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La Maison Simons was a successful 178-year-old, family-run fashion retailer with 15 locations across Canada and over CA$500 million in sales in 2018. On September 6, 2018, the president and chief executive officer (CEO), supported and approved the launch of a new marketing campaign featuring brassieres named after historic Canadian women. One of those women was the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin. Within hours of the launch of the marketing campaign, La Maison Simons’s social media feed erupted with comments from angry users who viewed the campaign as objectifying and sexualizing iconic Canadian women. McLachlin was also upset, the company having named one of the bras after her with her permission. Following a phone conversation with McLachlin, the CEO issued a formal apology and destroyed all materials related to the campaign. At McLachlin’s request, the company also became involved with fundraising for a women’s shelter. The CEO, who was embarrassed by the marketing campaign and quickly took responsibility for his mistake, was concerned that he had tarnished the company’s brand. Had he done enough to redeem it? What more could he do in the short and long term to improve the company’s reputation? What had he learned from this disastrous marketing campaign?

On January 8, 2017, Ronald Huggins, plant manager at AEL Mining Services Limited (AEL), needed to come up with innovative ways to keep his employees motivated. This need was driven by the downward trend of the local mining market. In 2011 and 2012, AEL had rolled out a major retrenchment, leaving employees with low morale and motivation, which in turn had affected performance levels. It became apparent that plant performance needed to ramp up. This was particularly important given the company’s strategic plans to expand internationally and focus 80 per cent of its business, rather than the current 20 per cent, on the international mining market.

Karabo Morule is the managing director of Old Mutual Ltd. Personal Finance in South Africa. In June 26, 2018, she is leading a team through the company’s process of organizational change. The dilemma she faces is how to retain the heritage of a shared values-based culture, while also modernizing and strengthening it to express a new customer-led approach with the focal point in Africa. Old Mutual Ltd. is the largest financial services provider in Africa, and it is attempting to retain certain aspects of its culture, such as its core values of respect, integrity, and accountability, while changing other aspects of its culture to include being a champion of the customer, the power of diversity and inclusion, and trust, all amidst the major transition of its primary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as a Pan-African organization. The case documents the organizational change process, demonstrating culture and women in leadership as critical levers of a successful change process.

In 2017, Dr. Gordon Morewood, chair of anesthesiology at Temple University Health System (Temple Health) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, faced a rapidly changing health care environment. Responsible for training anesthesiology residents and for all anesthesiology patient care across Temple Health’s system, Morewood faced rising expectations for improving patient outcomes, patient satisfaction, and financial performance. Communication in health care had long operated in silos, and Morewood knew that significant changes in medical education and a shift toward cross-functional communication in health care were needed. A digital real-time performance feedback application (app) could help with the change process by building a growth feedback culture. The app could also use people analytics to identify the skills, knowledge, and experience most critical to the institution and assess competency development across the organization. The tool could help Morewood achieve the changes needed to meet the expectations in health care. Should he launch the app across the health system? If so, how would he introduce the new feedback culture and its use?

Supplement for product 9B20C018.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Middle East Airlines (MEA) had to decide whether the airline should fly over Syria during the armed conflict. All other airlines in the Middle East had decided not to fly over Syria either because they did not want to show their support for the Syrian government or because they believed it was too dangerous. Yet, these airlines did not have as much to lose as MEA because, unlike them, 50 per cent of this airline’s flights flew over that country. It was estimated that MEA could lose US$50 million if it did not fly over Syria. What should the CEO do?

Supplement for product 9B20C037.

Supplement for product 9B20C037.

In the first of three mini-cases on workplace mistreatment, "Casual Fridays Gone Wrong," the vice-president of compliance for a collections company faced the dilemma of how to deal with a complaint about a manager's comments. The incident raised challenges for maintaining a respectful and inclusive workplace environment. In the second mini-case, "Dial 911—Health Care in Distress," a nurses' union representative at a mid-sized urban hospital needed to respond to a patient's threat to take his complaints about negligence to the media; he planned to identify the individual nurses he claimed had provided negligent care, in part due to his race. In the third mini-case, "A Toxic Academic Environment," formal harassment actions have been taken against Professor Marybeth Gasman, holder of an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2018, Software development corporation iQmetrix Software Development Corp. (iQmetrix), headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, had experienced exponential growth and success over the past two decades. The company’s head of People and Culture, was interested in the debate over the ideal performance appraisal process. After reading a few articles in the Harvard Business Review, she was considering dropping traditional performance appraisals and replacing them with written feedback only. To make an informed decision, she conducted a quasi-experiment by assigning employees to different performance evaluation conditions and then examined employee perceptions six months later to determine which evaluation format she should adopt company-wide.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B20C006.

This technical note provides step-by-step instructions for leveraging social network analyses to understand a team’s dynamics and thereby enhance a team’s collective effectiveness. More precisely, this note explains the basic terminology of social networks, the mapping of social relationships in an adjacency matrix, and the use of an adjacency matrix to create a graph that represents social interactions. This note also explains how to derive further insights into a team’s interpersonal relations by exploring the unique characteristics and personal situations of each actor.

Ballard Power Systems Inc. (Ballard), a Canadian disruptor in the clean energy sector, developed and produced hydrogen-powered fuel cells. The company had been revolutionary, but after many years in business the company was still research-oriented and doing more demonstration projects than selling fuel cells to customers. Revenues and stocks were sagging and employees, many of whom had been with the company for years, were disaffected. The energy company with a proud history of being a disruptor was, itself, at risk of being disrupted. The job of the new chief executive officer (CEO) was to motivate the staff and create in them a disruptive mindset that would carry the company forward into a new customer-focused future. There was an entrenched belief that Ballard was skilled at developing good ideas and that new technology needed to give way to the new ethos of being a customer-centred, disruptive, problem-solving organization. How could the CEO embed the changes and ensure the new values drove Ballard’s growth?

On November 21, 2018, the Italian luxury fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana (D&G) cancelled a show that was scheduled to take place in Shanghai, China, after controversial video advertisements and private Instagram messages, allegedly sent by Stefano Gabbana himself, went viral. The videos were seen by many to be racist, and they resulted in subsequent boycotts by Chinese celebrities and consumers. As D&G struggled to regain market share in China and suffered huge financial losses, major Chinese e-commerce companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Limited and JD.com Inc. joined the boycott by dropping the brand from their platforms. The Chinese luxury market was large and growing, and experts warned that the brand's profits would suffer from this mistake. What mitigation strategy or actions could D&G undertake to repair the damage done to its reputation, especially in China?

The chief human resources (HR) officer at National Pharmaceuticals (National), established in 1937 in Bihar, India, had been with the organization since 2007. The organization had been facing high employee attrition rates since 2013. Although the organization had reduced its employee attrition rate from 44 per cent in financial year (FY) 2014–15 to 25 per cent in FY 2017–18, the organization was yet to reach the industry benchmark rate of 12–13 per cent. This issue needed to be urgently resolved, as the organization would soon launch a new product range for which it required additional employees. A meeting was called with all the functional heads within HR. As the group discussed what had gone wrong and what had helped National in the past, they identified several factors that had led to the company’s high employee attrition rate and noted various human linked HR policies. The group had two weeks to create an effective action plan to meet the benchmark attrition rate of 12 per cent. This plan would be presented to the board of directors. Should the company change its recruitment, selection, performance management, and training policies to create the organizational culture the leaders aspire to? Should it invest in more training and development?

Mint Tax was founded in Vienna in 1960. By 2019, the company had approximately 80 employees and a broad client base in the areas of taxation, accounting, and payroll services. Over the previous decade, the company had experienced many successes and failures, including mergers, acquisitions, separations, firm structure changes, and financial losses. However, it had always managed to recover. Mint Tax was considering an expansion of its digital products, services, and internal processes and practices. The founder's daughter and current chief executive officer was motivated and had innovative ideas, but faced various challenges that prevented implementation of many of the company's ideas. To overcome these challenges, what steps should the chief executive officer and her team take to understand the company's strategic management patterns, identify and evaluate the company's capabilities, and develop solutions?

Presentation to accompany product 8B20C001.

In May 2019, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) had paused rapid expansion of its massive agile organizational transformation, trying to make the existing program work better. ANZ announced the decision to take the bank agile in May 2017, moving from the traditional command-and-control, risk-based, and process-driven hierarchy to collaborative teamwork. Such decisions came after not only competitive pressures from the disruptive entry of financial technology companies but also a series of internal scandals. Would the agile transformation be a solution for ANZ to respond to these external and internal challenges? How could ANZ be successfully transformed, given its corporate culture that had been deeply rooted for over 180 years?

Takata Corporation was a business-to-business firm based in Japan, whose logo once symbolized safety. In 2013, however, the company mishandled its airbag recall crisis, which was Japan’s largest automotive safety recall. The crisis led to the largest corporate bankruptcy filing of a Japanese firm and impacted Japanese banks involved in a collateral-free syndicated loan. How could the company have better managed the crisis?

On July 3, 2018, the president of AIESEC in Lebanon was pacing around the lobby of the conference venue before the morning plenary session. As one of the world’s largest youth-run organizations, AIESEC developed the youth of the world by sending them on cross-cultural exchange programs. The Lebanon chapter of AIESEC was established in 2011 and grew steadily in its early stages, until it began struggling with commitment and motivation problems at the leadership level, which spilled over to its members. Members who were once attracted by the promise of personal and professional development were leaving the inactive organization, which was no longer contributing to their growth. Lack of motivation and volunteer turnover were also causing a shortage of leadership candidates in the organization’s pipeline, which was having a serious impact on the long-term sustainability of AIESEC in Lebanon. From this conference session, the president of AIESEC in Lebanon hoped to address two main questions: How could member’s commitment be improved at AIESEC in Lebanon? What processes could be put in place to track the volunteer management changes?