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When the author became executive director of the United Nations Office for Project Services, in 2014, she faced a big challenge: moving the operational arm of the UN further along on the path toward behaving like a for-profit business--a journey begun by her predecessor eight years earlier. Faremo has accomplished this by creating a culture of discipline and a measured approach to risk-taking. Her experience includes a decade of development work, five years as Microsoft's director of legal and corporate affairs in Western Europe, and 10 years in the Norwegian government, during which she led four ministries. These roles helped prepare her for the daunting task of revamping how UNOPS prices jobs, increasing the percentage of business that comes from non-UN sources, and, recently, partnering with the private sector in a wind farm in Mexico--a move beyond simply performing services to investing assets in socially beneficial ways.

In 2018, the Project on Managing the Future of Work at HBS teamed up with the BCG Henderson Institute to survey 6,500 business leaders and 11,000 workers about the various forces reshaping the nature of work. The responses revealed a surprising gap: While the executives were pessimistic about their employees' ability to acquire the capabilities needed to thrive in an era of rapid change, the employees were not. The employees were actually focused on the benefits change would bring and far more eager to learn new skills than their leaders gave them credit for. This gap highlights a vast reserve of talent and energy firms can tap into: their own workers. How can a company do that? By creating a learning culture; engaging employees in the transition instead of shepherding them through it; developing an internal talent pipeline for the entire workforce; and collaborating with outside partners to build the right skills in the labor pools it hires from.

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that's a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers, or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others' thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees' vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

A decade of research into top executives shows that expertise can actually severely impede performance, in two important ways. The first is overconfidence: believing that brilliance in one area leads to competence in another. The second is when deep knowledge and experience leave leaders incurious, blinkered, and vulnerable--even in their own fields. The solution is clear: Rededicate yourself to learning and growth, and rediscover just a bit of what the Buddhists call "beginner's mind." Strategies that the most successful executives use to do so fall into three buckets: challenging their own expertise, seeking out fresh ideas, and embracing experimentalism.

The Presiding Bishop of the U.S.-based Episcopal Church speaks about love and unity in a time of deep division.

As the Age of Disruption heats up, corporate boards can expect to face ever-increasing pressure to become more strategic. The problem remains that boards have neither a template nor a common vocabulary for assessing a proposed transformation strategy. The authors’ research—based on a four-year study of 62 corporate transformations—provides boards with a tool to diagnose gaps or misalignments in strategy. The authors identified a three-layered architecture that characterizes winning transformation efforts, consisting of two imperatives and a choice. Using a sandwich as a metaphor, the choice is like the sandwich filling that provides the special flavour or focus of the transformation effort. The two imperatives are the outer layers of the sandwich. The first imperative states that the pursuit of value is the trigger for any transformation, while the second imperative states that the pursuit of leadership development is what makes the change stick. The choice dictates that the compelling journey is at the heart of any corporate transformation. Ongoing transformation efforts are either derivatives or combinations of quests for the following five qualities: global presence, customer focus, nimbleness, co-innovation, and sustainability. Board members can verify that the executive team has properly debated its priorities by asking three questions: 1) Which of the five themes are you pursuing? 2) Can you explain what drives value? 3) How are you retooling people to support the transformation?

Although evolutionary notions about business often lack direct grounding in Darwin’s work, evolutionary theory can still help us understand how organizations, institutions, and markets change. Unfortunately, when used to illuminate business strategy, many evolutionary concepts are misapplied. This paper strives to address the garbled strategic advice created by misinterpretations of evolutionary theory, which have led to incorrect assessments of markets and market participants. We examine three widely held beliefs that are based on misapplications of evolutionary theory: 1) profit-maximization strategies inevitably lead to the best outcomes, 2) business is survival of the fittest, and 3) specialization makes you stronger. Applying four standard games (Prisoners’ Dilemma, Chicken, Battle of the Sexes, and the Stag Hunt) to the business world, we created models of competition to track interactions between market entities and demonstrate why many business ideas are based on garbled interpretations of the evolutionary concepts of selection, frequency dependence, and adaptation. The key takeaways from our research are: 1) selection on outcomes does not dictate that aiming for profit maximization will always lead to the best outcomes, 2) frequency dependence means there can be no unidimensional fitness to aspire towards, and 3) it is not survival of the fittest, but best fitted for any particular contest. Simply put, adaptation (both proactive and reactive), not specialization, is the key to success. Recognizing this requires a fundamental shift, inverting the normal strategy sequence by suggesting firms change themselves, rather than seeking to change their world.

In 2016, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Feihe International Inc. (Feihe), the manufacturer of a leading infant formula brand in China, was considering whether his company should enter Canada. Although the company would be challenged by the Canadian dairy industry’s unique supply management system, Canada was eager to attract foreign investment and the CEO needed to overcome the intense domestic competition in China’s infant formula market. The CEO needed to decide on an integrated strategy to enter Canada. Should he pursue a greenfield strategy, an acquisition, or a joint venture?

In late September 2017, the country manager of Garrard Japan was reviewing an interim strategy to deal with emerging, negative views on the ongoing globalization of industry and commerce. Garrard Japan was a wholly owned subsidiary of Garrard S.A., a leading packaged foods company. The European-based multinational enterprise had been a major contributor to globalizing trade and commerce, and the survey results had highlighted a Japanese view that global companies were concerned more with profits than with meeting the needs of local communities. The country manager wondered whether the strategy developed by his team to change these perceptions was adequate. He was also considering how to execute the strategy and who should pay for it: Garrard Japan or Garrard S.A.?

India’s airline industry was an oligopoly, with six major players in the market. IndiGo, launched in 2006, had become India's largest airline and a dominant player, after having taken advantage of market conditions, including a rise in per capita income that led to increased demand for air travel. However, in 2018, after a decade of consistent profitability, IndiGo was experiencing a decline in profits that was affecting its share price. The airline’s management needed to consider how the company could sustain its market-leading position over the long term and even increase profits, while accepting the minimal control it and its competitors had over ticket prices, amid an atmosphere of rising costs for aviation fuel and personnel costs.

This case study describes Tieqilishi (TQLS) Group's corporate social responsibility initiative in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China. Case A, set in 2016, describes the poverty-stricken Liangshan prefecture. Famous for 'cliff villages' (villages on top of high mountains accessible only via ladders on steep cliffs), Liangshan had the largest population of Yi ethnic people, who lived in the autonomous region governed by their own set of traditional customary laws. Inhabiting remote mountainous areas, the isolated Yi people were plagued by poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse and AIDS. Lei Wenyong, Chairman and Founder of TQLS, had to decide whether TQLS should participate in the poverty alleviation program at Liangshan. Headquartered in Chengdu, Sichuan, TQLS was a leading enterprise in China's agriculture industry, specialising in animal husbandry and the production of animal feed and processed food. TQLS had a history of making charitable contributions to society in the past, but investing in Liangshan would require careful consideration.Case B traces TQLS senior management's decision to proceed with the development of a pig farming industry in Liangshan in 2016, and the many challenges they faced along the way, such as stringent environmental regulations, delays in obtaining government loans, poor transport infrastructure and manpower shortages. Case C is set in 2017, and describes the short- and long-term measures undertaken by TQLS to overcome those challenges. The company's CSR projects in Liangshan proceeded well, and were marked by the co-founding of the Liangshan Commercial Poverty Alleviation Institute with the local government, collaborations with universities, setting up of training centres and Yi Cultural Study Centres, and plans to build primary schools in the villages. In this final part of the case, Lei came to the realisation that a more effective poverty reduction approach could be achieved through collaboration with other companies.

Supplement to case SMU493

Supplement to case SMU493

Presentation to accompany product 8B19M030.

Spreadsheet for product 9B19M026.

Atikameksheng Anishnawbek was a First Nations community near Sudbury, Ontario. The reserve, described in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, encompassed much of the Sudbury mining camp, which produced an estimated CA$1 trillion of mineral resources. At issue was the boundary of the reserve, which was much smaller than agreed upon, and whether Atikameksheng could claim a share of the value. The reserve had not been surveyed until 34 years after the treaty was signed, which resulted in discrepancies, the most significant being that the surveyed reserve boundaries were much smaller than agreed upon and described in the treaty, thus excluding a great deal of the mineralized land. Atikameksheng did not have any agreements in place, nor was the community receiving compensation from the two largest companies mining the land, despite the high value of extracted minerals. In 2018, in the context of the ongoing boundary and compensation disputes, the chief had to decide how best to focus his energies to facilitate community economic development.

After more than a decade of development, US-based Synergy Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Synergy) received marketing approval from the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for its first drug, Trulance, which targeted a large market that had only two other approved competitors. Synergy now needed to scale up from a research-and-development shop to a sales-and-marketing powerhouse. The company had not partnered with a larger pharmaceutical company during the regulatory review process, which was typical for smaller drug development companies, and as a result, it retained 100 per cent of the sales revenue but had virtually no in-house sales or marketing capability. In September 2018, the company was heavily indebted and the stock was priced below US$2; many wondered if Synergy had been right to go it alone or if it should continue that strategy for developing the lucrative North American market. With a new chief executive officer, Trulance sales beginning to accelerate, and other products moving through the FDA approval process, Synergy needed to decide whether to stay the course and become a full-fledged pharmaceutical company or seek a partner and stick to its research and development competency.

Industria de Diseño Textil, SA (Inditex), primarily through its flagship brand Zara, had grown to be the world’s number-one fashion manufacturer and retailer with the introduction of what many considered a disruptive fast-fashion business model. However, Inditex’s chief executive officer insisted that this term failed to describe the company’s business model accurately. Like other successful business model innovators, Inditex in 2019 was faced both with new competitors who had successfully copied and enhanced key components of its approach and with the growing desire of fashion conscious consumers to shop online. Inditex needed to find a way to continue to differentiate Zara in this evolving industry while capturing more than its share of the tremendous market growth anticipated for the future.