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At the BMW Group, Gregor Gimmy, a serial entrepreneur and former consultant, introduces the Venture Client (VCL) model to engage with start-ups and boost corporate innovation. The case discusses its initial success at BMW and the rationale that drove Gimmy to establish a new model of external corporate venturing (ECV). It also provides background information on the key forces shaping the auto industry today, the challenges faced by legacy automakers as technological developments accelerate, and the emergence of new rules and new players.

BotGo was started in 2007 by Ravi Panchal, an engineer, after he lost motivation to continue at a managerial role at his job. A hands-on technical person, Panchal was inspired to create an underwater tank-cleaning robot. He started BotGo by bootstrapping it with his savings and roped in his friends for key positions in the company. He also started workshops for robotics education in colleges in order to sustain the company; he called this initiative BotLearn. In 2009, BotGo was incubated and Panchal started franchises for BotLearn as part of his growth plans. This led to a crisis within the company, escalating to a point where Panchal was forced to consider options. This case highlights the importance of a product-to-market fit and examines the decision to franchise in view of the case facts. The case also points towards the mistakes in crisis management, with particular emphasis on channel management. Towards the end of the case, Panchal is faced with a dilemma on whether to continue with the franchises or close them down. The dilemma is further accentuated since Panchal's decision would ultimately affect the growth of BotGo as well as directly challenge his intention to franchise.

In August 2018, Felicia Wong, Chief Investment Officer at 88 Capital, the investment arm of a Hong Kong family office, was considering investing in a bike-sharing company. The bike-sharing business was booming in China, with the two dominant players Mobike and ofo rapidly expanding. Mobike had been acquired for US$3.4 billion by Meituan Dianping, a food delivery company. ofo also had unicorn status with a roughly US$3 billion valuation. The bike-sharing industry could potentially disrupt the transportation industry. Bikes had the advantage of being able to bypass gridlocked streets and were more environmentally sustainable than private cars. In addition, the use of bikes promoted a healthier lifestyle and offered a prospective solution to the last mile problem for commuters who used public transport. But despite the many advantages of using dockless bikes, the practice brought about problems as these bikes were parked indiscriminately on pedestrian walkways and pedalled on busy roads. The industry also had too many players in China. In addition, bike-sharing companies were not yet profitable. Companies had prioritised gaining market share over making profits to increase the value of their respective platforms. It was expected that the industry would become more valuable should city planners approve plans to redesign transport networks to accommodate bikes. As at August 2018, the low rental fees and high capital expenditures were proving to be unsustainable. Mobike was the largest player in China and were likely to survive the industry's consolidation phase. The firm had strategic partnerships to help it reach critical mass and improve its service offerings. Wong wondered if it was worth investing in Mobike at this stage.

When Jean-Philippe Courtois took control of Microsoft's global sales, marketing and operations in 2016, reporting directly to CEO Satya Nadella, he realised that he needed to lead the organisation away from an "inspection culture" towards a culture of learning and coaching. After a first phase of transformation focused on giving Microsoft's sales teams the right skills to accompany customers as they moved to the cloud, a second phase aimed to fundamentally transform their behaviours and mindsets. The case study describes how Courtois and his leadership team envisioned and executed a culture change effort consisting of harnessing technology to generate insights into employee and partner work patterns and enabling coaching conversations that would help staff more effectively leverage their time to serve customers and attain key results.

When the author became executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, in 2014, she faced a big challenge: moving the operational arm of the UN further along on the path toward behaving like a for-profit business--a journey begun by her predecessor eight years earlier. Faremo has accomplished this by creating a culture of discipline and a measured approach to risk-taking. Her experience includes a decade of development work, five years as Microsoft's director of legal and corporate affairs in Western Europe, and 10 years in the Norwegian government, during which she led four ministries. These roles helped prepare her for the daunting task of revamping how UNOPS prices jobs, increasing the percentage of business that comes from non-UN sources, and, recently, partnering with the private sector in a wind farm in Mexico--a move beyond simply performing services to investing assets in socially beneficial ways.

Thanks to technologies that enable constant, customized interactions, businesses are building deeper ties with their customers. Firms can now address customer needs the moment they arise--and sometimes even earlier. By employing "connected strategies," companies are dramatically improving their customers' experiences, boosting their own operational efficiencies, and gaining competitive advantage. In their research the authors have identified four effective connected strategies: "Respond to desire," which entails filling customers' requests quickly and seamlessly; "curated offering," or presenting personally tailored recommendations; "coach behavior," or reminding people of needs and goals and nudging them to act; and "automatic execution," or anticipating what people want and delivering it without even being asked. To get the most out of these strategies, firms must understand customers' privacy preferences, build new capabilities, and use the learning from repeated interactions to shape future ones.

For decades, Western executives of multinational brands seeking to expand globally have operated under a simple premise: Marketing content and channel selection should be customized to local markets, but Western marketing principles are universal. Firms are particularly quick to export media and ad strategies to developing markets, where advertising and media are more recent developments. Meanwhile, Chinese marketers have developed a unique approach tailored to China's mobile-first consumer. It relies on the creation of shareable, viral content and the presence of dominant, channel-straddling media giants. It is faster and cheaper and often more effective than the Western marketing paradigm. It also is more embracing of risk. For companies that hope to enter China or grow existing operations there, understanding the Chinese marketing mindset will be essential to achieving success. This article examines the adjustments Western companies must make to succeed in China--and around the world.

Many companies are protecting themselves against "climate risk"--the damage they might suffer from heat waves, flooding, and other effects of global climate change. But the smartest companies are also paying attention to "carbon risk"--the costs they will have to bear as governmental policies extract a growing price for CO2 emissions. These firms are setting "internal carbon prices" (ICPs), putting a monetary value on their own emissions to better prepare for success in a lower-carbon world. This article explains the process firms go through: measuring their direct and indirect emissions, ascertaining current external carbon prices (both explicit and implicit), predicting future ones, deciding what time horizons their ICPs should cover, and considering emissions-reduction goals. The authors then discuss how internal carbon pricing is helping companies make decisions about new investments, manage financial and regulatory risks, and develop long-term strategy.

According to an analysis led by Ranjay Gulati, during the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, 17% of the 4,700 public companies studied fared very badly: They went bankrupt, went private, or were acquired. But just as striking, 9% of the companies flourished, outperforming competitors by at least 10% in sales and profits growth. A more recent analysis by Bain using data from the Great Recession reinforced that finding, showing that the top 10% of companies studied didn't merely survive; their earnings climbed steadily throughout the downturn and continued to rise afterward. Among the companies that stagnated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, few had made contingency plans, according to the Bain report. "When the downturn hit, they switched to survival mode, making deep cuts and reacting defensively." How should firms prepare for a recession, and what should they do when one hits? This research roundup examines advice in four areas: debt, decision making, workforce management, and digital transformation.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues have traditionally been of secondary concern to investors. But in recent years, institutional investors and pension funds have grown too large to diversify away from systemic risks, forcing them to consider the environmental and social impact of their portfolios. Analysis of interviews with 70 executives in 43 global institutional investing firms suggests that ESG is now top of mind for these leaders and that corporations will soon be held accountable by shareholders for their ESG performance. To respond to this shift in focus, companies must publish a statement of purpose, provide investors with integrated financial and ESG reports, increase the involvement of middle managers in ESG issues, invest in robust IT systems, and improve internal systems for measuring and reporting ESG and impact performance information.

In 2018, the Project on Managing the Future of Work at HBS teamed up with the BCG Henderson Institute to survey 6,500 business leaders and 11,000 workers about the various forces reshaping the nature of work. The responses revealed a surprising gap: While the executives were pessimistic about their employees' ability to acquire the capabilities needed to thrive in an era of rapid change, the employees were not. The employees were actually focused on the benefits change would bring and far more eager to learn new skills than their leaders gave them credit for. This gap highlights a vast reserve of talent and energy firms can tap into: their own workers. How can a company do that? By creating a learning culture; engaging employees in the transition instead of shepherding them through it; developing an internal talent pipeline for the entire workforce; and collaborating with outside partners to build the right skills in the labor pools it hires from.

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that's a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers, or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others' thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees' vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

From Volkswagen's emissions fiasco to Wells Fargo's deceptive sales practices to Uber's privacy intrusions, corporate scandals are a recurring reality in global business. Compliance programs increasingly take a legalistic approach to ethics that focuses on individual accountability. Yet behavioral science suggests that people are ethically malleable, so creating an ethical culture means thinking about ethics not simply as a "belief" problem but also as a "design" problem. The authors suggest four ways to make being good as easy as possible: Connect ethical principles to strategies and policies, keep ethics top of mind, reward ethical behavior through a variety of incentives, and encourage ethical norms in day-to-day practices.

A decade of research into top executives shows that expertise can actually severely impede performance, in two important ways. The first is overconfidence: believing that brilliance in one area leads to competence in another. The second is when deep knowledge and experience leave leaders incurious, blinkered, and vulnerable--even in their own fields. The solution is clear: Rededicate yourself to learning and growth, and rediscover just a bit of what the Buddhists call "beginner's mind." Strategies that the most successful executives use to do so fall into three buckets: challenging their own expertise, seeking out fresh ideas, and embracing experimentalism.

After a salesman jokingly asks a female colleague if her appearance is the reason for her inclusion in a leadership program, his friend, the only other person present, reports the incident to HR. Then the female colleague must decide, in view of her company's zero-tolerance policy, whether or not to pursue a complaint. This fictional case study by J. Neil Bearden features expert commentary by Maria Galindo and Sarah Beaulieu.

The Presiding Bishop of the U.S.-based Episcopal Church speaks about love and unity in a time of deep division.

After a salesman jokingly asks a female colleague if her appearance is the reason for her inclusion in a leadership program, his friend, the only other person present, reports the incident to HR. Then the female colleague must decide, in view of her company's zero-tolerance policy, whether or not to pursue a complaint. This fictional case study by J. Neil Bearden features expert commentary by Maria Galindo and Sarah Beaulieu.

After a salesman jokingly asks a female colleague if her appearance is the reason for her inclusion in a leadership program, his friend, the only other person present, reports the incident to HR. Then the female colleague must decide, in view of her company's zero-tolerance policy, whether or not to pursue a complaint. This fictional case study by J. Neil Bearden features expert commentary by Maria Galindo and Sarah Beaulieu.

While they go about things in very different ways, every organization is actually in the same business: behavioural change. Whether it is a bank encouraging consumers to switch to their product; a government agency trying to get citizens to pay taxes on time;or a health agency interested in improving the consumption of medication, behaviour-change challenges abound. As a result, some of the smartest organizations have begun to embed behavioural insights (BI) into their everyday processes. The authors describe the four main ways that BI can add value to any organization, as well as four approaches that an enterprise can take to embedding BI in its work.

Our life outcomes are powerfully determined by seemingly trivial, repeated acts. Our health, for example, depends on thousands of daily choices-to eat well and exercise regularly, to avoid smoking, and to take medications as prescribed. Yet 40 percent of premature deaths each year result from suboptimal behavior. The authors argue that the most promising avenue for making behaviour change 'stick' is to take proactive steps to change our habits. They provide advice for achieving this by 'targeting the situation' and 'shifting cognitions'. In the end, they show that there is an enormous untapped opportunity at hand to enable sustained improvements in daily decisions on a collective level.