In December 2023, the 60-year-old weight management industry stalwart WeightWatchers announced the launch of WeightWatchers Clinic, which incorporated GLP-1s , a new class of prescription weight-loss medications, into the company's portfolio of products and mobile app experience. The company's embrace of prescription medications for weight loss represented a bold strategic evolution. Since its inception, WeightWatchers had promoted peer-to-peer support coupled with science-based behavior modifications for weight loss, rooted in the idea that weight management was fundamentally about establishing healthy diet and exercise habits. While the company's core business would continue to center on behavior modification, WeightWatcher's new CEO Sima Sistani believed an expanded "toolkit" could be a game-changer for people for whom the company's traditional weight-loss program was inadequate and who required other kinds of support. Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran, had stepped into the CEO role at a critical moment for the company. Revenue had been declining for years due to slowing member subscriptions, a lackluster digital app, and increasing competition from a host of players. Now, a year and a half into her tenure, revenues continued to trend downward. As she looked ahead, Sistani pondered how to strike the right balance between investing in the "core" business and growing the nascent clinical offering. She recognized that, for the iconic company, there was a delicate balance to be struck between ramping up new products and services and winding down legacy offerings such as weekly in-person meetings, while also fortifying the digital app. She wondered if there were synergies that might offer new avenues for growth in a dynamic market.

"For ghSMART, freedom is the first principle from which all good things flow"-Geoff Smart, Chairman and Founder, ghSMART. ghSMART was a leadership advisory firm that was grounded in the principle of freedom. Talented Consultants and Partners could work remotely from where they wanted to, they could work on whatever they wanted to, and with whoever they like. There was no up-or-out culture, and employees were rewarded based on outcomes, not hours worked. In January 2022, ghSMART & Company conducted a comprehensive review of its 12-year performance, revealing remarkable growth with nearly $100 million in revenue by 2021 and a strong reputation for employee satisfaction and client impact. However, after a decade of success, the firm faced challenges related to its freedom-based culture, including difficulties in promoting self-sustaining partners, limited knowledge sharing, and uncoordinated innovation efforts. To shape its future, the firm's leadership had identified five key questions regarding maintaining its culture, formalizing promotion policies, decentralizing or centralizing innovation, geographic expansion, and the possibility of going public to address capital constraints. This case discusses these questions, and the central question of whether the company should change or keep their freedom-first culture as the company continued to expand.

From an open-concept 90's-style stone and wood cabin in Dublin, New Hampshire, Ryan Serhant reflected on his career as a real estate broker. As Ryan stared into the fireplace that featured prominently in the center of the house, he wondered whether the period of selling real estate at record highs in New York was over. A few short months earlier, the United States had begun to shut down to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus. New York City was unsure of its future under this newly defined threat. New York also faced a real estate crisis, as loyal residents started to leave the city in search of more space and distance from other people. Many experts feared that New York City real estate was "in a worse state than after September 11th and the 2008 financial crises." Students step into Ryan's shoes as he faced a decision in March 2020 at the height of Covid-19: Should he stay at his current real estate brokerage, launch his own brokerage in a pandemic, or enjoy the flexibility to start new ventures and spend time with family? As part of the discussion, students reflect on Ryan's time management techniques including the 1,000-minute rule, Task Triage and Finder, Keeper, Doer methodologies, and consider the strengths and weaknesses of these various time and prioritization strategies.

This case focuses on the challenges of incentivizing innovation within Moog, an engineering company based in New York state that designs and builds guidance systems for space, air, and land-based travel. The case enables students to grapple with the challenges of using compensation to motivate and incentivize employees to create commercially successful innovations. Thick culture motivates employees to innovate in unique ways that money cannot. Students analyze the ways in which Moog's unique culture and current incentive systems successfully, and unsuccessfully, drive innovation, considering Moog's specific challenge of commercializing and scaling innovations. Throughout the discussion, students will understand the ways in which incentivizing innovation is a structurally challenging problem within large companies. Incentivizing innovation differs from incentivizing other types of performance, and students should realize that money alone cannot drive innovation because of the challenges of measuring performance, especially given the long time horizons and the fact that innovation necessarily involves risk and uncertainty.

The UK government's Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) needed to hire a new associate and were trying to increase the diversity of their job candidates. This decision was based on academic research showing that recruiters and managers often fell into common traps like "stereotype" and "affinity" bias, where they hired people who looked the part or who were similar in appearance or background as themselves. To overcome these biases, the team had spent hours using a permanent marker to redact the names and educational information from each candidate's CVs, one-by-one. This painstaking process inspired Kate Glazebrook to develop Applied-a technological solution to debias hiring. Applied was a recruitment and hiring platform that used technology to eliminate biased language in job ads and used task-based assessments to reduce favoritism, among other features. Years after founding the company, Glazebrook considered asking her clients to remove CVs altogether. Could Glazebrook convince her new and existing customers to use the platform, even after taking away CVs?

At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their positions required. Applied used several strategies to encourage clients to rely more strongly on skills assessments.

These cases explore the impacts of industry shocks, resulting corporate actions that had a devastating impact on employees, and the legal conviction of corporate leaders for "institutional harassment. This case series follows the evolution of France Telecom from a national telephone monopoly to a private company facing two severe challenges: (1) The company's competitive advantage as a land-line carrier is being challenged by mobile carriers and the entry of new competition from other countries; and (2) the workforce is much larger than required by the company's new strategy, yet many employees are civil servants, making it very difficult to reduce headcount, despite many attempts to do so. As increasing pressure is mounted internally, the culture shifts from one where employees are proud to work to one described as "tense, even violent" and the physical and mental wellbeing of some employees becomes increasingly "fragile." The further impact of these developments is outlined in the (B) and (C) cases. The (A) case describes the development of the situation, the competitive challenges that prompted it, key decisions made by corporate leaders, and the impact of the same on various stakeholders. The discussion begins by asking students to apportion responsibility -how much is due to labor laws, to industry change; to past management; to current management; to the employees themselves? Have corporate leaders pushed employees too far, creating unacceptable levels of stress and unhappiness? What levers do leaders have to keep a business relevant and to do so in a way that is fair to all stakeholders? At its most fundamental, the case series helps students confront some fundamental tensions between the pressures and benefits of capitalism, the responsibilities of management, and the day-to-day and long-term impacts on employee well-being.

In the B case we learn that at least 19 France Telecom employees took their own lives between 2006 and 2009, 12 others attempted suicide, and eight suffered from serious depression for reasons reportedly related to work. Some of these deaths occurred in public places, others on company grounds. Labor inspector Sylvie Catala conducted an investigation and found that the "lack of consideration of psychosocial risks in the restructuring is the result of a policy implemented throughout the country... and that the company's top executives put pressure on middle management, who passed on this pressure to workers." She concluded that the company's actions likely "endangered human life" and constituted "moral harassment."

In the C case we learn that former CEO Didier Lombard, Deputy Chief Executive Louis-Pierre Wenes, Human Resources Head Olivier Barberot and France Telecom itself were charged for institutional harassment by French authorities, a first for a CAC 40 company. In December 2019 they were found guilty in a landmark ruling. Each was given a one-year jail sentence, with eight months suspended, and fined €15,000. France Telcom, which had since been rebranded as Orange, was fined €75,000 -the maximum allowed by French legal provisions at the time of the offenses.

This case describes the experiences of Michael Sanders-the Chief Executive of the What Works Center for Children's Social Care-as he led the design and implementation of a program of research aimed at improving the social care system in the United Kingdom (UK) at the national level. In the course of discussing the case, students are asked to consider the challenges of improving wellbeing for social workers and to debate the merits and challenges associated with the proposed experiments. The solutions and ideas shared by students illustrate various behavioral science techniques aimed at improving employee well-being by leveraging non-cash rewards and recognition, especially within the context of a financially constrained organization.

This case describes the experiences of Michael Sanders-the Chief Executive of the What Works Center for Children's Social Care-as he led the design and implementation of a program of research aimed at improving the social care system in the United Kingdom (UK) at the national level. In the course of discussing the case, students are asked to consider the challenges of improving wellbeing for social workers and to debate the merits and challenges associated with the proposed experiments. The solutions and ideas shared by students illustrate various behavioral science techniques aimed at improving employee well-being by leveraging non-cash rewards and recognition, especially within the context of a financially constrained organization.

Working professionals are often in the predicament of needing to make a choice between activities that will grant them more money or more time. Indeed, in large-scale representative panels of working adults, most respondents report feeling pressed for both time and money. Yet, we often are forced to make trade-offs between these valuable resources. Whether deciding to dine out vs. cook at home; to live in an expensive residence close to one's workplace vs. a cheaper abode with a longer commute; or to pursue a high-income job with long work hours vs. a humble salary with no overtime, trade-offs between money and time are prevalent in all of our major and daily decisions.

This case focuses on Charlotte Blank, the Chief Behavioral Officer at Maritz, as she tries to assist a major automotive manufacturer (CarCo) with increasing their sales by prepaying monthly bonuses to independently franchised car dealers and clawing them back if the sales targets are not reached. This pre-payment structure is what behavioral economists call "loss-framing." Broadly, this prepayment structure is an attempt to increase sales effort by harnessing people's desire to defend their earnings, endowments, and possessions. The case is based on a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper that can be read for additional detail on the underlying theory or empirics.

Can a "set your own salary" system boost employee happiness and motivation? Spiber made synthetic silk built from proteins mimicking the proteins found in spider silk, the world's toughest known material by weight. Kazuhide Sekiyama and Junichi Sugahara established Spiber to create protein materials that would eventually compete effectively with petrochemical-based materials widely used in apparel, auto parts, and airplane components, among many other applications. From the beginning, they envisioned a team built on mutual respect and a common purpose. The executive team wanted the company's compensation system to match the organization's values. Thus, the company had implemented a unique salary-setting process designed to inspire autonomy and responsibility among employees: each employee retained the ultimate authority to choose his or her own salary. The members of the executive team were excited about the "set your own salary" system, but was it having the intended effect?

Jordanian entrepreneur, Nour Al Hassan, founded Tarjama in 2008, tapping into an underserved and high demand need: Arabic translation service. Its lean model comprised of hiring full-time employees, mainly women, who worked from home. It steadily grew over the following decade to become a three-office, 140-employee company. In January 2017, Al Hassan launched a second business, Ureed.com, which encompassed a scalable, competitively priced online model. It was a linguistics marketplace, bringing companies and freelancers together. By October 2018, Ureed.com had significantly grown, having over 14,000 freelancers using the platform. As Al Hassan looked ahead at the ambitious growth plan they had in place, which included geographic expansion, diversifying the language offering, and monetizing Ureed.com's proprietary training and language tools, the main challenge she foresaw was maintaining the quality of the work performed by the freelancers while ensuring they remained motivated and loyal to the platform. Was the company ready for this growth plan or was it too ambitious for a company relying almost exclusively on freelancers? Would the training tools and technology add-ons suffice to sustain quality levels as the number of clients and freelancers grew? How could Al Hassan continue to create loyalty with an ever-growing number of freelancers? What were the other imminent challenges of adding new offices and languages simultaneously with only a small team of full-time employees?