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Should a fast-growing, employee-owned solar electric company accept a buyout offer from a private equity investor? Could it do so without sacrificing its distinctive, high-involvement culture? Namaste Solar, a 55-person firm based in Boulder, Colorado, designed and installed solar electric systems for residential, commercial, non-profit and government customers. In 2008, the company had been growing at breakneck speed for the past four years, since government incentives for the purchase of renewable energy had created a market for solar electric systems in Colorado. Now, two investors had approached the firm with serious buyout offers. A buyout would bring a new infusion of capital to the firm, enabling it to expand more quickly and install more solar systems, and employees with vested shares would benefit from an attractive sales price. However, Namaste, from the outset, had been committed to building a democratic, high-involvement culture. Ownership was widely shared, and all employees, whether or not they held equity, were encouraged to participate in strategic decisions facing the firm. Many were concerned that selling the company would mean sacrificing the firm's carefully crafted culture. What was the best way forward for Blake Jones and the green energy company that he and two partners had founded?

The case sketches the story of a charismatic and ambitious young business leader who, through value-adding commercial transactions, has helped set a South African pharmaceutical company, Adcock Ingram, on a trajectory of growth. The case reader meets up with him in May 2009 when he faces lack of closure and an ambiguous outcome to an offer to acquire a smaller pharmaceutical company. The case demonstrates the power of relationships, where the ambitions of different parties around the negotiations table and the incentives that shape their alliances can make or break a strategic business deal. As opposed to presenting a strategic decision-point for class discussion, the case presents students with an opportunity to analyze an unfavorable outcome of a business deal, and build a concept of behavioral requirements of success in business transactions. The case has been designed for class discussion and analysis of factors of leadership that underpin or influence acquisitions. As opposed to an analysis of the commercial rationale of an acquisition, it focuses on the behavioral components of leadership decision-making and their effect on business results. The case can provide a platform for the discussion of motives, interpersonal skills and relationships, and business activities in acquisitions.

The Wraparound Milwaukee program was created in 1995 by Milwaukee County, Wisconsin and provides services and treatment to severely emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children and youth. The program utilizes the "wraparound philosophy" to provide the children and youth it serves with a highly individualized, community and strength-based approach to care. The delivery of services are facilitated by a Care Coordinator who works with the family to choose the right services from Wraparound Milwaukee's network of individual providers and community based organizations. The program's funding is pooled from several state and county agencies. Wraparound Milwaukee's innovative approach to care has brought considerable savings to the county $3,878 per month per child for Wraparound Milwaukee versus $8,000- $10,000 per month per child that the county paid for residential placement. Wraparound Milwaukee has seen positive outcomes in the youth it serves after disenrollment in terms of clinical health indicators as well as other indicators. HKS Case Number 1927.0

The most common reason workers aren't frank with you isn't fear of retribution. It's a sense of futility.

A research update shows that women are still choosing circuitous career paths, despite the recession.

The vice-president of human resources at Sandcore Instruments has to make a recommendation to the company's president regarding a sales representative with a history of poor performance. The vice-president must decide what action to take, including whether the sales representative should be terminated. The vice-president must consider how his decision will affect other employees in the Quebec sales network.

The vice-president of human resources at Sandcore Instruments has to make a recommendation to the company's president regarding a sales representative with a history of poor performance. In this supplement to Sandcore Instruments (A), product #910C11, the vice-president discovers that the sales representative has offered to perform service work for a customer on his own time at a much lower price if cash is paid. The vice-president must update his action plan accordingly.

Organizations typically depend upon performance evaluation measures to provide feedback to managers regarding the achievement of strategic objectives. However, performance evaluation is often focused on negative aspects of performance, suggesting that managers may not be receiving enough reinforcement of the positive elements of their decisions. When applied effectively, performance measures not only create desirable motivation, but also encourage communication and the exchange of information among managers. Under this scenario, individual managers achieve their personal goals, while the organization satisfies its strategic objectives. The application of positive organizational scholarship principles to performance evaluation metrics can help make the evaluation process more effective. Using performance measures framed in a positive manner can help generate more creativity, more problem-solving ability, and greater communication among managers, leading to progress toward organizational objectives. We illustrate this approach with the application of positive metrics to the balanced scorecard for mid-level managers in implementing business strategy.

One unfortunate consequence of the focus on "charismatic," "transformational," and "visionary" leader behaviors during the past few decades has been the tendency to diminish the importance that transactional leadership behaviors have on leadership effectiveness. We say that this is unfortunate because recent research has shown that transactional leadership, in the form of contingent reward and punishment behaviors, can have substantial effects on a variety of important employee attitudes, perceptions, and measures of job performance. Therefore, in this article we discuss some possible reasons why transactional leadership has been relegated to a lesser role than transformational leadership, summarize the research that indicates the importance of leader contingent reward and punishment behavior to leadership effectiveness, and identify some of the mechanisms that these forms of leadership behavior work through to influence employee attitudes and behaviors. Following this, we address ten misconceptions managers often have regarding the administration of rewards and punishments, and provide some recommendations about how leaders can improve their effectiveness in administering recognition and discipline in organizational settings.

CEO pay has become a lightning rod for criticism and debate, but CEOs themselves have been largely absent from the conversation, says Procter & Gamble's former CEO. It's time to stand up for responsible compensation leadership and get rid of indefensible and inappropriate amounts and forms of compensation. The author's proposals include establishing simpler and clearer guidelines, eliminating post-employment provisions not based on performance, and creating a CEO-led coalition for responsible compensation. If CEOs don't take corrective action, he says, Congress surely will, and not necessarily in a form that will benefit anybody.

Practically every company these days has some form of program designed to nurture high-potential employees. But a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board demonstrates that nearly 40% of internal job moves made by people identified by their companies as "high potentials" end in failure. Disengagement within this cohort of employees also is remarkable: One in three emerging stars reported feeling disengaged from his or her company. Even more striking, 12% of all the high potentials in the study said they were actively searching for a new job-suggesting that as the economy rebounds and the labor market warms up, organizations may see their most promising employees take flight in large numbers. Why do companies have so much trouble bringing along their next generation of leaders? The Corporate Executive Board's research showed that senior managers make misguided assumptions about these employees and take actions on their behalf that actually hinder their development. When dealing with high-potential employees, firms tend to make six common errors: assuming that all of them are highly engaged, equating current performance with future potential, delegating the management of high potentials down in the organization, shielding promising employees from early derailment, expecting stars to share the pain of organization-wide cutbacks, and failing to link high potentials and their careers to corporate strategy. These mistakes can doom a company's talent investments to irrelevance-or worse.

Multinational companies are pinning their hopes for growth on emerging markets, specifically in the BRIC countries-Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which together account for 15%-20% of today's global economy. But these companies face a critical obstacle: a cutthroat war for talent. Despite the enormous labor forces in BRIC, top-notch talent is hard to find. India produces as many young engineers as the United States, but according to the McKinsey Global Institute, only 25% of them are suitable for employment by multinationals. Fewer than one out of 10 university graduates in China are prepared to succeed in a multinational environment. To better understand the talent dynamics in emerging markets and how multinational companies can succeed there, the authors launched a study of 4,350 college-educated men and women in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the United Arab Emirates. They found that the talent solution is in plain sight: Millions of educated women have entered the professional workforce in these countries over the past two decades. Though this talent pool is currently neglected and underleveraged, it represents the future. Women in emerging markets are enormously ambitious and passionate about their work, but they face complicated challenges that are fundamentally different from those of women in the developed world. Here's what companies like Google, Siemens, Intel, GE, and Pfizer are doing to shape talent models that work, especially for women in emerging markets.

Sally Randolph, chief medical officer at American Medical Center, has just learned that the CEO is cancelling the Evidence-Based Management seminar she has run for the past year. Sally and the seminar participants had worked hard to introduce the approach, which advocates basing all decisions on carefully gathered and rigorously assessed data. Although the seminar yielded thoughtful solutions to some of the center's trickiest management problems-such as uncoordinated patient care-the medical chiefs rejected them. Now the CEO wants to set up task forces, staffed with middle managers who were seminar participants, to try to sustain the evidence-based approach and to carry out a new strategic plan: creating Centers of Excellence, in the hope of boosting patient volume. Although he says that he values the evidence-based approach, Sally fears that he is merely paying lip service. Her challenge is making sure the approach doesn't fade away. She can try to gradually prove the value of evidence-based management within her own jurisdiction (regulating quality and control) or push for its implementation across the entire center immediately, as a central part of the CEO's strategic plan. Two experts comment on this fictional case study in R1005L and R1005Z.

Sally Randolph, chief medical officer at American Medical Center, has just learned that the CEO is cancelling the Evidence-Based Management seminar she has run for the past year. Sally and the seminar participants had worked hard to introduce the approach, which advocates basing all decisions on carefully gathered and rigorously assessed data. Although the seminar yielded thoughtful solutions to some of the center's trickiest management problems-such as uncoordinated patient care-the medical chiefs rejected them. Now the CEO wants to set up task forces, staffed with middle managers who were seminar participants, to try to sustain the evidence-based approach and to carry out a new strategic plan: creating Centers of Excellence, in the hope of boosting patient volume. Although he says that he values the evidence-based approach, Sally fears that he is merely paying lip service. Her challenge is making sure the approach doesn't fade away. She can try to gradually prove the value of evidence-based management within her own jurisdiction (regulating quality and control) or push for its implementation across the entire center immediately, as a central part of the CEO's strategic plan. Two experts comment on this fictional case study in R1005L and R1005Z.

Sally Randolph, chief medical officer at American Medical Center, has just learned that the CEO is cancelling the Evidence-Based Management seminar she has run for the past year. Sally and the seminar participants had worked hard to introduce the approach, which advocates basing all decisions on carefully gathered and rigorously assessed data. Although the seminar yielded thoughtful solutions to some of the center's trickiest management problems-such as uncoordinated patient care-the medical chiefs rejected them. Now the CEO wants to set up task forces, staffed with middle managers who were seminar participants, to try to sustain the evidence-based approach and to carry out a new strategic plan: creating Centers of Excellence, in the hope of boosting patient volume. Although he says that he values the evidence-based approach, Sally fears that he is merely paying lip service. Her challenge is making sure the approach doesn't fade away. She can try to gradually prove the value of evidence-based management within her own jurisdiction (regulating quality and control) or push for its implementation across the entire center immediately, as a central part of the CEO's strategic plan. Two experts comment on this fictional case study in R1005L and R1005Z.

The cases are used to introduce the concept of collective responsibility and leadership in team situations by applying the concept of Crew Resource Management for teams in a management setting. By drawing from the metaphor of aircrews to corporate scenarios challenges in leadership teams could be discussed in a wider context. Both cases describe the interaction of airline crews who are confronted with a non-routine problem that they have to solve. In the case of United Airlines 173 the crew ceases to function as team and the fully functional plane eventually crashes. As a result of this accident the concept of Crew Resource Management has been developed to optimize teamwork within the hierarchical structure of a cockpit crew. The case of United Airlines 232 complements the first case as it describes an airline crew that was confronted with a severe engine failure making their plane almost uncontrollable (similar prior accidents always resulted in the loss of the aircraft in non-survivable crashes). Using core elements of Crew Resource Management the crew was nevertheless able to achieve a survivable landing of the plane. Both cases cover essentially the last 30 minutes of both flights and focus on the communication of the flight crews.

The cases are used to introduce the concept of collective responsibility and leadership in team situations by applying the concept of Crew Resource Management for teams in a management setting. By drawing from the metaphor of aircrews to corporate scenarios challenges in leadership teams could be discussed in a wider context. Both cases describe the interaction of airline crews who are confronted with a non-routine problem that they have to solve. In the case of United Airlines 173 the crew ceases to function as team and the fully functional plane eventually crashes. As a result of this accident the concept of Crew Resource Management has been developed to optimize teamwork within the hierarchical structure of a cockpit crew. The case of United Airlines 232 complements the first case as it describes an airline crew that was confronted with a severe engine failure making their plane almost uncontrollable (similar prior accidents always resulted in the loss of the aircraft in non-survivable crashes). Using core elements of Crew Resource Management the crew was nevertheless able to achieve a survivable landing of the plane. Both cases cover essentially the last 30 minutes of both flights and focus on the communication of the flight crews.

The assistant site supervisor at Finemaster Projects Ltd. struggles with how to approach his boss for a raise. When hired, he had been told that regular annual reviews were held with employees and that good performance would be rewarded with corresponding pay increases. After one year with the company, the assistant site supervisor found that the owners rarely act on this policy, leaving it up to staff to approach management about raises, promotions and other performance-related issues. In his second year with the company, the assistant site supervisor experienced further disappointment with how his boss dealt with his compensation request and his faith in the company's pledge to reward employees for good performance was quickly fading. This supplement to Finemaster Projects Ltd. (A), product # 9B10C001, describes his meeting with his boss after two years.

The assistant site supervisor at Finemaster Projects Ltd. struggles with how to approach his boss for a raise. When hired, he had been told that regular annual reviews were held with employees and that good performance would be rewarded with corresponding pay increases. After one year with the company, the assistant site supervisor found that the owners rarely act on this policy, leaving it up to staff to approach management about raises, promotions and other performance-related issues. In his second year with the company, the assistant site supervisor experienced further disappointment with how his boss dealt with his compensation request and his faith in the company's pledge to reward employees for good performance was quickly fading. The (A) case covers the assistant site supervisor's first meeting with his employer when offered a position with company. The supplements, Finemaster Projects Ltd. (B) and (C) describe his meetings with his boss after 12 months and two years, respectively.

Sara Tsien must decide what performance assessment to give one of her employees who has, uncharacteristically, failed to meet one of her key objectives for the year. The situation is difficult for several reasons; the causes of the unacceptable performance are not clear; the employee has previously received excellent appraisals, including a recent one by the vice-president; and the employee was absent for a good part of the year on maternity leave. The various factors that influence sustained performance (ability, motivation, resources, role clarity, reinforcement) are examined, as well as steps leaders can take in improving performance of those for whom they are responsible.