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This case presents a dilemma that professional golfers face when having to choose a target point for landing the ball. Key to this case is to acknowledge uncertainty as reflected in less-than-perfect accuracy. Thus the ball will land in a ""cloud"" around the intended target. On such a cloud, some spots (e.g., the fairway) are better than others (e.g., sand bunkers or rough). There is therefore a conflict between advancing the ball as close to the hole as possible, while at the same time reducing the chance of being in trouble on the next shot. The idea is to find a sweet spot between these two competing goals. To operationalize this problem, we use data from the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tour to estimate the average number of shots to complete the hole as a function of (i) distance to the hole, and (ii) type of surface (fairway, rough, recovery, sand, or the green). The case comes with a companion Excel spreadsheet, UVA-QA-0953X, which shows a map of a classical hole in the PGA Tour (the 10th at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles). This Excel file also displays a heat map of a bivariate normal around any chosen target, and a heat map with the average number of strokes to complete the hole. Students' goal is to understand the model and use it to find a good target.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case UV8782

Autosalon Klokočka Holding s.r.o. (Autosalon Klokočka), a Czech Republic-based car dealership, needed to change its business ways. A family-owned car dealership, the company was founded in Prague in 1988 by Jan Klokočka. In the last thirty years, the company had grown into one of the largest authorized car dealers in the Czech Republic by providing a comprehensive range of services to car owners. But the automobile industry had been among the most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As automotive companies braced for a revival, they had to be prepared to undergo significant modifications to alter how they operated and generated value for consumers. Despite its continuous expansion over thirty years, Autosalon Klokočka had been experiencing substantial slowdown and financial losses. In 2020, the company recorded a significantly lower revenue than in the previous years. By early 2022, it was still unclear how long the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic would last and how changes in customer behaviour and capabilities, supply chains, channels, original equipment manufacturer strategic choices, and other crucial factors would affect Autosalon Klokočka. As the company found its financial position vulnerable, Jan Klokočka needed to determine how to mitigate negative consequences and create growth opportunities. How could the firm adapt its existing business model to improve profits in the next three to five years?

In 2021, Robert, a highly qualified immigrant from the United Kingdom, had recently joined PLT Consulting (PLT), a multinational management consulting company, as a junior consultant in the Tallinn, Estonia, office. This professional services firm had a strong international brand. However, Robert soon realized that the organization catered both internally and externally to more local demands. In particular, his lack of local language proficiency made the organization a challenging work environment for him, both professionally and socially. Robert raised the issue with his boss, who invited him to a meeting with representatives from PLT's human resources department and his work team. What concrete steps could they suggest that would help resolve the situation?

Marine transport is the most cost-effective way to move large volumes over long distances, and container shipping is the backbone of international trade in goods. Yet shipping contributed 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and the deep-sea segment, which included long distance trade lanes such as Asia to Northern Europe and Asia to North America, warranted special focus because they accounted for 80% of maritime transport's total emissions in 2019. New International Maritime Organization regulations that came into force in January 2023 mandated the annual calculation and grading of each ship of more than 5,000 deadweight tons. Vessels that received a grade of A, B, or C were compliant, while those graded D or E had time limits for getting back into compliance or removal from service. More significantly, the standards for grading required annual improvements in efficiency. This meant that a brand-new vessel built with the latest technology that was initially graded A could over time become graded E and no longer be legally operable if no upgrades were made. This is the supplementary spreadsheet for the case, 623006.

Founded in 578 AD, Kongo Gumi was a family-owned business until 2006, when the firm went into liquidation to pay its creditors. While its demise is briefly covered, the case study is focused on its longevity. A renowned builder of traditional temples, in a country where these are major tourist attractions, Kongo Gumi has left an indelible mark on Japanese culture and history. Many of the temples built by its carpenters are listed and some are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The unique needs of companies at different growth stages are best served by a marketing organization designed to meet the organization's goals and a CMO with the right skills. Early-stage companies need a scrappy generalist, developing companies need a scale specialist, and mature companies need a strategic marketing leader. Based on research and interviews with 100 CMOs, the authors identified three key traps in designing marketing organizations and ways to avoid them.

The "Moral Complexity in Leadership" series of cases and teaching notes help business instructors harness the power of fiction to prepare students for the moral and ethical dilemmas they will face throughout their careers. Meaningful fiction challenges students intellectually and emotionally; it reveals the inner worlds of human players and enables learning that can be difficult to access through case studies, commentary, or reporting. Through literature, students will wrestle with the kinds of problems they will face as leaders looking to make courageous decisions aligned with their moral codes. The works in this series represent a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and cultural frameworks; the characters are complex and contradictory, and the systems within which they operate (whether family, organizational, or cultural) influence them in varied ways. These cases have been taught to executive, full- and part-time MBA student audiences for many years. The series aims to increase students' understanding of moral frameworks and to enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. This installment of the series, "Hubris and Humility," examines the short story "Dead Men's Path," by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In the story, Michael Obi, the new headmaster of the Ndume Central School, hopes to modernize the school and surrounding community, both of which are deeply rooted in traditional ways and customs. However, he ultimately pays a high price for his "misguided zeal," which did not take into consideration the context or the interests of the school's stakeholders. Obi's experience offers powerful lessons to leaders tempted to implement their ideas in--and impose their values on--organizations or communities before taking the time to listen and learn. It highlights what can happen when leaders ignore the risks of hubris and fail to recognize the limits of their perspective.

This background note describes the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy (WtE) plant in Copenhagen, which merges traditional waste incineration with a combined heat and power (CHP) plant and air pollution control (scrubbing) technology, and had plans to add carbon dioxide (CO2) capture technology to become the cleanest incineration plant in the world. The note also provides an overview of integrated waste management, waste incineration, district heating, Amager Bakke's process, and the future of waste management in Denmark.

The Nuqul Group was established in 1952 by Elia Nuqul, a Palestinian refugee who fled his hometown in 1948 with his family to Jordan. He overcame many hardships in his initial years there, but subsequently started a trading business that grew to become one of Jordan's largest family businesses. Its flagship company, Fine Hygienic Holding (FHH), was a leader in hygienic paper products across the Middle East and North Africa. In March 2023, Ghassan Nuqul, a second-generation family member and chairman of FHH, was at a crossroads. Following his father's death in 2022, Ghassan and his three siblings decided to split the Group's assets among themselves so that each branch of the family could forge its own path. They were in discussions to finalize the details of the agreement. What would this mean for the future of the family? Would it make the family stronger, or would it weaken family ties?

In 2013, Aoibheann O'Brien and Iseult Ward founded FoodCloud, a non-profit social enterprise that aimed to address food waste and food insecurity issues. Through its technology platform, Foodiverse, FoodCloud connected surplus food from retailers with community groups in need. By 2022, the company had partnered with Tesco Ireland and Tesco UK, and was rolling out its solution in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. O'Brian and Ward were eager to scale their solution globally, but funding the growth of a non-profit posed a challenge. Options included spinning off Foodiverse into an investment-seeking entity or retaining non-profit status to raise a social impact bond. The founders also sought to amplify their impact in Ireland to position the country as a leader in food waste reduction. The co-founders wondered whether to focus on developing an exemplary local sustainable food system or expand their proven technology solution globally, and where to find the funds for their chosen path.

A perennial challenge for executives in established firms is deciding how and when to respond to emerging technologies. This article demonstrates that the way emerging technologies play out in established industries differs according to how the business system is affected. Some have primarily a supply-side effect (on how a firm in the industry creates its product), while others have a primarily demand-side effect (on how users consume the product). Supply-side effects play out over relatively long periods of time in a predictable way, with incumbent firms executing similar strategies though at different speeds. Demand-side effects are faster-acting and more volatile, with incumbents often experimenting with a range of different business models as they seek a viable way forward in a changing market. By understanding these important differences between supply-side and demand-side effects and being able to anticipate the typical patterns of responses from incumbents, executives can make better choices in how and when to invest in emerging technologies.

In times of crisis, organizations face a dilemma: How should they balance between minimizing losses and surviving financially, and acting for the benefit of all stakeholders and of society at large? In theory, managers should balance between multiple demands, forgoing short-term profits to address human needs when necessary. But in practice, managers may face challenges in balancing demands during a crisis. Combining the stakeholder-agency and compassion perspectives in the context of crisis management, we present the compassion-centric behavioral agency in crisis (CCBAC) framework to address this theory-practice gap. We suggest three levers for organizations and policymakers to encourage this behavior from organizations: developing and using technological and innovation capabilities, paradoxical leadership behaviors, and employee well-being and generosity programs. Organizations benefit from the CCBAC framework because they become better positioned to maintain their long-term competitive advantage and positive organizational identity while contributing to the needs of society. Policymakers benefit from incentivizing such organizations because they serve as an intermediary to achieve outcomes for society at large. Throughout this article, we use the COVID-19 pandemic, responses to mass shootings, and other example crises to highlight the tension and opportunity within our "both/and" approach. We conclude that organizations can be compassionate even as they pursue profit and efficiency in the long run.

The market for behavioral biometrics-a technological evolution whereby patterns in human movement and activities can be identified, captured, and analyzed-is expected to exceed US $11 billion by 2031. We highlight the evolution from early physiological biometrics (e.g., fingerprints and iris scans used to verify the identity of individuals) to today's behavioral biometrics. Technological advancements now turn our retail stores, offices, and warehouses into live data streams that let us closely and automatically monitor employees' conduct at work. Although this development raises several legitimate surveillance and privacy concerns, behavioral biometrics can potentially benefit organizations and employees alike. Such mutual benefits compel managers to approach behavioral biometrics using our TRUST framework: transparency of intentions, respect for concerns, understanding the importance of choice, sharing the data benefits, and proactively timing the development. Managers who do so will gain a clear focus on organizational and employee well-being.

Executives and organizations seeking to portray an image of competence and integrity should be careful what they wish for, given the state of modern media. Rather than being a passive conduit for one's image, today's media is much more activist and exerts substantial influence over the construction, reconstruction, and destruction of image. In studying the media's rapid transformation of one such glowing image in the wake of a scandal, we identified three key processes by which the media transforms image. These processes are relevant to a wide range of contexts. Perhaps most intriguing is the discovery that the media can leverage an existing, recessive narrative and convert it into a dominant one. This intriguing finding suggests that the pursuit of a glowing image might inadvertently sow the seeds of future destruction. In the heat of a scandal, executives and organizations are likely to struggle with countering the media's image-altering processes. Our findings imply a need for more careful, nuanced, and engaged image management both during a scandal and before scandal hits.

Loneliness is a rampant and modern epidemic that affects the majority of employed adults and shows no signs of subsiding. Loneliness not only contributes to numerous health problems-including anxiety, depression, heart failure, and suicide-but can also cause greater employee stress, cynicism, distrust, and decreased job performance, as well as higher turnover and absenteeism. Loneliness-prompted absenteeism singlehandedly costs employers billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. Consequently, understanding and managing workplace loneliness is of paramount importance for leaders. A review of the causes and outcomes associated with workplace loneliness is provided in this article, as well as three evidence-based interventions that can help reduce workplace loneliness: (1) fostering opportunities for relationship building, (2) increasing support around evolving work contexts, and (3) fortifying a people-focused organizational culture. By presenting research-based guidance, we help leaders combat on-the-job loneliness faced by employees, as well as managers; generate healthier work environments; and cultivate improved individual, team, and organizational performance.

Web3 technology is described as trustless in that interactions and transactions do not require trusted third parties and instead rely on smart contracts and the immutability of the decentralized blockchain. Thus, in contrast to earlier iterations of the web, Web3 users are asked to trust the technology itself rather than the human intermediaries. On its face, this shift to a trustless web calls into question the traditional conceptions of and requirements for trust. However, in this article, we caution against claims that advocate distrusting Web3 on the basis that, despite how quickly Web3 technology is advancing, the psychological processes through which people perceive and make sense of the social world remain fundamentally unchanged. Drawing on the psychology of trust and the evolution of web technologies and associated objects of trust, we argue that Web3 is not so trustless after all. We also highlight opportunities for brands to build trust in Web3 technology, including key considerations in leveraging opportunities and directions for further research. Overall, this article provides critical guidance to brand managers, policy advisors, and academics seeking to understand, build, and trust Web3 technology.