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Describes how a corporate entrepreneur shapes an internal growth venture within the company, mobilizes the resources that are needed to implement the venture, and achieves success. Complementing his entrepreneurial behavior, however, is the support that he receives from several senior managers in the firm. Allows a careful examination of the challenges for corporate entrepreneurship in a large multinational firm and the roles that senior executives have to play to support it.

Describes the founding of a fair trade coffee company. Asks participants to develop a business plan for the introduction of fairly traded Mexican coffee into the Dutch market.

Examines the key elements and principles behind Haier's performance management system and the organizational behavioral context in which it was implemented. Haier's performance management system constituted a significant competitive advantage and was a key factor in the company's transformation from a small, backward, collectively owned local company to the number five player in the global white goods industry. The strength of the case lies in the universality of the key principles behind Haier's management performance systems.

Discusses the product launch process at Logitech for a product in a new product category. Asks students to recommend target markets for introducing a (potentially) disruptive technology.

In April 2002, Venkatesh Tulluri, then strategy director of Rhodia's technical fibers division, announced to management that he wanted to engineer a spin-off and management buyout (MBO) of Kermel, a small company within Rhodia's portfolio. Kermel was a niche player in the specialty fiber market that had not been included in the ongoing company's asset divestment program. Investigates the evolution of the MBO process and the hurdles Tulluri has to overcome to give life to his endeavor.

Describes the leadership dilemmas facing the top management team of a leading Indian pharmaceutical company--the first in its industry to be listed on the NYSE. Much admired for its impressive growth, Dr. Reddy's stands at a crossroad. How much emphasis should it place on the legacy business of active pharmaceutical ingredients and generics that have brought the company its current stature, and how much should it focus on future business like specialty pharmaceuticals and discovering new chemical entities? The two represent different business models and straddling the strategy, organization, and human resources demands of each one is the challenge for Dr. Reddy's top team.

Obstacles to high performance can be as profoundly demotivating on the shop floor as they are on the battlefield. And for high performers, factors they can't control can hinder their best work and may drive them to look elsewhere. The ones who stay behind may be the ones who don't care.

We like to think enlightened managers understand employee motivation. But research conducted by Stanford's Chip Heath suggests that managers are not as good at judging what drives their employees as they might think. The key to improving your ability to understand motivation is to appreciate that employees are driven by the same things you are.

It sounds simple: Compensate managers with stock or options, and they'll do what's best for shareholders. But it doesn't always work that way; more than a few executives have cashed in while shareholder value burned up. To fix that problem, Roger Martin contends, boards need to abolish stock-based compensation and replace it with bonuses based on real earnings growth.

David Gergen, adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, knows a thing or two about how leaders get their messages across. In this edited e-mail interview with HBR's Gardiner Morse, Gergen discusses the power of persuasion and the theatrics of communicating well.

Organizations differ considerably in their rate of performance improvement. Because any improvement trajectory is the fruit of a series of improvement projects, the proximate cause of this variation among organizations lies in the varied ways these projects are managed. The success of these projects depends, however, not only on the goals and the efforts of the project team, but also on the context within which the projects are undertaken--and, more specifically, on the competencies on which the projects can draw. It is variation in these competencies--the organization's underlying "performance improvement capability" (PIC)--that explains the substantial and sustained differences in rates of improvement across organizations. This article describes the efforts of several hospitals to strengthen their PIC through five key components: skills, systems, structure, strategy, and culture.

The decision to adopt a new technology in the health care setting is merely the first step in an implementation journey. Whereas some new technologies are readily embraced by those who must use them, most are met with some resistance. In some cases, members of diverse groups--including administrators, clinicians, and technicians--must work together for a new technology to take hold effectively, becoming incorporated into routine practice in an organization. This article reports on a qualitative study of hospitals adopting a new technology for minimally invasive cardiac surgery that uncovered substantial differences in both approach and implementation success. Four case studies are presented to illustrate distinct, tacit frames held by the leaders of each implementation project and how these influenced the team learning process and, in turn, implementation success.

The importance of hospitals learning from their failures hardly needs to be stated. Not only are matters of life and death at stake on a daily basis, but also an increasing number of U.S. hospitals are operating in the red. This article reports on in-depth qualitative field research of nurses' responses to process failures in nine hospitals. It identifies two types of process failures--errors and problems--and discusses the implications of each for process improvement. A dynamic model of the system in which frontline workers operate reveals an illusory equilibrium in which small process failures actually erode organizational effectiveness rather than drive learning and change in hospitals. Three managerial levers for change are identified, suggesting a new strategy for improving hospitals' and other service organizations' ability to learn from failure.

High performance is often attributed to an organization's culture. However, culture can just as easily undermine performance when it blinds decision makers to important performance issues and entraps them in unfortunate courses of action from which they cannot disengage. The dynamics of cultural entrapment are explored in the case of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, in which pediatric cardiac surgeries continued for over a 14-year period despite evidence of poor-quality care and performance that was far below that of other comparable pediatric surgical centers. A single organizational process of behavioral commitment explains how the cultural mindset originated and why it persisted. The sequence of small, public, volitional, and irrevocable action; socially acceptable justification for that action; and the potential for subsequent activities to validate or threaten the justification created a causal loop that stabilized subsequent action patterns.

Labor-management cooperation has been regarded for many years as a panacea for organizations' competitive woes. The academic and popular presses have lauded the joint efforts of companies and their unionized workforces to come together to solve companies' competitive problems while saving employees' jobs. Moreover, research on and examples of labor-management cooperation have found that through joint efforts, unions and firms can improve organizational performance and employee outcomes. Increasingly, however, it appears that cooperation is often but a short-lived phenomenon. This article examines a major initiative of labor-management cooperation that was undertaken to facilitate the fundamental restructuring of the health care delivery system in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. For 10 years, management of more than a dozen hospitals and representatives of the Minnesota Nurses' Association came together to negotiate and manage the process of system integration, rationalization, and delivery improvement. The results were remarkable. Yet, just a few years later, despite the success, only remnants of labor-management cooperation remain in these hospitals. This article examines the reasons for this demise and provides lessons for those engaged in cooperative undertakings that may help extend the life of those initiatives.

The boom-to-bust cycle for Internet start-ups has been remarkably compressed. This article reports on a longitudinal study of eight industries that found that only 43% of independent B2B exchanges survived in the two years following Spring 2000. Most of these start-ups failed because they misdiagnosed their advantage over existing ways of doing business. In reality, the Internet is mainly about reformed applications that facilitate interactions and squeeze costs but do not change the basic structure and functioning of existing markets. Incumbents prevail when a technological disruption reforms an existing market rather than completely redefines industry boundaries and norms. Building on the lessons of past industry shakeouts, this article suggests that the prospective winners in digital markets will be found in three camps: adaptive survivors who find a protected niche by retooling their strategy for reformed markets; acquisitive incumbents who acquire the assets of pure-play companies at steep discounts; and pure-play start-ups that capitalize on their early-mover advantages in breakthrough markets.

The PC industry was in terrible shape in 2001. As Sony strived to fit the PC into a larger business model that included the sales of digital cameras, MP3 players, camcorders, TVs, cell phones and PDAs, the latter half of 2002 turned out to be financially very challenging for the PC business. Analysts were questioning the sustainability of Sony's successful entry and establishment of its PC business in the United States. Chronicles the 1995 to 1996 (re)entry efforts and results of the major Japanese firms. Describes the history of the U.S. PC as well as the U.S. PC market environment and developments during the period from 1995 to 2000.

Matt Grant, a part-time MBA student, is developing a free publication that lists a calendar of upcoming athletic events, including road races, walks, triathlons, biathlons, bicycle tours/races, open track meets, and multisport activities in the greater Boston region. In his spare time, he launched a trial edition, and the response is so encouraging that he is on the verge of giving up a promising career with a big electronics company to pursue his new venture full time. He is wondering how to break the news to his wife, who is pursuing her own career as a lawyer.

Changes came hard at Stein, Bodello, & Associates, Inc., a consulting civil engineering firm employing 100 people in four branch offices. Following a move to a new location and an upgrade of the business and project management functions, some unhappiness developed in the ranks of middle management. Concerns leadership and change but from a bottoms-up perspective: through the eyes of subordinates. Focuses on the need to learn how to manage the boss.

An interpersonal and systems case in which Jim Davis, who holds a staff position, is responsible for results that can be achieved only through influencing line (branch) managers over whom he has no direct authority. Lends itself to role plays of different kinds, yielding useful insights into the process of influence without direct authority.