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A summary of Humana's restructuring of its business around its pillars.

The (B) case offers a detailed account of Wendell Weeks's innovation strategy at Corning, and how his approach played a critical role in the COVID-19 pandemic. It illustrates the company's philosophy of making long-term investments in promising new technologies and products well before others believed their time was ripe.

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the business landscape. It is also affecting the roles of top managers within firms. Our survey of more than 160 senior managers in Europe suggests that digitalization, rather than encouraging more decentralized forms of management, will lead to an expanded role for headquarters and further empowerment of top managers. While acknowledging the benefits of the digital transformation, in this Executive Digest we identify five key challenges for newly empowered top managers and offer solutions for these digitalization traps.

This case study of strategic contracting at Ticketmaster results in a process model for the execution of legally astute contracting. The findings are drawn from a qualitative case study of Ticketmaster led by its legally astute attorney-CEO Fred Rosen. The study offers a novel portrait of strategic legal decision-making and connects the private aspects of contracting with the legal, regulatory, and strategic environment.

The power motive, defined as the desire to impact the behavior and emotions of another person, has long been controversial. On one side, the exercise of power has been put forth as a fundamental human need greater in strength than the need to survive. On the other, it has been vilified for its potentially devastating consequences. We argue the latter view is distorted, and, by relying too heavily on it, we have come to misunderstand the essential nature of power and its use by leaders charged with driving performance. It is not the power motive that leads to corruption and tyranny, but rather how the power motive is channeled into behavior by other personality factors. Consequently, those charged with leader selection should place greater emphasis on how individuals with strong power motives differ in how they channel power. Doing so will support the selection of executives best equipped to deliver organizational performance.

Many employees unexpectedly were required to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. With this abrupt change came the challenge of blurred lines between career and personal life. Lacking designated home office spaces, countless individuals had to create improvised work setups in living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms -- wherever there was space. Moreover, the closure of schools forced many working parents to attempt productivity while concurrently supervising their children. As a result of these changes, numerous employees have experienced lower work productivity, lessened motivation, increased stress, and poorer mental health. One approach that may help employees going through the challenges associated with working from home is mindfulness. Mindfulness may be particularly beneficial as it can (1) help employees mentally disconnect from work when they need to; (2) improve individuals' attention to work tasks and thereby improve their performance; and (3) allow workers to better manage screen fatigue. In this installment of Work/Life Balance, we elaborate on how mindfulness may help employees deal with these work issues, explain how mindfulness can be cultivated, and provide a list of mindfulness techniques. We also provide a set of recommendations for managers and team leaders responsible for their employees' wellbeing and productivity.

Mentorship from other experienced individuals has become essential to entrepreneurs and their fledgling ventures, particularly in today's accelerators. However, even with the acknowledgment that mentoring and coaching improve an entrepreneur's likelihood of success, we know very little about the nuances of mentor-mentee relationships or the individual characteristics important to an entrepreneur's coachability. Therefore, we examined mentors and founders across entrepreneurial support organizations to investigate the factors that influence an entrepreneur's coachability, how coachability translates to venture outcomes, and whether or not the mentor-mentee relationship met the entrepreneur's expectations. We found that entrepreneurs that are more coachable are ultimately more successful during their time in these programs and are more satisfied with their mentorship experience. This article provides insights for the leaders of accelerators to improve mentorship opportunities and suggestions for entrepreneurs to improve their coachability.

Most manufacturing companies face the possibility of a product recall crisis, if not within their own firms, then certainly somewhere within their supply chains. Recall crisis management typically finds a home within literature on crisis management, public relations, communications, marketing and brand management, and related fields. However, this research seldom addresses the operations support that must be mustered behind the scenes. The tumultuous material flows that can occur during a product recall imply a supply chain disruption. An effective response during the heat of a crisis therefore requires the foundation of a well-oiled supply chain. In this article I draw on learnings from the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) literature, integrate them with important precepts from the general crisis management and product recall literature, and identify managerial best practices that will help managers better prepare for product recall crises.

Chinese companies have been more successful in catching up with and sometimes surpassing, their global competitors in some industries but not all of them. This holds true for markets in China and international markets. In this article, we show how both the demand and the supply sides of an industry explain these differences, in terms of the existence of market and capability ladders that can help a new competitor climb from the low end, though the middle, and to the top. We then propose several alternative strategies that multinational companies can follow to respond to growing Chinese competition and recommend strategies with the most potential for a particular market and industry.

Leadership development has long been a primary concern for businesses. In recent years, owing to the high cost of traditional leadership development programs, organizations have shifted attention to leader self-development initiatives to facilitate human resource development. This article examines why people develop themselves for leadership positions. Drawing from the subjective expressions of business practitioners from multiple countries, our study identifies variations in leader self-development patterns for leadership positions within the subjects' organizations. Our findings suggest that individual perceptions of leadership have a strong effect on leader self-development processes. We use the insights gained from our inductive approach to develop a four-factor leader self-development model that provides useful developmental strategies and prescriptions for business practitioners and their organizations.

This article develops a conceptual model that supports and aligns supply chain strategies with organizational culture and leadership styles. We examine various supply chain theories and organizational behavior concepts to develop an integrated supply chain: the human factor model. Based on the underlying dimensions of environmental uncertainty and product complexity, we propose a 2x2 typology to identify four different supply chain systems that can be used by organization leaders to identify suitable supply chain strategies and compatible people management practices. We provide a useful and practical framework to analyze the alignment between the external environment and the internal organization of a supply chain system.

Digital transformation is rapidly changing the competitive landscape and the war on talent for today's organizations. As part of this economy, organizations and their HR units must continuously reevaluate leadership structures and practices that exploit core competencies while allowing for innovation (i.e., leadership ambidexterity)and incorporate big data with predictive analytics. In this vein, understanding how HR executives can create better solutions around this problem remains sparse. Specifically, what frameworks can HR executives apply to identify potential alignment failures in leadership succession planning in light of newer emerging markets? What internal decision-making traps need to be recognized? Finally, what specific forms of data and evidence must test these plans for relevance and recharge and renew the talent-to-strategy pipeline? In this article, we examine these questions by reviewing the gaps in the literature and identifying through our four-step model how organizations can incorporate ambidexterity building as a leadership succession planning practice.

The internet brought disruptive change to the business landscape through the creation of a whole host of digital marketing tactics. But with these new tactical options has come the need for marketing managers to (1) prioritize what they wish to accomplish and (2) determine which digital marketing tactics to invest in. We consider these issues from the perspective of four business strategies: prospectors, analyzers, low-cost defenders, and differentiated defenders. In this article, we provide marketing managers with insights into how businesses pursuing various strategies approach these digital marketing issues, with the ultimate goal being to assist managers in the efficient and effective implementation of their firm's adopted strategy.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, different nations have adopted a variety of response strategies to fight and contain the new coronavirus. Such national response strategies can be classified into three categories based on their underlying philosophy: strict control with unlimited resources, relentless contribution with limited resources, and rough rationality with limited resources. We discuss the philosophies, characteristics, and performances of the three response strategies and when they should be adopted. We also examine what marketing innovation strategies enterprises should adopt to survive and grow their businesses in both the short and long term. This study provides important strategic implications for national policymakers and enterprises on the use of response strategies as well as marketing innovation tactics and strategies to be used both during and after the pandemic.

#MeToo has become a global phenomenon since 2017, when many famous women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment (SH) against many famous men. Our purpose here is to help managers of both sexes understand their role in the wake of the #MeToo movement. We reviewed recent research on SH and #MeToo from both academic and practitioner outlets to get a pulse on what is currently being written on these topics. We also studied data we collected on current attitudes and behaviors men and women are experiencing in the wake of #MeToo, as well as examined one of the newer forms of harassment, namely online SH. We use our data and research to explore actions managers can take to prevent SH and respond to it when it occurs. In doing so, we provide new insights for business practice that both managers and scholars need to be aware of, and act upon, in the wake #MeToo.

Simultaneously to creating economic value, the two founders were committed to creating social value and respecting the environment. Social value stemmed from employing mostly women from the poorest segments of the population on a full-time, unlimited basis -while the industry largely employed workers on a temporary basis. Furthermore, wages, benefits, and shared decision-making created a unique organizational culture where fairness, learning, and personal development were paramount. At the same time, hydroponic technology, specialized infrastructure, and internal processes resulted in the industry's lowest environmental impact. By taking up a USD 300k bank loan, the founders had recently purchased a 25-acre lot and set up an up-to-date greenhouse. They had plans to continue growing the company and enlarging their market presence but were unsure of their business skills and if the business' cash-flows would be enough to pull this initiative through. They started looking for investors. Would investors accept their unwavering commitment to their triple bottom-line way of doing business? How would they relate to a purely business-oriented management philosophy? How could the company grow profitably and simultaneously maintain its commitment to the creation of social value without impacting their return on investment? Would the founders and the organizational culture respond satisfactorily to the severe demands of growth?

In 2018, Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in a bold move transferred all its assets to a fund pooled with other General Partners and Limited Partners, called Blue Meridian Partners, to focus substantial long range investments in a few carefully chosen nonprofits. The fund was intended to find proven, scalable solutions to problems that trapped America's young people in poverty. In addition to discussing the merits and demerits of this new approach to philanthropy, the case poses questions on two particular investments (Youth Villages and Nurse Family Partners) and whether they should receive the next tranche of investments. The (B) case, situated in 2020, describes the many quick decisions taken by the fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls for social justice, and raises the question of whether and how these decisions are aligned with the long range strategy of the fund.

The (B) case situated in 2020 describes the many quick decisions taken by the fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls for social justice, and raises the question of whether and how these decisions are aligned with the long range strategy of the fund.