Leadership is a prominent function within organizations and social entities, and research suggests leadership that is more active tends to be more effective. However, emerging research contends that more active leadership can place stressful demands on leaders, which can jeopardize their well-being and eventual effectiveness. In this article, we draw from research on job demands, job resources, and stress coping to outline an applied framework of leader strain management. The model explains how leadership demands (i.e., the challenges/hindrances leaders face) can influence leader strains (i.e., negative implications of the demands) and how leader resources (i.e., tangible/intangible assets) can be leveraged through coping activities to resolve demands or reduce strains. We propose five guidelines for leaders seeking to balance engaging their leadership responsibilities with maintaining their well-being and sustaining their effectiveness over time.
This case illustrates the founding philosophy and continuous improvement of Spark Education Limited ("Spark Education") and analyzes challenges in the online education industry. Since its inception, Spark Education has been committed to reshaping foundational learning and promoting education equality. Powered by technology and innovation, Spark Education delivered online small classes and AI courses. Based on the operating model of "courses + teaching + service," rounds of innovation and exploration have been conducted. After three years of development, Spark Education has grown into China's largest small-class online platform in mathematics thinking education. However, this young startup's pursuit for further excellence became a big question after the Chinese government introduced the "Double Reduction" policy in July 2021. Affected by this policy, many capital-fueled online and offline education companies, including Spark Education, have been hit hard. The "Double Reduction" policy wrecked Spark Education's IPO plans (the company had submitted its application in the US two months earlier) and imposed significant uncertainty on its future. These market players are in dire need of a way out of the crisis. Looking ahead, Spark Education needs to re-examine its business model and core strengths or build a second growth curve. In August 2021, Spark Education held an executive meeting on its transformation and future business direction. First, Spark Education has to review the value of its online education model, especially the small-class-based adaptive learning model. Second, can Spark Education follow Outschool's model of providing small online classes that were well-received in the US? And if so, what should Spark Education teach? The final question throws it back to the nature of education-What should Spark Education do to provide considerate education services and ensure students enjoy adaptive learning featuring technological innovation? How can children's
The sales of various drug products for AstraZeneca, a multinational pharmaceutical company, have been greatly impacted by the volume-based procurement resulting from the medical reform in China. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 epidemic has catapulted the internet pharmaceutical industry into rapid development. When crises are intermingled with opportunities, AstraZeneca attempted to establish Yiliyili.com, an internet medical service platform, by leveraging its offline resources. Chen Hua, the CEO of Yiliyili.com, has 14 years of experience in pharmaceutical e-commerce and has set up an innovative "doctors-to-pharmaceuticals" model in contrast to the mainstream that runs otherwise. This model was created through collaboration with doctors from contracted offline hospitals who were engaged online. The goal was to establish a stable and active group of doctor users while providing them with empowerment and supporting services. The objective was to replicate existing doctor-patient relationships in an online setting. Meanwhile, it has extended services in physical medical and pharmaceutical products to value-additive services such as case management and compliance-related services for patients. It has also extended the provision of prescription drugs other than essential drugs at non-public offline hospitals according to patients' needs to enhance its marketing abilities for such drugs. Furthermore, it has used its marketing capacity for prescription drugs to establish cooperation with other medical appliance manufacturers to form an integrated marketing platform through which it could average down its fixed costs for maintaining a huge marketing team while better-utilizing marketing capacities. Can Yiliyili.com gain a competitive edge over its traditional competitors by implementing a service-heavy strategy and utilizing its offline strengths to outperform its online advantages? Will it be able to establish itself as a top-notch provider of exceptional and cost-effective
Ping An OneConnect Bank (Hong Kong) Limited is a virtual bank that has pioneered the use of Fintech to provide efficient banking services to both SMEs and retail customers. The bank uses innovative credit risk and loan pricing models that rely on big data analytics, including detailed customs data for its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers in the import/export business.
Beryl is a leading brand in China's goji berry market that has stayed ahead of the competition quality-wise and is the only one to build a name for itself both offline and online. Beryl made a foray into e-commerce in 2015 and quickly outperformed rivals with low-priced berries. However, its success came at the expense of brand image. In 2018, Beryl repositioned itself by axing lucrative low-price products that brought the company ¥70 million in sales and accounted for 70% of total e-commerce sales. It shifted focus to new goji berry snacks to satisfy the demand for health products among younger generations. In 2020, the Covid-19 outbreak dealt a severe blow to Beryl's offline retail. As a bulwark against the pandemic, Beryl decided to embrace internet retail and make livestream marketing a strategic priority.
Feng Min, Sun Lei, and Li Shangzhen initially established Ruhnn as a Taobao brand called "LiBeilin". With the rapid development and growing integration of social platforms and e-commerce functionality, they partnered with fashion model Zhang Dayi to open an exclusive online private store. Following the store's promising debut, LiBeilin officially renamed itself Ruhnn and adopted an "influencers + incubator + supply chain" operating model. With its self-operated business, Ruhnn looked to optimize its model as the supply chain was too complicated and focus on influencer incubation and operations. It also brought in business partners to pursue monetization. Ruhnn's FY2021Q1 results indicated a dramatic surge in profitability, with the platform business becoming a significant driver of robust growth. In recent years, influencer marketing has exploded with a host of multi-channel networks (MCNs) mushrooming across China. Ruhnn faced a barrage of criticism for relying on Weibo despite declining commercialization. Ruhnn's management team faced several issues. Could influencer incubation be replicated at scale through institutional operations? How should Ruhnn empower influencers and better serve businesses with influencer marketing needs? Could the company's organizational structure keep up with the expanding influencer pool and business size?
Influence vulnerability has recently become a concern across society and in business. Such vulnerabilities increase as social networks are leveraged by different entities, oftentimes through social media, to affect how we think and behave. While many instances of social influence are positive and beneficial, others can be quite negative and lead to harmful outcomes for organizations and individuals such as reputational damage and an inability to control desirable thoughts, narratives, and behaviors, as well as decreasing people's freedom of thought and behavior. This article draws on the concepts of social embeddedness and network commitment to outline people's influence vulnerabilities. We then propose three guidelines to help reduce influence vulnerabilities based on the concepts of trustworthiness, network commitment, and self-management.
Since entering China in 1987 with its first restaurant in Beijing, KFC has been a great success and has become the largest quick-service restaurant (QSR) in the country. In 2015, Joey Wat was named Chief Executive Officer of KFC China. In the following year, Yum China (NYSE: YUMC) spun off from Yum! Brands and became an independent, publicly traded company. To expand KFC China's business one step further, Joey Wat had to navigate through a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive landscape. With China's rising economy and personal income levels, many more fast-food chains and snack choices entered the market and competition intensified. Moreover, over the years consumers were increasingly attracted to not only healthy diets, but also an enjoyable consumption experience. As Gen Z customers become the largest consumer base, they have shifted their focus more to value, personalized experience, and a sense of engagement in their food purchases, beyond just affordability and speed. For KFC, other issues were added to the challenge too: a high employee turnover rate and rising rent and labor costs. With highly standardized products and a stable ticket average, how should KFC move forward amid the new and challenging dynamics to achieve a breakthrough? KFC China had started its digital ecosystem early and built up powerful digital capabilities. Under Joey Wat's leadership, KFC China made various attempts to drive productivity, reduce costs, and constantly improve the customer experience. How did digitalization help with these accomplishments? How did KFC China carry out the digitalization? Would digitalization continue to benefit the business in the future?
Research and applied evidence suggest that online opinion leaders are important promoters of products and services. However, managers and firms need to choose which opinion leaders to work with and better understand how to collaborate with those leaders to promote different types of products and services. Online opinion leaders should be used to promote the experiential (hedonic) and functional (utilitarian) value of products and services over different online forums. In this article, we describe how online opinion leaders can serve appeal leadership functions, serve knowledge leadership functions, and take multiple roles (e.g., experts, celebrities, micro-celebrities, micro-influencers, early adopters, market mavens, enthusiasts). We then present a five-stage planning process designed to guide partnerships with online opinion leaders. Specific steps in the process include: planning (setting the objectives of the campaign and the role of online opinion leaders), recognition (identifying influential and relevant online opinion leaders), alignment (matching online opinion leaders and online forums with the products or services promoted), motivation (rewarding online opinion leaders in a way that aligns with their social role), and coordination (negotiating, monitoring, and supporting the influence of the online opinion leaders).
Brand post popularity positively relates to consumers' purchase intentions, actual sales, and stock prices. Research suggests that social media posts should be vivid, practical, interesting, personalized, and interactive. However, cross-cultural research also suggests that practices might not be equally effective across different regional markets. While vividness and practicality could be consistently important across cultures, characteristics of interest, personalization, and interactivity might need to be adapted to the cultural conditions of specific target markets. We consider how individualism/collectivism, long-term orientation, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and high-context/low-context cultures could influence brand post effectiveness. We provide suggestions for how to manage social media brand post popularity from a cross-cultural perspective to inform both domestic and global social media marketing campaigns. Suggested practices include: (1) making brand posts engaging; (2) targeting the 'I' in individualistic cultures and the 'we' in collectivist cultures; (3) focusing on consumers' identity in less long-term oriented cultures and on functional information in more long-term oriented cultures; (4) ensuring that posts help reduce uncertainty; (5) planning for one-way communication in higher power distance countries and two-way communication in lower power distance countries; and (6) making messages less direct in higher context cultures and more direct in lower context cultures.
As the retail industry in Chinese Mainland is facing a difficult economic climate, with the continuous decline of major retail indicators since 2016, strategic transformation in the mobile Internet era has become an urgent task and a common source of anxiety among many traditional firms. Retailers have turned to a new concept: the O2O (online-to-offline) "New Retail" model. This model leverages the advantages of the Internet-borderless coverage, real-time communication, massive quantities of data, and improved targeting-while utilizing offline capabilities, with the aim of seamlessly integrating online advantages (such as pricing) and offline advantages (such as service). This enables retailers to expand the service radius of transactions through the Internet, and widen the selection of products and services for customers. The Chairman of Ting Hsin International Group, Wei Yingxing, is beginning to consider whether the company's convenience store retail chain FamilyMart, a consistently excellent performer offline, should also explore the O2O "New Retail" model. The challenge will be how to leverage the nine million members of the Maxxipoint Card scheme that FamilyMart has created for its offline customers, and bring these customers online. Wei has asked FamilyMart's Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Lin Jianhong, to present a plan to the board within a month. This means that Lin has only one month to weigh the various issues and figure out whether FamilyMart should take its retail business online, and, if so, to determine what strategy to follow and how to implement it.