A female executive considers whether a staff job is a dead end or the next step to becoming CEO. This fictional case study by Anne Donnellon, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo feature expert commentary by Rakefet Russak Aminoach and Nadia Rawlinson.

A female executive considers whether a staff job is a dead end or the next step to becoming CEO. This fictional case study by Anne Donnellon, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo feature expert commentary by Rakefet Russak Aminoach and Nadia Rawlinson.

A female executive considers whether a staff job is a dead end or the next step to becoming CEO. This fictional case study by Anne Donnellon, Joshua D. Margolis, and Amy Gallo feature expert commentary by Rakefet Russak Aminoach and Nadia Rawlinson.

This case addresses the nuances of gender dynamics and career progression at the top of the organization, where even women who have strong leadership expertise, experience, and alliances with powerful male colleagues still get stuck. Told from the point of view of Sonia Millar, the case explicitly presents two significant challenges: How can Millar sustain her career momentum into the CEO role despite taking on the critical but difficult role of CIO: How can Millar address the potentially antagonistic actions of another business leader who may be another strong contender for the CEO promotion? The case provides the opportunity to discuss influence, action planning, talent management, inclusion, and implicit bias. It is designed to provoke debate in the classroom regarding the phenomenon of gender bias (among other forms of bias) in the workplace. It is recommended for upper-level undergraduates, MBA candidates, and executive education participants in courses focused on organizational behavior, power and politics, leadership, diversity, and career management.

Key topics include designing teams, managing teams, managing conflict, group dynamics, project management, product development, interdepartmental relations, and organizational change. MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new medical system for monitoring intensive-care patients. MediSys has invested heavily in IntensCare, which is eagerly awaited by the market. The product development team, representing several functional areas of the company, has been working on the product for six months but is now running into significant problems with the product design, the schedule, and their own group dynamics. Recently, pressure increased when they learned that two more powerful competitors had begun work on their own products for this market. Several team members are concerned about meeting the team's targets. Struggling especially hard to overcome the various problems is the marketing manager who has profit-and-loss responsibility for IntensCare.

Ken Winston, the regional sales manager at a securities brokerage firm, has reorganized his generalist salespeople into "Key Account Teams" (KAT), to increase sales of specialized, higher-margin fixed income products. Winston is also implementing a new corporate performance management system. To help improve coordination between sales and marketing, Winston must solicit feedback from marketing staff on how responsive his salespeople are to marketing's directives. The marketing group has information on product costs that allow it to forecast product profitability, and by persuading the sales force to focus on those products the marketers can improve firm-wide margins. The KAT model, implemented six months earlier, has challenged the core internal values of the organization - such as a salesperson's control of his or her customer base and the appropriateness of product specialization. However, the long-term test of the new organizational structure will be its alignment with external changes in the securities industry: how securities are bought and sold and the types of new products flooding the market.

Chronicles the launch of a Total Quality Management (TQM) program in Gillette Argentina. The case protagonist credits the initiative with a 40% benefit in business while recognizing that its success was heavily dependent on the effects of teamwork and customer focus. Now he is faced with how to increase market share elsewhere on the continent and preserve it in Argentina. The only real question now is how to expand the same TQM programs elsewhere. To use in undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs on human resources management, team dynamics and design, and implementation of quality programs.

This case examines the organizational changes and human resource strategies implemented to create an entrepreneurial culture within the formerly state-owned oil company. After a local entrepreneur radically downsized and reorganized the company, YPF was successfully taken public in 1993. But in a country where the economy had been closed for many decades and state-owned institutions had become bloated and highly bureaucratic, changing the mindset and behavior of the workforce to turn it into a competitive player in the world economy was not automatic. It required major redesign of organizational systems, like recruiting, training, and performance management. The case describes the changes introduced by a new vice president of human resources and offers early reaction to those changes.

Focuses sharply on a crossfunctional product development team at Honeywell's Building Controls Division. Traces the history of teams at the division, which introduced them as a response to intensifying competition and the need for faster development. Reveals the challenges team members, their managers, and executives face when an organization adopts a collaborative approach to work. With a history of sequential product development and animosity between functional areas, the MOD IV team has the added pressure of having to finish the division's most ambitious project in history under a strategy of faster development. Through three perspectives -- team member, manager, and executive -- the case exposes students to the reality of teamwork.

How do you manage yourself and your interaction with others when you feel your personal values challenged? What should you be aware of as you proceed with sensitive, ethical issues? Jonah Creighton coordinates the company's fast-track training program, and when he tries to place some participants at two of the company's overseas divisions, he learns of their discriminatory hiring practices. He finds this deeply troubling and attempts to have the issue addressed by his supervisor and others at the company. As he tries to act in accordance with his personal standards and convictions, his relationship with his supervisor deteriorates, and he feels increasingly uncertain about his future at the company. People do not seem to be responding to the problems he sees, and Jonah wonders how to proceed.

Covers Jonah's two-hour meeting with the company's executive vice president who is next in line to become president, and the outcome of the discriminatory hiring incident that initially troubled Jonah.

Traces the history of a collaborative effort to create an organization to manage a major international development project in the slums of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Focuses on a serious set of disagreements which develops several months into the project between the two principals, an Ethiopian woman who founded the project and a British entrepreneur who is the coordinator of the donor consortium. Designed to provide 1) an example of entrepreneurial action in the nonprofit sector, particularly in international development, 2) the opportunity to diagnose problems in the working relationship of two people who have very different backgrounds, and 3) the opportunity to devise plans for each person to take in addressing the problems.