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In 2006, two entrepreneurs founded Fugumobile Co. Ltd., a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai, China. The company grew organically in China by adapting to the evolving trends in digital marketing. In May 2021, the founders were facing a dilemma and had to choose between two options for sustainable and profitable growth of their company. The first option was to reach an extensive client base by continuing to deliver standardized services at affordable prices, which offered the company modest growth and profitability. The second option was to offer customized services at a premium price, which was more rewarding but would require recruiting experienced workers with a proven track record for selling and delivering high quality customized services, who were typically employed by large agencies and demanded significantly high salaries. The two founders had to decide which path to take.

This case highlights Wärtsilä's significant role in the decarbonization journey of the energy and marine sectors. Despite the difficult financial situation and challenging market dynamics - Wärtsilä was active in industries that relied heavily on fossil fuels with little potential for future growth - CEO Hakan Agnevall took a bold decision to convert threats into opportunities and use decarbonization as a vehicle to transform the company. His vision was to turn the company into a leader in sustainable solutions. The ambitious goal set by Agnevall presented Wärtsilä with numerous challenges. The industries in which the company operated were undergoing disruptive changes, but the transition to sustainable alternatives would take decades. Both the energy and maritime industries were characterized by long-term investment cycles and a certain conservatism in terms of adopting new technologies. One of the major hurdles faced by Agnevall was timing. Wärtsilä already had a portfolio of green technologies ready to be offered to customers, but the market demand for these solutions was not yet fully established. The transition to green solutions would require time. As the industry gradually transformed, Wärtsilä understood that it would take several years before the company could fully benefit from its new strategy and investments in green technologies. Balancing the long-term strategic commitment to decarbonization with the need to address short-term financial imperatives and satisfy shareholders was a critical challenge. Wärtsilä was making long-term investments in various green technologies, but the uncertainty surrounding which technology would eventually prevail added to the complexity of the situation.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) handles all online and mobile ticketing for the Indian Railways, the largest passenger carrier in the world, with an annual footfall of more than 8 billion. The IRCTC wished to monetise its data assets and floated a tender in July 2022 to engage a consultant for its data monetisation initiative. The tender faced severe backlash on social media from the lay public as well as privacy rights advocates, and invited the scrutiny of a Parliamentary Committee of the Government of India. Faced with this opposition, the IRCTC recalled the tender. This case allows students to analyse if there is value to IRCTC's data monetisation project and, if so, for which stakeholders. Should the tender be redesigned or should the IRCTC or Indian Railways do this exercise internally? Can data monetisation coexist with data privacy of stakeholders or should this project be abandoned? Would a tender for hiring a consultant for data analytics have seen as much resistance? The case highlights the importance of a tender document to be seen as a medium of communication for the lay public and not just as a commercial document for vendors.

Davis Bookhart, the founding director of Sustainability/Net Zero office, at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has an HKD 50 million problem. Four years ago, a fund was created to build a position of institutional leadership in sustainability from the largesse of the university's then president. Intended to pair students with research faculty and the university's operations staff in the development of sustainable, smart solutions to campus problems, the resultant program transformed the university's campus works into a living lab, offering an exploration of frontier problems in sustainability and an alternate pedagogical model to classroom teaching. Four years on, over 30 projects have been funded, with outcomes ranging from digitalizing the school's registrar to using artificial intelligence to build a smart monitoring system for the campus' bird population. Now, under new leadership and with its funding set to soon expire, Bookhart must reevaluate the living lab's impact and address how the case for a living lab might be institutionalized. He must also grapple with a broader question of what the role of the university will be in supporting early-stage innovation in China's now emerging Greater Bay Area?

In the early 2010s ADM, a century-old agricultural products and services company, embarked on a big transformation. It streamlined and reorganized its divisions, refocused its teams on smart investments and innovation, and became more strategic and disciplined about capital, costs, and cash. But then the leadership team turned its attention to another important C: customers. The goal was to reorient the business toward value-added nutrition products and services, a more stable sector in which it could build a broader base for growth and impact. Now the company is split into three segments: agricultural services and oilseeds; carbohydrate solutions; and nutrition. All three units sell not just raw or processed commodities but differentiated products. And ADM's leaders have identified three long-term global macro trends-food security, sustainability, and health and well-being-around which the company is making capital-allocation, strategic, and operational decisions. This transformation has been methodical and mission-driven. In 2019 ADM unveiled a new corporate purpose-"to unlock the power of nature to enrich the quality of life"-and over the past decade its heightened focus on innovating for the customer has brought it even closer to fulfilling that purpose. This story offers lessons for other companies that are trying to envision and execute similar change efforts.

In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled-a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors-members of a collaboration between the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard's Digital Reskilling Lab and the Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute-interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill-when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village. The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.

Governments around the world are increasingly intervening in the private sector through industrial policies designed to help domestic sectors reach goals that markets alone are unlikely to achieve. Companies in targeted sectors-such as automakers, energy companies, and semiconductor manufacturers-may experience dramatic changes in their operating environments. The policies could create new costs or deliver significant financial incentives to shift R&D or manufacturing investments. They might also incent firms to alter their supplier networks or change their trading partners. Managers who have grown up in markets without such interventions are now facing an unfamiliar environment. In this article, HBS professor Willy C. Shih outlines some of the policy approaches and offers a framework for responding to them. Business leaders need to understand the competing interests shaping the policies, engage and educate political leaders and their staffs, collaborate with upstream and downstream partners, and weigh the pros and cons of accepting government incentives.

Does your firm's culture support its strategy? If not, you'll need to retool your culture, and that's not so easy to do. The values, beliefs, and norms that make it up are intangible and diffused throughout your organization, and employees tend to resist anything that threatens established behaviors and relationships. To figure out the secret to doing cultural change well, the authors examined how business leaders around the world approached it. They learned that successful ones didn't begin with workshops, studies, or new HR policies. They began by creating stories highlighting actions that were deeply inconsistent with a firm's established culture but reinforced an alternative culture more aligned with its strategies. The most effective stories were authentic, featured the leaders themselves, offered a break with the past and a path to the future, appealed to hearts and minds, and were dramatic and memorable. Most critically, they empowered employees to begin crafting their own stories about cultural change so that everyone in the organization ended up co-creating a new culture together.

In recent years leading executives-from firms like Google, Bridgewater, and Netflix-have touted the advantages of a work environment marked by candid feedback. Employees seem to have bought into the benefits too. In a 2019 survey, 94% said that corrective feedback improved their performance when it was presented well. Unfortunately, the increased diversity of our workplaces has made it much more likely that feedback won't go over well and will be misinterpreted as an act of hostility. That's because people from different cultures, genders, and generations have varying expectations for how feedback is delivered and by whom. What's standard in America, for instance, can come off as harsh or baffling in other countries. Boomers and Millennials hold radically different ideas about what's appropriate too. And gender differences add to the complexity. Women who are frank are often seen as aggressive, and men have a bad tendency to offer unwelcome advice. This article explains how to navigate the divides: Understand the norms of feedback recipients and adjust for them. Follow the three A's-make sure any advice is intended to assist, actionable, and asked for. Last, get everyone on your team on the same page by establishing a common approach and building regular feedback loops into your collaborations.

Generative AI and other easy-to-use software tools can help employees with no coding background become adept programmers, or what the authors call citizen developers. By simply describing what they want in a prompt, citizen developers can collaborate with these tools to build entire applications-a process that until recently would have required advanced programming fluency. Information technology has historically involved builders (IT professionals) and users (all other employees), with users being relatively powerless operators of the technology. That way of working often means IT professionals struggle to meet demand in a timely fashion, and communication problems arise among technical experts, business leaders, and application users. Citizen development raises a critical question about the ultimate fate of IT organizations. How will they facilitate and safeguard the process without placing too many obstacles in its path? To reject its benefits is impractical, but to manage it carelessly may be worse. In this article the authors share a road map for successfully introducing citizen development to your employees.

Business leaders are being urged to adopt a multistakeholder approach to governance in place of the shareholder-centered approach that has guided their work for several decades. But through hundreds of interviews with directors, executives, investors, governance professionals, and academics over the years, the author has found wide differences in how those leaders understand stakeholder capitalism. That lack of clarity can put boards and executives on a collision course with one another when decisions requiring difficult trade-offs among stakeholders' interests arise. It also creates expectations among stakeholders that if unfulfilled will fuel cynicism, alienation, and distrust. To help reduce the risk of such negative consequences, the author has created a guide for corporate leaders that illuminates four versions of stakeholder capitalism: instrumental, classic, beneficial, and structural. They reflect significantly different levels of commitment to the interests of stakeholders and rest on very different rationales.

Companies typically treat their innovation projects as a portfolio, aiming for a mix of projects that collectively meet their strategic objectives. The problem, say the authors, is that portfolio objectives have become standardized, and innovation projects are often only weakly related to a company's distinctive strategy. This article introduces a new tool to help leaders better align their innovation investments. The strategic innovation tool kit has two elements: a strategy summary framework and an innovation basket. Leaders start by clarifying a unit's strategy and determining what needs to change to achieve it. The change needs are translated into innovation goals, and leaders create their "innovation basket" by plotting each project against those goals. They can then cut projects that aren't aligned and create new ones that are. It's an iterative and creative process: Projects are adjusted to fit the strategy but can also shape it. Examples from the authors' research demonstrate how the process of creating an innovation basket gives managers fresh insight into what their innovation activities are really doing for their strategy.

The increasing frequency of interactions we have with AI and automated technologies means it is vital to understand how those things make people feel about themselves. Why? Because how people feel about themselves affects a wide range of success factors, including sales, customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, employee satisfaction, and employee performance. The authors have been studying people's reactions to automated technology for more than seven years. In this article they focus on psychological responses to AI and automated technologies that they've observed in service and business-process design, product design, and communication, and offer practical guidance to help leaders and managers figure out how best to use these new technologies to serve customers, support employees, and advance the interests of their organization.

Mastering the art of spontaneous speaking is important for leaders. They must do more than just deliver a good prepared keynote-they need to nail the Q&A and small talk afterward, or crush off-the-cuff toasts and speeches. The author suggests that anyone can become proficient at this art using the right tactics and behaviors: Toasts, Q&As, and small talk don't require any specific personality traits. He offers key strategies that include avoiding conventional responses in favor of establishing genuine connections, and prioritizing brevity while delivering messages. He also highlights the need to speak authentically without the pressure to be perfect-which means daring to be dull. An equally important aspect is active listening to understand and respond effectively to others' needs. And structuring thoughts logically during impromptu conversations is a useful tactic. Fear or nervousness need not deter anyone from communicating effectively on the spot.

Shortly after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Priya Gowda learns that the company he built from a small dairy farm into a major Indian conglomerate is in deep financial trouble. Unbeknownst to her and his investors, her husband had taken on a lot of short-term, high-interest loans, and the company is struggling to make its payments. As sole heir to his majority stake in Splendid Ice Cream, Priya is now its de facto CEO. Her creditors advise her to sell or liquidate the company, but Priya is determined to preserve her husband's legacy. Her daughters, however, worried that the business is taking too high a toll on her, beg her to let it go. Should she give in to them or keep trying to save Splendid? Expert commentators weigh in.

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, what lessons have we learned? Four new books-The Big Fail, Lessons from the Covid War, The Phoenix Economy, and Chaos Kings-and a blog series on Crooked Timber search for answers. They examine the response to the crisis, the systemic and societal weaknesses it revealed, and the ways it has fundamentally changed the world.

The 12-time NBA All-Star shares the insights he gained from his mentors and reflects on what it takes to lead both a team and the players' union.

Shortly after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Priya Gowda learns that the company he built from a small dairy farm into a major Indian conglomerate is in deep financial trouble. Unbeknownst to her and his investors, her husband had taken on a lot of short-term, high-interest loans, and the company is struggling to make its payments. As sole heir to his majority stake in Splendid Ice Cream, Priya is now its de facto CEO. Her creditors advise her to sell or liquidate the company, but Priya is determined to preserve her husband's legacy. Her daughters, however, worried that the business is taking too high a toll on her, beg her to let it go. Should she give in to them or keep trying to save Splendid? Expert commentators weigh in.

Shortly after the sudden death of her beloved husband, Priya Gowda learns that the company he built from a small dairy farm into a major Indian conglomerate is in deep financial trouble. Unbeknownst to her and his investors, her husband had taken on a lot of short-term, high-interest loans, and the company is struggling to make its payments. As sole heir to his majority stake in Splendid Ice Cream, Priya is now its de facto CEO. Her creditors advise her to sell or liquidate the company, but Priya is determined to preserve her husband's legacy. Her daughters, however, worried that the business is taking too high a toll on her, beg her to let it go. Should she give in to them or keep trying to save Splendid? Expert commentators weigh in.

With its ability to take mundane tasks off employees' hands and make everyone more productive, ChatGPT is a game changer. In fact, it is just as big a deal for leaders as COVID-19 was. That according to Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick. In this wide-ranging interview with HBR Ideacast host Curt Nickisch, Mollick describes the main ways to use the technology, which include basic writing tasks and HTML coding. He also touches on the risks involved and the questions leaders need to be asking in order to optimize the use of ChatGPT in their organizations. And for those who haven't yet tried it out, his advice is simple: holding off on experimenting with ChatGPT is a big mistake.