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In March 2020, a physician in southwestern Ontario, Canada began working on the development of an innovative digital application called the Pandemic Population Health Navigator, designed to help mitigate the pressure on Ontario’s health care system due to the rapid increase and spread of COVID-19 infections. The founder worked quickly to engage local health system partners, trusted advisors, the provincial government, and a digital health vendor to support the development of his innovation, which was intended to act as a COVID-19 triage tool. The project garnered widespread support and benefited from unprecedented quick approval times by the provincial government, which was undergoing a provincial transformation to a new health care system. Six months later, however, unexpected issues and risks began to surface. A key stakeholder was threatening to terminate the project’s agreement due to increasingly complex customization demands from users of the Pandemic Population Health Navigator. The physician realized that he quickly needed to find a way to alleviate these complexities and associated risks, while maintaining the trust of his health care collaborators.

In April 2021, the co-founders of the Onyx Initiative (Onyx) were reviewing the progress of their six-month old organization. The co-founders had founded Onyx to expand the Black talent pipeline by offering a scholar program that connected Black students with mentors and offered them online professional development. The initiative had successfully accepted an inaugural cohort of 170 Black students and partnered with numerous corporate, community, and educational partners. Recently, corporate sponsors had approached Onyx with a request to expand programming to their US offices. The co-founders needed to decide if now was the right time for expansion, or if this would be spreading their new organization too thin.

The chief commercial officer of Johnson Controls International, a multinational manufacturer and marketer of security systems, was noticing a change in the buying behaviour of one of its premier customers. As one of the company’s designated strategic accounts, this customer was entitled to multi-level collaborative support. Of late, the customer had been taking a “bid-and-buy” approach to its purchases, ignoring the standards agreed to in the strategic agreement with Johnson Controls International. It also sought a scaled-down version of a security system, and this ran contrary to the original strategic account agreement. The chief commercial officer was examining the way forward with the customer. Should he demote it from the strategic account status to a regular sales account, despite the risks involved in doing so?

Dupden Lepcha started Tingvong Homestay, the first homestay in the remote Dzongu region of Sikkim, India, when the region was opened for tourism in 2006. Initially, the response to Dupden’s homestay was good, improving Dupden’s financial position and earning him the respect of the community. With Dupden’s active encouragement and help, other members of the community also established homestays. Over time, however, a few of these homestays outperformed Tingvong Homestay by creating greater awareness of their offering.<br><br>Despite the government’s intention to develop the region as an ecotourism hub, the pace has been slow, compelling the village council to take proactive steps. They have asked Dupden to play an active role in working closely with government officials, and now Dupden must decide whether to focus on his homestay or take up the role offered by the council and work toward the development of the Dzongu region as an ecotourism hub.

Saudamini Mattu was the chief executive officer of Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla (AJSK), a successful Indian luxury brand specializing in luxe couture, interior design, and wedding decor. The brand had roots in ancient Indian embroidery, and its story was inextricably linked with the personalities of its founders, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, who thought of themselves as revivalists creating luxury products and experiences using designs with an Indian ethos. The luxury brand had deeply resonated with its loyal customer base for over three decades, but AJSK had to now address the relevance and sustainability of its brand story. Mattu therefore had to evaluate whether AJSK’s brand story was relevant in the constantly shifting luxury market, and recraft the brand story for the House of AJSK, while considering missed opportunities and the viability of the business model of a creative organization in a challenging economic scenario.

In 2020, the legal cannabis industry in the United States was emerging. One large player in the nascent industry was Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy Growth), a cannabinoid company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario, that grew cannabis and managed a range of cannabis-related brands. In September 2020, Canopy Growth announced a partnership with Martha Stewart that entailed the development of a mix of cannabis edibles and oils for wellness sold under the name Martha Stewart CBD. Although the legal cannabis industry held tremendous promise, there were a wide range of unique challenges associated with selling cannabis products, including regulatory and policy issues, stigmas associated with illegal cannabis, and other more typical issues associated with selling new products such as the need for consumer education. The partners would need to consider how consumers would respond to the Martha Stewart CBD offerings, what specific obstacles they would have to overcome, and what market segment(s) and products they should prioritize.

In January 2020, the chief executive officer of the family-run business Scak Textiles LLP (Scak), based in India, was thinking about how the company could achieve a new milestone of ₹500 million in revenue by 2025. He wondered why the company, after coming so far, could not achieve that number with a sustainable margin. What else could he do to help Scak reached this target, and how could he solve the bottleneck of resource constraints?<br><br>The bright next-generation entrepreneurs of the family were taking an active interest in the business and had strategic plans for enhancing the effectiveness of both business and revenue models while navigating the ever-changing business ecosystem. The promoters of Scak wanted an outline of the entrepreneurs’ recommendations with adequate assumptions and a business valuation. The promoters would expect a 15 per cent return on additional capital invested; the corporate tax rate would be 30 per cent. The next-generation family members saw three possible options: add manufacturing operations, establish e-commerce platforms for business-to-business and business-to-consumer businesses, or enter the business of exporting. Could they take up all three options, or should they maintain the status quo? The value and future of Scak would depend on their decision.

Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B21N003.

Student Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21N003.

In 2018, the chairman of Sichuan Mt. Emei Zhuyeqing Tea Co., Ltd. (ZT), a tea enterprise founded in 1998, faced a strategic decision. ZT had become an economic entity in China, having successfully integrated tea plantation, cultivation, processing, and marketing. Since 2013, however, ZT had experienced sluggish growth. According to a third-party research report, the company’s development bottleneck was caused by fuzzy strategy and an out-of-focus operation. The company’s chairman needed to decide the next steps for ZT. Should ZT continue to pursue its cost leadership strategy by developing multiple brands and expanding geographically? Or should ZT adopt a focusing strategy, by building its green tea brand, and moving in stages toward the goal of national market expansion?

In mid-2020, the organizer of the Qingdao International Beer Festival (QIBF) faced a predicament. The QIBF was an annual festival held every August in Qingdao, China; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizer had initially abandoned the idea of holding the QIBF in 2020. By the end of March 2020, the spread of the pandemic in China had been basically contained. The organizer then decided to restart the event preparations. However, on June 12, 2020, a second COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Beijing. Could the QIBF be held as expected in August 2020? What should be done to control the pandemic’s spread and coordinate the planning and design work of the festival? Based on this predicament, could the organizer meet the festival's goals while safeguarding the health of all participants?

While much of the Western world focuses on aspects of China that appear to threaten other nations, we should not ignore the lessons that can be found in China’s remarkable evolution as a marketplace innovator. The first key fundamental lesson to take from China’s digital innovators is the benefits of fully embracing user-driven innovation, starting with unmet customer needs, rather than transformational technology embodied in what you are sure will be a killer product. The second major lesson that Chinese digital innovators can teach us is to go beyond digital functionality and offer users an all-embracing digital lifestyle. While Google and Facebook derive most of their revenues from online advertising, Tencent and Alibaba’s online advertising accounts for a fraction of their revenues, because they follow a different business model, which constitutes the third fundamental lesson that the West can learn from China’s digital innovators. While Western companies fret about growing user bases to grow advertising, most Chinese digital innovators focus on generating profits by selling an ever-increasing portfolio of products and services designed to satisfy unmet customer needs or contribute to a more complete digital lifestyle.

An alarming number of leaders have been failing to serve as role models for future generations at a time when positive examples of leadership have never been more important. Like everyone, leaders make mistakes, which we often attribute to bad morals. But in most cases, these mistakes occur as consequences of poor judgment resulting from weaknesses in character. Most organizations fail to understand the key role that developing and maintaining character plays in improving judgment, and fail to seriously focus on character when hiring. In Developing Leadership Character—which offers a deep dive into Ivey’s research on how the interrelationships of various dimensions of character support good judgment—the case for character development is broken down into four parts. First, individuals can work on developing their own character strengths. Second, organizations can contribute to the character development of both individuals and organizations. Third, these processes must occur if individuals and organizations are to succeed in the contexts in which they operate. Finally, the results from character development will yield critical benefits to individuals and organizations, thereby justifying the effort required. While there are long-established selection criteria for competencies, it’s relatively rare for employers to discuss the character dimensions required to succeed in leadership roles. When hiring and promoting in today’s disruptive world, organizations need to ensure that leadership candidates have the essential dimensions of character required to selflessly lead others.

This article aims to help employers implement equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) training efforts that can make the difference between meeting today’s elevated expectations and falling short by focusing only on select characteristics like race and gender. Understanding the pervasiveness of biases and how they impact our thinking and behaviour can help us try to moderate how we act and communicate, which is why introspection and implicit bias tests are used to detect the strength of a person’s automatic associations between mental representations. But introspection and implicit bias tests don’t eliminate biases or help us avoid falling into the Judgment Trap. According to the research behind the TRACOM SOCIAL STYLE Model, 75 per cent of people with whom you interact have a different behavioural pattern or “Social Style,” including the Driving Style, Expressive Style, Amiable Style, and Analytical Style. Social intelligence training can help those with each of the four Social Styles make adjustments that can enable people to interact more effectively, empathetically, and transparently. By deploying Social Style training to focus on behaviours, organizations empower people to recognize how their perceived strengths can actually impede their relationships with co-workers, while moving them to appreciate diversity of thought and behaviour. This counters the unfounded judgments that our brains ironically make in the name of efficiency, and thus enables us to interact more respectfully and effectively.

In 2019, the pricing manager at the US manufacturing facility for Sparrow GmbH (Sparrow), a chemical manufacturer based in Germany, asked the project manager at Roland Berger, a global management consulting firm, to provide her opinion on the pricing for Sparrow’s bid on a basic chemicals contract with Impendium Chemicals. The basic chemicals industry was a highly competitive and commoditized environment; as a result, pricing decisions with respect to formulating bids were very important. Although the company had traditionally relied on the estimates of salespersons for pricing, it needed to develop a more refined approach to its pricing strategy. The project manager had to decide which costing method was most appropriate for this contract and recommend a price for the bid.

In April 2020, the business head and the human resources head at Apturja Power Limited (APL) were anxious about the rising levels of new-hire turnover across all five power plant locations. Out of 2,000 employees hired in the past two years, half had left the organization within a year of joining. High attrition posed an issue for APL's cost-competitiveness strategy by not only increasing hiring costs but also nullifying the time and energy spent in acquainting and training employees to APL's requirements. Both department heads wanted to identify reliable indicators so that they could develop an appropriate action plan to reduce new-hire turnover and thereby strengthen APL's human capital.

Spreadsheet for product 8B21C001.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21C001.

This article aims to help employers support women as they pursue their goals and dreams by changing organizational dynamics that prevent progress. There are steps that one can take to balance cross-gender relationships and improve the cultural context in which employees interact. These steps will get organizations headed in the right direction—and faster, while getting them farther, than preaching change by itself. Unfortunately, when an organization decides that it needs to change something like its gender relationships, employees typically have no idea what to do other than talk about the fact that they are being told to change. The following steps can mitigate the pain associated with change by focusing on objectives while letting employees lead the conversation about what needs fixing to achieve them: 1) start at the end and visualize the story you want tomorrow’s organization to tell, 2) set a release date for your new story, 3) build a plan backward, 4) create a pilot team of change agents, 5) create new habits one at a time, 6) measure the right things, and 7) celebrate objectives and reward the right behaviours. Ultimately, firms should not assume their employees will reject change no matter how it is positioned. More often than you might think, an organization’s people really just don’t know what change could or should be.

As the second wave of COVID-19 was ramping up in 2020, a three-day virtual summit organized by the Ivey Academy brought together senior HR professionals from across Canada to discuss working on the front lines of organizational disruption. Day 1 examined equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts. As 2020’s civil rights protests demonstrated, the institutional programs conducted around EDI in the past have failed to deliver what is expected today, not to mention what justice demands. Day 2 was themed “from staying afloat to charting a course.” With remote work leading to problems—ranging from rising mental health issues and Zoom fatigue to increased cyberattacks—most companies are still trying to figure out what level of remote work makes sense for future operations. Summit attendees discussed the need to further develop virtual working skills and leadership empathy, while focusing employees on purpose more than profits, beefing up mentoring/coaching, and breaking down virtual silos. Finally, Day 3 examined the re-humanization of the workplace. The pandemic has essentially stripped the workplace of direct human-to-human interaction as work hours soar. As a result, employee stress is up, along with substance use, which has impacted engagement. HR summit attendees discussed the need to explore new ideas that go well beyond offering flexible hours, technical training, and mental health support programs—these included blackout periods, high-end virtual events, and online food vouchers for team lunches.