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Nobody really recommends command-and-control leadership anymore. But no fully formed alternative has emerged. So mature companies often struggle to balance the need for innovation with the need for discipline. The authors studied two exceptions: the new-product-development stars PARC and W.L. Gore. Both companies, they learned, have three distinct types of leaders. "Entrepreneurial leaders," found at lower levels, create new products and services and move their firms into unexplored territory. "Enabling leaders," in the middle, make sure the entrepreneurs have the resources they need. And "architecting leaders," near the top, monitor culture, high-level strategy, and structure. This system allows both companies to be self-managing to a surprising degree. Employees choose their work assignments and dream up new projects, whose success rests on colleagues' volunteering to join in--making the companies collective prediction markets. And the mechanisms that enable self-management also balance freedom and control: The companies function efficiently and exploit new opportunities even as they minimize rules.

Grief is a universal human experience, yet workplace culture is often inhospitable to people suffering profound loss. Managers come to work prepared to celebrate births and birthdays, and even to handle illnesses, but when it comes to death, they fall silent and avert their gaze. The default approach is to try to spare the office from grief, leaving bereaved employees alone for a few days and then hoping they'll return expediently to work. This article provides guidance on how to humanely help team members return to productivity. Grief rarely unfolds in a neat progression, and managers should understand the phases the bereaved will experience and the most helpful response to each. Immediately after a death, acknowledging the loss without making demands is the best a manager can do. After grieving employees are back on the job, managers should be patient with inconsistency in performance and attitude. And as workers eventually emerge from mourning, managers should support this opportunity for growth. In confronting grief, managers help fulfill their promise to bring out the best in their employees.

Marvel Studios has redefined the franchise movie, in part by finding the right balance between creating innovative films and retaining enough continuity to make them all recognizably part of a coherent family. The authors analyzed 338 interviews with producers, directors, and writers and 140 reviews from leading critics. They digitally analyzed each movie's script and visual style and examined its network of actors and behind-the-scenes workers. They argue that Marvel's success rests on four principles: (1) selecting for experienced inexperience, (2) leveraging a stable core, (3) continually challenging the formula, and (4) cultivating customers' curiosity.

If you're passionate about your career--and about being a great mom or dad--you're facing an ongoing struggle for at least 18 years. But you can learn techniques to reduce the stress and successfully balance your professional and family roles. The author, an executive coach who specializes in helping working parents, suggests that you start by identifying the kinds of challenges you're confronting. There are five core types: those involving transitions (such as returning to work after parental leave, or hiring a new caregiver); practical challenges (dealing with errands, appointments, and all your other responsibilities); communication issues (conversations and negotiations about working-parent matters); feelings of loss (fear that you're missing out at work or at home); and identity concerns (uncertainty about your priorities and how you define yourself). To mitigate these challenges, the author recommends five powerful strategies: (1) Rehearse to prepare for transitions; (2) audit your commitments and plan your calendar so that practicalities don't overwhelm you; (3) frame your working-parent messages effectively; (4) use "today plus 20 years" thinking to put losses into perspective; and (5) revisit and recast your professional identity and brand.

The famed fashion designer describes why she waited until age 40 to launch her own business, what she learned from working for Ralph Lauren, and how she balances her two roles as creative director and business head.

A new study looked at what happens when auto owners get ratings on their driving immediately from an app. The surprising finding? Their driving usually gets worse.

Sandu Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (Sandu Pharmaceuticals) was a publicly listed company operating in the pharmaceuticals and health care sector. It manufactured Ayurvedic medicines. Incorporated in 1985, the company traced its history back over more than a century. The third generation was at the helm of the firm in September 2016. The company’s director, was thinking about how previous successive generations in the family had handled the challenge of absorbing family members into the business, and in particular about whether he was doing enough to prepare the next generation to take over a business that was bound to grow more rapidly in the future, given the growing concern worldwide about the cost of allopathic health care and demand for less invasive and more holistic treatments.

On April 2, 2017, the chairman of Kamat Hotels (India) Limited (KHIL) and his son, the company’s chief executive officer, were having breakfast and recalling tough times endured in 2014 after a failed corporate debt restructuring. It had been one of the most important decisions ever made by the public sector undertaking bank—leaving their previous joint lenders and deciding to assign the loan to an asset reconstruction company. The incident had proven to be a turning point for the company. The failure of the corporate debt restructuring mechanism had become an unexpected advantage, and the company never looked back. The two leaders were now focused on their commitment to grow the company in a sustained manner, staying true to the local environmental challenges. With the goal of aggressive growth in several Indian states, the chief executive officer was looking for more hotels to own, manage, or lease in the mid to high segments of the market as an expansion plan. His vision was to someday retire as the owner of one of India’s largest hotel assets and to take his family name forward to the next benchmark of Indian hospitality. Was this the best path forward for KHIL?

Ofo (stylized “ofo”), a Beijing-based bicycle-sharing company, had grown bicycle sharing from nothing into a dockless mobile application (app) service industry with over 120 million monthly active users sharing 30 million bicycles in cities across China and around the world. Founded by five bicycle enthusiasts in 2014, its dockless system used a smartphone application to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging an hourly rate for use. Although only two years old in 2017—and yet to turn a profit—the company was valued at over USD 1 billion in a recent E round of private-equity financing. ofo’s new funds would be used to buy bicycles for international expansion and hire more talent, but in a rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, the company needed to assess its current and future position.

Presentation to accompany product 8B19M055.

In August 2018, the managing director of Grace Castings Ltd. (GCL) was preparing for an upcoming board meeting. At the meeting, which was expected to take place at the company's head office in Ahmedabad, India, he planned to present the strategic plan for GCL's future expansion as well as chart the company's direction. GLC was a small mill that manufactured steel products, including structural bars, thermomechanically treated bars, angles, and channels. In fiscal year 2017-18, the fully family-owned business had a financial turnover of US$33.85 million. With the recent growth in India's steel industry, the managing director was considering various options for expansion. The first option was backward integration, which meant increasing the capacity of billet manufacturing by adding a 30-metric-ton induction furnace. The second option was to expand the business by adding a new power plant. The managing director had to decide whether to recommend one or both of these options or simply maintain the status quo and grow the company at a slow pace.

In June 2017, executives from Amalsad Vibhag Vividh Karyakari Sahakari Khedut Mandali Ltd. (Amalsad Cooperative) met to consider possible changes to the cooperative’s interventions in commodity marketing, particularly, whether further interventions would benefit member farmers. Linking a unique reward and penalty scheme to the grade supplied by the farmers and directly supplying produce to the terminal market in Delhi had resulted in a 15 per cent increase in the farmers’ income. Streamlining the entire process—from receiving the commodity, grading and sorting the supply, to paying the farmers—had considerably reduced delays. The chairperson of the Amalsad Cooperative, which covered farmers from 17 villages near the town of Amalsad, in India, was pleased that reengineering the commodity marketing process had not only fetched a better price but had also eliminated the inefficiencies associated with marketing through the traditional channel—the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee trading yards, or mandies. However, he wondered whether further refining the grades would enhance the income of the members and asked his executives what other processes could be modified to benefit the members, especially in rendering services.

In 2014, the vice-president of Group Corporate Social Responsibility at Singtel, a Singapore-based provider of telecommunications products and services, was scrutinizing his proposal for the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) transformation. He wanted to reposition Singtel's CSR approach to create greater social impact while demonstrating greater benefit to the company beyond promoting its branding and reputation. In doing so, he was mindful that the proposal would require greater financial investment on the part of the company. The proposal would also need to leverage the company's capabilities and partnerships and address the possibility of dropping its current beneficiaries. His team needed to convince the board of directors and senior management that the potential benefits of the proposed changes would be worth the financial investment and the possibility of reduced brand exposure.

In August 2018, the managing director of Grace Castings Ltd. (GCL) was preparing for an upcoming board meeting. At the meeting, which was expected to take place at the company’s head office in Ahmedabad, India, he planned to present the strategic plan for GCL’s future expansion as well as chart the company’s direction. GLC was a small mill that manufactured steel products, including structural bars, thermomechanically treated bars, angles, and channels. In fiscal year 2017–18, the fully family-owned business had a financial turnover of US$33.85 million. With the recent growth in India’s steel industry, the managing director was considering various options for expansion. The first option was backward integration, which meant increasing the capacity of billet manufacturing by adding a 30-metric-ton induction furnace. The second option was to expand the business by adding a new power plant. The managing director had to decide whether to recommend one or both of these options or simply maintain the status quo and grow the company at a slow pace.

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being the search engine that doesn’t track you, and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.

In July 2015, Tassal Group Limited (Tassal) announced the acquisition of De Costi Seafoods Company (De Costi) in a combination deal of cash and shares. The acquisition would allow Tassal to address a A$4.3 billion Australian seafood market that was much larger than the previously addressable salmon market of $700 million. Tassal had previous experience in species diversification. However, the environmental impacts of its major operations in Macquarie Harbour had been under the scrutiny of the Australian authority. Given the critical harbour issues, should Tassal continue to expand overseas? What were the motives to acquire De Costi? Did Tassal have sufficient capabilities and resources to cope with the high demand for Tasmanian salmon, particularly in the Asian market?

In late 2012, Shanghai Euclid Printing Machine Co. (Shanghai Euclid), a joint venture between a Chinese state-owned enterprise and an American multinational enterprise, was in the process of closing down. Established in December 1993, the joint venture had experienced successive rounds of downsizing over the past 18 years, dropping from an original high of 1,800 employees to a workforce size of 668 in 2012. In its place, a 100-per-cent state-owned enterprise would now be founded, and any employees and business activities that would be retained needed to be moved to this new enterprise, Shanghai Gutenberg Printing Machine Co. (Shanghai Gutenberg). The general manager at Shanghai Euclid had to make some difficult decisions about the strategic orientation of Shanghai Gutenberg. He also needed to come up with a plan regarding the remaining 668 employees, deciding whom he could retain and who would need to be laid off. Considering the importance of social harmony in the Chinese context, he also needed to determine how to conduct the workforce change process in order to cause the least possible disruption to employees and other stakeholders.

In August 2016, Foxconn Technology Group (Foxconn) acquired a majority stake for US$3.8 billion in Sharp Corporation (Sharp), which was on the verge of bankruptcy. In addition to gaining more liquid crystal display (LCD) capacity, Foxconn was combining Sharp’s advanced technology and marketing resources with its own to expand and move up the value chain in both research and development and brand building. However, the post-acquisition integration to realize such value-creation potentials faced several challenges, including the probability that Sharp’s Japanese style of management might not assimilate well within Foxconn’s organization. Now in 2018, what should Foxconn do to seamlessly integrate the two entities? How could Foxconn achieve its efficiency, cost, and innovation goals while moving toward becoming the technology leader and successfully creating its own global brand?

Project Communication from Start to Finish is a five-chapter book by Geraldine Hynes, Ph.D., a communications expert, university lecturer, and author. Its key premise is that skills in project management are critical in a broad range of businesses and industries. A key knowledge area for project managers is communication. This book offers techniques and strategies that enhance communication in diverse environments. It offers innovative ways to bridge cultural gaps, increase understanding, and ensure project success. Project managers will learn how to build trust and rapport, manage conflict, listen, communicate expectations, give performance feedback, and overcome communication barriers. A look to the future includes best practices for using emerging technology when communicating with distributed teams. This book's concise format makes it a readable, practical guide, and it can also be used as a reference for fixing the most frequent communication breakdowns. Cases and examples are presented to illustrate applications of the communication principles from a project's start to finish. This chapter begins by explaining that communication is a key knowledge area for project managers and presents research findings that show the correlation between communication effectiveness and project success as well as organizational success. It then introduces the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (the PMBOK Guide), the premier resource for project managers, particularly the sections of the Guide that focus on communication competencies for project managers. In the third section of this chapter, project life cycles are described, as well as the role of communication at each stage of the life cycle. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of the book's conceptual model "The Sequence for Success"-and shows how the model embodies ideas that are found in the PMBOK Guide.

Project Communication from Start to Finish is a five-chapter book by Geraldine Hynes, Ph.D., a communications expert, university lecturer, and author. Its key premise is that skills in project management are critical in a broad range of businesses and industries. A key knowledge area for project managers is communication. This book offers techniques and strategies that enhance communication in diverse environments. It offers innovative ways to bridge cultural gaps, increase understanding, and ensure project success. Project managers will learn how to build trust and rapport, manage conflict, listen, communicate expectations, give performance feedback, and overcome communication barriers. A look to the future includes best practices for using emerging technology when communicating with distributed teams. This book's concise format makes it a readable, practical guide, and it can also be used as a reference for fixing the most frequent communication breakdowns. Cases and examples are presented to illustrate applications of the communication principles from a project's start to finish. Chapter 2 is designed to help project managers learn strategies and techniques for communicating in agile and waterfall methods of project management; overcoming communication barriers; appreciating diversity; and developing cultural competence. It begins by demonstrating the importance of communication in two typical methods of project management-agile and waterfall. It then lays two "cornerstones" or basic concepts that are the foundation on which the Sequence for Success model of project management, introduced in Chapter 1, is built. The first cornerstone is diversity appreciation (Figure 2.1). The chapter also suggests several communication strategies that you, as a project manager, can adopt to capitalize on the advantages of workforce diversity. In the final section, the chapter identifies and defines the model's other cornerstone, cultural competence.