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This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It is impossible to block negative emotions from the workplace. Whether provoked by bad decisions, misfortune, or employees' personal problems, no organization is immune from trouble, and trouble agitates bad feelings. In many organizations, negative emotions are brushed aside or are altogether taboo. However, discounting or brushing aside negative emotions can be costly to organizations -leading to lost productivity and employee disengagement. For more than two decades, the author has studied workplace circumstances that evoke negative emotions, from exceptional organizational crises to everyday incivility. One fundamental finding is that few executives handle employees' negative feelings well. Many managers report that they do not know how to deal with negative emotions in the workplace. To address this condition, the author details how to improve competence and confidence in responding to negative emotions. She recommends specific actions to prepare for and step up to negative emotions at work -including anger, fear, and sadness, in particular. Promptly stepping up to negative emotions, the author points out, can stem interpersonal turbulence and keep satisfaction, engagement, and productivity intact. What's more, when negative emotions are acknowledged openly, the author argues, employees can learn to anticipate and interpret their colleagues' reactions to difficult circumstances more astutely. They grow to understand their own reactions better, too. With these improvements, appropriate responses to challenging situations can be made earlier, when adjustments are generally easier, more effective, and less expensive.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. Many projects are launched with great promise but lose traction and momentum during project delivery, when the real work of the initiative is underway. Shifting organizational priorities, changes in leadership, and distrust of information about the project's progress can scuttle a project's reputation and, ultimately, its chance for success. This self-perpetuating downward spiral can cause contributors to distance themselves from an effort that is losing support, cannot overcome inertia, or worse, is derailed. Even the most technically sound and strategically important projects can fall into this "cycle of doubt"and fail to meet their objectives. Building on previous work on project branding, the authors conducted a multisource, practice-based field investigation to seek insights on how to help organizations and project leaders understand, avoid, and recover from the cycle of doubt. Analyses revealed practical insight on three related issues: how to recognize when a project is vulnerable to the cycle of doubt; how to ensure that a project does not fall into a downward spiral of skepticism; and how to reverse negative momentum if a project begins to stall. The research found four main categories of doubt triggers that can sap support and lead a project into a negative tailspin. These warning signs are when strategic priorities change, sponsors appear equivocal, delivery hiccups occur, or communication missteps raise doubts. The authors offer eight action steps providing possible avenues by which vulnerable projects can successfully overcome or avoid a momentum slide. An additional checklist helps project leaders get a sense of how well (or poorly) their projects are positioned to forestall or recover from escalating doubts.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies can monetize their data by improving internal business processes and decisions, wrapping information around core products and services, and selling information offerings to new and existing markets. Adopting any of these approaches, however, requires management commitment to specific organizational changes and targeted technology and data management upgrades.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. To understand how advances in artificial intelligence are likely to change the workplace - and the work of managers - in coming years, you need to know where AI delivers the most value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In the past several years, the list of companies whose internal systems have been hacked has grown rapidly. It now includes such high-profile businesses as Target, JPMorgan Chase, Home Depot, Sony Pictures, Ashley Madison, and Yahoo. No industry appears to be safe from attacks. Unfortunately, the authors say, investment in security measures is only part of the answer; traditional methodologies can only do so much. To be effective, managers in charge of cybersecurity need to adjust their mindsets and become as open and adaptive as possible. In this article, the authors present a framework drawn from the knowledge and opinions of experts, including interviews with more than 20 experienced hackers. As the authors explain, hackers have two different mindsets depending on the stage of the attack: explorative and exploitative. An exploration mindset used in the early stages of an attack combines deliberate and intuitive thinking and relies on intensive experimentation. Once access to a system is gained, hackers adopt an exploitation mindset. An attack typically involves four steps: Step 1: Identifying Vulnerabilities If hackers think your company is worth attacking, they will examine it thoroughly for weaknesses, surveying the network information, organizational information, and security policies. Companies can protect themselves by adopting an iterative and adaptive process and making a point of conducting a high-level "footprint"of their systems on a regular basis. They should also make sure that employees are well informed on policies regarding sharing of information. Step 2: Scanning and Testing After a hacker has broken into your network, weaknesses in the applications running on those systems could become avenues for further unauthorized access. To protect your company, examine your network and identify potential weaknesses.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For Volvo Cars, pursuing digital innovation required fundamentally rethinking the organization, while also keeping the core business functioning efficiently. The company did so by balancing four interrelated competing concerns: (1) new and established innovation capabilities; (2) process and product focus; (3) external and internal collaboration; and (4) flexibility and control in relationships with external partners.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. If you want to lead your organization's technology transition, the first step is grasping the realities of digital transformation -rather than getting seduced by the hype.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Although additive manufacturing -also known as 3-D printing -was developed back in the 1980s, lately it has become increasingly talked about as managers look for ways to improve efficiency and reduce production costs. The appeal of additive manufacturing is its potential to reduce the need for expensive materials and energy, cut lead times, and make supply chains more efficient. Despite the promise of additive manufacturing, the authors argue, near-term expectations are overblown. Based on dozens of interviews, study of the literature on the history of materials and process technologies, industry meetings, and factory visits, they have identified three myths that need to be dispelled. The first myth is that additive manufacturing will allow producers to make parts of any complexity as easily and economically as parts that are manufactured in traditional ways (in other words, that it will make complexity "free"). The second myth is that additive manufacturing will prod manufacturing to become local. And the third myth is that additive manufacturing will allow producers to replace mass manufacturing with mass customization. In the authors'view, none of these expectations is likely to be realized in the next few decades. Although the authors say that additive manufacturing will make it easier to design lighter parts with complex geometries and internal cavities, they point to important drawbacks and restrictions. Knowing the parameters of what's possible to produce requires skills that are currently scarce. There are also safety and technical issues. Some of the safety concerns stem from the fact that the technology is new. Although many people are looking for additive manufacturing to bring manufacturing closer to markets and consumers, the authors believe that this scenario has been exaggerated, largely due to economies of scale.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. According to the authors, there are few questions in business more powerful than "What problem are you trying to solve?" The authors argue that leaders who can formulate clear problem statements get more done with less effort and move more rapidly than their less-focused counterparts. Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within those who do the core work of an organization, whether it be manufacturing, product development, or service. As valuable as good problem formulation can be, it is rarely practiced. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have suggested that the brain is prone to leaping straight from a situation to a solution without pausing to define the problem clearly. Such "jumping to conclusions"can be effective, particularly when done by experts facing extreme time pressure, like fighting a fire or performing emergency surgery. But, when making change in an organization, neglecting to formulate a clear problem statement often prevents innovation and leads to wasted time and money. A good problem statement has five basic elements: It references something the organization cares about and connects that element to a clear and specific goal; it contains a clear articulation of the gap between the current state and the goal; the key variables -the target, the current state, and the gap -are generally quantifiable, even if they cannot be measured objectively; it is as neutral as possible concerning possible diagnoses or solutions; and it is sufficiently small in scope that it can be tackled quickly. To tackle complex problems, executives need to complement good problem formulation with a structured approach to problem-solving. The authors recommend an approach using a modified version of the A3 form, which was originally developed by Toyota Motor Corp. to support knowledge sharing in its factories by summarizing a structured problem-solving effort in a single page.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. What is the value of data? Many businesses don't yet know the answer to that question. But going forward, companies will need to develop greater expertise at valuing their data assets.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The 2017 Data & Analytics Report by MIT Sloan Management Review finds that the percentage of companies deriving competitive advantage from analytics increased for the first time in four years. Incorporating survey results and interviews with practitioners and scholars, the report finds that companies'increasing ability to innovate with analytics is driving a resurgence of strategic benefits from analytics across industries. The report is based, in part, on MIT SMR's seventh annual data and analytics global survey, which includes responses from 2,602 business executives, managers, and analytics professionals from organizations located around the world.

In February 2008, as world markets slid deeper into economic decline, J. Michael Pearson joined Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceuticals company, then based in a quiet suburb of southern California. By August 2015, the stock price peaked, valuing the company at nearly $90 billion, up from $2 billion in 2008. In that time, Valeant had made over 100 acquisitions with total revenues growing from roughly $750 million in 2008 to over $10 billion in 2015. The explosive growth of Valeant in just seven-and-a-half years was not without purpose.

Online stores sell thousands of products and services. Despite all care, mistakes can get made. These mistakes can have severe implications for the seller. A contract once formed is normally binding on the parties. The seller gets bound to sell at the mistaken price. Can an online seller get out of the contract on the ground that the price was a mistake? The only court judgement on the theme is Chwee Kin Keong v. Digilandmall.com Pte Ltd, a judgement of the Singapore High Court. With reference to the judgement, the case explores pricing mistakes by online stores.

Vishant Patel, the founder of Patidar Exports Private Limited (PEPL), an export firm for cotton and other products in Ahmedabad in January 2017, was thinking whether to export cotton to Indonesia or not. He exported cotton to countries like China, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Vietnam, but not sure about Indonesia because of the strict regulation of the buyers in the country. Indonesia was the sixth largest importer of cotton in the world. Exporting to Indonesia could create a new market for Patel while meeting the standard requirements would increase the cost of his cotton. He was not confident whether Indonesian buyer would like to purchase Indian cotton at a higher cost when they had options like American and Australian sellers available.

A maker of paints and product coatings is considering introducing a new high-performance, environmentally-friendly hardwood coating called Lena. To proceed with the next phase of development, Pintura's VP of new product development must present a convincing analysis of the product's feasibility-along with a proposed marketing program. The VP must consider the relationship of the proposed product to the rest of the Industrial Finishes Group's product line, as well as how it would contribute to corporate and divisional objectives. The Pintura case can be used in a variety of classes, including an introductory marketing course, a capstone course, or a business-to-business (B2B) marketing course. The primary focus is on product-policy decisions. The most likely use for the case is in a module on product-line planning. It also can be used as a case on marketing planning.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 917523.

In 2006, Sophia Tannis, a 36-year-old professional with the U.S.-based multinational company CPA Solutions (CPA), who had worked internationally for many years, was asked by an influential leader at corporate headquarters in the United States to inject herself into a business-critical situation in Moscow. An established local competitor had been using various methods to damage CPA's reputation in Moscow, and Tannis had to decide between employing the usual approaches expected by her leaders-involving the courts, media, and outreach to customers-or taking a more informal, relationship-based approach, as her Moscow-based counterpart encouraged. Tannis had to make a choice that could impact the company's credibility, and she had to choose between strategies that were successful in North America and Europe and those proposed by her local advisors.

The Hershey Company has just received a purchase offer from Mondelez, another confectionery company, and students are thrust into the role of Layla Dylan, one of Hershey's board members. The Hershey Company has an unusual ownership structure, in which the Hershey Trust Company controls 9% of the shares and 80% of the voting rights. The Hershey Trust Company is charged with providing for the Milton Hershey School, a responsibility which can be interpreted as ensuring for the richness of the entire community of Hershey, PA. While the purchase offer for the Hershey Company makes business sense, it may interfere with the charter of the Hershey Trust Company. As a board member of both the Hershey Company and the Hershey Trust Company, Dylan must balance the two organizations' goals as she makes her decision.

In 2009 Mark Weick, Director of Sustainability at The Dow Chemical Company, faced a difficult decision. Dow had spent three years working steadily toward meeting its 2015 sustainability goals, but the recent acquisition of Rohm & Haas threatened to change all that. The ongoing 2009 global recession had diminished the capital resources Dow could use to improve sustainability. The acquisition increased the size of Dow and meant that the already diminished capital would need to be stretched further and that Dow would need to improve sustainability more than anticipated. Could Dow achieve its 2015 sustainability goal of improving energy intensity by 25% over 2006? Weick had an important decision to make. Should he adjust the 2015 energy intensity target, potentially weakening Dow's reputation as a leader in sustainable chemistry? Or should Dow aim to meet the 2015 goals, knowing that failure to do so could damage its reputation?

The online virtual learning (K-12) industry in 2017 remains an industry moving fast with many different players and stakeholders. While online virtual learning is beginning to make its way into school districts, it is far from being mainstream and a long way from full adoption. One company - Connections Education - is at the forefront of the movement. The case provides information on the company and the industry (historical and current as of 2017) and introduces the challenges the company faces in its quest to create a better way of learning for all students.