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The UPower founders, Jake DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, were recent graduates from MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering Department. They chose to attend Palo Alto-based Y Combinator's accelerator program to focus on building a "mini" nuclear reactor that would produce up to ten MW of power and could fit in two 40-foot intermodal shipping containers. The UPower reactor was designed to serve the need for "off-grid" electric power. These off-grid customers were in remote locations such as mining operations, military bases, Arctic townships or even island nations. While DeWitte and Cochran were ecstatic about the progress they had made and the enthusiastic open-mindedness of Bay Area investors to backing groundbreaking and even potentially contentious "big ideas," they wondered if their investors would have the patience to finance UPower over the long term.

In 2013, Pinar Abay was appointed as the CEO of ING Bank Turkey. At 34, she was the youngest bank CEO in Turkey's history. Her appointment raised eyebrows because of her youth and because her career at McKinsey had given her no day-to-day bank management experience. ING, however, wanted a younger leader who could relate to Turkey's young and digitally savvy population. Upon her appointment, Abay determined that major changes were required in operations, personnel and culture. She adopted a variety of innovative approaches to making these changes, ranging from non-traditional hires to sitting for hours in call centers to personally answering customer complaints on Twitter. As Turkey's 12th largest bank, however, ING Turkey lacked scale, so Abay and her team considered a number of non-traditional ways to organize distribution and market the bank to promote growth.

Managing change is consistently ranked as one of the most critical and difficult tasks that leaders face. This note outlines the key choices that leaders must make when engineering change. It is organized into four sections, offering guidance on how to: 1) diagnose the need for change; 2) determine what sort of change is called for (e.g., radical or incremental); 3) develop a delivery strategy that fosters stakeholder buy-in; and, 4) evaluate impact. Managers, instructors, and students of change management should find this note especially useful for discussing the core tenants of designing and implementing a change initiative. This is an abridged version of the "Leading and Managing Change" note.

The head of human resources at Attock Refinery Limited was trying to evaluate the company's existing performance appraisal system in the context of the forthcoming refinery expansion project as well as looming changes in industry dynamics. Over the last few decades, the performance management system at Attock Refinery had undergone significant changes as a result of both internal and external factors. The modified performance management system had solved certain issues, but other challenges remained. The company wanted to determine whether the changes in the performance management system were effective in managing several administrative tasks (e.g., promotion and fixing performance increments), development activities like training and, above all, the fulfillment of Attock Refinery's strategic aim to inculcate a company-wide culture of performance.

Rocket Internet, a unique technology incubator based in Germany, invests in and develops startups in Europe and emerging markets that are versions of successful technology firms primarily located in the United States, such as eBay, Zappos, Amazon and Groupon. Fundamentally, the company seeks to reduce the uncertainty of entrepreneurial startup ventures by imitating proven business models and replicating them in other geographic regions. Rocket Internet has recently begun to expand into emerging markets more aggressively, and its chief executive officer must now decide on the best strategy to continue the firm's global expansion.

Amazon began life as an online bookseller, of course, but now there are few products you can't buy on the site. New research led by HBS's Feng Zhu investigates a common worry of Amazon's third-party sellers: What happens when, instead of just matching buyers and sellers, the platform decides to offer competing products itself? Zhu's team examined 164,000 products sold exclusively by third parties and found that 10 months later, Amazon had begun directly selling items in 3% of those product categories. Further, the items sold directly by Amazon often became the default option in search results. The team recommends that sellers using the Amazon platform take some defensive steps: They can reduce the odds of Amazon's entering the market by signing exclusive deals with suppliers (or manufacturing some products themselves) and focusing on a large selection of niche products rather than widely popular items. This reprint contains three additional Idea Watch articles. "Do CMOs Really Add Value?" looks at extensive new research aimed at providing a once-and-for-all answer to this persistent question (the conclusion, in brief: Yes). "The Wrong Way to Reduce Churn" describes a study of a wireless communication firm whose seemingly customer-friendly outreach effort--offering overspending consumers a better plan--backfired and cost it customers, and offers some theories as to why. And "Quitting Time" is a visual depiction of when employees in a million-person sample left their companies--showing that in today's candidate-driven job market, people move on surprisingly soon.

A new set of experiments reveals that being let down induces surprisingly collaborative behavior in people.

Agricultural inventions from 18th-century noble estates in France, including a wheat thresher, a tree transporter, and an incubation shed for chicken eggs.

The case deals with the value chain of groundnuts, from the farm to the market, conducted through a system of cooperatives based in the district of Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh, India. The organization providing the necessary support and training to the cooperatives is the Centre for Collective Development (CCD). CCD is able to provide financing, training and other support required to the village-level cooperatives and the district-level federation of co-operatives. The case describes the different activities in the supply chain from the farm, to the mill to the final marketing. It further highlights the challenges from issues such as lack of irrigation, price fluctuations, etc. The key decisions to be made are whether the scope of the co-operatives should be expanded to include other products, and whether the federation should invest in forward integration and further value-adding activities.

This case examines the delisting choice of Saint Gobain Sekurit India Limited ("SGSI"), a French-owned Indian company, listed on the BSE Limited ("BSE"). On June 4, 2010, and August 19, 2010, the Indian central government enacted legal amendments, increasing the minimum public shareholding required to be maintained by listed companies to 25%. Companies that were listed on any stock exchange in India as on June 4, 2010 were given until June 3, 2013 to increase their public shareholding to 25%. The French promoters of SGSI, who held 85.77% of the company, faced a difficult choice - should they dilute their own shareholding in the company to maintain SGSI's listing on the BSE (a legacy from the previous owners of the company) or voluntarily delist from the BSE? On the face of it, continued listing does not provide SGSI with meaningful benefits - they had rarely raised money from the public, and their global profile does not substantially benefit from being listed on an Indian exchange. Further, continued listing meant that Saint Gobain would face dilution costs. On the other hand, delisting transactions could be expensive predominantly owing to the fact that the delisting price is determined by a reverse book-building process that vests significant bargaining power with ordinary shareholders. Further, delisting transactions have been known to be particularly unpredictable for foreign promoted companies in India. The promoters of Saint Gobain had to make an informed decision - whether to dilute (to be) or delist (not to be).

The case on BharatMatrimony.com elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side with those on the other side. The case describes the entrepreneurial journey of the firm and its founder, elaborates on the business model, and its attempts at diversification. Key issues for discussion using this case include sustainability of the matching platform business model and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

The caselet on Practo elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side (clinics) with those on the other side (patients). The case elaborates on the business model, and elucidates why a combination of the SaaS offering (Practo Ray) and the platform business model (Practo.com) is essential to the sustainability of the business model. Key issues for discussion using this caselet in conjunction with the BharatMatrimony.com case and the Just Dial caselet include sustainability of matching platform business models and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

The caselet on Just Dial elucidates the business model of a matching platform, one that matches the users on one side (consumers) with those on the other side (local, small and medium businesses). The case elaborates on the business model, and elucidates the evolution of Just Dial's business from a simple local search platform, to a search & transact platform. The case ends with questions on the sustainability of the business model and the extension to product ecommerce. Key issues for discussion using this caselet in conjunction with the BharatMatrimony.com case and the Practo caselet include sustainability of matching platform business models and identification of the specific industry conditions where such business models could be extended (and where it could not be).

Spreadsheet supplement for case IMB541.

This case traces the rise and rise of Amazon.com, the second company after Apple to hit a trillion dollar market cap. The growth of Amazon is described, from its origins back in 1995 through to 2016. The case intentionally provides a lot of detail on specific new products and services created over this twenty year period, and how many of these were highly risky bets, and some were failures. For example: there is a discussion of how Amazon survived the original dotcom bubble bursting by deliberately reducing investment and showing a profit for the first time; the origins of Amazon Prime, Amazon marketplace, the Kindle, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon video are all described with enough detail for students to ask, why did they do this? What was the bigger purpose behind these moves? The case also talks about Amazon's management principles and organization culture. For example, one of Bezos's guiding principles was to "obsess over customers" - meaning always seeking out ways to improve the quality of their buying experience and offering additional services and products to meet their evolving needs. There is also a discussion of the "always day one" culture, the "willingness to be misunderstood" and the style of leadership Bezos exhibits.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. A survey of top business executives from major international organizations found that 79% said it was extremely important to have leaders who act on behalf of the entire organization, not just their units. The rest said it was very important. Nearly 65% said they expected at least half of their senior and midlevel managers to behave as enterprise leaders -that is, executives who are as successful at serving the needs of the enterprise as they are at growing the units they head. The expectation that managers will know what's happening elsewhere in the enterprise is rising, authors Douglas A. Ready and M. Ellen Peebles write, but few organizations have been set up to support the development of such enterprise leaders. So how are managers learning to become effective enterprise leaders, and how can organizations encourage their development? The authors surveyed and interviewed scores of executives from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and focused on three companies: Pfizer, Li & Fung, and Unilever. They found that regardless of the business or the location, enterprise leaders developed their capabilities in similar ways -through a combination of deliberate personal development, high-level mentoring, and opportunities afforded by their work that enabled strong unit performers to become even more effective as enterprise leaders. According to the authors, the essence of enterprise leadership lies in combining two often incompatible roles -those of builder and broker. That means executives need to build their unit's vision and integrate it into the wider corporate vision, clarifying where the enterprise is going and how their teams can best contribute, both within and beyond unit boundaries. They must build unit capabilities and share resources and business know-how across units to contribute to enterprisewide organizational capability.

Although learning executives such as chief learning officers must shoulder the burden of developing the company's talent capabilities and supporting strategic priorities, the authors argue that CEOs and other top executives have a critical role to play. Personal engagement and leadership on the part of the CEO can make a big difference in setting the right tone for the organization. While companies often begin with training-needs assessments, the authors recommend starting by mapping what they call the "CEO agenda"to ensure that learning gets properly aligned with strategy. This connects learning and development with the company's specific needs and cuts through the noise of multiple initiatives vying for attention -highlighting the critical "must-win battles"that the CEO has identified. The next task is to operationalize the learning agenda through a portfolio of learning and development activities. This involves doing an inventory of existing learning and development resources. Companies should repeat this on a regular basis, the authors say, to ensure that the activities in place reflect the company's learning strategy. Companies should be wary about making wholesale changes to learning portfolios and organizational structures, the authors warn, unless there are major shifts in the company's mission or business context. Reorganizations "should be limited to situations where they are warranted -for example, when the learning agenda is misaligned with corporate strategy or the strategy changes." Like the CEO agenda, the company's learning agenda should articulate the essential strategic initiatives for corporate learning. Choices about what to include or eliminate to bring learning activities in line with current priorities should not be made in isolation, and the authors say it's important to get input and buy-in from both the learning organization and business leaders -all the way to the CEO level.

But what is the right way to apply this theory? What are its core elements, and how predictive is it? In this article, authors Andrew A. King and Baljir Baatartogtokh examine these questions. To begin with, they found that the theory's essential validity and generalizability has been seldom tested in the academic literature. The studies that have been published fail to provide confirmatory evidence for the theory. To assess the theory, the authors surveyed and interviewed experts on each of 77 cases discussed in Christensen's two books, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution (the latter with coauthor Michael E. Raynor). Based on the interviews, the authors found that many of the theory's exemplary cases did not fit its conditions and predictions. A handful corresponded with all of the theory's elements (for instance, the disruptions by salesforce.com, Intuit QuickBooks, and Amazon.com). But the majority were found to include different motivating forces, and some displayed unpredicted outcomes. Among them were cases involving legacy costs, the effect of numerous competitors, and changing economies of scale. The threats faced by the companies in the sample, the authors say, cannot be understood from a single viewpoint or solved by a single prescription. "Instead,"they write, "managers need to evaluate difficult problems from a number of different perspectives. In that spirit, we do not advocate discarding the theory of disruption. Rather, we recommend using its best parts in addition to classical approaches to strategic analysis."Case studies about disruptive innovation "can provide warnings of what may happen,"the authors argue, "but they are no substitute for critical thinking. High-level theories can give managers encouragement, but they are no replacement for careful analysis and difficult choices."

The authors conducted two surveys, yielding responses from more than 1,200 young professionals, and had 18 in-depth interviews to examine the work behaviors and experiences of early-career, highly skilled employees. They found that young professionals have short average tenures at organizations. Ninety-two percent of them are on the lookout for other job opportunities while employed, and their job search continues even if they seem engaged in their current job. They consider jobs with high stakes, top management support, and ample formal training the most valuable and important for their career development, and they want more coaching, mentoring, and formal training from employers than is currently given to them. The authors organize their conclusions around three themes: the rewards of job change, the job-search behaviors of this footloose group of professionals, and the management-development practices that may keep them with employers. The researchers note that their findings on the relationship between employer changes and promotions represent a radical departure from both previous empirical research and past conventional wisdom about job hopping and career success. A decade ago, it was generally believed that promotions accompanied with a disproportionately large increase in responsibility were more likely to be given to insiders than outsiders. This advantage seems to have eroded: The authors found no marked differences between the promotion patterns of job hoppers and those who stayed with the same employer during the early stage of their career. Young professionals have marked and ambitious career goals that are often not linked to any particular organization, and they don't see frequent jumps across employers in a negative light. In fact, this relentless job search is not necessarily driven by dissatisfaction with the job and the intention to leave the organization, as traditional models of job search and turnover might assume.

A prototypical high-road company the author cites is Southwest Airlines Co., which has been the most profitable airline in the U.S. over the past 30 years and has also often been rated as one of the best places in the U.S. to work. Also mentioned is Market Basket, a family-owned grocery store chain headquartered in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. In the summer of 2014, Market Basket's legacy of low prices, good customer service, and good-quality jobs was highlighted when a family feud broke out among members of its board of directors and the family member who had been serving as CEO and was popular among employees was fired. After a six-week "strike"by nonunion employees and managers that had broad community and media support (it caused an astounding 92% reduction in the company's revenues), the board agreed to sell the business to the ousted CEO, whose reinstatement employees had sought. Standard economics argues that the higher labor costs are as a proportion of total costs, the more important it is to control these costs. However, the author explains, high-road companies take another view, relying heavily on practices including screening employees for their strong technical, problem-solving, and collaborative skills; investment in training and development of the full workforce; compensation systems that align employee and company interests through profit sharing and/or payment for attaining higher levels of skills; and labor-management partnerships.