On April 20, 2010, Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement, was sitting in her office in the West Wing. The split screens on her muted television in her office were, as usual, tuned to news channels to scan for breaking news. She looked up at the breaking news scroll and saw what appeared to be an oil rig fire. "I im-mediately called in my Chief of Staff and asked him to find out the details. Because if it was in America, it was going to become our problem," said Jarrett. She soon learned that a powerful ex-plosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, located about 40 miles off the coast of Louisi-ana. The rig was on fire and more than a dozen workers were unaccounted for after the blast. While the Coast Guard assumed the task of coordinating the emergency response, President Obama called on Jarrett to directly managing the political response. The case goes on to describe Jarrett's leadership actions-specifically, the measures she took to manage the White House's relationship to the governors of the five states affected by the spill, from the date of the explosion through the event's conclusion. HKS Case Number 2265.0.

As incoming President and CEO of the National Urban League in 2003, Marc Morial believed that promoting racial equity in corporate America was a natural part of the organization's remit. In the latter third of the 20th century, the NUL had helped individual African Americans secure employment in a number of major industries, but these successes were hard-won, time-consuming, and, most frustrating, isolated. Morial wanted to push corporations to move beyond their one-off diversity improvements to institute sustained, systemic advances. Yet how exactly to do that was not so clear. Despite its longtime relationships in corporate America, the National Urban League did not have any obvious leverage to push its diversity mission. But Morial found a way to increase the NUL's bargaining position in two ways: one, by joining forces with other civil rights groups and two, by seizing on moments when a company needed permission for an acquisition or merger. This leadership case focuses squarely on Morial and his thinking. It includes descriptions of Morial's personal and family background in New Orleans during the 1960s, a time of racial change and difficulty, and it includes background about the history of the National Urban League and its challenges to meet the 21st century civil rights landscape.

In 2017, Tarana Burke, founder of the movement against sexual violence known as Me Too was unexpectedly catapulted to international fame. The phrase she had coined to promote a sisterhood of survivors, "Me Too," had become a viral social media hashtag. Within days, Burke went from being a grassroots community organizer to a national icon and the movement she had nurtured for more than a decade in Church basements and school classrooms, erupted into a global rallying cry that brought down the careers of dozens of powerful men accused of sexual misconduct, including Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and many others in more than 80 countries. Soon, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people and was awarded the prestigious Ridenhour Prize for Courage, which she shares with luminaries such as John Lewis. To Burke, a reckoning on sexual violence on such a large scale was long overdue, but neither her newfound celebrity nor the growing notoriety of the Me Too movement had ever been part of the plan. This case provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of Burke as a leader from her early days as a community organizer to the years after she had become a household name. Burke's refreshingly honest account of her internal and external dilemmas as she created and sustained a movement to empower survivors of sexual violence, against considerable odds-and despite significant backlash from many quarters-offers important lessons for students of leadership everywhere.

This leadership case package, a written case with a podcast supplement, describes the biggest challenges to confront four-star Admiral James G. Stavridis during two of his tours of duty-one as commander of U.S. Southern Command, or "SouthCom," the U.S. Defense Department's regional command for Central America, South America, and parts of the Caribbean) and one as the military commander of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). Stavridis came to SouthCom with a reform agenda. Understanding that he had a short window to act, he tried to impose certain cultural and organizational changes on the Command, relying on traditional military top-down compliance. He got compliance-but only temporarily; his reforms were rolled back as soon as he left the Command. Learning from this disappointment, Stavridis took a very different approach at NATO. Appointed Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 2009, Stavridis immediately confronted a crisis: the U.S.-led Afghan mission was failing and losing support from NATO leaders. What's more, NATO was not a top-down organization. Decisions were made by consensus-and skills of persuasion were consequently paramount. The written case relates Stavridis' reflections about the challenges he faced in SouthCom and at NATO, and the strategies he employed to address them. A 20-minute podcast supplement ("Reflections on the Inner Life of a Leader: Adm James Stavridis in Conversation with Prof. Robert Wilkinson," transcript available) features a more general discussion about tricky challenges in leadership-such as how to deal with a person with whom you deeply disagree; how to structure key processes to gain agreement, how to keep emotions in check in difficult moments; and what personal practices help to keep an extraordinarily demanding life in balance. Case Number 2195.0

The case covers the two-year, on-again off-again negotiation between the Government of Uganda and the fearsome rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony. The negotiations marked a historic moment for many reasons. After decades of failing to root out Kony and his rebel army capable of horrific acts of violence, and faced with millions of internally displaced people, the Ugandan government embarked on peace talks with the LRA. But neither party had come to the negotiating table willingly. Kony faced arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity and the Ugandan government faced pressure from international donors and the pan-African leadership to find a peaceful solution to a long-simmering conflict. In the end, the negotiations didn't result in a peace agreement and Kony remained at-large, but these historic talks provide much fodder for analysis for students of negotiation and raise many critical questions, including on whether to pursue peace or justice. The case package includes a 16-minute video featuring an interview with Ruhakana Rugunda, the Government of Uganda's chief negotiator, and a 3:11-minute video where Luis Moreno Ocampo, former Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, talks about the Court's role. Rugunda's video consists of 11 clips that can be played separately during the class session to frame specific discussions, such as Kony and the ICC and what success would have looked like for the government.

In the lead-up to the United Nations' 2015 climate summit in Paris, excitement ran high and so did anxiety. Negotiators hoped for a new international agreement, the first such effort since the disappointing collapse of negotiations six years earlier in Copenhagen. But the text of the agreement was still subject to debate. This case focuses on the efforts of one mid-level participant in the process, Josefina Braña-Varela, policy director for Forests & Climate at WWF. Her focus: to try to ensure that forest protection received a specific mention in the Paris Agreement. Two years earlier, national delegates had added a set of rules and standards called the Warsaw Framework for REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) to the international climate regime. Under this framework, developing countries could qualify for payment in exchange for reducing deforestation or forest damage, or for introducing practices such as sustainable forest management. But participation in the program was entirely voluntary. It remained to be seen whether developed countries would provide enough funding to make it work, and whether developing countries would be willing to adopt policies to measure and reduce deforestation and forest degradation. In this context, Braña-Varela thought it crucial that the Paris Agreement send a signal that delegates viewed forest preservation not a side concern, but as an objective as critical as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Some negotiators were leery of doing so, however, for an array of reasons. The case provides enough background for the reader to understand the tensions over this issue, then follows Braña-Varela, a one-time forest negotiator for Mexico, in her new role at WWF. The case shows the strategic choices of a respected, but not especially powerful, figure, as she tries to influence a complex international process. Case number 2118.0