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In the mid-1980s, Arrow, the world's largest electronics distributor, implemented a college recruiting program to hire salespeople. The program was part of an effort to increase the professionalism and skill set of the sales force in an industry where few salespeople had college degrees. After an expensive and thorough training program, many of the new college grads hired were poached by Arrow's competitors for higher salaries. Arrow was ultimately unsuccessful in persuading the college grads to stay, and the recruiting program ended after five years. In 1997, CEO Steve Kaufman decided to start a new college recruiting program, determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Supplements the (A) case. A rewritten version of an earlier supplement.

Supplements the (A) case.

Working women are well respected at the office--until they have children, finds law professor Joan C. Williams.

You can overdo feedback, HR professor Alain Gosselin's field research reveals.

Employers are beginning to realize that they face a nearly invisible but significant drain on productivity: presenteeism, the problem of workers being on the job but, because of illness or other medical conditions, not fully functioning. By some estimates, the phenomenon costs U.S. companies over $150 billion a year--much more than absenteeism does. Yet, it's harder to identify. You know when someone doesn't show up for work, but you often can't tell when, or how much, poor health hurts on-the-job performance. Many of the health problems that result in presenteeism are relatively benign. Research in this emerging area of study focuses on such chronic or episodic ailments as seasonal allergies, asthma, headaches, depression, back pain, arthritis, and gastrointestinal disorders. The fact is, when people don't feel good, they simply don't perform at their best. Employees who suffer from depression may be fatigued and irritable--and, therefore, less able to work effectively with others. Those with migraine headaches who experience blurred vision and sensitivity to light, not to mention acute pain, probably have a hard time staring at a computer screen all day. A number of companies are making a serious effort to determine the prevalence of illnesses and other medical conditions that undermine job performance, calculate the related drop in productivity, and find cost-effective ways to combat that loss. Indeed, researchers have discovered that presenteeism-related declines in productivity sometimes can be more than offset by relatively small investments in screening, treatment, and education. So organizations may find that it pays to make targeted investments in employees' health care--by covering the cost of allergy medication, for instance, or therapy for depression.

As a newly minted CEO, you may think you finally have the power to set strategy, the authority to make things happen, and full access to the finer points of your business. But if you expect the job to be as simple as that, you're in for an awakening. Even though you bear full responsibility for your company's well-being, you are a few steps removed from many of the factors that drive results. You have more power than anybody else in the corporation, but you need to use it with extreme caution. In their workshops for new CEOs, held at Harvard Business School in Boston, the authors have discovered that nothing-not even running a large business within the company-fully prepares a person to be the chief executive. The seven most common surprises are: You can't run the company. Giving orders is very costly. It is hard to know what is really going on. You are always sending a message. You are not the boss. Pleasing shareholders is not the goal. You are still only human. These surprises carry some important and subtle lessons. First, you must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations. Second, you must recognize that your position does not confer the right to lead, nor does it guarantee the loyalty of the organization. Finally, you must remember that you are subject to a host of limitations, even though others might treat you as omnipotent. How well and how quickly you understand, accept, and confront the seven surprises will have a lot to do with your success or failure as a CEO.

The strength of the American economy does not rest on its manufacturing prowess, its natural resources, or the size of its market. It turns on one factor--the country's openness to new ideas, which has allowed it to attract the brightest minds from around the world and harness their creative energies. But the United States is on the verge of losing that competitive edge. As the nation tightens its borders to students and scientists and subjects federal research funding to ideological and religious litmus tests, many other countries are stepping in to lure that creative capital away. Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, and others are spending more on research and development and shoring up their universities in an effort to attract the world's best--including Americans. If even a few of these nations draw away just a small percentage of the creative workers from the United States, the effect on its economy will be enormous. In this article, the author introduces a quantitative measure of the migration of creative capital called the Global Creative-Class Index. It shows that, far from leading the world, the United States doesn't even rank in the Top 10 in the percentage of its workforce engaged in creative occupations. What's more, the baby boomers will soon retire. And data showing large drops in foreign-student applications to U.S. universities and in the number of visas issued to knowledge workers, along with concomitant increases in immigration in other countries, suggest that the erosion of talent from the United States will only intensify. To defend the U.S. economy, the business community must take the lead in ensuring that global talent can move efficiently across borders, that education and research are funded at radically higher levels, and that we tap into the creative potential of more and more workers. Because wherever creativity goes, economic growth is sure to follow.

In an increasingly diverse business environment, managers must be able to navigate the thicket of habits, gestures, and assumptions that define their coworkers' differences. Foreign cultures are everywhere--in other countries, certainly, but also in corporations, vocations, and regions. Interacting with individuals within them demands perceptiveness and adaptability. And the people who have those traits in abundance aren't necessarily the ones who enjoy the greatest social success in familiar settings. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and then blend in. It has three components--cognitive, physical, and emotional/motivational. Although it shares many of the properties of emotional intelligence, CQ goes one step further by equipping a person to distinguish behaviors produced by the culture in question from behaviors that are peculiar to particular individuals and those found in all human beings. In their surveys of 2,000 managers in 60 countries, the authors found that most managers are not equally strong in all three of these areas of CQ. The authors have devised tools that show how to identify one's strengths and developed training techniques to help people overcome weaknesses. They conclude that anyone reasonably alert, motivated, and poised can attain an acceptable level of CQ.

Presents a detailed account of power dynamics that unfold in the firm when one of its best and brightest threatens to leave. Focuses on the dynamics of attracting, retaining, compensating, negotiating, and leveraging a star performer in a professional services firm. A manager and a star performer fight to improve their relative bargaining power. Specifically traces the detailed events from the resignation threat to the research director's struggle over deciding whether to counteroffer, to promote a junior, or to hire from outside the firm. Teaching Purpose: To discuss issues ranging from managing talent to resignation dynamics, power and influence, compensation, negotiation strategies, and managing a professional services firm.

Focuses on a major transformation of Otis Elevator's infrastructure. Led by the CEO, this transformation represents a remarkable long-term reengineering of all the processes of the firm to drive its operating costs down and service image up. The transformation is the continuation of a process that has been going on for more than 20 years.

In 2003, officials in Mexico's Ministry of Social Development were debating whether to eliminate a long-standing program that provided subsidized milk to poor families. In its place, they would expand a new program that gave poor families educational and nutritional cash grants provided that they kept their children in school and made regular visits to health clinics. The milk program, operated by an agency called Liconsa, had been spared so far because it did not require direct budgetary resources due to its preferential access to imported powdered milk. Nevertheless, advocates of expanding the cash grant program argued that the milk program was redundant and less effective. This case can be used to discuss the choices in designing assistance to the poor in economics and social policy courses or to discuss the theory of the consumer in economics courses. HKS Case Number 1766.0

Highlights how one school district leverages human capital management to help create a high-performing system.

George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, Latour has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. Latour does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Stern sit in on developers' meetings and accompany the sales force on client calls. He takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Stern never seems really to take the bit. In fact, Stern considers Latour's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What's more, she is spread too thin. Yet, when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--Latour asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. In R0409A and R0409Z, four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice-president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.

By the time Lou Gerstner took the helm in 1993, IBM had a long history of progressive management when it came to civil rights and equal opportunity employment. But Gerstner felt IBM wasn't taking full advantage of a diverse market for talent, nor was it maximizing the potential of its diverse customer and employee base. So in 1995, he launched a diversity task force initiative to uncover and understand differences among people within the organization and find ways to appeal to an even broader set of employees and customers. Gerstner established a task force for each of eight constituencies: Asians; blacks; the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community; Hispanics; white men; Native Americans; people with disabilities; and women. He asked the task forces to research four questions: What does your constituency need to feel welcome and valued at IBM? What can the corporation do, in partnership with your group, to maximize your constituency's productivity? What can the corporation do to influence your constituency's buying decisions so that IBM is seen as a preferred solution provider? And with which external organizations should IBM form relationships to understand better the needs of your constituency? The answers to these questions became the basis for IBM's diversity strategy. David A. Thomas stresses that four factors are key to implementing any major change initiative: strong support from company leaders, an employee base that is fully engaged with the initiative, management practices that are integrated and aligned with the effort, and a strong and well-articulated business case for action. All four elements have helped IBM make diversity a key corporate strategy tied to real growth.

George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, Latour has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. Latour does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Stern sit in on developers' meetings and accompany the sales force on client calls. He takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Stern never seems really to take the bit. In fact, Stern considers Latour's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What's more, she is spread too thin. Yet, when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--Latour asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. In R0409A and R0409Z, four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice-president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.

George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, Latour has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. Latour does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Stern sit in on developers' meetings and accompany the sales force on client calls. He takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Stern never seems really to take the bit. In fact, Stern considers Latour's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What's more, she is spread too thin. Yet, when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--Latour asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. In R0409A and R0409Z, four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice-president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.

A recent MBA graduate describes the joys and frustrations of an expatriate life - both at personal and professional levels - as experienced by a young, single woman. She has been living in Bangkok for three years and is slowly adjusting to the local way of life when she receives a job offer that will relocate her back to her home in Hawaii. Reaching a decision, however, is not easy given career-related uncertainties in both countries as well as the array of conflicting emotions that confront her. She must decide how to sort through these issues. Should she remain in Bangkok or return home? Her decision is complicated by the fact that she had not entertained the idea of returning to the United States.

Case B: An update bringing the reader current with developments in Booz Allen Hamilton¿s knowledge management strategy since Case A. Reinforces and deepens the point that knowledge management is a convergence of at least three factors: an appreciation of knowledge issues, the availability of sophisticated IT technology, and the managerial competence to suitably craft jobs and culture. This case takes the reader through the experiences of Booz-Allen & Hamilton in crafting their knowledge system and dealing with these factors.

Pat Tallon is the corporate attorney for Monitor Technology's parent company and has been asked to mediate a job-performance conflict between Chris Kerns, the manager of MT Engineering, and Shannon Allen, an engineering-support technician who works for Kerns.