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Workplace toxicity leads to a host of negative mental and physical health outcomes, particularly for women of color. Leaders can better support these employees and build a more equitable culture with the guidance offered here, starting with sharing more feedback, shifting organizational processes, and valuing contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

This case gives an overview of Elon Musk's career arc through the lens of the 2003 founding of Tesla and its growth through 2022. Background information is included on Tesla's unique strategic decisions, its operational and reputational struggles and successes, and the broader evolution of the electric vehicle market, emissions regulations, and green technology developments. The case also contains information on Musk's early life and endeavors beyond Tesla, with a focus on his management style and the implications for Tesla's success and his aim to influence human civilization for the better.

In April 2022, Sergi (CEO) and Aureli (COO), co-founders of Worldcoo, a Catalan social impact tech startup that offers fundraising solutions for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) projects through a round-up donation system, are considering options for scalability and growth. Since the "redondeo solidario" (solidarity roundup) was launched in 2017, the startup has contributed funding to over 620 (2021) projects of local and international NGOs, making it the leader in rounding-up donations in Spain. For Worldcoo, one of its key successes has been the establishment of B2B relationships with diverse merchants and payment service providers (PSP). With constant negotiation and searching, the startup has developed partnerships with large retailers such as Condis and Eroski supermarkets, and MasterCard. In spite of the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis that affected physical retail, the company managed to increase revenues from €1.2 to €2 million in 2021. With scalability in mind, Sergi and Aureli aim to reach €5-€5.5 million in revenue by 2022, which presents challenges and opportunities for Worldcoo's strategy.

In November 2021, Procter & Gamble Company (P&G)'s announcement regarding the recall of more than a dozen of its Old Spice and Secret aerosol deodorants and sprays over elevated levels of benzene threatened to damage their brand value. Considering that product recalls come at a cost and involve various phases, P&G need to assess how the recall will impact their brand value. As the Cincinnati, Ohio, multinational consumer goods corporation progress with their recall, what can they do to sustain trust and confidence among their consumers and use the recall as an opportunity to solidify their brand image and superiority proposition and prevent an irreversible loss in their profits?

It was September 2022, and, despite a long day at the office, Stephen Price had a lot to consider. He had just finished a meeting with the development and sales team at Graywood Developments (Graywood), during which they had discussed one of the latest developments in Graywood’s pipeline—the Centricity project. With a zoning bylaw amendment (ZBA) in hand, kicking off sales for the project was the next step in the process. However, with a looming recession and an anticipated cooling of the real estate market, Price had to decide whether to proceed with a sales launch in the first quarter of 2023, or shelve the launch until market conditions improved. Graywood could ultimately launch sales in January 2023 in the hope of achieving an average selling price of CA$1,650 per square foot, or it could delay the launch until January 2024 and hopefully sell at $1,700 per square foot or higher—though there was no guarantee that the market would improve. He wondered what impact his decision would have on Graywood’s plans to launch its tenth real estate fund in 2023. This case includes a complex merchant developer Microsoft Excel model, whereby students can adjust inputs and observe how key metrics change.

As a top-ranking hospital in Western China, Huaxi (which means West China in Chinese) Hospital of Sichuan University (Huaxi Hospital) had been navigating a digital transformation journey. In the early phases, Huaxi Hospital focused on the development of setting up a digital foundation. Specifically, it created the relevant supporting departments and built eighteen digitalized systems. In 2013, when Weimin Li became president of Huaxi Hospital, he prompted the expansion of digitalization. Telemedicine services, hospital services using smart technologies, and online hospital services represented examples of the digital innovation adopted. More recently, the COVID-19 epidemic further accelerated the process of hospital digitalization, and Huaxi Hospital continued to advance and keep up with the rapid changes. Artificial intelligence-assisted diagnosis and big-data platforms were implemented during this later phase. However, despite its success and facing an increasingly turbulent and complex health care industry, Huaxi Hospital needed to continually explore future digital transformation strategies. What could the future of Huaxi Hospital look like in the digital age? How should the hospital prioritize its different initiatives plans and design a road map for its future digitalization?

Boards of directors have important responsibilities in the context of top management succession processes. However, their role has not been sufficiently studied in the setting of family-controlled firms. Meanwhile, family executives often play a major role in the performance of family firms. In fact, replacing those family managers has important implications and needs to be treated as a priority by boards of directors. In this industry note, we explore the unique challenges that succession processes pose for the boards of family firms. We conclude that boards of directors should be particularly conscious of the need for planning, coordinating, and overseeing succession processes to meet both the business challenges and the controlling family’s expectations.

In 2022, AXA and its CEO Thomas Buberl faced new types of challenges, including systemic risks such as climate change, geopolitical instability, public health crises, and social tensions caused by economic risks. AXA was one of the world's largest insurers. Since becoming CEO in 2016, Buberl had led a transformation to rebalance its portfolio toward property and casualty (P&C) insurance, reducing its exposure to financial-market risk. At a September 2022 Management Committee offsite, Buberl focused management's attention on AXA's "S" strategy-i.e., its social and societal role. The case includes a history of AXA's growth and transformation prior to and under Buberl's leadership, including its adoption of the purpose: "to act for human progress by protecting what matters" and the vision "to transform AXA's value proposition 'from payer to partner.'" Also covered are AXA's green business strategy to mitigate and adapt to the risks posed by climate change, new innovations, such as data platforms in commercial and health insurance, and AXA's attempts to extend coverage to customers in emerging markets and low-income customers in developed markets.

How can a successful executive assess her next move as the CEO of a firm with a promising and yet uncertain new drug? Amy Burroughs' mandate to find a therapeutic window for Cleave Therapeutics oncology drug was on track but faced an uncertain future. Overseeing the human trials of a refined second-generation drug candidate, Amy had led the company back from the "valley of death" after Cleave's initial offering resulted in off-target toxicity. Still, after completing multiple dose escalation cohorts, Cleave's scientists told Amy that they could not draw any definitive conclusions about the benefits of the drug. Amy and her team knew the importance of speed and capital in the high-risk business of oncology drug development where success often takes more resources and time than expected and competitors lurk . Nearing the close of a five-year investment window, should the thinly staffed Cleave 2.0 continue to recruit patients and clear dosing cohorts at a rapid rate, or should Amy prioritize funding and partnership discussions?

Most organizations put more resources toward identification, protection, and detection rather than their ability to respond to and recover from a cyber breach, leaving themselves vulnerable. But because companies can't protect against every new cyberattack, it's critical that they reduce the potential impact by putting more focus on cyber resilience. The authors describe how leaders can apply seven biology-inspired adaptive design principles to become more resilient against cyberattacks.

Research shows that the prevailing assumption that workplace deviance stems from a few bad apples is mistaken. Leaders have as strong, if not a stronger, effect on whether employees engage in deviant behaviors than is usually acknowledged. Thus, when employees act badly, savvy leaders take a step back and consider whether and how they may be complicit in that behavior.

Facing a crisis or an opportunity, leaders often fall back on the leadership style that has worked for them in the past. But to be effective, they need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to respond in real time. In this article two leadership coaches offer an approach, called the "four stances," to help leaders improve their interpersonal communication: Lean In. Take an active stance on resolving an issue. Actions in this stance include deciding, directing, guiding, challenging, and confronting. Lean Back. Take an analytical stance to observe, collect, and understand data. Actions include analyzing, asking questions, and possibly delaying decisions. Lean With. Take a collaborative stance, focusing on caring and connecting. Actions include empathizing, encouraging, and coaching. Don't Lean. Be still and create space for a new solution to bubble up from the subconscious. This stance also serves to calm emotions if they have been triggered. Actions include contemplating, visualizing, and breathing. Leaders should identify which stance is their default, make a plan for using alternative ones in various situations, and be ready to pivot if an approach is not working.

A study of some 16,000 major projects-from large buildings to bridges, dams, power stations, rockets, railroads, information technology systems, and even the Olympic Games-reveals a massive project-management problem. Only 8.5% of those projects were delivered on time and on budget, while a mere 0.5% were completed on time and on budget and produced the expected benefits. In other words, 99.5% of large projects failed to deliver as promised. Master architect Frank Gehry consistently defies those odds, producing projects of staggering beauty while meeting time and budget targets. This article reveals four lessons, gleaned from interviews with Gehry and his colleagues, for successfully managing big projects.

In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts; figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now. Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.

More than 3,000 office workers at an oil and gas company in Oklahoma City have been telecommuting since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of them love the arrangement, and the freedom to work remotely is also a big draw for new hires. But there are downsides: Employees who have to be on-site in the oil fields and on drilling rigs are resentful; collaboration and knowledge transfer are more challenging; costly office space is going unused; and local businesses are suffering because of the emptiness of the downtown core. The company's CEO must decide: Should we mandate a return to the office for everyone? This fictional case study features expert commentary by Logitech's Bracken Darrell and Spotify's Katarina Berg.

In times of tumult, we need comfort, healing, and inspiration. A good way to find them is by appreciating the vast and wondrous things that transcend us, say several new books.

More than 3,000 office workers at an oil and gas company in Oklahoma City have been telecommuting since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of them love the arrangement, and the freedom to work remotely is also a big draw for new hires. But there are downsides: Employees who have to be on-site in the oil fields and on drilling rigs are resentful; collaboration and knowledge transfer are more challenging; costly office space is going unused; and local businesses are suffering because of the emptiness of the downtown core. The company's CEO must decide: Should we mandate a return to the office for everyone? This fictional case study features expert commentary by Logitech's Bracken Darrell and Spotify's Katarina Berg.

More than 3,000 office workers at an oil and gas company in Oklahoma City have been telecommuting since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of them love the arrangement, and the freedom to work remotely is also a big draw for new hires. But there are downsides: Employees who have to be on-site in the oil fields and on drilling rigs are resentful; collaboration and knowledge transfer are more challenging; costly office space is going unused; and local businesses are suffering because of the emptiness of the downtown core. The company's CEO must decide: Should we mandate a return to the office for everyone? This fictional case study features expert commentary by Logitech's Bracken Darrell and Spotify's Katarina Berg.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the obsolescence and vulnerability of many existing auditing practices. While some progressive practices have been implemented (e.g., remote audits using rudimentary information and communication technologies), a new paradigm is needed not only to account for the risk of repeated lockdowns but also to align practices with the level of digitalization, automation, and use of artificial intelligence in the current business environment. In this article, we argue that the adoption of new technologies requires a fundamental rethinking of how auditing services are delivered. We argue that new technological possibilities have implications for five other auditing elements that enable a shift from the old to the new paradigm of auditing, namely actors, processes, spaces, training and skills development, and services. We explain how nonfinancial audits conducted under the new paradigm are key enablers of a firm's ability to participate and to thrive in a competitive international marketplace.

Blockchain, a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT), can be used for supply chain and is commonly discussed among distribution giants and small players. Blockchain's actual and perceived benefits, in addition to track-and-trace mandates from regulatory bodies, have driven these discussions. However, there is no mention of how existing dispute resolution processes have been overhauled in favor of blockchain smart contracts, which can be used to manage and resolve disputes. This conversation gap is critical as trust will erode if supply chain partners cannot settle disputes adequately. We highlight the importance of supply chain DLT management and suggest tactics for resolving the inevitable disputes that arise with disparate information. These guidelines, including adopting portable and enforceable contractual terms and a standardized dispute resolution process, can have practical applications beyond blockchain.