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In 2011, the management of Novozymes, the industrial enzymes leader, reflected on the viability of their positioning in the fast growing, yet increasingly competitive Chinese market. Novozymes, a technological innovation pioneer, was prominent in China's premium enzyme markets, but felt pressure from local low-cost rivals in volume-driven, commoditized segments. How should Novozymes relate to local competitors? By competing on technological innovation only in high-margin verticals? Or through a separate subsidiary with a new low-cost business model for commoditized verticals?

In 2006, the Japan subsidiary of Tommasi Motorcycles, an Italian manufacturer of high-end motorcycles, was implementing a new customer data application to help its motorcycle dealerships increase the effectiveness of their sales and marketing activities. Horizon LLP, a consulting firm, was Tommasi's global implementation partner for the application. To identify any dealer concerns regarding the new system, Tommasi Japan had brought in additional consultants from Horizon to conduct a series of interviews with the dealers. As the consultants soon discovered, the dealers' concerns with Tomassi went far beyond the new application. An unannounced visit by an influential dealer set all the players on a collision course, and soon exposed their widely differing views and a number of fundamental problems in the relationship between Tommasi Motorcycles Japan and its dealer network.The case begins with a series of separate dialogues involving the director of sales and marketing, Nobu Katoh; the expat president of Tommasi Motorcycles Japan, Fambio Bonardi; Koji Saito, an influential owner of multiple dealerships; and two consultants from Horizon, both of whom are non-Japanese. When they meet in the board room of Tommasi Motorcycles Japan, the ensuing conversation reveals a number of issues: opportunistic behaviour by the bilingual Katoh, who plays the role of translator - and also gatekeeper - between the dealers and Tommasi's Japanese National Office by limiting, filtering and shaping communications in both directions; a limited understanding of local market conditions by expat Tommasi management who rotate in and out of their positions every three years; frustration on the part of business-savvy dealers; and naiveté on the part of the consultants, who did not see the social hierarchies at work, nor realize that their cultural and language fluency, which had in past projects always been an asset, could also be a threat.

Prabjot Nanua was proud of the growing capabilities of the General Motors Technical Center India Powertrain Engineering group that he oversaw. Since 2003 engineers there had expanded the center's capabilities, developing a reputation within GM for completing high-quality design and analysis projects for other Technical Centers at a substantially lower cost. In areas such as tolerance stacking analysis, GMTCI-Powertrain was now the only location in GM worldwide that performed this type of work. Nanua thought about the next stage of development for the center. Should they "go deep" and focus on more areas of technical competency where the center had developed a competitive advantage? GMTCI could become the center of expertise for a narrower set of methods and capabilities like they had done in tolerance stacking. Or should they "go broad" and continue to lobby headquarters for more complex assignments that might ultimately lead to program ownership for an entire vehicle? Each scenario had different implications for how GMTCI fit within the network of Technical Centers and corporate GM. If they did the former, they might be faced with the perception that GMTCI was limited to back-office analysis for GM's products. But when Nanua put on his headquarters "hat," he wondered if that shouldn't also be the corporation's priority for them.

Theo Chocolate, Inc. is a small start-up chocolate manufacturer struggling to establish brand recognition in the highly competitive branded gourmet chocolate segment. Theo's unique value proposition, of being "the only organic, Fair-Trade, bean-to-bar chocolate factory in the United States," drives its business. The company was started and operates under the premise that socially responsible business practices are cornerstones of its operations. Since its inception, Theo has built a loyal and growing following, especially in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Its first three years were spent building this customer base and forging a brand based on its value proposition and everyday business practices. However, despite steady improvements in all financial indicators, to date Theo had not been profitable - the company expected to break "into the black" in its fourth year. The case explores the challenges Joe Whinney and Debra Music (the Founder/CEO and VP of Sales and Marketing, respectively) face as they emerge from the first stage of the entrepreneurial venture. The key decision facing the company, and Debra in particular, is whether Theo can in fact afford to stay true to the strategy and value proposition that has defined its existence. It is trying to establish a unique brand in a marketplace that is dominated by large well-established competitors with significant resources at their disposal. It has not been profitable in doing so. The case provides students an opportunity to wrestle with very real issues that idealistic entrepreneurs face - compromising principles, brand-building, managing cash flow and planning for the future.

This is a best practice case. The WLGore is a very successful firm and the case describes in detail the culture of the enterprise. WLGore differs from the mainstream enterprise in a number of ways -strategy, structure, ownership, leadership, and operations. This case allows the participants to delve into each of these elements and see how they are all consistent and reinforcing one another. The main focus of the case is its "culture of innovation." Both "culture" and "innovation" are two items discussed and debated incessantly inside large organizations, but there is always confusion and clutter. This case was written with the sole purpose of shedding light and putting some concreteness around these slippery concepts. Please note that this case has been written entirely using publicly available material.

When people imagine practicing a skill or sport during "lucid dreaming," the state in which a sleeping person recognizes he's in a dream and takes control of it, their performance in that activity improves in real life.

The World Economic Forum surveys experts and industry leaders every year to see what risks concern them most. This year's results, compiled from the responses of 469 leaders, put chronic fiscal imbalances at the top of the list. Other leading worries are rising greenhouse gas emissions; terrorism; water-supply crises; and cyber attacks.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Companies, the authors argue, are increasingly turning toward business model innovation as an alternative or complement to product or process innovation. Drawing on extensive research they conducted over the course of the last decade, the authors define a company's business model as a system of interconnected and interdependent activities that determines the way the company "does business"with its customers, partners and vendors. In other words, a business model is a bundle of specific activities -an activity system -conducted to satisfy the perceived needs of the market, along with the specification of which parties (a company or its partners) conduct which activities, and how these activities are linked to each other. Business model innovation can occur in a number of ways: (1) by adding novel activities, for example, through forward or backward integration, (2) by linking activities in novel ways, or (3) by changing one or more parties that perform any of the activities. Changes to business model design can be subtle, the authors note; even when they might not have the potential to disrupt an industry, they can still yield important benefits to the innovator. The authors offer a number of examples of business model innovation and pose six questions for executives to consider when thinking about business model innovation: 1. What perceived needs can be satisfied through the new model design? 2. What novel activities are needed to satisfy these perceived needs? 3. How could the required activities be linked to each other in novel ways? 4. Who should perform each of the activities that are part of the business model? 5. How is value created through the novel business model for each of the participants? 6. What revenue model fits with the company's business model to appropriate part of the total value it helps create?

In 1995 Jin Zhiguo was put in charge of the Hans Brewery, a fresh Tsingtao acquisition. On his first day there, he found a financial statement on his desk that said, "Daily production: 1,000." Not bad, he thought. But then he learned that the number referred to bottles, not cases--and this at a company employing more than 1,000 people. Although it was a moment of "great disbelief," Jin says that such underperformance wasn't unusual then for Chinese businesses: The government determined production plans, and few managers paid attention to customer needs or traditional marketing. He set out to revolutionize the brewery's culture over the next five years, partly in response to aggressive market competition from Western brands. One of the first things he did was to start sitting in restaurants and talking with customers about beer. What he learned led to a more popular product and better distribution, and within a year production had risen to 790,000 bottles a day. The company had gone from annual losses of 25 million yuan to revenues of 10 million yuan. By 1999, annual revenues had reached 50 million yuan, and Hans had become Tsingtao's best-performing brewery. Jin assumed the presidency of Tsingtao in 2001 and helped the company adapt to being market driven. Among his many leadership imperatives was a continuing emphasis on employees' spending time listening to customers.

Why do some teams consistently deliver high performance while other, seemingly identical teams struggle? Led by Sandy Pentland, researchers at MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory set out to solve that puzzle. Hoping to decode the "It factor" that made groups click, they equipped teams from a broad variety of projects and industries (comprising 2,500 individuals in total) with wearable electronic sensors that collected data on their social behavior for weeks at a time. With remarkable consistency, the data showed that the most important predictor of a team's success was its communication patterns. Those patterns were as significant as all other factors-intelligence, personality, talent-combined. In fact, the researchers could foretell which teams would outperform simply by looking at the data on their communication, without even meeting their members. In this article Pentland shares the secrets of his findings and shows how anyone can engineer a great team. He has identified three key communication dynamics that affect performance: energy, engagement, and exploration. Drawing from the data, he has precisely quantified the ideal team patterns for each. Even more significant, he has seen that when teams map their own communication behavior over time and then make adjustments that move it closer to the ideal, they can dramatically improve their performance.

In a fast-paced and ever-changing business environment, traditional teams aren't always practical. Instead, companies increasingly employ teaming: gathering experts in temporary groups to solve problems they may be encountering for the first and only time. This flexible approach was essential to the completion of the Water Cube, the building that hosted swimming and diving events during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, and to the 2010 rescue of 33 Chilean miners. More and more people in nearly every industry now work on teams that vary in duration and have constantly shifting membership. Teaming presents technical and interpersonal challenges: People must get up to speed quickly on new topics and learn to work with others from different functions, divisions, and cultures. Several project management principles-scoping out the challenge, structuring the boundaries, and sorting tasks for execution-help leaders facilitate effective teaming. Leaders can also foster cross-boundary collaboration by emphasizing purpose, building psychological safety, and embracing failure and conflict. Individuals who learn to team well acquire knowledge, skills, and networks. Organizations learn to solve complex, cross-disciplinary problems, build stronger and more unified cultures, deliver a wide variety of products and services, and anticipate and manage unexpected events. Teaming helps companies and individuals execute and learn at the same time.

All teams would like to think they do their best work when the stakes are highest-when the company's future or their own rests on the outcome of their projects. But too often something else happens. In extensive studies of teams at professional service firms, Harvard Business School's Gardner has seen the same pattern emerge over and over: Teams become increasingly concerned with the risks of failure rather than the requirements of excellence. As a result, they revert to safe, standard approaches instead of delivering original solutions tailored to clients' needs. Gardner has a name for this phenomenon: the performance pressure paradox. Here's how it develops: As pressure mounts, team members start driving toward consensus in ways that shut out vital information. Without even realizing it, they give more weight to shared knowledge and dismiss specialized expertise, such as insights into the client's technologies, culture, and aspirations. The more generically inclined the team becomes, the more concerned the client grows, which turns up the pressure and pushes the team even further down the generic road. But forewarned is forearmed. By measuring each person's contribution deliberately, ruthlessly insisting that no one's contribution be marginalized, and framing new information within familiar contexts, teams can escape the performance pressure paradox and keep doing their best work when it matters most.

The author, whose biography of Steve Jobs was an instant best seller after the Apple CEO's death in October 2011, sets out here to correct what he perceives as an undue fixation by many commentators on the rough edges of Jobs's personality. That personality was integral to his way of doing business, Isaacson writes, but the real lessons from Steve Jobs come from what he actually accomplished: He built the world's most valuable company, and along the way he helped to transform a number of industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. In this essay Isaacson describes the fourteen imperatives behind Jobs's approach: focus; simplify; take responsibility end to end; when behind, leapfrog; put products before profits; don't be a slave to focus groups; bend reality; impute; push for perfection; know both the big picture and the details; tolerate only "A" players; engage face-to-face; combine the humanities with the sciences; and "stay hungry, stay foolish."

If senior executives are feeling ever more pressed for time, why would they add more to their plates? It might sound counterintuitive, but research by Booz & Company's Gary L. Neilson and Harvard Business School professor Julie Wulf shows that over the past 20 years the CEO's average span of control, measured by the number of direct reports, has doubled. It stands at almost 10 today. This gives fresh relevance to a perennial question for senior leaders: Just how much should they take on? The authors suggest five areas to consider: Where are you in the senior executive life cycle? How much cross-organization collaboration is required? How much time do you spend on activities outside your direct span of control? What's the scope of your role? What's the best mix of roles for your team? A diagnostic tool provides guidance for leaders considering these questions and can help them estimate their optimal span of control. The issues explored are ones many senior executives--not just CEOs--should revisit throughout their careers. The best leaders, the authors show, stay mindful of the evolving demands of their job and continually tweak their team as they go.

Lessons taught and learned in the challenging, unpredictable environment of a wilderness expedition have direct applications to today's business world. That's according to two directors at the National Outdoor Leadership School, who in this article share five principles for expedition--and career--success. (1) Practice leadership. The fundamental philosophy of NOLS is that leadership can be learned--even by those who don't think they have a natural ability to lead. You just need to practice making decisions, then reflecting on and learning from the outcomes. (2) Lead from everywhere. In an expedition group, or in an organization, you can play four roles, often simultaneously: designated leader, active follower, peer leader, and self-leader. Effective teamwork rests on knowing how and when to step into each role. (3) Behave well. Leadership means getting along in a diverse group, cooperating with teammates, effectively resolving conflict, and keeping yourself and others motivated. (4) Keep calm. On expeditions and in business, people often end up scrapping not only Plan A but also Plan B. Leadership involves planning for things you can control, letting go of things you can't, expecting the unexpected, and maintaining composure when unforeseen circumstances arise. (5) Disconnect to connect. The fast-paced, high-tech world of work wreaks havoc on leaders' ability to engage in the careful, strategic thinking required of them. It's important to disconnect from 21st-century distractions and to connect with nature once in a while.

What compels a famous Chinese artist to cross disciplines, work in collaboration, and champion human rights.

The case focuses on succession planning for a successful family business that has reached a crossroads in which different family members have different stakes in the outcome of the business. The president of Goodwin Sporting Goods is 66 years old, has health concerns and is concerned about how to finance his retirement. He also has three children who rely on the business for financial support. He must make some tough decisions that will affect both the business and his family.

In mid-2010, the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Phase Separation Solutions (PS2) needed to address potential cooperative opportunities with separate Chinese organizations regarding its Thermal Phase Separation (TPS) technology. PS2 was a Saskatchewan-based small environmental solutions company that had grown under the president's entrepreneurial direction to become a North American leader in the treatment of soil, sludge and debris impacted with various organic contaminants. The company specialized in the cleanup of two waste streams using its TPS technology. The first was the remediation of soil contaminated with persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The second was recovering usable oil from industrial sludge generated in various industries such as the oil and gas industry.

The case focuses on succession planning for a successful family business that has reached a crossroads in which different family members have different stakes in the outcome of the business. The president of Goodwin Sporting Goods is 66 years old, has health concerns, and is concerned about how to finance his retirement. He also has three children who rely on the business for financial support. He must make some tough decisions that will affect both the business and his family.

Dialogue in the Dark Hong Kong Limited (DiD HK) is a social enterprise founded in August 2008 with a vision of providing "insight for everyone". In line with the worldwide DiD, the core values of DiD HK are diversity, quality and sustainability. As a social enterprise, DiD HK aims to achieve both social and financial objectives. Although it has to raise the awareness of the public toward blind or visually impaired (VI) people and promote employment opportunities for them, DiD HK aims to achieve financial success, financial sustainability and dividend payout to investors. In the first two years of operation, DiD HK's innovations have attracted many participants, and more jobs are created for visually impaired employees. It made inroads toward a breakeven in 2010 through its unique ownership and business models. The startup team invented many new programs unheard of in other franchises. Although DiD has franchises all over the world, none of them are sustainable and successful. Geared toward expanding to other parts of Asia, DiD HK was not without its problems. Its product range and market had room for improvement. There was a lack of repeat visitation. DiD HK also needed further financial capital, human resources and other resources. Thus, it is imperative for management to review its strategies, and find ways to sustain its expansion and financial performance. If DiD HK can overcome these challenges, it may serve as a role model social enterprise not just in Hong Kong, but also in other parts of the world.