of this effort.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although standard economic theory (and common sense) dictates that customers should be just as willing to purchase carpeting priced at $500 plus delivery priced at $100 as they are to purchase carpeting with free delivery priced at $600, recent research suggests that price partitioning, the manner in which a total price is divided into components, affects customers' price perceptions, their willingness to purchase and even their likelihood of repurchasing from the same vendor. The challenge is deciding when to charge separately for extras and when to combine extras into a single total price. Whether "nickel-and-diming" your customers or "keeping things simple"is more effective for a specific transaction depends on a variety of factors, such as whether customers comparison shop, whether they are more sensitive to the prices of some components (delivery) than to others (carpeting), whether the price of one component is small or large relative to the others, whether the company controls the costs and quality of a particular component, and which components are most central to the customer's goals. The authors provide managers with a decision framework to determine when to separate what they charge into a number of parts, and when to roll everything into one price.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. How are organizations attempting to compete on their ability to capture, analyze and act on information? How do you win with data and analytics? MIT Sloan Management Review conducted a global survey of nearly 3,000 executives to learn how they're turning the data deluge and analytics into competitive advantage -or trying to, anyway. The major comprehensive analysis is still to come, but in these two companion articles ("10 Insights"and "10 Data Points"), readers will find an early snapshot of how managers are answering the most important question organizations face. To answer that question, SMR has teamed with the IBM Institute for Business Value to build a new innovation hub and research program called "The New Intelligent Enterprise." Through the SMR and IBM IBV collaboration, The New Intelligent Enterprise aims to help managers understand how they can capitalize on the ways that information and analytics are changing the competitive landscape. What threats and opportunities will companies face? What new business models, organizational approaches, competitive strategies, work processes and leadership methods will emerge? How will the best organizations reinvent themselves to use technology and analytics to achieve novel competitive advantage? How will they learn not only to be smarter, but to act smarter?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As information technology becomes increasingly critical within large, global organizations, chief information officers are being held to higher standards. In addition to streamlining business processes, reducing enterprise costs and improving work force effectiveness, top management also wants the IT department to be a strategic business partner -to forecast the business impact of emerging technologies, lead the development of new IT-enabled products and services, and drive adoption of innovative technologies that differentiate the organization from competitors. Although organizational charts and standardized processes can be helpful, the authors find that these traditional tools are not flexible enough to support the types of internal and external collaborations and partnerships that large, global IT organizations need to maximize value. The key to delivering both operational excellence and innovation, they argue, is to allow innovative solutions to emerge unexpectedly through informal and unplanned interactions between individuals who see problems from different perspectives. Based on their research at Monsanto and 11 other large companies, the authors argue that CIOs who learn to balance formal and informal structures can create global IT organizations that are more efficient and innovative than organizations that rely primarily on formal mechanisms. The authors found that organizational network analysis provides a useful methodology for helping executives assess broader patterns of informal networks between individuals, teams, functions and organizations, and for identifying targeted steps to align networks with strategic imperatives.

From the moment Mulcahy stepped into her job as CEO, in 2001, the Xerox board began discussing who would succeed her. Looking back on the long process of grooming and choosing her successor, she acknowledges the wisdom of having started that conversation a lot earlier than might feel comfortable. It allowed ample time to give the four candidates developmental responsibilities and visibility with the board. Meanwhile, Mulcahy sent honest signals to them about what the possibilities were if they didn't get the job, in an effort to keep their talent within the company. She felt that pitting them against one another in a classic "horse race" would be dysfunctional for Xerox. In July 2009 Ursula Burns succeeded Mulcahy, in the first woman-to-woman CEO handoff among Fortune 500 companies-and became the first African American woman to lead a large U.S. company. The board's confidence in her had been well established long before, and the final transition was accomplished without drama.

Do investments in your employees actually affect workforce performance? Who are your top performers? How can you empower and motivate other employees to excel? Leading edge companies such as Google, Best Buy, P&G, and Sysco use sophisticated data-collection technology and analysis to answer these questions, leveraging a range of analytics to improve the way they attract and retain talent, connect their employee data to business performance, differentiate themselves from competitors, and more. The authors present the six key ways in which companies track, analyze, and use data about their people-ranging from a simple baseline of metrics to monitor the organization's overall health to custom modeling for predicting future head count depending on various "what if" scenarios. They go on to show that companies that compete on talent analytics manage data and technology at an enterprise level, support what analytical leaders do, choose realistic targets for analysis, and hire analysts with strong interpersonal skills as well as broad expertise.

With the best of intentions, companies up and down supply chains experiment with isolated efforts to improve sustainability-only to encounter a long string of unanticipated consequences, often in the form of financial, social, or environmental costs. That's partly because most firms respond in a piecemeal way to pressure from customers, shareholders, boards, employees, governments, and NGOs. For instance, they demand that suppliers change their materials to environmentally friendly ones or move manufacturing closer to end markets to reduce emissions from transportation. And they tweak their own operations by using compact fluorescent lamps, recycling more of their materials, and so on. Lee's research shows that it's much more effective to take a holistic approach to sustainability and make broader structural changes, as shirt manufacturer Esquel, steelmaker Posco, and others have done. Such changes can include reinventing processes, developing new kinds of relationships with business partners, and even collaborating with competitors to achieve scale. Stakeholders increasingly hold corporations accountable for supply chain partners' actions, as we've learned from widely publicized recalls of tainted pet food and lead-laden toys. Clearly, sustainability is a competitive concern. The core managers overseeing your supply chain must own and tackle it as aggressively as they do cost, quality, speed, and dependability.

Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline and The Necessary Revolution, talks about the challenges of leading organizations at a time when their supply chains need to be radically transformed. The first challenge is building an understanding of the larger system in which any organization exists. The second is learning to work with parties throughout that system, such as NGOs that can provide access to crucial knowledge and expertise. The third challenge is developing a different attitude about sustainability: Being "less bad" is not a vision that can inspire people to undertake large-scale change. These supply chain challenges are all leadership issues, but they are not restricted to chief executives. Leadership in this area can come from many places in the organization, including technical and process specialists, and even from the outside. What's important to effecting change across a supply chain is passion, an ability to form networks, organizational savvy, and a recognition of the realities, such as finite resources, that are now asserting themselves.

Few people outside the supply chain function used to care where products came from. Nowadays, everyone from company leaders to interest groups to consumers wants to know something, if not everything, about a product's origins. Steve New, of Oxford University, explores the technology, logistics, and inevitable opportunities and risks involved in exposing your supply chain to the world. The new tools for making supply chains transparent are proliferating. They range from sand-grain-size radio-frequency ID tags embedded in products, to customer-facing online databases that allow any comer to probe a product's history, to webcams that show what's going on at suppliers in real time. Managing such information so that it's accurate, useful, and secure is no small task. But complex as the logistics may be, the benefits to a company are often well worth the effort. Transparency, if wisely marketed, can win the confidence of consumers who are inclined to buy your products and even that of potentially hostile interest groups. An unfettered, granular view into your own operations can also help you identify problems and, ultimately, strengthen the efficiency and integrity of your supply chain. Nonetheless, power that's so accessible can easily be wrested from a company. Leaders must remain on top of the vast wells of supply chain information at their fingertips so that they can analyze-and then wisely reveal-what they find before outsiders do.

Conventional financial tools can lead to supply chain mistakes. Most managers use the discounted cash flow (DCF) model to help them make decisions such as where to locate a new manufacturing plant or whether to use a foreign or domestic supplier. But DCF typically undervalues flexibility-and as a result, companies may end up with supply chains that are low cost as long as everything proceeds according to plan but extremely expensive if problems arise. De Treville, of the University of Lausanne, and Trigeorgis, of the University of Cyprus, argue that you can avoid this pitfall by complementing a DCF analysis with a real options valuation. This technique lets you put a dollar figure on flexibility in the supply chain and helps you assess the value of having direct control. The authors explain how a real options approach helped the Swiss company Flexcell decide whether to locate a new plant at home or abroad. The CEO was able to show his board that the flexibility afforded by a factory near company headquarters would more than make up for the 15% per unit cost savings that would have been realized at a factory elsewhere. He also demonstrated that the costs resulting from a disruption to a Swiss plant would be much lower than those resulting from a disruption to a foreign plant. The decision to manufacture at home has paid off handsomely, especially in view of the uncertainties created by the current economic crisis.

Members of the HBR Advisory Council share their insights on the sustainability performance of their company's supply chains. Many say they feel hindered by forces beyond their control, such as cost, complexity, lack of information and know-how, and the sense that customers and investors are not deeply concerned about sustainability issues. And they overwhelmingly cite financial concerns as the chief obstacle to sustainability innovation in their supply chains.

Until a few years ago, General Electric believed that its products could virtually market themselves. Marketers had been limited to passively pushing information to those centrally responsible for innovation-typically in R&D or engineering-with the result that brilliant minds were languishing in dead-end jobs. When it came to discussions about corporate strategy, marketing wasn't at the table. But as GE's businesses matured, the company realized that it could no longer win simply by launching increasingly sophisticated technologies or taking existing technologies to new markets. To succeed, GE would need a marketing engine that could collaborate directly with customers and lead to new markets-one rooted in standards as rigorous as those for functions such as finance and human resources. CEO Jeff Immelt issued a mandate that marketing should be a vital operating function across GE and an engine for organic growth. The marketing team took on the challenge of identifying and codifying from scratch the skills it would need. The result was a marketing framework for the entire company along three dimensions: principles (creating a common language and standards), people (getting the right leaders in place), and process (including very specific measures for grading performance). Marketers took their place alongside technologists and had a voice earlier in the process, as GE's innovation expanded to include ideas grounded in customer needs and market trends.

These days more companies are inviting customers to help them design products. Now a few are taking things further and including their other stakeholders-employees, suppliers, distributors, and even regulators-in "co-creation" efforts, too. By focusing on improving the experiences of everyone involved, such firms are achieving breakthrough insights, lower costs, new revenues, and new business models. Consider how this worked at France's La Poste, which wanted to expand package delivery and banking services in light of a decline in its mail business. La Poste had three obstacles: unmotivated union tellers, customers disgruntled by long waits, and frustrated local managers, who felt caught in between. The company set some high-level goals and invited all three groups to decide how to reach them together. To get tellers' buy-in, La Poste gave them a say in their schedules. In workshops, the groups figured out when each office should be open and how its space should be configured. The results: a 50% decrease in waiting time, a jump in satisfaction for customers, soaring job satisfaction among tellers, and significant growth in package delivery and banking, despite the recession.