In October 2015, Google restructured into Alphabet, a holding company, which analysts said would facilitate innovation among its diverse subsidiaries. But when news reports surfaced revealing struggles within Alphabet companies including Nest, the smart thermostat maker, observers began to wonder if the reorganization made sense after all.
In the coming decades, as the pace of technological change continues to increase, millions of workers may need to be not just upskilled but reskilled-a profoundly complex societal challenge that will sometimes require workers to both acquire new skills and change occupations entirely. Companies have a critical role to play in addressing this challenge, but to date few have taken it seriously. To learn more about what their role will entail, the authors-members of a collaboration between the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard's Digital Reskilling Lab and the Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute-interviewed leaders at some 40 organizations around the world that are investing in large-scale reskilling programs. In synthesizing what they learned, they became aware of five paradigm shifts that are emerging in reskilling: (1) Reskilling is a strategic imperative. (2) It is the responsibility of every leader and manager. (3) It is a change-management initiative. (4) Employees want to reskill-when it makes sense. (5) It takes a village. The authors argue that companies will need to understand and embrace these shifts if they hope to succeed in adapting dynamically to the rapidly evolving new era of automation and AI.
In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the genomic codes of all known species that could be tapped for discovery and innovation, from new medical interventions to more efficient manufacturing processes. He proposed to use blockchain technology to make the data both accessible and trackable so that its use could be monitored. Castilla-Rubio envisioned a time when a company in the U.S. could access a biological asset from the Peruvian Amazon, develop and commercialize a product based on the asset, and have a fraction of the resulting sales land directly in the bank account of various beneficiaries, including the Peruvian government and indigenous communities. Now he was facing major decisions about how to structure EBC to achieve his goals. Should he start at the top and build partnerships with national governments and inter-governmental organizations as the cornerstone of EBC? Or would it be better to forge ahead with a few stakeholders in an entrepreneurial project?
The case complements Pasta Serafina (A) by describing the aftermath of a town hall meeting in which management had publicly denounced the absenteeism problem and challenged the employees to find a solution. In spite of the initial mistrust against management, the fear of an imminent plant closure coupled with the relief associated with finally being able to be heard by management, pushes the employees to act to contain the problem themselves. Within a short time, absenteeism hits record lows. Management, however, is left wondering about the sustainability of the new culture.
Plant management at Pasta Serafina, a pasta producer in the south of Italy, is struggling to contain employee absenteeism. While the misbehavior is concentrated in a minority of the workers, its effects impact not only the plant's performance, but also the climate and work environment. Embedded in institutional and legal environment that allows very little room for corrective action, and already dealing with persistent low margins, management decides to address the issue by asking the employees themselves to find a solution to the problem. The case exposes students to managerial challenges associated with curbing moral hazard and changing the company culture in a setting where standard legal and contractual tools, such as firing workers for performance or using incentives to influence behaviors, are not available.
Accomplice, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Boston, is raising its second fund in November 2017. Since 2009, the firm has followed a seed-led investment model, investing in tech companies at the earliest stages, often when products and business models are still experimental. The firm's partners are pleased with their preliminary returns and the deal flow they've been able to cultivate, in part by empowering local entrepreneurs to invest in promising new ideas on their behalf. The partners are confident their long-term returns will validate their investment strategy and positioning in the increasingly competitive VC market. Will investors agree?
The case focuses on Irene Rosenfeld's tenure as CEO of the global snack food company Mondelēz International. Beginning in 2006, she had led the company through many acquisitions, including France's LU Biscuit and British confectionery company Cadbury, before, in 2012, boldly splitting the company into two: Kraft, a North American grocery business, and Mondelēz International, a global snack food company.
CyberArk was the recognized leader in the Privileged Account Management (PAM) space, a cybersecurity subsegment it had essentially created to secure organizations' IT systems and sensitive data. Over 17 years, the Israeli company had grown to a market capitalization of over $1.6 billion, with sales exceeding $217 million and 900 global employees with a strong corporate culture. In May 2017, Udi Mokady, founder, chairman, and CEO, debated how best to drive growth. He mulled over whether he should stay the course and remain focused on providing best-of-breed PAM for enterprises, both on-premise and in the cloud, or expand into new markets. Cyber threats were on the rise, which afforded numerous growth opportunities such as entering the broader identity management space, creating new products to protect critical infrastructure, and securing the burgeoning world of the Internet of Things (IoT). This case explores the company's competitive position, the challenges of sustaining its advantages in a highly competitive and consolidating industry, and whether it should pursue organic or inorganic growth, while maintaining company culture.
Business schools teach MBA students that you can't compete on the basis of management processes because they're easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, according to the strategists. But data from a decade-long research project involving 12,000 firms challenges that thinking. The study examined how well companies performed 18 core management practices. It found vast differences in how they execute basic tasks like setting targets, running operations, and grooming talent, and that those differences matter: Firms with strong managerial processes do significantly better on high-level metrics such as profitability, growth, and productivity. What's more, the differences in process quality persist over time, suggesting that competent management is not easy to imitate. In this article the authors review the findings of the research and explore what prevents executives from investing in management capabilities, arguing that such investments are a powerful way to become more competitive.
In late 2015, CEO Vince Forlenza was reviewing Becton Dickinson's transformation efforts designed to enable the company to innovate and grow in a changing environment. Becton Dickinson had been a successful medical device company for over 100 years. In recent years, cost pressures were causing its major customers to consolidate, and also to rethink their purchasing practices-moving from looking for products to looking for cost-effective solutions that added value and improved patient outcomes. These market forces caused Becton Dickinson to try to adapt to remain successful. In 2009, the company used the Growth and Innovation Profiling process to determine what barriers were preventing the company from achieving its strategic objectives. The result showed that the company needed to make changes in the areas of capabilities, coordination, and culture. Forlenza then led a transformation effort consisting of numerous initiative to overcome these barriers. Despite significant progress over the next few years, by 2013 Forlenza and his team became convinced that these changes alone would not be enough to enable Becton Dickinson to transform into a solutions company and achieve sufficient growth to remain relevant. In early 2015, Becton Dickinson acquired CareFusion, an acquisition 25-times larger than any of its previous acquisitions, and set out to create a new, integrated company made up of the best of both. By late that year, with the integration well underway, Forlenza was asking himself how successful the transformation had been and what he should do next to continue the journey.
In 2015, VMware, a pioneer in server and network virtualization and a member of parent company EMC's "federation" of companies, had set its sights on becoming a leading public cloud provider. Two years prior, VMware first entered the public cloud market with its vCloud Air offering. In order to gain market share and compete with major cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, what strategy should VMware pursue? Should the company try to partner with an established cloud player, or build out its public cloud offering through its own internal investments and acquisitions?
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, is deciding how to structure the firm presence in Cloud computing. He can pursue the opportunity in multiple ways: doubling down the investments in an internal and nascent cloud offering, partnering with established third parties, or through an acquisition. At the same time, he also needs to continue ensuring the success of VMware virtualization business, and a recent acquisition in mobile. How will the different decisions affect his use of time?