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To promote accountability, productivity, and shared learning, many organizations create open work environments and gather reams of data on how individuals spend their time. A few years ago, HBS professor Ethan Bernstein set out to find empirical evidence that such approaches improve organizational performance. What he discovered is that this kind of transparency often has an unintended consequence: It can leave employees feeling vulnerable and exposed. When that happens, they conceal any conduct that deviates from the norm so that they won't have to explain it. Unrehearsed, experimental behaviors sometimes stop altogether. But Bernstein also discovered organizations that had established zones of privacy within open environments by setting four types of boundaries: around teams, between feedback and evaluation, between decision rights and improvement rights, and around periods of experimentation. Moreover, across several studies, the companies that had done all this were the ones that consistently got the most creative, efficient, and thoughtful work from their employees. Bernstein's conclusion? By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can capture the benefits of both, and encourage just the right amount of "positive deviance" needed to increase innovation and productivity.

Few companies measure whether the design of their workspaces helps or hurts performance, but they should. The authors have collected data that capture individuals' interactions, communications, and location information. They've learned that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office; creating chance encounters between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization, improves performance. The Norwegian telecom company Telenor was ahead of its time in 2003, when it incorporated "hot desking" (no assigned seats) and spaces that could easily be reconfigured for different tasks and evolving teams. The CEO credits the design of the offices with helping Telenor shift from a state-run monopoly to a competitive multinational carrier with 150 million subscribers. In another example, data collected at one pharmaceuticals company showed that when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams by 10%, his or her sales increased by 10%. To get the sales staff running into colleagues from other departments, management shifted from one coffee machine for every six employees to one for every 120 and created a new large cafeteria for everyone. Sales rose by 20%, or $200 million, after just one quarter, quickly justifying the capital investment in the redesign.

Businesses constantly innovate to create new value--but unless they also focus on how they capture value, they won't realize maximum benefit from their breakthroughs. And even avid innovators often have a blind spot when it comes to value capture. Managers need to think about value capture more imaginatively and as a matter of course. A new framework developed by IMD business school's Stefan Michel can help them do so. Michel details 15 value-capture innovations, which fall under five broad categories. Firms can profit by changing the price-setting mechanism (think of Priceline), the payer (media businesses where advertisers subsidize content consumption), the price carrier (Netflix), the timing of the exchange (commodities futures), or the segment served (grocery coupons, which "fence off" customers who prioritize savings). The practical applications of the framework are proven: In workshops at a major airline and a global professional services firm, for instance, cross-functional teams using this tool quickly devised new ways to capture value that boosted their company's profits.

The best way for companies to improve the lives of the world's poorest people--those at the bottom of the pyramid--is to focus first on doing good business, not just on doing good. That's the contention of the authors, who say that a steady flow of profits from manageable ventures will pave the way for later investments in more-ambitious socially beneficial projects. The authors cite two main challenges in selling profitably to the bottom of the pyramid: changing consumers' behavior and changing the way products are made and delivered. To help companies see how these challenges affect various business prospects, they have developed an "opportunity map" that classifies opportunities along a spectrum from the least complex and resource-intensive to the most. At the simplest end are targeted marketing opportunities in mature markets. In the middle are opportunities in growth markets: efforts to redesign products, extend distribution channels, or create new ones. At the other end of the spectrum are frontier-market ventures to develop new products, conquer competitors' markets, expand into greenfield markets, develop new business models, or create altogether new markets. The authors present examples of each type and explain that companies can pursue multiple opportunities simultaneously. If they choose wisely, they can make profits and advance their social missions at the same time.

The technology industry has a big problem with diversity, one that seems to be getting worse: In 1991 women held 37% of computing jobs; today they hold only 26%. But if tech firms want to get serious about hiring, retaining, and promoting more women, they'll need something more effective than sensitivity or mentoring programs that "fix" individual behavior, and longer lasting than cultural change programs. The author suggests an approach that borrows from tech's own playbook on experimentation: Collect detailed data on bias in your organization, identify company-specific ways to measure its effect, create hypotheses about how to move those metrics, and then throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Working women face four kinds of bias: prove-it-again (continually being asked to prove their competence), tightrope (backlash for being too assertive or too nice), maternal wall (erroneous assumptions about mothers), and tug-of-war (pressure to distance themselves from other women). All four affect hiring, work assignments, evaluations, and promotion and compensation. Companies need to understand how, and then thwart these biases with "interrupters," small changes to business systems that stop patterns of bias. They can be as simple as adding "salary negotiable" to want ads--which closed the pay gap between men and women by 45% in one study. Doing anything once will not change organizational culture. Bias needs to be disrupted constantly, and the iterative interrupter approach may well be the way to do that.

It's not easy to recover from a big career disappointment such as getting fired or being passed over for a promotion. Many people sink into anger or denial, blaming situational factors or company politics. Though that's a natural response, it can also prevent them from breaking free of the destructive behaviors that may have derailed them in the first place. People who successfully rebound from career losses take a different approach: They do the hard work of figuring out why they lost, identifying which new paths they could take, and then seizing the right opportunity--whether that's a different role in the same organization, a move to a new company, or a shift to a new industry or career. Drawing on in-depth research and the authors' consulting experience, this article offers practical guidance for transforming anger and self-doubt over what seems like a failure into focused exploration and excitement about the fresh possibilities the situation presents. To gauge your ability to rebound from career setbacks, take the self-assessment at hbr.org/assessments/mirror-test.

Sarah is a director of a Real Estate Investment Trust whose CEO has expressed his admiration of her intellect and drive for information, but board meetings have become tense recently, and the CEO has grown distant. In Sarah's opinion, the problem is obvious: Sid Yerby, the CFO. Despite Sarah's repeated requests for comprehensive financial statements, he continues to come to board meetings with a mere two pages of analysis that lack any explanation or footnotes. Increasingly, however, hers seems to be the minority view, and, as the only woman on the board, she is starting to feel isolated. The chairman has warned her that everyone is starting to think of her as "pushy." Should she quit the board? Expert commentary comes from Ilene S. Gordon, CEO and chairman, Ingredion, and Sue Decker, former president, Yahoo.

Bobbi Brown, chief creative officer of the eponymous "natural looks" cosmetics line, talks about building a brand within a large corporation.

Sarah is a director of a Real Estate Investment Trust whose CEO has expressed his admiration of her intellect and drive for information, but board meetings have become tense recently, and the CEO has grown distant. In Sarah's opinion, the problem is obvious: Sid Yerby, the CFO. Despite Sarah's repeated requests for comprehensive financial statements, he continues to come to board meetings with a mere two pages of analysis that lack any explanation or footnotes. Increasingly, however, hers seems to be the minority view, and, as the only woman on the board, she is starting to feel isolated. The chairman has warned her that everyone is starting to think of her as "pushy." Should she quit the board? Expert commentary comes from Ilene S. Gordon, CEO and chairman, Ingredion, and Sue Decker, former president, Yahoo.

Sarah is a director of a Real Estate Investment Trust whose CEO has expressed his admiration of her intellect and drive for information, but board meetings have become tense recently, and the CEO has grown distant. In Sarah's opinion, the problem is obvious: Sid Yerby, the CFO. Despite Sarah's repeated requests for comprehensive financial statements, he continues to come to board meetings with a mere two pages of analysis that lack any explanation or footnotes. Increasingly, however, hers seems to be the minority view, and, as the only woman on the board, she is starting to feel isolated. The chairman has warned her that everyone is starting to think of her as "pushy." Should she quit the board? Expert commentary comes from Ilene S. Gordon, CEO and chairman, Ingredion, and Sue Decker, former president, Yahoo.

In 2011, DaVita HealthCare Partners (DaVita)-a Fortune 500 healthcare services company specializing in kidney dialysis services-and the Denver Public Schools (DPS)-the largest school district in Colorado-forged a plan to incorporate greater intentional focus on culture and leadership within the district. A few months into the 2013-2014 school year, DaVita "Mayor" Kent Thiry, DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg, and members of their teams gather to review and assess the overall progress, impact, and challenges of their unique corporate-community partnership focused on leadership development and culture over the past two years. With the partnership showing great promise, Thiry and his team wonder how they might create new partnerships and grow their social impact as a company without detracting from DaVita's own growth and expansion and the needs of its own "teammates." The case gives students the opportunity to explore how a mission-driven Fortune 500 company can leverage its own resources and HR expertise to partner with non-corporate entities to create social value and support success in American public education.

In 2014, Arjun Dhawan (MBA 2004), president of HCC Concessions, is working toward the completion of his largest road development project yet. The route, a 250-km stretch leading from the critical eastern Indian port of Kolkata into the interior of the province of West Bengal, is a prime example of both the benefits and the drawbacks of public-private partnerships in the Indian transportation sector. Despite delays and political pressure, HCC Concessions has nearly finished building the road and now is receiving offers to purchase the project's equity.

In 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia faced a freshwater shortage. Despite the global financial crisis, Saudi Arabia experienced modest economic expansion and increasing stress on its water infrastructure due to expanding agricultural production. The major investments in desalinization plants that the country expected to see had not yet materialized, furthering the strain on resources. This case, used in Darden's "Economics of Water" elective, examines what policy reforms should be explored in bringing Saudi Arabia's water use and agricultural production into balance.

When the Rio Tinto mining company decided to increase its output of iron ore by 25% in its Marandoo location, it had to deal with an unexpected problem: an excess of water in the deep reaches of the mine. Because freshwater is a scarce resource in this region of Australia, Rio Tinto's challenge was to come up with a comprehensive water strategy for the region. This case is used in Darden's "Economics of Water" course elective.

As Serena Shamash opened the doors to her newly renovated restaurant, the last thing she was expecting to see was two inches of water covering the floor of the bar. Yet, this was just another day in the life of an entrepreneur. She had overcome many obstacles over the emotionally charged three years it took to give birth to her business dream - Eat Me, The World on Small Plates®. Now that she had achieved this goal, what was next? Her main preoccupation recently was how to extract herself from the day-to-day operations of the restaurant in order to start the next phase of her business. Eat Me was expected to reach operating breakeven at the end of the year, a major milestone in its short life. Did Eat Me still require her full attention? Or was it time to move beyond the first unit and consider scaling up? What about launching a new concept? She had already started developing new ideas and was getting anxious not to get stuck in the daily grind of this industry. But how would she decide on which direction to pursue? Learning objectives: Entrepreneurial careers, starting a restaurant, affinity financing, managing growth in a service industry, managing relationships while starting a company, setting strategy, creating a value proposition in the restaurant industry, personnel management, key success factors in hospitality.

One of the biggest challenges for multinational corporations (MNCs) is to determine and consolidate their borders. In order to do so, MNCs increasingly strive to create value innovation, particularly within their internal capital market. Accordingly, their corporate treasury functions have witnessed three stages of major evolution in the 21st century.

Banco do Brasil, a leading Brazilian bank and one of its most established institutions, has a number of growth options. After a long but timid internationalization trajectory, it foresees various foreign expansion opportunities based on Brazil's accelerating economy and international visibility. These economic and social improvements also open up tempting domestic opportunities.

This case centers around the shareholder dispute between three major shareholders of Turkcell, and how its management vied against increasing regulatory intervention and market competition in the absence of a fully-functioning board. The battle for control of the Turkish telecom giant led to several years in which the company could not hold annual shareholder meetings, renew its board of directors, or pay dividends, and lacked a board-approved operating budget. Nevertheless, it maintained its majority market share and was the only telecom player with positive EBITDA in the market. What were the implications of this dispute for Turkcell's broad ambitions? How would the continuing battle affect management, talent, and the company's financial performance?