This case follows the organic growth story of ServiceNow, a workflow platform serving enterprise customers. ServiceNow found product-market fit in streamlining workflows for IT service management. It later evolved its product, engineering, and go-to-market organizations to expand first into adjacencies within IT and then into additional domains such as HR, customer service, and others. The case charts ServiceNow's path of organic growth towards $10 billion in revenue, challenging students to consider decisions around build vs. buy, organizational design, innovation investments, and the leveraging of a unified platform technology.

Culture is easy to sense but hard to measure. The workhorses of culture research--employee surveys and questionnaires--are notoriously unreliable. Studying the language that employees use in electronic communication has opened a new window into organizational culture. New research analyzing email, Slack messages, and Glassdoor postings are challenging prevailing wisdom about culture. Some of the findings: (1) Cultural fit is important, but what predicts success most is the rate at which employees adapt as organizational culture changes over time. (2) Cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution. (3) The best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs.

Culture is assumed to play a pivotal role in organizational success and failure. In contrast to prevailing top-down perspectives, this article proposes an approach to studying culture that accounts for myriad organizational subcultures, how individuals fit into those subcultures, and the causes and consequences of shifts in culture and cultural fit. The language through which people communicate with colleagues offers a powerful lens for studying cultural dynamics and its relationship to individual, group, and organizational success. This article describes a burgeoning stream of research that uses language as a window into culture and discusses its implications for managerial practice.

In the spring of 2016, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or SFMOMA, opened its doors for a series of celebrations following a three-year closure. The museum had much to rejoice: a $305 million renovation that included a spectacular new ten-story addition that almost tripled gallery space; the 100-year loan of the renowned 1,100-work Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of postwar and contemporary art; the success of the "Campaign for Art," which saw generous donors gift or promise approximately 3,000 artworks; and the opening of the new Pritzker Center for Photography, the largest gallery and research space for photography in the United States. Reviews that rolled out in the wake of the celebrations proved largely laudatory. The Boston Globe, for instance, said SFMOMA was not only bigger, it was "also better-to such a degree, and in so many interesting, potentially game-changing ways, that for the next six months museum directors everywhere are going to be driven crazy fielding the same question: 'Have you seen what they've done in San Francisco?'" But once SFMOMA re-opened to the public on May 14, Director Neal Benezra and his colleagues had to get down to the business of running what was in many regards a brand-new museum. Most crucially, perhaps, they had to determine how to best continue fulfilling Benezra's oft-repeated pledge: to make SFMOMA mean more to more people. This case, based on interviews with Benezra, his colleagues, and SFMOMA Board President Robert J. Fisher and Board Chairman Charles R. Schwab, explores SFMOMA's effort to fulfill Benezra's pledge.

The Joffrey Ballet is a landmark Chicago nonprofit performing arts organization that helped shape the landscape of American ballet. In 2016, the Joffrey was at a point of transformation after a period of financial crisis and artistic decline. It had successfully raised $4 million for the widely anticipated new production of the Nutcracker. With annual revenues at around $20 million, this production represented a significant investment, and the organization needed to continue its artistic momentum while maintaining fiscal responsibility. The leadership team decided to launch an $80 to $120 all-funds campaign to ensure the artistic and financial health of the organization. Known for its diversity, the Joffrey Ballet had a history of balancing highly athletic performances of canonical works with boundary-blurring new ballets. Founded in New York City in 1954, it carved a niche as the distinctly American company in the ballet ecosystem known for its classical European influences. After its relocation to Chicago in 1995, the ballet relied upon its New York reputation in the face of financial and artistic woes. By 2016, however, the Joffrey Ballet was poised to reemerge as a major player in the national and international dance landscape. It had just celebrated its 60th anniversary and its 20th year in Chicago, and the leadership team debated the essential areas for investment going forward. The endowment, currently at about $1.4 million as of June 30, 2016, needed to be grown. The profitable Academy needed more space and funds to grow, while Community Engagement programs offered the potential for impact in the community. Programming large-scale works from the most important choreographers was essential but costly. In order to attract donors and secure the Joffrey's future, the organization needed to craft a compelling fundraising case supported by a sound business plan.

In June 2009, the online gaming company Zynga launched the free social game Farmville on Facebook, which set a new record by reaching one million Daily Active Users four days after launch, skyrocketing to 30 million in six months. The case takes an inside look at how Zynga created FarmVille in just six weeks, including the important strategic and technical decisions Zynga made, the sometimes tense team dynamics, and the challenges Zynga's founder and CEO Mark Pincus faced within Zynga. The company's experienced game developers had strongly resisted his idea to develop a farm game because farm games performed poorly on traditional game consoles and were considered an inferior gaming category. But Pincus believed they afforded access to new audiences and wanted to seize the strategic opportunity offered by the convergence of advances in technology and the meteoric rise of Facebook. These combined well with Zynga's advanced data analytics capabilities, which allowed the company to aggressively advance a new business model "Games as a Service," in which developers continuously added features to make a social game consistently compelling. Post launch, FarmVille was continually evolving and adding new features. But after a few months, the quality of the code and the ideas for new features were getting worse, more bugs and quality assurance problems arose, and users were complaining that new features were late and the game was getting rote. This case is set in late December 2009 as user numbers started to drop, and Pincus and the FarmVille team tried to figure out how to turn this trend around. Zynga's leadership team had to figure out how to reinvigorate FarmVille so that it would continue to be the goose that laid the golden eggs.