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This case explores a way to identify an industry by simply examining a set of financial ratios. Certain industries have unique financial statement items and, hence, unique financial ratios. Some, on the other hand, have a few financial ratios that are consistently high or low. Students will grapple with practical questions on the identification of various industries simply by analyzing sets of financial ratios. In a practical context at school or workplace, students will then be able to reverse the process, i.e., to identify and apply financial ratios to certain significant industries, such as a stock exchange, banking, insurance, oil and gas, IT consultancy, e-commerce, and pharmaceutical.

They may be turning great candidates away.

A new study reveals a silver lining: This syndrome may actually make you more likable.

Ecosystems are the result of a delicate balance between centripetal forces that push economic activities toward integration, and centrifugal forces that pull economic activities out onto the market. Ecosystems evolve when these forces change. For example, technological complementarities - the main source of centripetal force - are dynamic and may be commoditized, generalized, or standardized over time. Management and coordination also change: for example, open innovation practices enable firms to move innovation activities from the in-house R&D lab out into the ecosystem. This article discusses how such dynamics in technologies and management lead to ecosystem evolution.

AcademyOne, Inc. (AcademyOne) was a small privately owned software provider whose focus was on providing students with college transfer solutions. It operated as an educational technology company that provided software as a service (SaaS) products to simplify and streamline the college transfer and advising process. After surviving an economic recession and an industry lawsuit, the firm had regained its financial footing, and in 2021, now that it was financially secure, some of its long-term investors had asked to cash out their investments. AcademyOne's president and chief operating officer was tasked with looking for ways to grow the business and with valuing AcademyOne, with the end game of selling the business.

This case follows the decision-making of Connie Ovalspot, fictional head of human resources at Squarespace. Ovalspot is being called on to advise the CEO and board members on how to address white supremacy on the company's platform following a domestic terror attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. After the event, employees reached out to Squarespace executives to protest the existence of extremist and hate-related groups on the company's platform. They asserted that Squarespace had a responsibility to remove these profiles. Ovalspot is tasked with determining the most appropriate and prudent course of action, including drafting a corporate response to the Charlottesville tragedy. This case examines the intersection of a firm's responsibility to its strategy, employees, customers, and values, viewed through both a legal and social lens.

Twelve years ago, in 2010, the private equity firm New Mountain Capital acquired a little-known Wisconsin software company, RedPrairie, for $565 million. In September 2021 it sold that same company, now named Blue Yonder, for $8.5 billion to Panasonic. About $5.7 billion of the gain had come from organic growth, not acquisitions. That success wasn't driven by any specific lucky break, technology breakthrough, or new product. Rather, it was the result of continual investment and improvement in the company's management, strategy, and governance--the same approach that best-in-class private equity firms have employed for years across dozens of industries and thousands of companies. By explaining how New Mountain transformed Blue Yonder, this article shows how private equity firms create value for businesses and for the economy. And it underscores how much the PE industry has evolved since its inception.

Resignations are at an all-time high, and companies desperate to fill vacancies are trying everything from pay raises to trendy perks. But those interventions are falling short, because the real problem, as the author explains, is that so many jobs are stressful, meaningless, and unlovable. Buckingham's data on what keeps employees engaged (from his work at ADP Research Institute) suggests that companies should change their approach to performance management to take advantage of each employee's unique skills and passions. That necessitates three mindset shifts: viewing employees as the key stakeholders in the organization; moving away from standardization in performance management tools; and trusting employees to accomplish their performance goals the way they see fit. No company today is yet the full "Love + Work" organization that Buckingham describes, but lululemon, Walmart, Amazon, McKinsey, and Cisco are among those that have begun to embrace some of its characteristics and have seen improvements in both retention and overall performance.

Traditionally, the most reliable way for a firm to find its next wave of growth was to apply the capabilities of its core business in an adjacent market. But recently a new pattern has begun to emerge. More firms are learning the art of building large second cores--what Bain's Zook and Allen call "engine twos." Given that in the past five years, 60% of big public companies have seen their growth stall out or stagnate--often because of technological disruption--finding an engine two has become increasingly imperative. What does it entail? Successful engine twos have four factors in common. They target markets where the profit pool is sizable and growing or shifting, as Amazon's cloud computing business did. They have a differentiated competitive advantage, which is often built up through acquisitions, as happened at Disney+. They adopt entrepreneurial approaches, like Bradesco's digital unit, Next, and leverage the scale and assets of the original core, as the industrial cleaning company Ecolab's new water-purification business did. In combination these four elements magnify one another's effects, often creating businesses that have much greater potential than firms' original cores.

Contrary to what many people think, virtual health care, also known as telemedicine or telehealth, is much more than a cheap digital knockoff of in-person care. When used appropriately, it improves patient health, reduces costs, and makes care more equitable and accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Its use has soared during the Covid era--and the authors argue that providers around the world should aggressively strive to tap its full potential even after the pandemic abates. Pearl and Wayling take readers inside Kaiser Permanente and Intermountain Healthcare, two of telehealth's earliest adopters and most effective users in the United States. They show how telehealth can reduce expensive and unnecessary trips to the ER, reduce America's chronic-disease crisis, address disparities in care, make specialty care faster and more efficient, and provide access to the best doctors. And they outline what's needed to spur adoption to a fully telehealth-driven system. Employers, who currently provide health insurance coverage to nearly half the U.S. population, could drive such a change by banding together and designing new reimbursement and care delivery approaches. The resulting savings could amount to tens of billions of dollars a year.

As a Black man with three decades of experience in the corporate world, the author has a deep understanding of how to conceive and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas from the top down. Following the 2020 murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, he was approached by numerous executives who wanted to act to combat systemic racism and sought his advice on how to proceed. So White and his daughter Krista wrote the book "Anti-Racist Leadership" to share what he has learned. In this article, adapted from the book, White provides guidance for getting started. Leaders should listen to and learn from colleagues across the organization, enlist senior executives in the cause, audit the culture, and document what their companies are already doing to foster diversity and inclusion. They should then establish benchmarks for measuring progress, build "action learning teams" to spearhead the effort, and develop and communicate an overall plan. As the world goes into economic recovery mode, leaders have a brief window in which to reimagine their approach to the workforce. This article can help them seize the opportunity and bring fully inclusive cultures to the organizations they run.

Despite substantial regulatory reform following the 2008 financial crisis, financial firms are still suffering from fraud and other forms of ethical misconduct. As a result, they have collectively paid out more than $400 billion in fines over the past 12 years. A 2019 Harvard Business School study found that among a sample of Fortune 500 companies, more than two instances of internally substantiated misconduct occur each week, on average. It's becoming increasingly clear that the traditional approach to financial regulation--imposing formal rules and investing in a strong compliance function to ensure that institutions, managers, and employees comply with those rules--cannot protect firms against excessive risk-taking and financial misconduct. The authors of this article draw on their experience advising some of Europe's largest financial institutions to present an alternative approach to compliance that is based on the principles and discoveries of behavioral psychology. It involves understanding the contextual drivers of human behaviors and introducing small changes, or "nudges," to eliminate misconduct at the source.

The triple fit canvas is a sales framework designed to facilitate collaborative value creation between sellers and buyers. Inspired by the Blue Ocean Strategy canvas developed by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne and the business model canvas developed by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, the triple fit canvas is both a diagnostic and an action framework. It extends a limited, product-centric view to a broader, customer-centric perspective. It shifts the focus from selling existing products and services to helping create new ones. In this article the author details the key components of the triple fit canvas and describes how companies such as BMW, Konica Minolta, and GAP have benefited from it.

Though they've been warned for decades about the dangers of overrelying on gut instinct and personal experience, managers keep failing to critically examine--much less challenge--the ideas their decisions are based on. To correct this problem they need to think and act like scientists. That requires doing five things: (1) being a knowledgeable skeptic and relentlessly questioning assumptions; (2) investigating anomalies--things that are unexpected or don't look right; (3) devising testable hypotheses that can be quantifiably confirmed or disproved; (4) running experiments that produce hard evidence; and (5) probing cause and effect. Drawing on the experiences of Harrah's Entertainment, Sony, Bank of America, and Lego, Thomke and Loveman show how scientific methods can help companies discard ineffective practices, increase marketing and operational efficiency, boost customer satisfaction and sales, find new sources of growth, and even turn around struggling businesses.

For years business leaders have turned to peer forums--groups of four to 10 people with similar interests who meet regularly for confidential conversations--to share their problems, find support and insights, and learn and grow. But because such forums are small and private, many people don't know much about them. In this article two authors who have studied forums extensively open a window into them. Drawing on their research, Groysberg and Halperin explain the different types of peer forums, how they can benefit individuals in a variety of jobs and organizations, and the principles and practices that make them successful, as well as the challenges they sometimes face.

Do you keep postponing work you need to do? The problem probably stems from one of three things: your habits and systems (or lack thereof), your desire to avoid negative emotions (like anxiety and boredom), or your own flawed thinking patterns (which can make a task seem harder than it is). Luckily, there are simple strategies for managing each. To develop good habits, for instance, do your important work in a consistent pattern daily: After I do this, I do my deep work. Devise a system for starting new tasks (drawing on one you've handled well); that will make it easier to get the ball rolling. When a task makes you anxious, do the easiest part first and progress from there; motivate yourself to do a boring task with a reward for completing it. And if you're cognitively blocked, consider what would make a task impossible--and then identify its opposite. Novel work often is filled with friction. You must recognize that tension doesn't mean you're not making progress. And if a project still feels overwhelming, tackle it in small chunks of time, not big ones.

The CEO of a Toronto-based toy company is trying to decide whom to hire for a critical position in its Asia division. He has two strong candidates: a Chinese-American woman with little on-the-ground experience in Asia, and a white Texas-born man who has spent his entire career in Hong Kong and is fluent in Mandarin. The company's board expects the CEO to prioritize diversity. This fictional case study by David S. Lee features expert commentary by Daisy Auger-Dominguez and Yuting Wang.

A look at some new books exploring the topic of immigration, including " 8 Billion and Counting," by Jennifer D. Sciubba; "The Immigrant Superpower," by Tim Kane; "One Quarter of the Nation," by Nancy Foner; "Streets of Gold," by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan; and "Crossing Borders," by Ali Noorani.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Interpreter of Maladies" talks about the surprising arc of that book, why she's now writing in Italian, the writers who have most influenced her, and more.

The CEO of a Toronto-based toy company is trying to decide whom to hire for a critical position in its Asia division. He has two strong candidates: a Chinese-American woman with little on-the-ground experience in Asia, and a white Texas-born man who has spent his entire career in Greater China and is fluent in Mandarin. The company's board expects the CEO to prioritize diversity. This fictional case study by David S. Lee features expert commentary by Daisy Auger-Dominguez and Yuting Wang.