This case asks how startup founders make scaling decisions in light of their priorities for their business and for themselves. Otto was a technology company that applied artificial intelligence technology to sales. It deployed natural language processing to find sales targets for companies, write messages for those targets, and send them over email, social media, and other means. Otto's automated sales outreach was personalized at scale and improved results for its clients. Early in 2024, its founders had to decide how to scale their business. They had three options: they could focus on business-to-business sales for individual clients, which posed the specific challenge of growing while working with large customer organizations; they could concentrate on the financial services field, in which they sourced deals for private equity companies and investment banks; or they could sell Otto to a larger sales firm.

This case is about TPG Rise Climate, a $7.3 billion climate impact fund launched in 2021 by alternative asset manager TPG. Climate investing is a complex, capital-intensive endeavor; entering it has forced TPG to think and act differently. Relative to other funds, Rise Climate's investments take longer to mature, require far more capital, and are more vulnerable to swings in commodity markets and fickle government policies. Set in December 2023, the case finds TPG considering the future for Monolith, a Rise Climate portfolio company with significant impact potential but an uncertain business model.

Allen, the author of the best seller Getting Things Done, and Schwartz, the author of the best seller Be Excellent at Anything and the CEO of The Energy Project, are two of the world's foremost authorities on increasing personal efficiency. Yet although they agree on much, their ideas on how to maximize the output of knowledge workers are fundamentally different. In this edited conversation with HBR, they discuss their own approaches and what they've learned from each other's work, along with subjects ranging from the distractive pull of e-mail to the benefits of napping in the middle of the workday. Allen has developed a system of time management that encourages workers to regularly make to-do lists-and helps them blast through the items on them. Breaking down big tasks into smaller "next actions" can help people stay focused and productive, he argues, and multitasking is to be avoided at all costs: We have only so many resources and can do only one thing well at a time. Schwartz focuses on workers' attitudes and how organizations can help them achieve a mental state that keeps their energy high. People should work for 90 minutes and then take a break to recover, he says. They should tackle their most important task first thing in the morning. And managers should consider themselves "chief energy officers," inspiring and regularly recharging the people they lead-while remembering to meet their own needs as well.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Business strategy begins with operations, the competitive landscape and markets. But David Bach and David B. Allen of the IE Business School Center for Nonmarket Strategy argue that strategy should not end there. Rather, a robust nonmarket strategy that addresses government regulation, political and social movements, even activist opposition should figure strongly in any strategy. Nonmarket strategy starts with the premise that issues and actors "beyond the market" affect the bottom line. Which nonmarkets are most important? That depends on the key issues a company confronts. By identifying key issues, and then the actors who are shaping them, a company can begin to shape the nonmarket -- a crucial approach when the issue is core to the underlying market as well.