London Hydro, Inc. (London Hydro) must forecast the electricity demand of the firm’s clients. The Ontario Energy Board had just announced the results of a pilot program to introduce a new pricing scheme to residential energy consumers in Ontario. This was the origin of tiered pricing, which was based on overall monthly energy usage. In the past, consumers had all been on a time-of-use plan where energy was more expensive during peak hours and cheaper in lower-demand hours. Thus, London Hydro had to anticipate the potential change in client behaviour and predict the effects of the pricing shift.Using data it had gathered on individual household energy consumption, London Hydro hoped that by forecasting which consumers might shift to the new tiered pricing plan it could gain key insights that would help the firm understand what effects the plan might have on its revenues and on its clients’ consumption behaviours.
London Hydro, Inc. (London Hydro) must forecast the electricity demand of the firm's clients. The Ontario Energy Board had just announced the results of a pilot program to introduce a new pricing scheme to residential energy consumers in Ontario. This was the origin of tiered pricing, which was based on overall monthly energy usage. In the past, consumers had all been on a time-of-use plan where energy was more expensive during peak hours and cheaper in lower-demand hours. Thus, London Hydro had to anticipate the potential change in client behaviour and predict the effects of the pricing shift. Using data it had gathered on individual household energy consumption, London Hydro hoped that by forecasting which consumers might shift to the new tiered pricing plan it could gain key insights that would help the firm understand what effects the plan might have on its revenues and on its clients' consumption behaviours.
Employee conflict is a problem that costs the global economy billions annually. As part of a six-year study on organizational effectiveness, the authors surveyed more than 750 people at 500 companies worldwide. According to their findings, the majority of today’s employees must regularly deal with what they consider unreasonable counterparts when trying to do their jobs. When faced with conflicting opinions, one in four study participants reported that people within their organizations predominantly relied on manipulation or coercion to get their way. In addition to increasing turnover, toxic work relationships reduce employee productivity and engagement by increasing employee dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, and depression. The good news is that people often misread each other. The other good news is that when companies proactively work to resolve workplace conflict through joint problem-solving, they are around four times more likely to report that personal differences fuel learning and innovation rather than conflict. This article aims to help organizations turn employee conflicts into a positive force, which requires effectively navigating a challenging workplace terrain by creating a culture in which colleagues strive to see others with the same degree of empathy as they see themselves. According to the authors’ research, when collaboration goes beyond individual actors and pervades a company’s culture, and a joint problem-solving approach to influence is routinely employed, people learn from disagreement, make better decisions, and develop innovative solutions.
Many people don't tackle negotiations in a proactive way; instead, they simply react to moves the other side makes. While that approach may work in a lot of instances, complex deals demand a much more strategic approach. The best negotiators look beyond their immediate counterparts to see if other constituencies have a stake in the deal's outcome or value to contribute; rethink the scope and timing of talks; and search for connections across multiple deals. They also get creative about the process and framing of negotiations, ditching the binary thinking that can lock negotiators into unproductive zero-sum postures. Applying such strategic techniques will allow dealmakers to find novel sources of leverage, realize bigger opportunities, and achieve outcomes that maximize value for both sides.
The assignment of students to schools is often a controversial process that requires a delicate balance between operational needs (school capacity and costs) and student and community needs (quality of school and community cohesion). In 2016, Boston Public Schools (BPS) implemented a new student assignment process that attempts to balance both operational needs and students' access to quality schools. This case examines BPS' new student assignment process and considers whether it satisfies both sets of needs. The case also provides a simplified spreadsheet assignment model and dataset to allow students to see the tradeoffs and how they can be balanced.
CEOs and other senior executives these days must manage countless complex, high-stakes conversations across functional areas and divisions, with alliance partners and critical suppliers, and with customers and regulators. The pressure of such negotiations make them a lot like U.S. military officers in an Afghan village, fending off enemy fire while trying to win trust and intelligence from the local populace. Both kinds of leaders face what the authors call "dangerous negotiations," in which the traps are many and good advice is scarce. Although the sources of danger are quite different for executives and officers, they resort to the same kinds of behaviors. Both feel pressure to make quick progress, project strength and control (particularly when they have neither), rely on force rather than collaboration, trade resources for cooperation rather than build trust, and make unwanted compromises to minimize potential damage. The authors outline five core strategies that "in extremis" military negotiators use to resolve conflicts and influence others: maintaining a big-picture perspective; uncovering hidden agendas to encourage collaboration; using facts and fairness to get buy-in rather than grudging support; building trust; and focusing on process as well as outcomes. These strategies provide an effective framework with which business negotiators can change their thinking ahead of the deal as well as their actions at the bargaining table.
Corporate alliances are growing in number--by about 25% a year--and account for up to a third of revenues and value at many companies. Yet some 60% to 70% of them fail. What is going wrong? Because alliances involve interdependence between companies that may be competitors and may also have vastly different operating styles and cultures, they demand more care and handling than other business arrangements, say Hughes and Weiss, management consultants at Vantage Partners. The authors have developed five principles--based on their two decades of work with alliances--to complement the conventional advice on alliance management: (1) Focus less on defining the business plan and more on how you and your partner will work together; (2) Develop metrics pegged not only to alliance goals but also to performance in working toward them; (3) Instead of trying to eliminate differences, leverage them to create value; (4) Go beyond formal systems and structures to enable and encourage collaborative behavior; and (5) Be as diligent in managing your internal stakeholders as you are in managing the relationship with your partner. Companies that have adopted these principles have radically improved their alliance success rate. Schering-Plough, for example, engages in a systematic "alliance relationship launch": four to six weeks of meetings at which the partners explore potential challenges, examine key differences and develop shared protocols for managing them, and establish mechanisms for day-to-day decision making. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida measures the quality of alliance progress through regular surveys of both its own staff and its partners'. These companies have learned that the conventional advice is not so much wrong as incomplete. The five simple rules can help fill in the blanks.
Companies try all kinds of ways to improve collaboration among different parts of the organization: cross-unit incentive systems, organizational restructuring, teamwork training. Although these initiatives produce occasional success stories, most have only a limited impact on dismantling organizational silos and fostering collaboration. The problem? Most companies focus on the symptoms ("Sales and delivery do not work together as closely as they should") rather than on the root cause of failures in cooperation: conflict. The fact is, you can't improve collaboration until you've addressed the issue of conflict. The authors offer six strategies for effectively managing conflict: Devise and implement a common method for resolving conflict; provide people with criteria for making trade-offs; use the escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching; establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation; ensure that managers resolve escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts; and make the process for escalated conflict-resolution transparent. The first three strategies focus on the point of conflict; the second three focus on escalation of conflict up the management chain. Together they constitute a framework for effectively managing discord, one that integrates conflict resolution into day-to-day decision-making processes, thereby removing a barrier to cross-organizational collaboration.