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David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue, is forced to confront a crisis in customer confidence following operational difficulties on February 14, 2007. This becomes a vital test of his leadership.

David Neeleman (B) traces the events subsequent to the (A) case.

In 2007, the individual consulting firms loosely held under the name Mercer Specialty Consulting came together more closely to form the $1.5 billion strategy consulting firm Oliver Wyman. CEO John Drzik hoped that this rebranding effort would create greater alignment and collaboration across the firm, resulting in greater client value. With increasingly complex needs, clients sought consultants with deep expertise to solve their most challenging problems-and each firm that formed Oliver Wyman had the deep expertise in a particular field that clients wanted. However, creating a consulting firm based on specialization presented some challenges. For example, to what degree could each of the original firms integrate under a single name without losing the distinct specializations (and in some cases, brand equity) that made each firm so successful in the first place? This case describes the history of Oliver Wyman, the rebranding process, and the resulting changes to organizational structure and recruiting.

The shareholders, who provide capital, have the most at stake in a company and the biggest incentive to ensure its success - so they should call the shots and reap the biggest returns, right? Wrong, says a professor at IMD. He argues that in today's firms, labor bears the most risk and provides the competitive advantage. Labor, therefore, should make the decisions and get the residuals.

The CEO of Chanel recalls her days as a young merchant, when she was taken to task by a powerful executive for not listening. Twenty years later, his words still profoundly affect the way she thinks about her company's products and interacts with customers, employees, and other stakeholders.

Short-term, virtual, and cross-cultural teams have become the new norm, but building trust among team members is particularly challenging. That has implications for how managers should motivate and reward them.

The next U.S. administration will face enormous challenges to world peace, the global economy, and the environment. Exercising military and economic muscle alone will not bring peace and prosperity. According to Nye, a former U.S. government official and a former dean at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the next president must be able to combine hard power, characterized by coercion, and what Nye calls "soft" power, which relies instead on attraction. The result is smart power, a tool great leaders use to mobilize people around agendas that look beyond current problems. Hard power is often necessary, Nye explains. In the 1990s, when the Taliban was providing refuge to Al Qaeda, President Clinton tried - and failed - to solve the problem diplomatically instead of destroying terrorist havens in Afghanistan. In other situations, however, soft power is more effective, though it has been too often overlooked. In Iraq, Nye argues, the use of soft power could draw young people toward something other than terrorism. "I think that there's an awakening to the need for soft power as people look at the crisis in the Middle East and begin to realize that hard power is not sufficient to resolve it," he says. Solving today's global problems will require smart power - a judicious blend of the other two powers. While there are notable examples of men who have used smart power - Teddy Roosevelt, for instance - it's much more difficult for women to lead with smart power, especially in the United States, where women feel pressure to prove that they are not "soft." Only by exercising smart power, Nye says, can the next president of the United States set a new tone for U.S. foreign policy in this century.

During his nearly 14 years at the helm of networking giant Cisco Systems, Chambers has developed an uncanny ability to sense market trends long before others do. He predicted, for instance, that voice transmission would become free long before computer networks could even carry it. And Cisco was one of the first to shift from call centers to web-based customer service. Seeing the future is essential for a company that must start developing a product some six years before it goes to market. How does Chambers do it? He looks for what he calls "market transitions" - subtle social, economic, or technological signs of an impending disruptive shift - which, he says, start turning up five to seven years before the market actually grasps their significance. The move to open-source software development was one that Chambers saw and Microsoft did not. Early on, Chambers learned to sense market transitions by listening closely to customers, connecting individual dots of behavior into patterns that indicated future trends. Later, he realized he needed to turn Cisco's management processes upside down to benefit from that foresight. In this interview, Chambers describes how he was able to surrender his role as a command-and-control CEO and institute a collaborative decision-making model that allows the company to respond speedily to emerging transitions. Managers throughout Cisco now form cross-functional teams, working together to identify and exploit new opportunities quickly. The model allows Cisco to simultaneously implement 22 major sales initiatives as effectively as most companies do one or two.

Like the best-laid schemes of mice and men, the best-rehearsed speeches go oft astray. No amount of preparation can counter an audience's perception that the speaker is calculating or insincere. Why do so many managers have trouble communicating authenticity to their listeners? Morgan, a communications coach for more than two decades, offers advice for overcoming this difficulty. Recent brain research shows that natural, unstudied gestures - what Morgan calls the "second conversation" - express emotions or impulses a split second before our thought processes have turned them into words. So the timing of practiced gestures will always be subtly off - just enough to be picked up by listeners' unconscious ability to read body language. If you can't practice the unspoken part of your delivery, what can you do? Tap into four basic impulses underlying your speech - to be open to the audience, to connect with it, to be passionate, and to "listen" to how the audience is responding - and then rehearse your presentation with each in mind. You can become more open, for instance, by imagining that you're speaking to your spouse or a close friend. To more readily connect, focus on needing to engage your listeners and then to keep their attention, as if you were speaking to a child who isn't heeding your words. To convey your passion, identify the feelings behind your speech and let them come through. To listen, think about what the audience is probably feeling when you step up to the podium and be alert to the nonverbal messages of its members. Internalizing these four impulses as you practice will help you come across as relaxed and authentic - and your body language will take care of itself.

Leadership teams that can't reach consensus wait for the CEO to make the final call - and often are disappointed by the outcome. Frisch calls this phenomenon the dictator-by-default syndrome. Many companies turn to team-building and communication exercises to try to fix the situation. But that won't work, the author argues, because the trouble is not with the people, it's with the decision-making process. Attempting to arrive at a collective preference on the basis of individual opinions is inherently problematic. Once leadership teams realize that voting-system mathematics are the culprit, they can stop wasting time on irrelevant psychological exercises and instead adopt practical measures designed to break the impasse. They must begin by acknowledging the problem and understanding what causes it. When more than two options are on the table, the scene is set for the CEO to become a dictator by default. Even yes-or-no choices present difficulties, because they always include a third, implied alternative: "Neither of the above." When the CEO and the team understand why they have trouble making decisions, they can adopt the following tactics to minimize dysfunction: Clearly articulate the desired outcome, generate a range of options for achieving it, test "fences" (which can be moved) and "walls" (which cannot), surface preferences early, state each option's pros and cons, and devise new options that preserve the best features of existing ones. Teams using such tactics need to adhere to two ground rules. First, they must deliberate confidentially, because a secure climate for conversation allows members to float trial balloons and cut deals. And second, members must be given enough time to study their options and assess the counterarguments. Only then can they achieve genuine alignment.

Dr. C.V. Chen learned that one of Lee and Li's senior legal assistants had illegally sold a client's shares in a Taiwanese company and sneaked out of Taiwan with over NT$3 billion. Lee and Li took several actions to minimize the impact of the situation on the firm, its clients and its employees. Now Chen began to review the events and the actions taken. Although he knew that the worst was behind, he also knew that a great deal of work needed to be done in order to ensure the reputation of the firm would remain intact in the future.

In September 2001, Tony Fernandes left his job as vice president and head of Warner Music's Southeast Asian operations. He reportedly cashed in his stock options, took out a mortgage on his house, and lined up investors to take control of AirAsia, a struggling Malaysian airline. Three days later, terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. Despite the negative aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, by 2003, AirAsia had demonstrated that the low-fare model epitomized by Southwest and JetBlue in the United States, and by Ryanair and easyJet in Europe, had great potential in the Asian marketplace. Now, Fernandes had to make plans to ensure that AirAsia maintained its momentum while considering the influx of new entrants into the low-fare segment of the airline industry in Asia.

This note details the critical areas that apply most directly to the job of a manager and to some of the research that has been accomplished in this area. Specific topics include organizational structure and culture, effective leadership techniques, the proper use of power and influence, proven ways of motivating employees and the effects cognitive differences and diversity in the workplace have on behavior in organizations.

The credit crisis of 2008 placed compensation practices at publicly traded firms in the United States under scrutiny. This case examines perceived excessive pay and severance packages at several firms implicated in the credit crisis of 2008, the executive compensation provisions in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, and discusses the implications for compensation committees at public companies.

Muhtar Kent had just been promoted to the CEO position in Coca-Cola. He was reflecting upon the past leadership of the company, in particular the success that Coca-Cola enjoyed during Robert Goizueta's leadership. The CEOs that had followed Goizueta were not able to have as positive an impact on the stock value. When his promotion was announced, Kent mentioned that he did not have immediate plans to change any management roles but that some fine-tuning might be necessary.

The growing globalization of many industries has led many U.S.-based companies to open facilities overseas. In the process, researchers have counseled U.S. companies to adopt many local customs and policies to increase their probability of success in these new locations. During this same time period, many foreign-owned companies have moved into the United States and either purchased existing facilities or started new operations. The purpose of this case is to investigate how a non-American company (Toivonen) has adapted to the U.S. environment. It assesses the role of the parent company culture in the day-to-day operations of the American subsidiary.

"The diversity lady has a label on her forehead and talks about the standard message," one senior executive at a large corporation said. "It's the same message we got 20 years ago. We do it annually but employees never get any of that. I've never had a diversity talk to my staff." Traditional diversity initiatives generally focus on specific dimensions of difference such as gender, race, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness, or religion. This material involves role-plays among a diverse group of players that encourage inclusion of a broader scope of social-identity differences such as diversity of problem-solving styles and emotional intelligence differences.

The Crescent Standard Investment Bank Limited (CSIBL) was the largest investment bank quoted on all the stock exchanges in Pakistan, so when it declared a huge loss of Rs2.1 billion (US$35.5 million) for the year December 31, 2005 the market was taken by surprise. There had been some rumors that all was not well and that the investment banking regulator, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), had sent a team to investigate the affairs of the bank. Since the main shareholders were individuals or companies of the well-known business group known as the Crescent Group, there was enormous interest in the CSIBL affairs by financial and political circles as well. The case describes the various types of entities that were merged to form the CSIBL, principally to protect the stakeholders by creating an entity with a large capitalization. The bank had reported in its annual reports that all the internal control mechanisms for good governance stipulated by the SECP were in place and the auditors (internal and external) had reported that these were satisfactory. Yet, when subjected to an investigation, it was revealed that the internal management was involved in a variety of acts of misrepresentation and concealment. The case focuses on the weaknesses in the structure of the corporate governance regime in Pakistan. The fact remains that no amount of internal or external checks can stop the internal management from colluding to perpetuate a fraud.

Dr. C.V. Chen received news that one of Lee and Li's senior assistants had found a loophole in a power of attorney from one of the firm's clients, SanDisk Corporation (SanDisk), that had allowed him to illegally sell the client's shares in a Taiwanese company and to sneak out of Taiwan with over NT$3 billion. Unfortunately, Lee and Li had no insurance to cover this embezzlement. Chen knew that the three senior partners needed to develop a plan of action to save the law firm, take care of the lawyers and other employees, maintain the reputation of the firm within Taiwan and abroad intact, do what was best for SanDisk and Lee and Li, and keep the more than 12,000 clients from deserting the firm.