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In May 2013, the owner of Sawdust, Co., a small woodworking business outside Kigali, Rwanda, has to decide on a new strategic direction for his company while not compromising its past success. He had started the company in 2007 with the goal of revolutionizing the sawdust industry in his country while also promoting social welfare in the region by offering employment to both survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Although the company has achieved modest profits, he is eager to do more. However, some tough decisions lie ahead. He can choose to go alone and take out bank loans to invest in the three lines of machinery needed to expand the business; he can engage in a joint venture in which he will have to give up an equity stake in return for the required capital; or he can follow the status quo. How can he achieve top line revenue growth, remain profitable and socially responsible and withstand international competition?

The chief financial officer at Beijing Automobile Group Co. Ltd., a large Chinese state-owned automobile manufacturer, is weighing up whether the company should purchase an equity stake and/or access to the intellectual property rights and production equipment of Saab Automobile, the troubled Swedish premium automaker owned by General Motors. Previous experience of Chinese technology acquisitions in the auto sector has given him pause for thought. He has to weigh up the likely return on investment, the ability of the company's workforce to absorb and develop new technology, and the role of competitors in China's rapidly growing auto market. He has three options: purchase access to Saab's intellectual property rights alone, purchase an equity stake as well as access to those rights or do neither. If he goes ahead with either of the first two options, and if the gamble pays off, he will enhance his own reputation and that of his company. However, if the gamble fails, not only reputation but potentially a lot of money will be lost and much effort wasted in trying to absorb a foreign product into current operations.

Perched on a cliff, the ninth-century Tatev Monastery is one of the most important monasteries in Armenia. A prominent Moscow-based businessman has decided to make it into an accessible and attractive tourist destination. Complicating matters is the region's significant poverty and inaccessibility due to harsh weather conditions and a lack of proper infrastructure. In addition, shortcomings in hospitality management and training mean that tourist numbers remain low. One of the greatest challenges of the project is the management of eight stakeholders, including the Armenian Church, the local community, investors and UNESCO. How can the founder of the revival project devise a commercially successful strategy that will address all stakeholders' interests without compromising his own principles and ethical values?

In early 2011, the founder of REfficient, an asset recovery service based in Hamilton, Ontario, was thinking about how she should manage the rapid growth that seemed just around the corner. Founded in 2010 to help cable firms generate value from their stock of surplus equipment, REfficient, with no direct competitors in the Ontario market, had grown rapidly and had a list of corporate customers, two warehouses and five employees. The company was positioned as the efficient way for customers to recover value from their surplus assets; it would collect and inventory them, provide an online list and track the environmental impact of selling or discarding them. The company was now looking to secure a pilot project with the Ontario provincial government. Innovative in the “green” sense because of its innovative reuse, recycle or resell model, as well as its integrated carbon footprint estimator, REfficient was a good match for the program. But how would it deal with an increasingly large variety of items, given its limited resources and space?

A young Aboriginal entrepreneur faces three major challenges to growing his lifestyle apparel business. First, he has been unable to find a trusted partner who is both competent and passionate about the venture. Second, he is spread thinly across the multiple roles involved with running and growing the business. Third, he has not yet fully tested any of the proposed business models to determine whether they will require considerable investment or abandonment. The entrepreneur lacks the time and space to think strategically about his best course of action. The case challenges students to evaluate his company's business model and performance and to chart a successful strategy for the future, considering the dual perspectives of being a solo entrepreneur and an Aboriginal businessperson.

The director of corporate responsibility at Cameco Corporation, a global uranium mining company, is debating whether to engage in formal negotiations leading to a partnership with a remote First Nations community in northern Saskatchewan, and if so, how. The director knows that a partnership may be costly upfront but it might also lead to future opportunities. Keenly aware of the need to manage rapidly growing expectations within the First Nations community, while also managing the expectations of long-term partners, the director needs to decide on a way forward that will deliver the best results for all concerned.

This case focuses on Pfizer, the largest research-based pharmaceutical company globally with sales of over $51 billion and operations in 175 countries in 2013. It introduces students to the field of green chemistry and discusses the business and environmental effects of such a strategy. While Pfizer has measured the benefits of green chemistry, communicating these externally has been challenging. In addition, manufacturers of generic drugs largely have not embraced green chemistry. As the first lead of Pfizer's Green Chemistry team, the first of its kind in the industry, how will you prepare for a meeting with your team's steering team to address progress and new initiatives? You will have to understand the complex market by, for example, identifying key drivers for other pharmaceutical companies, including generics, for adopting green chemistry. How should Pfizer communicate the impact of its sustainability efforts, including "greener" drugs, to the public?

The three founding members of the Civil Society Human and Institutional Development Programme (CHIP), a Pakistani not-for-profit organization, need to determine how to satisfy management and operational costs. CHIP is a mainstream development organization in Pakistan, with a focus on Human and Institutional Development. CHIP became successful by maintaining high standards of management practices. Such standards require regular financial support to account for the cost of institutional necessities, such as staff positions in financial and administration management and human resources. While international donors are willing to work with CHIP due to its high management standards, they are not willing to meet the costs of these standards.

Just before the celebration of the 2014 Chinese Lunar New Year, Tencent, the world's fourth largest Internet company, launched a mobile application for its popular WeChat platform: the Red Envelope. By clicking on a virtual red envelope icon, gifts of money could be sent to or received from friends and family to celebrate this special occasion. Combining a Chinese cultural tradition with modern social networks, this simple initiative soon became a major milestone in China's mobile market. It brought more than eight million users to Tencent's WeChat Payment platform in the first eight days after the New Year, helping the company break the barrier of mobile payment adoption among its vast user base and giving it a significant advantage in the country's competitive mobile payment market. This somewhat unexpected, record-making success, also made many companies rethink how to survive and thrive in China's rapidly growing technology sector.

After failing to make the basketball, baseball, and football teams in high school, the author persuaded the administration to start a lacrosse team, figuring that no one would know any more than he did about how to play. Eventually he got good at the game and became team captain. He took a valuable lesson from that experience: Opportunity is something you manufacture, not something you wait for. That lesson has informed his career ever since. For example, while he had a part-time job moving boxes as part of a relocation for Little, Brown, he happened across an assignment to create a book jacket. Familiarity with Photoshop and Quark enabled him to quickly come up with a design and slip it into the pile of submissions. When the editors and the sales team chose it as the best, he was offered a full-time job. A couple of start-ups and a stint at Google later, Stone and a close friend came up with the idea for Twitter. His job at the company was to "bring humanity to the technology" and to help "shape our story for the outside world." (He drew the bird logo.) His latest venture is Jelly Industries, a seven-person company of which he's the CEO. There he has learned that the chief executive's most important job is to constantly communicate.

People in all walks of life are rightly concerned about advancing automation: Unless we find as many tasks to give humans as we find to take away from them, all the social and psychological ills of joblessness will grow, from economic recession to youth unemployment to individual crises of identity. What if, the authors ask, we were to reframe the situation? What if we were to uncover new feats that people might achieve if they had better thinking machines to assist them? We could reframe the threat of automation as an opportunity for augmentation. They have been examining cases in which knowledge workers collaborate with machines to do things that neither could do well on their own--and they've found that smart people will be able to take five approaches to making their peace with smart machines. Some will "step up" to even higher levels of cognition, where machines can't follow. Some will "step aside," drawing on forms of intelligence that machines lack. Some will "step in," to monitor and adjust computers' decision making. Some will "step narrowly" into very specialized realms of expertise. And, inevitably, some will "step forward," by creating next-generation machines and finding new ways for them to augment the human strengths of workers.

Fifty years ago fashion and luxury goods were all about family businesses and entrepreneurial designers. Today most of the best-known brands belong to a diversified group like LVMH, Richemont, or Kering. The success of such groups contradicts the management notion that a focus on one core leads to superior returns--and that diversification adds little value. An analysis of the performance of 350 fashion houses suggests that group affiliation does add value, say INSEAD's Andrew Shipilov and Frederic Godart. They found that the fashion collections of group brands were more successful, and judged more creative by industry buyers, than those of independent brands over a 10-year period. How do luxury groups get this edge? Through the way they groom their designers and managers. The groups exploit the variety of their businesses by setting up internal talent markets that offer rich learning opportunities. Rising stars are thus less tempted to leave the organization, and cross-group job moves help spread knowledge and best practices. Group watchmaking companies, for instance, have been able to boost their sales by hiring experts in marketing and CRM from their groups' fashion and cosmetics firms. Worldwide operations give groups another advantage, because spending time overseas is critical to executive development. This is especially true in the luxury field, where international experience exposes designers to creative influences and executives to new but fast-growing customer segments. However, it isn't just in their approach to internal talent that groups excel. They prime the entry-level pipeline by sponsoring educational programs and offering apprenticeships to promising students, as well as recruit external functional know-how more effectively than the independent brands do.

Many people today regard their computers, tablets, and smartphones as indispensable, both professionally and personally. But they can also be dangerous: Research shows that spending too much time on e-mail and social media reduces your productivity and engagement at home and at work. So how can you avoid digital overload? In this article, two experts offer dramatically different strategies. Larry Rosen, a psychologist, advocates pulling away from technology in order to refocus. His advice: Limit the time you spend with your devices, using behavioral techniques to gradually wean yourself away; when you are using technology, take periodic breaks to exercise, meditate, or otherwise recharge; and avoid on-screen activities before bedtime to ensure that you get proper rest. Alexandra Samuel, a pioneer in electronic engagement, recommends the opposite tack: Embrace technology and make smarter use of digital tools to manage information overload. She suggests filtering your e-mail and using a newsreader app to customize the stream of articles and blog items you receive. You can also automate your postings to social networks. The author's approaches needn't be mutually exclusive. Indeed, combining them may be the best way to combat digital distraction.

The politician and peace negotiator on starting a dialogue, getting people to listen, and the importance of public service.

Global consumption of petroleum products stood at just more than 90 million barrels per day by the end of 2013, and was expected to increase to 91 million or more by the end of 2014. Petroleum companies were constantly exploring the planet for new oil reserves to meet this voracious demand for fossil fuels. Because three-quarters of the earth was water, it was evident that these oil reserves were largely underwater; however, until the end of 2013, very few players had explored this opportunity. Although reaching deep-water drilling sites posed various challenges — environmental, political, technological, etc. — offshore exploration was the future of the oil and gas industry.<br><br>Because of its very successful campaigns, Cairn India was ideally positioned for offshore exploration. Capturing and capitalizing on the opportunity of offshore exploration would give it an edge, but the question remained: Would it be better to gain the prime mover advantage or wait for other players to start the process so that it could learn from others’ mistakes and reap benefits later?

When researchers asked carpenters, roofers, and in-line skaters how to improve safety gear for all three activities, each group turned out to be significantly better at thinking of novel solutions for the fields other than its own. Studies like this one demonstrate the value of accessing expertise from "analogous fields"--areas that seem different on the surface but are similar on a deep structural level. This piece shows how to find the far-flung experts who can jump-start your search for breakthrough ideas. This reprint contains two additional Idea Watch articles. "Global Growth, Paltry Returns" describes new research showing that many international expansions fail to deliver consistent and sizable profits and that companies are often better off growing locally. "When to Forget the Rearview Mirror" examines a study of forecasts in the music business, showing that in creative, volatile fields, historical data often impairs people's ability to interpret contextual data and make sound predictions.

Organizational design can be complex, involving many different levers. But at its roots are a few fundamental formal structures or forms: functional, matrix, and divisional. This case tracks the early history of a (fictitious) start-up company in the software/mobile entertainment industry that rapidly expands and needs to consider the pros and cons of these various archetypes of formal structure.

The newly appointed director of Surgical Business Analytics has been charged with the task of improving predictions of surgical case volume at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. He is provided with 48 weeks of elective surgery schedule data that give the number of surgeries booked on specific dates prior to the surgery day and the actual number performed. Variation in daily operating room volumes is a major problem because of the mismatch in timing between when the staff schedules are made and when the final demand is known (usually the day before). This uncertainty creates staffing challenges for all support and ancillary services, including nurses, orderlies, anesthesiologists, the recovery room, pathology, radiology and the sterile cart centre. Can he develop a method to improve surgical case volume prediction that is actionable in a managerially useful time frame? How can he engage and approach stakeholders who may often consider "analytics," "data analysis" and "computations" as a black hole?