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Inspired by research linking happiness and productivity, Hitachi had invested in developing new "people analytics" technologies to help companies increase employee happiness. Hitachi had begun manufacturing high-tech badges that quantify a wearer's activity patterns. Data from these devices revealed an unusually high correlation between certain patterns of activity and a person's subjective sense of happiness at work. Unlike mood rings or even facial expressions, both of which were highly unreliable, Dr. Kazuo Yano--the mastermind responsible for bringing ""happiness sensors"" to market--believed he now had the ability to accurately sense happiness. When combined with other sources of data like Outlook calendars or email, Dr. Yano's team could pinpoint with scientific precision which activities, events, or even people generated the most happiness in employees at work. With a firm proof of concept in hand, Dr. Yano was ready to push the business model further. He was rolling out an app to provide personalized "happiness" recommendations to employees, and he was considering other ways to automate the model to bring it to scale. He was confident that the new technology had the power to transform employee happiness and the productivity of workforces, in Japan and beyond, if he could only find the right business model to launch such a happiness movement.

Over 10% of all 2017 university graduates in Japan used GROW, an artificial intelligence platform and mobile app developed by Tokyo-based people analytics startup IGS, to recruit for a job. This case puts participants in the shoes of IGS founder and CEO Masahiro Fukuhara, a first-time entrepreneur, as he considers the varied ways the "big data" he is collecting is being used--and whether some uses promised more meaningful (or less potentially misleading) impact than others. After briefly introducing IGS, Fukuhara, and GROW, the case outlines exactly how GROW works, starting with a mobile app to assess competencies and personalities of candidates and ending with artificial intelligence (machine learning) to produce high-quality recommendations to companies about whom they should hire. The case then articulates precisely how three companies--airline ANA (All-Nippon Airways), global conglomerate Mitsubishi Corporation, and advertising/media company Septeni--use GROW in very different ways to manage talent recruiting, screening, hiring, placement, and development. The case asks students to consider two questions: (1) Which of the three company's approach to using people analytics for talent acquisition and development is most appealing (or most concerning)?; and (2) Should Fukuhara turn on the most advanced part of the artificial intelligence engine, allowing GROW not just to provide recommendations to clients about whom they should hire, but also (based on performance and attribute data of previous hires) to overrule clients' specifications (or biases) about the competencies they should be targeting in their ideal hires?

This Reading provides a user guide for leading and participating in teams; it is designed to give a clear sense of how to design, launch, and manage effective teams. The Introduction notes that teams are the basic building blocks of organizations but they often underperform or even fail, illustrated by a video detailing a fatal plane crash attributed to poor teamwork. The Essential Reading (31 pages in length) discusses the evolution of teams, noting the recent trend from stable bounded teams ("traditional teams") to more fluid and unbounded ones ("4D teams" or "teaming"). It then discusses team effectiveness, common reasons teams fail, and the concept of team process gains and losses. Next, it provides a guide to leading effective teams focused on three levers: 1) team design (setting team purpose, composition, structure, timeline, reward structure, and resources); 2) team launch (establishing productive norms and a shared mindset); and 3) team process management (monitoring processes and dynamics, intervening when appropriate). The section ends with a brief discussion of team culture and a graphic of the three-lever model. The optional Supplemental Reading (9 pages in length) examines the relationship between an organization's structure and the success of teams, bridging material on teams and organization design. This Reading has four videos: "United Airlines Flight 173" shows how poor teamwork can lead to failure; "The Evolution of Teams" provides a quick summary of the evolution of teams; "Tune In to the Skills Your Team Offers" shows how a team adjusted member roles to improve performance; and "Create Norms to Unify Your Team" covers a successful team launch. The Reading has one Interactive Illustration: a test of social sensitivity used in recent research on team effectiveness.

Most observers who have written about holacracy and other forms of self-management take extreme positions, either celebrating these "bossless," "flat" work environments for fostering flexibility and engagement or denouncing them as naive experiments that ignore how things really get done. To gain a more accurate, balanced perspective, the authors--drawing on examples from Zappos, Morning Star, and other companies--examine why these structures have evolved and how they operate, both in the trenches and at the level of enterprise strategy and policy. Self-organization models typically share three characteristics: (1) Teams are the structure. Within them, individual "roles" are collectively defined and assigned to accomplish the work. (2) Teams design and govern themselves, while nested within a larger structure. (3) Leadership is contextual. It's distributed among roles, not individuals, and responsibilities shift according to fit and as the work changes. Adopting self-management wholesale--using it to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how people will be rewarded across an entire enterprise--is hard, uncertain work, and the authors argue that in many environments it won't pay off. But their research and experience also suggest that elements of self-organization can be valuable tools for companies of all kinds, and they look at circumstances where it makes more sense to blend the new approaches with traditional models.

The president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, goes undercover as a service crew member to discover how and whether his employees can speed up cleaning, checking, restocking, and refueling. Expert commentary comes from Atilla Korkmazoglu, president of ground handling and cargo operations at Celebi Aviation Holding, and Vikram Oberoi, managing director and CEO of EIH Ltd.

The president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, goes undercover as a service crew member to discover how and whether his employees can speed up cleaning, checking, restocking, and refueling. Expert commentary comes from Atilla Korkmazoglu, president of ground handling and cargo operations at Celebi Aviation Holding, and Vikram Oberoi, managing director and CEO of EIH Ltd.

The president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, goes undercover as a service crew member to discover how and whether his employees can speed up cleaning, checking, restocking, and refueling. Expert commentary comes from Atilla Korkmazoglu, president of ground handling and cargo operations at Celebi Aviation Holding, and Vikram Oberoi, managing director and CEO of EIH Ltd.

In 2005, Teruo Yabe is asked to revive Tessei, the 669-person JR-East subsidiary responsible for cleaning its Shinkansen (""bullet"") trains. Operational mistakes, customer complaints, safety issues, and employee turnover are at or near all-time highs, even as the demands on Tessei continued to grow. Given previous leaders' failed attempts to fix Tessei's problems with increased managerial monitoring and controls, Yabe seeks a creative approach to overcome the motivation, capability, and coordination challenges facing his organization. Like many contemporary leaders, he selects transparency as his tool. He is, however, unique in adopting a highly nuanced approach to implementing transparency. In the process, he not only leads a fantastic organizational turnaround but even helps to make otherwise ""dirty"" work more meaningful for Tessei front-line employees. The case therefore presents students, particularly in leadership, organizational behavior, operations management, and service operations courses, with an opportunity to think through how a well-crafted transparency strategy can act as a powerful leadership tool.

Part of a leader's job is to equip the organization to transform inputs into outputs by defining organizational strategy, shaping organizational identity, and then managing four organizational components-formal organizational structure, culture, people, and critical tasks-such that each component, and their interaction, aligns to produce performance. Substantial research has demonstrated that well-aligned organizations will be more capable of (1) attaining strategic goals, (2) efficiently utilizing resources to do so, and (3) adapting to unforeseen, future challenges. This short note walks through the Congruence Model, a simple yet powerful tool for achieving alignment in an organization.

To promote accountability, productivity, and shared learning, many organizations create open work environments and gather reams of data on how individuals spend their time. A few years ago, HBS professor Ethan Bernstein set out to find empirical evidence that such approaches improve organizational performance. What he discovered is that this kind of transparency often has an unintended consequence: It can leave employees feeling vulnerable and exposed. When that happens, they conceal any conduct that deviates from the norm so that they won't have to explain it. Unrehearsed, experimental behaviors sometimes stop altogether. But Bernstein also discovered organizations that had established zones of privacy within open environments by setting four types of boundaries: around teams, between feedback and evaluation, between decision rights and improvement rights, and around periods of experimentation. Moreover, across several studies, the companies that had done all this were the ones that consistently got the most creative, efficient, and thoughtful work from their employees. Bernstein's conclusion? By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can capture the benefits of both, and encourage just the right amount of "positive deviance" needed to increase innovation and productivity.

With 24,000 staff and over 300 stores, Belk Inc. sought to replace its entirely manual labor scheduling system with an automated software solution from Reflexis. Belk hoped the upgrade would simplify scheduling, reduce time employees spent in non-customer-facing roles, and result in improved allocation of resources through the use of big data, thereby increasing sales productivity. Like many other retailers, Belk expected the benefits from automated scheduling software to be significant. But unlike other retailers who took an iron hand approach to push compliance, Belk's implementation permitted store managers "edit" the system to "fix" the "bugs" in the automated schedules-seeking not to replace labor but rather inform it. Belk commenced piloting the solution in May of 2013 and subsequently expanded the number of stores running the software to 50 over the course of 2013. Despite signs of initial success with the stores running the scheduling solution, Bass quickly began to notice a significant issue with the implementation: over 70% of shifts generated by the system were receiving manual overrides ("edits") by the store managers. Store managers believed the edits were necessary to remain responsive to local needs-and were, indeed, productive. Senior executives were skeptical, concerned that edits indicated resistance to productive change, and unsure of why Belk had spent so much time and money on an automated system only to have the stores override it. Having deliberately allowed store managers and lead schedulers to override the system, SVP Eric Bass (a retail store veteran who worked his way up to corporate) now needed to understand how and why they were doing so, and make sure that those edits were being made in a constructive manner. In a disagreement between human and machine, Belk allowed humans to win by design by giving them the right to edit the 'optimized' schedules.

Valve, one of the world's top video game software companies, has also become an iconic example of an organization with virtually no hierarchy. A 400-person organization, Valve's unique organizational form (described in detail in the case and accompanying employee handbook) includes 100% self-allocated time, no managers (and therefore no managerial oversight), a structure so fluid that all desks have wheels to allow free movement between "cabals" (teams) on a regular basis (which happens frequently enough that Valve created a homegrown tracking app to allow peers to find each other), a unique hiring apparatus that supports recruitment of T-shaped individuals, and a purely peer-based performance review and stack ranking. As customer demand and market forces draw Valve into hardware in 2013, Valve questions whether their organizational model will need to change as it expands from software into hardware-and, if so, whether they should prioritize strategy over structure or structure over strategy. The case, therefore, presents students with a strategic and organizational challenge that tests students' understanding, and Valve's resolve, with regard to the congruence between their organizational model and strategic direction.

Valve, one of the world's top video game software companies, has also become an iconic example of an organization with virtually no hierarchy. A 400-person organization, Valve's unique organizational form (described in detail in the case and accompanying employee handbook) includes 100% self-allocated time, no managers (and therefore no managerial oversight), a structure so fluid that all desks have wheels to allow free movement between ""cabals"" (teams) on a regular basis (which happens frequently enough that Valve created a homegrown tracking app to allow peers to find each other), a unique hiring apparatus that supports recruitment of T-shaped individuals, and a purely peer-based performance review and stack ranking. As customer demand and market forces draw Valve into hardware in 2013, Valve questions whether their organizational model will need to change as it expands from software into hardware-and, if so, whether they should prioritize strategy over structure or structure over strategy. The case therefore presents students with a strategic and organizational challenge which tests students' understanding, and Valve's resolve, with regard to the congruence between their organizational model and strategic direction. Students should have read and discussed the (A) case, and Valve's options for entering hardware, prior to the (B) case being distributed. The (B) case provides significant detail on Valve's initial decisions but keeps the final outcome as a work-in-process.

Small differences in the leadership of teams can have large consequences for the success of their efforts. Many initiatives fail not because of a fatal error in judgment or insufficient ideas, knowledge, motivation, or capabilities to deliver a solution. They fail because, as is so often heard, "we needed to be more of a team to succeed," "we weren't a sufficiently high-performing team," or "our team suffered from a lack of leadership." In a world where most problems faced by organizations are too complex for a single individual to tackle alone, leadership frequently involves designing, launching, and managing teams. And yet teams are fickle. Even as teams become more common at all levels of organizations, a shocking number of them fail to live up to their potential or even to deliver at all. Teams remain the most flexible and powerful units of learning, change, and performance in most organizations but require effective leadership to succeed. This note summarizes the conditions leaders can create to increase the chances of creating, managing, and participating in successful teaming environments.

This case presents financial statements and selected rations for 14 unidentified healthcare organizations and asks that each set of financial information be matched with one of the following healthcare companies: a biotechnology firm, a community nursing company, a distributor (medical), a DME licensee and seller, a DME developer and seller, a home care provider, a hospital (diversified), an insurer, a lab/diagnostic firm, a medical device manufacturer, a nursing home operator, a pharmaceuticals company (branded), a pharmaceuticals company (generics), and a private practice.

This case presents financial statements and selected ratios for 14 unidentified healthcare organizations and asks that each set of financial information be matched with one of the following healthcare companies: a biotechnology firm, a community nursing company, a distributor (medical), a DME licensee and seller, a DME developer and seller, a home care provider, a hospital (diversified), an insurer, a lab/diagnostic firm, a medical device manufacturer, a nursing home operator, a pharmaceuticals company (branded), a pharmaceuticals company (generics), and a private practice.

The case was prepared to be used as part of a process review in the first year Technology and Operations Management course at HBS. It offers students an opportunity to discuss the context of a manufacturing process choice, and then examine actual production numbers that resulted from a series of choices. While there isn't a traditional case issue, the discussion should focus on the gap between theoretical process designs and the reality of practical implementations, with the impact of operator variability in pace and the complex intertwining with work scope. The case only meant for one discussion pasture to review the Hayes-Wheelwright product-process matrix, and the impact of variability on line performance. While comparative numbers for the process choices are provided, the hope would be to develop students' intuition around why the numbers change so much.

Few CEOs successfully manage the evolution of their companies from OEM outsourcer to branded manufacturer to expert consumer marketer as well as Tony Lo, CEO of Giant Manufacturing Co. Ltd., now the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world. In the mid-1980s, Giant produced over a million bikes per year with the Giant brand on fewer than 15% of them; by 2008, Giant was producing 6.4 million bicycles with 70% carrying the Giant brand. And in 2010, the transition was still in-process as CEO Lo experimented with a new business model for women cyclists in Taiwan and globally--leveraging some of Giant's lessons learned and challenging others. The case explores Giant's historical evolution from OEM outsourcer to branded manufacturer, which relied heavily on Giant's forward integration into the construction of a world-class, global retail organization. Giant's ability to understand the customer and move him/her up-market has driven both sales growth and profitability (e.g., average sales prices in 2006, 2007, and 2008 were $325, $345, and $360 respectively). That sets the stage for Lo's latest challenge: a realization that his products were not meeting the needs of women customers (including particularly his wife). As a result, Lo commissioned his CFO Bonnie Tu to open the first all-women's bicycle store in Taipei (owned by corporate, not the traditional retail organization), and charged her not only with figuring out the needs of women customers, but also mandating that she turn a profit. "Because your only customers are women, if you don't know how to sell to them, you're out of business -period. So you experiment for survival," explained Lo. The case concludes by examining the company's continuing integration into retail stores, looking closely at the Liv/giant pilot and the surprising business model that it developed.

At Precision Electro-Tek's mobile phone manufacturing facility in southern China, thousands of operators - bright and capable young men and (mostly) women like Jieliang Hao are motivated to improve line productivity through small innovations for faster assembly and have discovered many ways to increase their performance. Meanwhile a globally-networked team of manufacturing experts led by Marty Cole, the case protagonist, is trying to spread best practice from other sites around the globe. Unfortunately these two processes sometimes inadvertently clash, presenting a management challenge. The case helps students examine the implicit assumptions managers make in organizing work inside a factory. These assumptions reflect theories of worker behavior and motivation in combination with managers' beliefs of what constitutes "best practice." Students are offered an opportunity to dissect these lean manufacturing theories and recognize that in this particular implementation, implementation of best practice without sufficient consideration of the interplay of theories on motivation has led to unexpected outcomes. The case offers an opportunity to explore the link between work design and compensation, and understand the differences between compensation and motivation. The case frames the role of the general manager in setting up work structures and compensation systems in a very traditional and explicit setting, one where linkages should be clearly visible yet assumptions are often deeply buried and implicit. Our expectation is that students will see the lessons generalize to most, if not all, of the organizations where they have worked. There are three cases: the (A) case describes the management view, the (B) case describes the direct labor worker view, and the (C) case details the results of an employee survey that was conducted on two manufacturing lines.

At Precision Electro-Tek's mobile phone manufacturing facility in southern China, thousands of operators-bright and capable young men and (mostly) women like Jieliang Hao-are motivated to improve line productivity through small innovations for faster assembly and have discovered many ways to increase their performance. Meanwhile a globally-networked team of manufacturing experts led by Marty Cole, the case protagonist, is trying to spread best practice from other sites around the globe. Unfortunately these two processes sometimes inadvertently clash, presenting a management challenge. The case helps students examine the implicit assumptions managers make in organizing work inside a factory. These assumptions reflect theories of worker behavior and motivation in combination with managers' beliefs of what constitutes "best practice." Students are offered an opportunity to dissect these lean manufacturing theories and recognize that in this particular implementation, implementation of best practice without sufficient consideration of the interplay of theories on motivation has led to unexpected outcomes. The case offers an opportunity to explore the link between work design and compensation, and understand the differences between compensation and motivation. The case frames the role of the general manager in setting up work structures and compensation systems in a very traditional and explicit setting, one where linkages should be clearly visible yet assumptions are often deeply buried and implicit. Our expectation is that students will see the lessons generalize to most, if not all, of the organizations where they have worked. There are three cases: the (A) case describes the management view, the (B) case describes the direct labor worker view, and the (C) case details the results of an employee survey that was conducted on two manufacturing lines.