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The workplace of the future focuses on how and what work is done, not where and when it is done. Thus, organizations increasingly provide new and innovative information technology (IT) to create the workplace of the future by effectively facilitating digital work. However, digital work means more than just using new, innovative IT. Along with increasing flexibility, employees also crave balance and structure when, for instance, it comes to the blurred boundaries between private and business life. Our article investigates how three organizations from diverse domains establish digital work. Based on our empirical results, we identify four major management challenges organizations need to overcome in order to introduce digital work environments effectively. Further, we identify lessons learned and derive eight recommendations for organizations to facilitate digital work.

Want a potential new boss to be satisfied after hiring you? Then resist the initial salary offer. This article is the result of a survey conducted of decision-makers during hiring to determine how counteroffers affect the workplace. The main research question was how employer perceptions of value, loyalty, and personal likeability are affected when a candidate responds to an initial salary offer with a counteroffer. Other issues addressed were how variables such as gender, tactic utilized, amount of the initial offer, and amount of the counteroffer affect employer perceptions. The article’s research found that, on average, when a candidate responds to an initial salary offer with a counteroffer, the end result is an increase in employer perceptions of value, a slight increase in perceptions of loyalty, and no change in perceptions of personal likeability. Furthermore, among male employers, these positive perceptions of value and loyalty were even more significant (perceptions of personal likeability remained unchanged). The research found that requesting a moderate increase is likely more advantageous than requesting a small increase. It also confirms the general negotiations principles of “be first” and “be high.” In addition, while controlling for all other variables, a male candidate’s counteroffer resulted in a markedly better offer than a female candidate’s counteroffer.

Most companies find it extremely difficult to achieve high organizational fluidity—even leading firms like Cisco and Microsoft. However, Huawei has made significant strides toward closing the gap between internal flexibility and the rate of external market change. The authors of this article carried out face-to-face interviews in Shenzhen over a period of five weeks, beginning in September 2015, with 15 former senior executives of Huawei, including seven vice presidents, two senior vice presidents, and one executive vice president. So how does Huawei achieve superfluidity? First, Huawei is structured primarily around customer needs so as to ensure the customer is at the centre of everything. Second, its support functions are built around flexible platforms. Third, its management-level employees are continually rotated between different jobs. Fourth, its culture is one obsessed with maintaining the pace of change. Huawei’s recipe for creating a superfluid organization is radical. It overturns the conventional wisdom that manufacturing companies need to be structured as a matrix of product-based business units, functions, and geographic subsidiaries, in favour of the kind of project-based organization used by construction companies, consultants, and investment banks.

This case examines the competition between ports and port operators in the Pearl River Delta over the last four decades. The cities surrounding the Pearl River estuary are the "workshop of the world," and the development of manufacturing in the region was heavily dependent on efficient container shipping. As China has opened up and drawn more direct trade traffic to Shenzhen and Guangzhou ports, the operators in Hong Kong have had to adapt. More change is afoot, and Hong Kong may have to reinvent itself again.

On Monday, July 23, 2018, the operations manager at Sorel Life Insurance Company in Montreal, Quebec was preparing for a meeting scheduled for Friday. The meeting was called by her boss, the vice-president of operations, to discuss Sorel's second quarter financial results. Performance of Sorel's underwriting department was continuing to decline; market share had dropped, policy completion time had increased, and fewer applications were being processed. In addition, Sorel was receiving complaints from insurance agents about poor turnaround times. During Friday's meeting, the operations manager was expected to provide specific recommendations to address the problems in the underwriting department.

Regulus Solar Power Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, had continued to experience financial growth over the past decade, thanks in large measure to the environmental movement and declining solar panel prices. The expansion of renewable resources was one of the lynchpins of the environmental movement sweeping the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Regulus Solar Power Inc. had focused on installing solar powered systems throughout the Southwest United States, primarily on residential and commercial applications. By 2018, however, revenues had gone flat due in largely to the rapid expansion of the largest solar panel installer in the United States into Regulus Solar Power Inc.'s traditional marketplace. The company's management team wished to examine the impact of lowering prices on revenues and assess the opportunities for more fully engaging environmental movement groups.

The general manager at Gati, a well-known logistics services company in India, was worried about the number of complaints the company had received. The popular supply chain solutions and logistics service provider had introduced a premium express service scheme five months ago and, since then, had 231 complaints concerning the late delivery of goods. This new scheme charged a considerable markup and guaranteed shipment of goods within 72 hours. Being dedicated to ensuring quality, the general manager had to decide whether the process was under control and if the company was operating within tolerable error limits. Could he find a solution to streamline the delivery process and achieve a target defect of 0.0005 per cent? Using MS Excel, statistical techniques were used to unravel the multi-faceted dilemma and help in decision-making.

Regulus Solar Power Inc., headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, had continued to experience financial growth over the past decade, thanks in large measure to the environmental movement and declining solar panel prices. The expansion of renewable resources was one of the lynchpins of the environmental movement sweeping the United States. Since its founding in 2010, Regulus Solar Power Inc. had focused on installing solar powered systems throughout the Southwest United States, primarily on residential and commercial applications. By 2018, however, revenues had gone flat due in largely to the rapid expansion of the largest solar panel installer in the United States into Regulus Solar Power Inc.’s traditional marketplace. The company’s management team wished to examine the impact of lowering prices on revenues and assess the opportunities for more fully engaging environmental movement groups.

The general manager at Gati, a well-known logistics services company in India, was worried about the number of complaints the company had received. The popular supply chain solutions and logistics service provider had introduced a premium express service scheme five months ago and, since then, had 231 complaints concerning the late delivery of goods. This new scheme charged a considerable markup and guaranteed shipment of goods within 72 hours. Being dedicated to ensuring quality, the general manager had to decide whether the process was under control and if the company was operating within tolerable error limits. Could he find a solution to streamline the delivery process and achieve a target defect of 0.0005 per cent? Using MS Excel, statistical techniques were used to unravel the multi-faceted dilemma and help in decision-making.

This case focuses on the supply chain strategy of Walmart. Set in 2019, it provides a detailed description of the company’s supply chain network and capabilities. Data in the case allows students to compare Walmart’s source of competitiveness with those of other retailers—both online including Amazon.com and traditional brick–and-mortar retailers, such as Target—to develop insights into the management of a large, complex, global supply chain network. As competition between Walmart and its online and offline competitors heated up, a key challenge for the company’s president and chief executive officer was deciding what changes made to Walmart’s expanding supply chain would best support its strategic objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Walmart need as its business model continued to evolve?

The director of World Tailors, a small Canadian manufacturer that employed immigrant and refugee women to sew high-quality aprons, napkins, and market bags, wondered how all of the needed products would be completed for the 2017 December holiday season. During the past seven years, demand for World Tailor products had steadily increased from craft markets, online orders, and retail stores. How could the capacity of its current operations be better managed and expanded? World Tailors was more than a local manufacturer: it supported courageous women, who had recently arrived in Canada as refugees and immigrants, to integrate into the community. Would reorganizing as a business co-operative better balance the unique social mission of the organization?

Excel spreadsheet for product 8B18D020.

In 2018, Henri Seydoux, CEO and Founder of Parrot, believed that his company was at an inflection point in its history. Parrot had been a European leader in consumer electronics since the 1990s, first developing Bluetooth kits for cars before moving on to electronic toys and, significantly, the AR Drone in 2010 - a remote-controlled quadcopter that was way ahead of its time. In the years that followed, Parrot's sales volumes and popularity quickly increased. But new players were entering the market. Giant Chinese rival DJI, in particular, aggressively lowered its prices, forcing weaker companies out of the market. If Parrot was to survive the shakeout, Seydoux would have to figure out how to compete in an industry where even well-capitalized companies were collapsing. The questions that he faced were both strategic and urgent. Where to compete and how to win?

In 2019, the general manager of the Xiamen branch of Eastern Lotus Bank was facing difficulties overcoming customer-introduced variability, which significantly influenced the efficiency of the bank's front-office service. She needed to analyze and summarize the different types of customer-introduced variability. Then she had to identify potential strategies that would enable the bank to accommodate this customer-introduced variability while maintaining a high-quality customer service experience. She also needed to decide how to allocate and arrange the limited human resources at the bank efficiently and effectively. To make these decisions, she had to systematically evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the front office under both pooled- and separated-resource allocation scenarios. For instance, how long did customers have to wait for services in each different resource allocation scenario? Moreover, how well were the limited human resources (staff) utilized under each scenario?

Student spreadsheet supplement to case W19319

This case describes UMM Bank in Indonesia, a service operation that is working to improve profitability by selling more services to its customers. To achieve this goal it is using a cross-selling approach entitled the Personalized Plan Program (PPP). However, there are several challenges with the PPP initiative. The cornerstone of the PPP is a free, one-on-one meeting between the customer and a bank sales agent, if the customer responds by providing some information online within a 15-day promotional period. But these meetings often must be scheduled after the promotional period, seemingly due to the amount of time the bank's support staff needs to prepare Personalized Plans for customers once they enter their financial information online. UMM Bank sales agents imply that clients are frustrated with the delays and this may be hampering the success of the entire PPP initiative. Students will learn that initiatives like cross-selling can stress a service system's operations. Therefore, it's important to understand the operational levers of capacity, demand management, demand variability, and pooling to help anticipate and overcome these challenges.

This case focuses on the supply chain strategy of Walmart. Set in 2019, it provides a detailed description of the company's supply chain network and capabilities. Data in the case allows students to compare Walmart's source of competitiveness with those of other retailers-both online including Amazon.com and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, such as Target-to develop insights into the management of a large, complex, global supply chain network. As competition between Walmart and its online and offline competitors heated up, a key challenge for the company's president and chief executive officer was deciding what changes made to Walmart's expanding supply chain would best support its strategic objectives. What supply chain capabilities would Walmart need as its business model continued to evolve?

In May 2017, an associate professor at Balsam State University (Balsam State), was reviewing the most recent evaluations for her fourth-year elective course, Field Forensics. While she knew that the term had not gone particularly well, she was still surprised by the poor ratings her course had received. This associate professor had been teaching at Balsam State for nearly seven years, and her elective course had previously scored well during evaluations. With only a few months to make changes to the course before the fall semester, she needed to glean what insights she could from the course evaluations and determine what changes, if any, she should make to her course.

Lean management-in manufacturing, supply chains, healthcare, services-has lost its way. Telling evidence of lean's dissolution shows up for inventory-intensive organizations in the form of worsening inventory numbers. My research of financial records of more than 1,500 global companies over 15 years shows growing inventories since the turn of the 21st century. Reduction of inventory is a concrete and visual marker of leanness and quicker customer response, while inventory growth is one of the more salient factors that degrades financial health. As to what has gone wrong with lean, the answer is nearly everything: ambiguous terms and concepts, trivializing the essence, botching the basics, going through the motions, analysis paralysis, puffery masking action, abetting organizational silos, discontinuity, and losing interest. This article addresses these in more specific terms with reference to key outcome measures, especially those most customer-relevant.