個案總覽

By aligning executives' financial incentives with company strategy, a firm can inspire its management to deliver superior results. But it can be hard to get pay packages right. In this article four experts break down the key elements of compensation and explain how to put them together effectively. When designing packages, boards must make decisions about the proportion of fixed versus variable pay, short-term versus long-term incentives, cash versus equity, and group versus individual rewards. Many look at the copious data available on executive pay and benchmark their plans against those of their industry peers. The mix is also driven by company size, region, culture, and risk appetite. A good plan always begins with a firm's strategic goals, however. Is the company striving for profitable growth, a turnaround, or a transformation? Is it trying to compete with public companies as a private entity? Each scenario calls for a different plan design. The Covid-related economic crisis may also alter plans. If targets become unachievable, incentives will lose their power and need to be revised--offering firms a chance to incorporate measures that serve stakeholders' interests better.

The case presentation describes the company's milestones since its arrival in Argentina, the evolution of its safety culture and its safety management system, as well as the firm's relationship with the trade union and how it unfolded over the years. Finally, the case outlines all major obstacles hindering the roll-out of a Just Culture system, leading to the time when a decision must be made to continue or halt the project in light of the concerns raised by some managers and union delegates.

As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal and Catalant), for freelance workers (Upwork and 99designs), and for crowd­sourcing innovation (Kaggle and InnoCentive). Almost all Fortune 500 firms use such platforms. But most do so in an ad hoc, inefficient way, according to a Harvard Business School/BCG study. Companies need to get much more strategic about their engagement with talent platforms and fully embrace their ability to increase labor force flexibility, speed time to market, and facilitate business model innovation. That will require rewiring policies and processes and redefining working norms. Most important, leaders must inspire the cultural shift needed to realize the platforms' transformative potential.

Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company's performance. This article critiques the popular rhetoric about diversity and revisits an argument the authors made 25 years ago: To fully benefit from increased racial and gender diversity, organizations must adopt a learning orientation and be willing to change the corporate culture and power structure. Four actions are key for leaders: building trust and creating a workplace where people feel free to express themselves; actively combating bias and systems of oppression; embracing a variety of styles and voices inside the organization; and using employees' identity-related knowledge and experiences to learn how best to accomplish the firm's core work.

Recent research provides clear evidence that some people do indeed make better interviewers than others. Using a simple methodology, you can identify your best interviewers to help decrease hiring expenses, increase the quality of new hires, and reduce employee turnover.

In mid-December 2016, John Cortes, owner, founder, and general manager of JC Premium Cars in Colombia, reached the final stage of the recruitment process for a new sales manager. A prestigious international headhunting firm had spent nearly two months seeking suitable candidates who could also potentially succeed Cortes as general manager. He had recently sold a significant stake in the firm to SLB, a multinational bank that was rapidly expanding into the country. At the assessment center, the performances of the three shortlisted candidates left Cortes dissatisfied. He was negatively surprised by the performance of his favorite candidate, while the other two finalists did not exactly fit the desired profile, contrary to the impressions he had formed of them earlier in the process. The recruitment process had begun with a fundamental instruction from Cortes to the headhunter: "I want the best and the most experienced individuals in the market." He thereby set very specific criteria in terms of experience and knowledge within JCPC's market niche. The headhunting firm found only a few candidates meeting Cortes's requirements, and eventually concluded that "These are all the qualified candidates available in the market." Cortes, who had hoped to retire in order to rest and dedicate himself to other businesses, now believed this would not be possible in the near future. As SLB needed to approve the sales budget for the following year, Cortes was pressed to appoint the new sales manager before the end of the month.

The adoption of information technology (IT) in public services in India has been uneven and fraught with numerous difficulties. The case describes a context within the Indian police, where a middle-level officer, Vijay Kumar, led the adoption of an IT-based projectto organise an All India Level Police Meet. Vijay faced significant resistance from senior police officers, and he had to navigate the realm of organisational politics to implement the organisational change project within severe time constraints. Vijay had clearly articulated the design principles of efficiency, transparency and accountability behind the implementation of the IT project right from the beginning. While he took ownership of the project to see it through, he also sought the sponsorship of the top leadership to overcome contingencies in a project of dynamically changing scope and tight deadlines.

The adoption of information technology (IT) in public services in India has been uneven and fraught with numerous difficulties. The case describes a context within the Indian police, where a middle-level officer, Vijay Kumar, led the adoption of an IT-based projectto organise an All India Level Police Meet. Vijay faced significant resistance from senior police officers, and he had to navigate the realm of organisational politics to implement the organisational change project within severe time constraints. Vijay had clearly articulated the design principles of efficiency, transparency and accountability behind the implementation of the IT project right from the beginning. While he took ownership of the project to see it through, he also sought the sponsorship of the top leadership to overcome contingencies in a project of dynamically changing scope and tight deadlines.

The adoption of information technology (IT) in public services in India has been uneven and fraught with numerous difficulties. The case describes a context within the Indian police, where a middle-level officer, Vijay Kumar, led the adoption of an IT-based projectto organise an All India Level Police Meet. Vijay faced significant resistance from senior police officers, and he had to navigate the realm of organisational politics to implement the organisational change project within severe time constraints. Vijay had clearly articulated the design principles of efficiency, transparency and accountability behind the implementation of the IT project right from the beginning. While he took ownership of the project to see it through, he also sought the sponsorship of the top leadership to overcome contingencies in a project of dynamically changing scope and tight deadlines.

Many White people deny the existence of racism against people of color because they assume that racism is defined by deliberate actions motivated by malice and hatred. However, racism can occur without conscious awareness or intent. When defined simply as differential evaluation or treatment based solely on race, regardless of intent, racism occurs far more frequently than most White people suspect. As intractable as it seems, racism in the workplace can be effectively addressed. Because organizations are small, autonomous entities that afford leaders a high level of control over norms and policies, they are ideal sites for promoting racial equity. Companies should move through the five stages of a process called PRESS: (1) Problem awareness, (2) Root-cause analysis, (3) Empathy, or level of concern about the problem and the people it afflicts, (4) Strategies for addressing the problem, and (5) Sacrifice, or willingness to invest the time, energy, and resources necessary for strategy implementation.

Karen Bruck, Corporate Sales Director at MercadoLibre, Latin America's largest e-commerce platform, needs to make a decision about one of her managers, who, while analytically savvy, has an approach that does not fit in with the company's culture.

This case describes how consultant Margaret Huebner successfully updated the human resources (HR) function for the emergent Port of Salalah in the Sultanate of Oman in the early 2000s. The Port was at a promising stage of development when Huebner arrived and aspired to grow into a world-class shipping hub and employer of choice for Oman. However, its HR procedures were barely existent. The Port needed to hire hundreds of new employees, and its rapid growth was outpacing its compensation structure, job design, and communications system. The case provides an overview of the Port's business and workforce and then details the contextual features of the organization and nation, including the country's Omanization efforts to hire and retain local employees in key leadership positions and the role of women in the workforce. The strategic, business-oriented approach Huebner employed can serve as an example of how expatriates can affect organizational change while being respectful of local culture. How can Huebner exit her consulting role while ensuring the programs she built continued to thrive? What key points of concern must she address in terms of continuity and local acceptance? Which programs are most critical for the Port to maintain the organizational changes Huebner helped induce? This case was the second place winner in WDI Publishing's MENA Case Writing Competition "Doing Business in the Middle East North Africa Region," sponsored by Michigan Ross Executive Education.

Digital to the core has been a rally call in DBS Bank for almost a decade. The bank was recognized as the "World's Best Digital Bank" by Euromoney twice in 2016 and 2018 respectively. What role did HR play in supporting the bank's transformation journey? The aspiration to transform the bank into a 28,000-person startup culture requires the Human Resources Division to reimage the HR value chain. What would a HR digital roadmap look like? How would employees, including potential new hires, experience an employee-centric digital culture? In a global war for digital talent, how to win the heads and hearts of employees?

This is an abridged version of "MOD Pizza: A Winning Recipe?" HBS Case No. 416-004. Scott and Ally Svenson, the founders of MOD Pizza, had to make a number of decisions in planning how to scale their small company. They wanted to grow MOD from 45 stores as of May 2015 to 200 stores by the end of 2016, and while the two believed that MOD could manage this growth from an operational standpoint, they wanted to make sure that MOD's culture was sufficiently strong to survive this rollout. The company had developed a strong culture, and the Svensons did not want MOD's core values and philosophies to be compromised as it rapidly expanded. To that end, they considered what the company needed to do in order to protect its core culture. Should it put rigid safeguards in place or trust that MOD could successfully scale its culture by hiring the right people and helping them develop as employees? The Svensons also discussed the possibility of an IPO at some point in the near future; what would this mean for its ability to stay true to its core values?

This compact case describes an incident between an aspiring manager and an employee, related to an interpretation of expected engagement of the latter in a planned Agile Boot Camp-an event designed to bolster the transfer of the organization towards new ways of working. Alexander, the main case protagonist, overhears Victor, his employee, say that he will take only a passive part in the event since it is classified by Human Resources (HR) as training, and not as a workshop, in terms of how working time for such an activity is accounted for. Alexander, for whom the Boot Camp is very important, feels the urge to engage in the conversation (which he does in part B of the case).

This compact case describes an incident between an aspiring manager and an employee, related to an interpretation of expected engagement of the latter in a planned Agile Boot Camp-an event designed to bolster the transfer of the organization towards new ways of working. Alexander, the main case protagonist, overhears Victor, his employee, say that he will take only a passive part in the event since it is classified by Human Resources (HR) as training, and not as a workshop, in terms of how working time for such an activity is accounted for. Alexander, for whom the Boot Camp is very important, feels the urge to engage in the conversation (which he does in part B of the case).

As consumers increasingly choose to make their purchases from the comfort of their own homes rather than to visit brick-and-mortar stores, the need for fast-moving fulfillment and distribution centers (DCs) is proliferating. The Amazon effect that is so significantly changing the way people shop is also associated with an acute shortage of blue-collar workers in the retail-distribution industry. Firms' traditional responses to the scarcity of warehouse labor are to increase hourly wages and to integrate automation and robotic product-fulfillment technologies. We identify an innovative human-capital-management approach that provides a timely, alternative solution to this important business problem. We present anecdotal, descriptive overviews of firms that are implementing blue-ocean strategy (BOS) to proactively hire and assimilate workers with disabilities into their DCs. We also identify effective practices for partnering with local disability-service agencies to ensure that proactively hiring warehouse workers with disabilities creates mutual value and improves productivity. Finally, we discuss corporate social responsibility and the social impact of successfully hiring and assimilating workers with disabilities, with the intent of encouraging firms in the retail-fulfillment industry to view the traditional business problem of hiring warehouse workers from a new and alternative perspective.

This case describes a complicated employee decision experienced by entrepreneur, Sana Remekie, in mid-2019 after she opted to mix business and friendship. Sana was the CEO of Conscia Corporation, a tech company focused on knowledge management software solutions (i.e., the integration of disparate content from throughout an organization into a single, useable information hub). Sana recruited Caesar Martinez away from his previous employer to work as one of her Solution Architects. Sana hired Martinez in part because of their previous working relationship and subsequent friendship. Unfortunately, Martinez's performance did not meet Sana's expectations. Consequently, Sana was torn between her need for strong employee performance at her startup firm, and her longstanding friendship and feelings of personal responsibility for Martinez's career and well-being. To resolve this dilemma, students are put into Sana's shoes as they formulate and defend a course of action for deciding how to manage Martinez.

AI-enabled recruiting systems have evolved from nice to talk about to necessary to utilize. In this article, we outline the reasons underlying this development. First, as competitive advantages have shifted from tangible to intangible assets, human capital has transitioned from supporting cast to a starring role. Second, as digitalization has redesigned both the business and social landscapes, digital recruiting of human capital has moved from the periphery to center stage. Third, recent and near-future advances in AI-enabled recruiting have improved recruiting efficiency to the point that managers ignore them or procrastinate their utilization at their own peril. In addition to explaining the forces that have pushed AI-enabled recruiting systems from nice to necessary, we outline the key strategic steps managers need to take in order to capture its main benefits.

Can a "set your own salary" system boost employee happiness and motivation? Spiber made synthetic silk built from proteins mimicking the proteins found in spider silk, the world's toughest known material by weight. Kazuhide Sekiyama and Junichi Sugahara established Spiber to create protein materials that would eventually compete effectively with petrochemical-based materials widely used in apparel, auto parts, and airplane components, among many other applications. From the beginning, they envisioned a team built on mutual respect and a common purpose. The executive team wanted the company's compensation system to match the organization's values. Thus, the company had implemented a unique salary-setting process designed to inspire autonomy and responsibility among employees: each employee retained the ultimate authority to choose his or her own salary. The members of the executive team were excited about the "set your own salary" system, but was it having the intended effect?