In the four years since Rob Miranda became CEO of Growing Places, a provider of on-site child care for companies in the Midwestern United States, he has been a font of ideas. For instance, he set up rooms where moms can breastfeed their babies during breaks in the workday and put Webcams in classrooms so that parents can "visit" their children from their desks. As a result of Rob's entrepreneurial vision and operational savvy, the company has achieved profitable growth. The problem is that Rob tends to stick his foot in his mouth. Evan Breyer, the company's founder and chairman, hopes that Rob will learn to avoid making verbal gaffes; he even gets Rob to see a coach. But while Evan is wrapping up a facility tour for a potential corporate sponsor of a scholarship program, Rob makes an insensitive remark about breastfeeding in front of the visitors--among them, a reporter. Not surprisingly, the local paper runs a scathing editorial the next day. Several days later, during a conference presentation on preschool curricula, he does it again with a comment implying that teachers are lazy and unprepared. The result is more bad press and a meaningful dip in stock price. It's beginning to look as though Rob is not going to change, and many board members are talking ouster. Should Evan try to persuade the board to hang on to Rob? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0612A and R0612Z are Ronald A. Heifetz, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; John H. Biggs, the former CEO of TIAA-CREF; Torie Clarke, a CNN analyst; and Roger Brown, a cofounder of Bright Horizons.

In the four years since Rob Miranda became CEO of Growing Places, a provider of on-site child care for companies in the Midwestern United States, he has been a font of ideas. For instance, he set up rooms where moms can breastfeed their babies during breaks in the workday and put Webcams in classrooms so that parents can "visit" their children from their desks. As a result of Rob's entrepreneurial vision and operational savvy, the company has achieved profitable growth. The problem is that Rob tends to stick his foot in his mouth. Evan Breyer, the company's founder and chairman, hopes that Rob will learn to avoid making verbal gaffes; he even gets Rob to see a coach. But while Evan is wrapping up a facility tour for a potential corporate sponsor of a scholarship program, Rob makes an insensitive remark about breastfeeding in front of the visitors--among them, a reporter. Not surprisingly, the local paper runs a scathing editorial the next day. Several days later, during a conference presentation on preschool curricula, he does it again with a comment implying that teachers are lazy and unprepared. The result is more bad press and a meaningful dip in stock price. It's beginning to look as though Rob is not going to change, and many board members are talking ouster. Should Evan try to persuade the board to hang on to Rob? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0612A and R0612Z are Ronald A. Heifetz, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; John H. Biggs, the former CEO of TIAA-CREF; Torie Clarke, a CNN analyst; and Roger Brown, a cofounder of Bright Horizons.

When Roger Brown and Linda Mason decided to start a child care and early-education company 15 years ago, they knew about the challenges inherent in the industry: no barriers to entry, low margins, few economies of scale, heavy regulatory oversight--to name just a few. But that didn't stop them. They eventually built Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a company that now has more than 340 high-quality child care centers, serving 40,000 children and employing 12,000 people. How did they do it? Sheer determination helped. But even more important, they developed a business model that took advantage of industry weaknesses. When the couple sat down to hash out a plan for the company, they realized that the key to achieving profitability and creating barriers to entry was to partner with companies. They could achieve higher returns by having those companies build and outfit the centers and, at the same time, boost customer loyalty. Brown's first-person account describes the difficulties the couple and their company faced along the way, including the struggle for funding and a board that questioned Bright Horizons' business model and basic philosophy of good child care. But, Brown says, the commitment to a singular business model and the determination to make strengths out of weaknesses made the impossible possible.