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Oscar Ramirez, an employee at the Whole Nine Yards Construction & Landscaping Company, has been assigned to manage the remodel of Mayor Lawrence's family estate, which locals call ""Lawrence Lair."" One member of his team is his nephew, Martin Fuentes, who is in need of both summer work and a mentor. In this case, Fuentes is running late to work because he stayed up late the night before trying to compute several descriptive statistics using the temperature data he's collected from his uncle's ion machine. He tries to figure out the quickest route to work given the traffic light cycles. Once Fuentes makes it to work, he's introduced to Mayor Lawrence, who asks him to calculate several probabilities about his upcoming debate and his likelihood of winning the next election. This case is designed to be taught in a math literacy course for non-MBA audiences. Although it can be used alone, it was created as the fourth in a module of five cases total. It builds on the learnings in "The Living Roof" (UVA-G-0654) and is followed by ""How to Become a Minus"" (UVA-G-0655).

This case is inspired by the career experiences of Craig Smith, Group President and Managing Director, International Division, Marriott International. In this role, Craig oversees the international operations of one of the world's leading and largest hospitality companies. He is responsible for Marriott's operations outside of North America. Craig started his career at Marriott and has been with the organization for over three decades. He started his career in housekeeping and then progressively assumed roles with greater responsibility including senior roles across Asia and Latin America. The case is based on a series of interviews conducted with Craig. The interviews identified a series of experiences that shaped Craig's leadership journey, including leading a team during the midst of a catastrophic crisis. The case is organized around these pivotal experiences and through these stories students gain an insightful and personal perspective on aspects of leadership, specifically authentic leadership and servant leadership. Additionally, the case can also be used to explore the importance of inculcating a strategic perspective in planning and developing one's career. Craig's richness of experience contributes to a case that is suitable and interesting for a wide range of participants, including undergraduate, MBA, and executive level students.

Oscar Ramirez, an employee at the Whole Nine Yards Construction & Landscaping Company, has just been awarded his first major contract. Ramirez has been assigned to manage the remodel of Mayor Lawrence's family estate, which includes the design and remodeling of the family home as well as the landscaping of the surrounding land. As project manager, Ramirez is in charge of hiring and managing a team of contractors; one member of his team is his nephew, Martin Fuentes, who is in need of both summer work and a mentor. Ramirez spends his first day with Fuentes exposing him to the beauty of mathematics. Fuentes, who once saw mathematics as nothing but rote memorization and a series of nonsensical procedures, begins to see mathematics as a language that can be used to describe relationships that exist in the world around us. As Fuentes develops an appreciation and excitement for mathematics that mirrors Ramirez's love of the subject, Ramirez decides to share with his nephew a new machine that he has been designing and engineering. This case is designed to be taught in a math literacy course for non-MBA audiences. Although it can be used alone, it was created as the first in a module of five cases total. Each subsequent case builds on the material in this one. For the next case in the series, please see Safiya Sinclair, Kimberly Corum, and Gregory B. Fairchild, "It's All in the Signs" (UVA-G-0653).

Oscar Ramirez, an employee at the Whole Nine Yards Construction & Landscaping Company, has been assigned to manage the remodel of Mayor Lawrence's family estate, which locals call ""Lawrence Lair."" One member of his team is his nephew, Martin Fuentes, who is in need of both summer work and a mentor. After showing Fuentes the machine he's been engineering, Ramirez explains positive and negative (signed) numbers to his nephew. Then Fuentes accompanies Ramirez to his first meeting with all the contractors for the Lawrence Lair project, where Ramirez learns that there are two potential setbacks. Fuentes takes the opportunity to try to help his uncle by crunching the numbers to find solutions. This case is designed to be taught in a math literacy course for non-MBA audiences. Although it can be used alone, it was created as the second in a module of five cases total. It builds on the learnings in "A Universal Language" (UVA-G-0652) and is followed by ""The Living Roof"" (UVA-G-0654).

The Sagrada Família was one of Barcelona’s most popular tourist attractions. Designed by famed architect Antoni Gaudí, the as-yet unfinished basilica was set to be completed in 2026. Initiated in 1882, the basilica was one of the longest-running architectural projects ever undertaken, and its construction had faced both opportunities and challenges over the years, with obstacles such as inadequate funding, a change in leading architects, and no firm deadline in place. The most recent obstacle to the completion of the basilica’s construction was the COVID-19 pandemic, which had cast uncertainty over when construction would resume. Despite the focus on the Sagrada Família’s completion, there was potential for tension between the artistic process and traditional project management practices. The current construction team had to determine how to proceed with the project to ensure its long-term recognition while also honouring Gaudí’s legacy.

Mindsets are individuals' mental lenses that selectively organize and encode information, thereby orienting them toward a unique way of understanding their experiences and guiding them toward corresponding actions and responses. Decades of research have demonstrated that mindsets are foundational to how individuals process and operate. Despite this research, mindsets have largely been overlooked by practitioners when developing leaders. In this article, we seek to illuminate the foundational role mindsets play in leadership effectiveness to elicit greater emphasis on mindsets in leadership development. To do so, we explore what mindsets are, why they are so important for leadership development and effectiveness, and which mindsets leaders could further develop to operate more effectively. Specifically, we review the research associated with four different sets of mindsets - (1) fixed and growth mindsets, (2) goal orientations, (3) implemental and deliberative mindsets, and (4) prevention and promotion mindsets - to demonstrate how each affects leaders' effectiveness. We conclude by discussing how leadership developers and leaders themselves can focus on mindsets to improve leadership effectiveness.

This article features a moderated conversation between the author and five leading researchers and practitioners in the field of quantitative content analysis and, more specifically, computer-aided textual analysis (CATA). The interview subjects discuss the factors contributing to CATA's rise as a research method as well as the benefits and pitfalls of using CATA. The conversation also covers best-practice advice that companies may employ to increase the accuracy of CATA results. These include using different programs or algorithms for the same problem, known as algorithm error.

As the sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) systems develop and AI becomes a key element of organizational strategy across a wide spectrum of industries, new demands are being placed on senior leaders. To understand the growing challenges leaders will face in the age of AI, we conducted interviews with 33 senior leaders in several countries across a wide range of industries. Our research highlights key capabilities and skills that leaders will require. Underlying these capabilities is a mindset oriented toward continuous learning and self-development, which will enable ongoing and rapid adaptation to change. Our findings identified the following key capabilities: digital know-how, data-driven focus, networking, ethics, and agility. To successfully navigate the coming era, senior leaders will need to focus on reskilling the workforce, recruiting and retaining highly skilled talent, building an intrapreneurial culture, and managing unprecedented changes in technologies and the nature of work.

As the workplace continues to change, a new generational cohort - Generation Z, sometimes referred to as iGen - is beginning to enter the workforce. At the same time, millennials are now progressing in their careers and will be challenged with managing these incoming workers. The purpose of this article is to provide a contextual overview that identifies and illuminates some of the defining work-related characteristics of these two youngest generations in the workplace to increase understanding of the potential intergenerational conflict between these cohorts and develop leadership strategies that can be utilized to increase employee morale and productivity. This article analyzes the millennial supervisor-Gen Z subordinate relationship based on generational cohort theory, leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, and the work values framework.

In the last two decades, industry-university collaborations (IUCs) in research and development in the hard sciences have become increasingly more successful and common. In contrast, successful IUCs in softer social sciences, such as business, remain relatively uncommon. But business research requires an even higher degree of collaboration than research in the hard sciences if its results are to be relevant to businesspeople. Fortunately, business academics are becoming more and more interested in collaborating with businesspeople. The purpose of this article is to motivate businesspeople to collaborate as well. We do this by showing the businessperson the historical origins of business research's irrelevance, by describing the benefits the business world could receive from collaborative research, by showing why collaboration is especially needed in social sciences such as business, and by showing why academics cannot do relevant business research without practitioners' help. Specifically, we will show that the businessperson's help is needed to ensure that their priorities are met, to formulate the right research questions, to provide relevant data, and to contribute their problem solving inventiveness.

Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, leaped into China with a buyout of Joyo.com Limited, China’s largest online book, music, and video retailer, in 2004. Amazon had the ambition of becoming the dominant online retailer in China by capitalizing on its globally recognized brand, cutting-edge technologies, and advanced business model and philosophy. In the following years, China’s e-commerce industry experienced exponential growth, representing a golden opportunity for technology firms. For Amazon, however, many challenges started to surface, including intense competition from Alibaba Group Holding Limited and JD.com Inc., which limited Amazon’s growth. In 2018, as China’s e-commerce industry quickly became one of the world’s largest, Amazon had to determine what its next steps should be.

This supplement to Hopax (A), product number 9B10M004, recounts the events that followed until 2008 and explains how the company applied principles of judo strategy to become the second largest supplier of repositionable notes in the world.

Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, leaped into China with a buyout of Joyo.com Limited, China's largest online book, music, and video retailer, in 2004. Amazon had the ambition of becoming the dominant online retailer in China by capitalizing on its globally recognized brand, cutting-edge technologies, and advanced business model and philosophy. In the following years, China's e-commerce industry experienced exponential growth, representing a golden opportunity for technology firms. For Amazon, however, many challenges started to surface, including intense competition from Alibaba Group Holding Limited and JD.com Inc., which limited Amazon's growth. In 2018, as China's e-commerce industry quickly became one of the world's largest, Amazon had to determine what its next steps should be.

Founded in 1984 in Vancouver, Aritzia has been a massive success story, expanding across Canada and into the United States with no signs of slowing down. In March 2020, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic spreading rapidly through North America, the women's fashion retailer was forced to shutter all its 97 boutique stores and shift sales to the e-commerce channel, while making other key financial and operating decisions to respond to the pandemic. In May 2020, with Aritzia given the green light to begin slowly and cautiously opening its locations, the CEO and the executive team needed to decide how to move forward in a time of crisis and continue its growth plans.

Dare2Compete was a global platform connecting students, professionals, educators, colleges, and companies through innovative challenges, events, and gamified hiring assessments. It catered to two markets—students and companies. For students, it provided information on competitions, and listed internships, scholarships, and hackathons. For companies, it was an employer branding consultant and recruitment service provider. Dare2Compete was one of the largest networks of college students in India. Prospective employers could discover, engage, and hire students through the platform, facilitated by competitions, quizzes, hackathons, business simulations, and case studies.<br><br>In 2020, after five successful years of operations, Dare2Compete’s founder, Ankit Aggarwal, believed it was time to grow and was deciding on a growth strategy to pursue for achieving his objective of doubled growth for Dare2Compete in the coming year. He was considering three directions for growth: penetrate further into the market, expand globally into new markets, or develop a new product for the existing market.

In early June 2020, the owner of BYKlyn, an exercise bike fitness studio in New York, was considering her response to the business disruption that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the health and fitness industry. BYKlyn had recorded consistent annual growth since its launch in 2014. The fitness studio owner had been confirming her business expansion plans by moving into a larger space in the city when the pandemic struck in early 2019. Consequently, she was forced to shut down the business in mid-March 2019, in compliance with COVID-19 regulations. After a two-month lockdown, the New York state government announced phased-in reopening plans, and the fitness studio owner was considering three options for restarting her business: reopen at the existing premises; move to a virtual environment with a new business model; or set up an outdoor fitness club, which would offer fitness club members a completely new workout format.

The Hill & Levene Schools of Business (HLSB) Paul J. Hill Business School at the University of Regina, were considering widely divergent strategic alternatives, in what was expected to be a new and permanently altered post Covid-19 competitive environment, for business schools and higher education learning. The case considers three alternatives: 1. a return to the classic business model, with a new state-of-the-art building; 2. specialize as a virtual business school, for maximum national and international student access; or 3. Take advantage of the learning during the Covid-19 crisis and excel as an adaptive hybrid business school. Each alternative has strategic, marketing, operational and financial implications.

Niya Jones, a Partner at a major management consulting firm, must review the work of two of her mentees--Joseph Park and Elena Ramírez--for their first end-of-year performance review as new Project Leaders. Both have produced strong results in their new roles, but neither Park nor Ramírez could be more different in how they went about leading their respective teams. How should Jones evaluate these Project Leaders according to the criteria developed by her firm?

As the COVID pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden downturn was a challenge for CEO Brian Chesky and his leadership team because the firm had adopted a stakeholder model with five key constituents: guests (renters), hosts (landlords), employees, communities and shareholders. While all five groups could benefit in the long-term if the firm succeeded, it was less clear how they should balance the potentially conflicting demands in the short-term particularly given the mounting losses. For example, in the face of travel restrictions, Airbnb could support guests by requiring hosts to refund deposits or could support hosts by allowing them to keep deposits. Similarly, should Airbnb use existing cash to maintain employment levels or downsize to protect capital providers? In the highly uncertain environment that existed in April 2020, Chesky and his team had to make many critical decisions with little precedent and limited information to guide them. As one of the first Silicon Valley "unicorns" to adopt a stakeholder business model, the world would be watching to see what they did, how they did it, and why.

In 2018, the owner of a Sasol Limited (Sasol) fuel retail franchise in Pretoria, South Africa, was facing the challenge of how to continue growing her business by retaining her existing customers and offering the products and services they expected. A woman entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry, the franchisee had worked her way up the corporate ladder in the financial services industry and, after being retrenched from her position at a bank, had purchased a fuelling station. She now wanted to gather information on her customers' needs in order to make an informed decision about how to scale the service offerings at her site to increase revenue, but she was unsure as to how to go about gathering this information. Various brands in the service station industry had seen decreased customer visits, and in this competitive environment, it was important to increase her efforts in building loyalty among her service station's customers.