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This case focuses on the Unilever Foundry, a platform for Unilever to engage with start-ups and entrepreneurs, providing them with access to Unilever's brands as a means of enabling their growth while bringing innovative technology back to the company. The case provides a brief description of Unilever's evolution from the mid-1990s to 2016, focusing on its various attempts to make the business more innovative and agile. With the arrival of Paul Polman as CEO and his "sustainable living plan", the impetus to innovate was once again very high and a number of initiatives were launched to help the company move beyond its traditional ways of working. In May 2014 the Foundry was launched to create commercial opportunities by connecting Unilever businesses with start-ups. Through a licensing mechanism, the start-up would make its technology available to Unilever to bring innovation to its brand or get the rights to use a Unilever brand within certain guidelines. The Foundry was essentially a platform for collaboration. The case explores how the Foundry functioned and evolved both within Unilever and in the collaborations with external start-ups. By December 2015 its leader, Jeremy Basset, had a team of seven people and operated in several locations across the world. The case closes with various issues facing Jeremy - whether to raise greater awareness of the Foundry within Unilever; how to scale it to make a difference within the huge organisation that was Unilever; and ultimately, where to go from here?

From humble beginnings, Petróleo Brasileiro S.A. (Petrobras) became one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies, gaining a reputation for sound leadership and strong technical expertise. By the mid-2000s, the company was often cited as one of the best managed national oil companies. By 2016, Petrobras was in a very different position. The company was embroiled in a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal and was one of the most indebted companies in the world. The decade-long corruption scheme reached the highest levels of business and Brazilian politics - Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, was the chairwoman of the Petrobras board from 2003 to 2010. Several senior Petrobras executives and Brazilian politicians had been arrested on allegations of bid rigging and bribery and more arrests were likely. In 2015 Petrobras was forced to write down the value of its assets by $14.9 billion and take a $2.1 billion charge for the scandal. Capital investments would be reduced significantly over the next five years in order to reduce debt and help recover investor confidence.

Agus Halim, the CEO of PT Diamond Energy Resources Indonesia, a wholly owned subsidiary of an Australian based mining company, was contemplating whether to invest in a new coal mine near East Kalimantan, Indonesia. His consultant had prepared a preliminary acquisition plan that includes a capital budget with verified mineable surface coal reserves and projected coal prices. This acquisition would add to Diamond's coal reserves and position itself as an important player in the coal export market in Indonesia. Before getting the green light from his parent firm, Agus needed to ensure this investment would create value for the firm. He also needed to convince his local banker to provide the necessary financing in a challenging environment with very volatile commodity prices.

In 2010, China's rapid development of wind energy, and specifically, its policies to promote wind turbine manufacturing, had resulted in significant loss of market share in the wind turbine market in China for U.S. and other foreign manufacturers. Although China was clearly violating WTO rules with its trade policies, U.S. and other firms were reluctant to bring a dispute to the WTO for fear of retaliation on the part of the Chinese government in the form of loss of access to the Chinese market. As a result, the United Steel Workers of America trade union brought the dispute the WTO. Because the trade violations were so clear, China backed down even before the dispute could get out of the first, "consultations" phase of the WTO dispute settlement process.

HDIF is one of the few Armenia-based organizations that falls under the vague definition of a social enterprise. HDIF is focusing its activity in three areas: selling handicrafts; tourism development through organizing festivals; and, empowering rural communities in Armenia. The founder, Tim Straight, is leaving the foundation and the executive director will have to assume responsibility for the emerging new strategy that she and the founder had begun discussing. Should she continue down the same path and remain heavily dependent on the continuing financial investments from Tim Straight, or should she shift to a new and economically promising area of eco-tourism in order to become financially sustainable?

In the fall of 2012 the author decided he needed to do some soul searching. The start-up he'd founded six years earlier had grown into a global company with more than $300 million in revenue, and it was still delivering on its promise to donate a pair of shoes for every pair sold, but Mycoskie felt disillusioned. His days were monotonous, and he had lost his connection to many of the executives in charge of daily operations. He and his wife moved to Austin, Texas, so that he could take a sabbatical. He dedicated a lot of time to private contemplation, but he also spoke regularly with his executive coach, entrepreneur friends, and business nonprofit leaders he admired. He traveled to conferences around the country to learn from experts in social enterprise and international development. And he read "Start with Why," by Simon Sinek, about leaders who inspire action and companies that create compelling products. All this, combined with a chance conversation about the coffee trade in Rwanda, led to the creation of TOMS Roasting--which, like TOMS Shoes, would have a one-for-one model: For every bag of coffee sold, the company would provide a week's worth of clean water to a person in need. As TOMS approaches its 10th anniversary, the author writes, he feels more energized and committed than ever.

U.S. public companies are dying at faster and faster rates; in fact, they have a one in three chance of being delisted in the next five years. Why? They are failing to adapt to the growing complexity of their environments, the authors argue--misreading those environments, selecting the wrong approaches to strategy, or failing to support a viable approach with the right behaviors and capabilities. Drawing on their research at the intersection of business strategy, biology, and complex systems, BCG's Martin Reeves and Daichi Ueda, along with Princeton biologist Simon Levin, describe six principles that confer robustness in what's known as "complex adaptive systems"--principles that are directly applicable to business. Firms should: (1) Maintain heterogeneity of people, ideas, and endeavors; (2) Sustain a modular structure of loosely connected components; (3) Preserve redundancy among components; (4) Expect surprise, but reduce uncertainty; (5) Create feedback loops and adaptive mechanisms to ensure the variation, selection, and propagation of innovations; and (6) Foster trust and reciprocity in their business ecosystems. Rising corporate mortality is an increasing threat, and the forces driving it are likely to remain strong for the foreseeable future. Understanding and implementing the principles that create robustness in complex adaptive systems can mean the difference between survival and extinction.

Most companies don't realize how central emotions are to building the right culture. They tend to focus on cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that set the overall tone for how employees think and behave at work. Though that's incredibly important, the authors' research shows that it's only part of the story. The other critical part is emotional culture, which governs which feelings people have and express at work. Barsade and O'Neill have found that emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even "hard" measures such as financial performance and absenteeism. So when managers ignore or fail to understand it, they're glossing over a vital component of what makes organizations tick, and their companies suffer as a result. By not only allowing emotions into the workplace but also consciously shaping them, leaders can better motivate their employees. This article describes some of the ways emotional culture manifests at work-for instance, in the form of joy, companionate love, and fear-and the impact it can have in a range of settings and industries. It also suggests ways of creating and maintaining an emotional culture that will help you achieve your company's goals.

Empathy is all the rage pretty much everywhere. It's touted as a critical leadership skill, one that helps you influence others in your organization, anticipate stakeholders' concerns, respond to social media followers, and even run better meetings. But it has its limits. Empathy taxes us mentally and emotionally, and can even impair our ethical judgment. It's also a finite resource: The more we spend on one person or group, the less we have left for others. Expecting employees to continually drain their reserves can impair individual and organizational performance. Managers can prevent the ill effects of empathy and promote the good by using a few simple strategies. First, have people focus on certain sets of stakeholders, rather than asking them to understand and empathize with anyone and everyone. Second, help them meet others' needs in ways that also address their own so that they don't end up feeling depleted by every interaction. And third, give them empathy breaks, where they focus strictly on their own personal needs, to allow them to replenish their reserves.

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. According to data collected by the authors over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more. There is much to applaud about these developments-but when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. At many companies, people spend around 80% of their time in meetings or answering colleagues' requests, leaving little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. What's more, research the authors have done across more than 300 organizations shows that the apportionment of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. The avalanche of demands for input or advice, access to resources, or sometimes just presence in a meeting causes performance to suffer. Employees take assignments home, and soon burnout and turnover become real risks. Leaders must start to manage collaboration more effectively in two ways: (1) by mapping the supply and demand in their organizations and redistributing the work more evenly among employees, and (2) by incentivizing people to collaborate more efficiently.

No matter how approachable you may be as a manager, chances are good that your employees are withholding valuable intelligence from you. Research shows that many people are more likely to keep mum than to raise important questions or suggest new ideas. Companies use a variety of tactics to get people to open up, like "climate" surveys and all-staff feedback sessions. But they usually fall short for two key reasons: a fear of consequences and a sense of futility. In this article, two professors look at how leaders' misguided attempts to promote candid expression fail to address-and sometimes stir up-those feelings. For example, if you ask for anonymous input, you may be signaling that it's not safe to speak openly in your organization. And if you don't act on feedback, employees will quickly come to believe that providing it is pointless. But there are several ways to create a much more vocal culture, say the authors. To make idea sharing less intimidating, tone down the power cues with employees, and gather feedback in regular, casual exchanges. Be transparent about the processes for gathering and following up on ideas. And if you really want to know what people think, go ask them. Research shows that when employees do speak up, organizations see increased performance. So getting all this right pays off-both for workers eager to make contributions and for their firms.

Thanks to powerful ideation approaches such as design thinking and crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts, from both insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists. Yet many organizations still struggle to identify and seize big opportunities. That's because major changes in society and technology fundamentally challenge the conventional understanding of what is valuable, rendering obsolete whatever criteria companies are using to identify customer problems they could address. To see which ideas truly have potential, managers need new assessment criteria. From studying and working with 24 companies that have succeeded in capturing big opportunities, the author has devised a process to create such criteria--one that is rooted not in the art of ideation but in the art of criticism. It engages a company's own employees and helps them articulate their individual visions. These are then compared and discussed, first in pairs and later in a group, in order to distill them into a handful of even better proposals. The views of outsiders are sought only at the end.

Algorithms tend to be myopic. They focus on the data at hand--which often pertains just to short-term outcomes. Algorithms are powerful predictive tools, but they can run amok when not applied properly. Consider what often happens with social media sites. Today many use algorithms to decide which ads and links to show users. But when these algorithms focus too narrowly on maximizing click-throughs, sites quickly become choked with low-quality content. While clicks rise, customer satisfaction plummets. The glitches, say the authors, are not in the algorithms but in the way we interact with them. Managers need to recognize their two major limitations: First, they're completely literal; algorithms do exactly what they're told and disregard every other consideration. While a human would have understood that the sites' designers wanted to maximize quality as measured by clicks, the algorithms maximized clicks at the expense of quality. Second, algorithms are black boxes. Though they can predict the future with great accuracy, they won't say what will cause an event or why. They'll tell you which magazine articles are likely to be shared on Twitter without explaining what motivates people to tweet about them, for instance. To avoid missteps, you need to be explicit about all your goals--hard and soft--when formulating your algorithms. You also must consider the long-term implications of the data the algorithms incorporate to make sure they're not focusing nearsightedly on short-term outcomes. And choose the right data inputs, being sure to gather a wide breadth of information from a diversity of sources.

When you look at the top people in a given industry, you often find that many of them once worked for the same well-known leader. In the NFL, 20 of 32 head coaches trained under Bill Walsh or someone in his coaching tree. Dozens of top hedge fund managers got their start under Julian Robertson of Tiger Management. Nine of Larry Ellison's top execs became CEOs, COOs, or chairs of other companies. The list goes on: Jay Chiat, Alice Waters, Bob Noyce, Lorne Michaels, and Mary Kay Ash are all known for grooming extraordinary people who became leaders in their fields. After conducting deep research into the practices of these superbosses, Tuck professor Finkelstein found similarities in their "people strategies." In hiring, they focus on intelligence, creativity, and flexibility; look for unconventional talent; and adapt roles and even organizations to suit people. In development, they set high expectations, build master-apprentice relationships, and encourage fast, step-change growth. All of us can borrow from their playbook to improve our own ability to identify and hone talent.

The CEO of Tots & Teens, an apparel company headquartered in New Jersey, learns at a company party that one of the factories in Bangladesh where T&T's clothing is made has just collapsed in the middle of a workday, killing more than 2,000 workers. She and her COO immediately fly to Dhaka to visit the disaster site and plan their response. Aside from finding a way to support the victims and their families and to tighten up oversight of the company's supply chain, they must decide whether to move production to a factory in China in order to get the fall line out in time. With expert commentary from John Manners-Bell, the CEO of Transport Intelligence, and Adam K. Kanzer, a managing director of Domini Social Investments.

The astrophysicist on balancing his TV career with his day job and why no one could dissuade him from a career in science.

The CEO of Tots & Teens, an apparel company headquartered in New Jersey, learns at a company party that one of the factories in Bangladesh where T&T's clothing is made has just collapsed in the middle of a workday, killing more than 2,000 workers. She and her COO immediately fly to Dhaka to visit the disaster site and plan their response. Aside from finding a way to support the victims and their families and to tighten up oversight of the company's supply chain, they must decide whether to move production to a factory in China in order to get the fall line out in time. With expert commentary from John Manners-Bell, the CEO of Transport Intelligence, and Adam K. Kanzer, a managing director of Domini Social Investments.

The CEO of Tots & Teens, an apparel company headquartered in New Jersey, learns at a company party that one of the factories in Bangladesh where T&T's clothing is made has just collapsed in the middle of a workday, killing more than 2,000 workers. She and her COO immediately fly to Dhaka to visit the disaster site and plan their response. Aside from finding a way to support the victims and their families and to tighten up oversight of the company's supply chain, they must decide whether to move production to a factory in China in order to get the fall line out in time. With expert commentary from John Manners-Bell, the CEO of Transport Intelligence, and Adam K. Kanzer, a managing director of Domini Social Investments.

In the seven years since Don Blanchon was hired as the Chief Executive Officer of Whitman-Walker Health, it had transitioned into a primary care-based community health center and a patient-centered medical home serving a diverse population in a rapidly changing area of Washington, DC. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 would, in Blanton's view, increase access to providers for WWH's patient population, thereby increasing the competition. The implications of this change left senior management with unresolved strategic questions. Should WWH pursue a "hybrid FQHC model," a new location, new services, or a future strategic partnership with a large health system? What should the next direction be for WWH, and how should it get there?

Peter Drucker once said that healthcare organizations "are the most complex form of organization that we have ever attempted to manage." In this wide-ranging interview, an American health-sector strategy expert working in Canada explains why Drucker's statement is true. He goes on to describe the need for patient-centric care and the importance of focusing on the social determinants of health. He also compares the Canadian and U.S. systems, the pros and cons of each, and what a truly sustainable healthcare system would look like. In the end, he shows the power of markets in the quest for population health.