As co-founders of home nursing company Buurtzorg, Jos de Blok and Gonnie Kronenberg prized both self-management and organizational learning. Buurtzorg's 10,000 nurses across 950 neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands were empowered to manage themselves, both in terms of client care and team management. In its 16 years of existence, that had made Buurtzorg highly successful and had made its model attractive both for other Dutch companies and internationally. Yet because neighborhood teams managed themselves, so much of what they learned remained in the team. While nurses would sometimes try to spread such solutions to peer nursing teams, such as through calls/texts or the compan's internal social network BuurtzorgWeb, there was no holistic, top-down process for reviewing and disseminating best practices across all nursing teams-in part because Buurtzorg had been designed to avoid such hierarchical, top-down management in favor of a more flat, nimble, and minimally bureaucratic organization. They attributed much of the company's success (in terms of high client satisfaction and low employee turnover) to that model. But as the Dutch population aged and the country faced an increasingly dire nursing shortage, nurses would need to work more efficiently than ever, and elevating local, variegated learning to company-wide best practices would be one way to do so. How could Buurtzorg break the tradeoff between prizing self-management and effective sharing of best practices for organizational learning?
Frustrated by the current system's shortcomings, including failing to provide clients with the teams they needed for increasingly advisory work and affording junior consultants an opportunity to adequately apprentice, Murphy was worried that the current compensation system was holding RRA back from executing on his growth strategy intended to help RRA-a top 5 search firm-recapture market share lost to its competitors since the great recession. He had tried many attempts, over multiple years, to change the culture through other means, but only with tepid success. Now he had to decide whether to pull the trigger on a large-scale effort to adjust RRA's discretionary bonus system after hearing concern-and even anger-over the proposal from some of his top 20 consultants. To permit students to analyze the situation, they have access to detailed, real performance and compensation data for all RRA consultants in 2015 (in the supplementary (C) case spreadsheet), along with the modeling RRA did to forecast the effect of the compensation system changes on each person. Students can therefore analyze how a more collaborative approach to compensation might positively impact some consultants and adversely impact others, assessing the benefits and risks of the dislocation. By asking students to decide whether Murphy should move forward with the new compensation system, or whether an alternative might be better, students will wrestle with the role of compensation systems in driving intended behaviors, such as collaboration, and thus in supporting or warping organizational culture, performance, and growth. By analyzing the dislocation to employees' variable compensation due to a change, students will learn the challenges of changing and calibrating compensation systems.
Frustrated by the current system's shortcomings, including failing to provide clients with the teams they needed for increasingly advisory work and affording junior consultants an opportunity to adequately apprentice, Murphy was worried that the current compensation system was holding RRA back from executing on his growth strategy intended to help RRA-a top 5 search firm-recapture market share lost to its competitors since the great recession. He had tried many attempts, over multiple years, to change the culture through other means, but only with tepid success. Now he had to decide whether to pull the trigger on a large-scale effort to adjust RRA's discretionary bonus system after hearing concern-and even anger-over the proposal from some of his top 20 consultants. To permit students to analyze the situation, they have access to detailed, real performance and compensation data for all RRA consultants in 2015 (in the supplementary (C) case spreadsheet), along with the modeling RRA did to forecast the effect of the compensation system changes on each person. Students can therefore analyze how a more collaborative approach to compensation might positively impact some consultants and adversely impact others, assessing the benefits and risks of the dislocation. By asking students to decide whether Murphy should move forward with the new compensation system, or whether an alternative might be better, students will wrestle with the role of compensation systems in driving intended behaviors, such as collaboration, and thus in supporting or warping organizational culture, performance, and growth. By analyzing the dislocation to employees' variable compensation due to a change, students will learn the challenges of changing and calibrating compensation systems.
Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC's Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the "new normal" in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology's capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling-through collaboration and without radical surgery-the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it-and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT's internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose.
Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC's Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the "new normal" in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology's capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling-through collaboration and without radical surgery-the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it-and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT's internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose.
Nationwide is "on your side," but did employees feel that way? CAO Gale King and CEO Steve Rasmussen, starting in 2008, invested heavily in a human capital strategy centered around "engagement" at the Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Set in 2014, this case tells the story of those efforts to bolster employee engagement as a key part of the company's strategy to recover from the financial crisis (which it did far more effectively than most of its peers, rising in the Fortune 500 ranking as a result). From 2008 to 2013, Nationwide has seen employee engagement improve from the third to the sixth decile of Gallup's North American Finance and Insurance workgroup database. The case details the multi-pronged human capital strategy that Rasmussen and King implemented. It concludes by asking students to consider: will a new initiative aimed at moving Nationwide's dozen brand under a single umbrella jeopardize the culture gains that Nationwide has achieved over the last six years?
Nigel Le Quesne, CEO of Jersey-based financial services firm JTC, firmly believed that "shared ownership" was at the heart of his company's successful track record. The firm had seen its revenues, profits, and number of clients and staff grow steadily throughout its over 30-year history, and management attributed much of its competitive edge to its culture in which engaged employee owners had fully aligned interests and collaborated for the greater good of the firm. Le Quesne had seeded the first employee benefit trust with some of his own equity when becoming CEO in 1998, making all employees-from the receptionists to top executives-direct shareholders in the firm. Over time, the employee owned equity had grown from 5% to 23% and the trusts created significant value that had already been directly distributed to employees in two past pay-out events. In 2018, after JTC's successful IPO, Le Quesne and his leadership team have to decide if and how to adjust the shared ownership tools to their new public markets environment.
Making good hiring decisions is a critical management activity, yet many leaders just "wing it" when interviewing candidates to fill openings by having an organic conversation to assess the candidate's fit, unknowingly subjecting the process to unconscious bias. Instead, organizations should employ structured interviewing techniques to carefully assess the skills needed for a given opening, to determine a consistent approach for fairly evaluating candidates' skills, and ultimately to make the best possible hiring decision. This note aims to help the reader acquire the skills necessary to be an effective interviewer and to champion best-practice interviewing within his or her organization. Beginning by briefly summarizing the pitfalls of unstructured interviewing, the note proceeds to explain three types of structured interviewing techniques, the steps hiring managers should undertake to prepare for and conduct interviews, and tips for making evidence-based assessments.
While several tactics can drive company performance by instilling a sense of shared ownership among employees, perhaps the most direct is to actually share ownership with employees. Many public and private companies across industries have done just that, and studies have found that sharing ownership with employees can benefit a number of workplace performance metrics. This note summarizes the historical context from which shared corporate ownership grew, presents the three key decisions that leaders need to make when offering shared ownership (how broadly to do so, with what accountability, and with what rights), details the strategies that companies can use to share ownership with employees (e.g., profit-sharing, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), etc.), illustrates different strategies particular companies have employed, and concludes with open questions for future leaders. The goal of the note is to educate future leaders and managers on the implications of shared ownership decisions on employee engagement, and ultimately, long-term company performance. The note also provides a basic how-to user's guide to familiarize future managers with approaches to sharing ownership more broadly with employees.
Millennials are redefining what it means to develop future leaders. In business organizations, leadership development-defined as "the expansion of a person's capacity to be effective in leadership roles and processes"-has traditionally been the work of corporate development programs for select employees handpicked and cultivated by senior management. With the millennial generation of leaders, however, leadership self-development is becoming far more common. This note embraces the movement towards leader self-development. It also recognizes that, for it to be successful, those who are now in the driver's seat-the high-potential and emerging leaders themselves-must be equipped to succeed. The note lays out the PACE Model for leadership self-development, grounded in research, to help developing leaders forge systematic habits to accelerate self-development and success.
From the outside, DISCO-a Japan-based manufacturer of precision tools for semiconductor production devices-appeared to be a rather ordinary company that had achieved rather extraordinary success: it had simultaneously achieved 70% global market share, had lifted its profitability from 15% to 30% over the past seven years, and was consistently selected as a ""Best Workplace"" in Japan. The secret to DISCO's success, according to Sekiya, lay in its truly individualized management of human capital which they called the P-Will (Personal Will) system. P-Will was a proprietary managerial accounting system based on Will, a currency that enabled internal market transactions. At DISCO, every hour of labor and every good was associated with a price in Will. Employees were expected to act like independent business owners; they used the P-Will system to manage their own revenue contributions and business expenses in Will. Four times a year, the balances of individual P-Will accounts were converted to real currency and paid out as bonuses. In the last couple of years, about 10 companies, including other companies in the semiconductor industry, had visited Sekiya wanting to replicate DISCO's enviable success and introduce the P-Will system at their companies. However, none of these companies had actually implemented it. Seeing off another guest who had visited DISCO, Sekiya asked himself: Why don't other companies adopt the P-Will system? What were the conditions under which P-Will would work-and not work?
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46pm, a 9.1-on-the-Richter-scale, six-minute long earthquake unleashed a tsunami that ravaged the Tohoku region of Japan, damaging the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power facility and releasing sufficient radioactive material into the air and ocean to make it one of only two "level 7" nuclear disasters in history (second only to Chernobyl). But just how much radioactive material had escaped was not clear. A tense time was made worse by sporadic disclosures of fragmented information. Those who had power or cell service, mostly friends and family outside the region, were glued to their television and smartphone screens, but, by definition, no one could see the radiation they feared. Frustrated by their own desires to know what should have been knowable, three technologists-Sean Bonner, Pieter Franken and Joi Ito-founded non-profit Safecast around a volunteer-centered, open, citizen-science, "crowdmapping" model to monitor radiation levels. With the help of thousands of volunteers, by 2018, Safecast had become not just the "go to" source of information on radiation issues in Japan and elsewhere, but also the vanguard example of citizen science. Yet as Safecast's dataset strengthened exponentially, the sustainability of its financial model weakened. The same open, crowd-based model that made the founder's data collection sustainable was still financially unsustainable. Was there a business model that could sustain the organization financially without undermining their volunteer-based operations, and if so, what would it look like?
Each individual who enters an organization will, at some point, leave. And yet most future leaders spend significantly more effort learning about recruiting than departures, despite the sensitivity and challenges associated with the latter. This note is intended to help address that imbalance. This note provides a roadmap for managers and employees to follow when instituting or facing layoffs. It aims to help managers consider the broader implications that should be taken into account when conducting layoffs, including how to structure and execute them effectively; how to minimize the negative impact on laid-off employees, "surviving" employees, the firm's reputation, and the community; and what alternatives any firm contemplating layoffs should consider.
Organizations have often sought to meet the pressures of rapid change through novel ways of managing human capital to boost innovation and productivity. Hackathons have emerged as one of the latest approaches to do just that. How can those responsible for managing human capital use hackathons as a new tool in their toolkit? This note is meant as a guide for academics and practitioners to understand what hackathons are, how they work, when and how they can be useful, and how they complement other more traditional tools for organizational innovation and productivity. The note ends with a summary of questions and additional resources for more detail.
This note describes the major considerations and frameworks of compensation. Its audience is general managers interested in learning about their own or their employees' compensation.
Clever, a high-growth EdTech company based in San Francisco, had grown quickly in market share (Exhibit 1-2) and headcount (Exhibit 3). As with many high-growth companies, however, early employees (many of whom had never managed people before) had been given the opportunity to manage teams, and they had done so with mixed success and consequences for both company success and employee retention. Reflecting on Clever's progress as of early 2017, co-founder and CEO Tyler Bosmeny proposed investing in developing effective managers, such that others wanted to work for them and grow under them. Premised on the belief that providing high-quality feedback was a critical function of effective managers, he launched a Radical Candor initiative, based on tech veteran Kim Scott's book "Radical Candor," that sought to develop managers by helping them master the art and science of developing others.
A summary of events that occured after the (A) case, including Los Angeles winning nomination for the 2028 Olympics with assistance from Pagliuca and Boston 2024 bid material.
Two leadership groups from Boston 2024 negotiate with government bodies, community leaders, and olympic officials in an effort to bring the 2024 Olympics to Boston.
Makena Lane has a gift for producing results, even in the challenging retail context of the 2010s, but she also has a knack for "ruffling some feathers" in the process. Recruited to a Fortune 500 grocery and pharmacy retailer after climbing to Associate Principal in McKinsey & Company's retail practice, she successfully grew their high-margin yet highly competitive beauty category beyond anyone's expectations. Yet then she was passed over for promotion, receiving the feedback that her "concerning" and "abrasive" interpersonal style had made it impossible to promote her. Instead of a promotion, Lane is offered an executive coach. The case offers a uniquely in-depth (and intimate) view of how Lane approaches the one-year coaching engagement and the outputs from it, including her pre-coaching self-reflection, agreed-upon purpose and outcomes, 360 feedback, the coach's advice to her, an in-depth coach's final report, and Lane's one-pager of lessons learned. At the end of the year of coaching, Lane's boss unexpectedly departs, leaving Lane with a direct path to promotion. Senior leadership now once again faces the difficult decision of whether to promote Lane, this time based on their assessment of whether Lane has authentically transformed through coaching or just taken superficial steps to check off boxes on the way to promotion.