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Supplements the (A) case.

Designed to aid in the transfer and application of knowledge gained from the executive program to the live situation that program participants face in their jobs. Teaching Purpose: To bring practical relevance to executive education programs, permitting focused consideration of a concrete, current business problem managers are facing at work.

Raises issues about how the nature and function of a board changes as its company moves from ownership by its employees (including the founder) to ownership by a private equity firm, Hellman & Friedman, to public ownership. Teaching Purpose: To consider changes in board membership, board duties, and board responsibilities. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Supplements the (A) case.

On December 2, 2001, Enron Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. One of the most highly publicized business debacles in history-its settlements, criminal charges, civil charges, and workouts will continue for years. But outside of the courts and sensational press, what really happened? What caused the collapse of what at one time was the sixth largest company in the United States? The case explores the Enron story-in an attempt to not only answer the question of what happened, but what may be learned from this failure.

This disguised case provides a strategic plan devised and used on a military base. Senior officers clarified their strategy, outlined capabilities needed, and designed measures to assess. The organization's mission statement/charter, goals, and metrics are available for evaluation. Is the vision clear and could the goals be successfully translated into action? Does the plan lend itself to become part of the culture and daily business life on the base?

From its beginning in 1947, the Torvald Klaveness Group succeeded in the shipping business through innovation and the vision of one man, Torvald "TK" Klaveness. The company grew and prospered until 1989, when TK handed the reins over to the second generation. His eldest son remained true to his father's principals and business philosophy. As yet another management transition drew closer, the next generation considered changes to the founder's succession plan and the company's strategic approach.

This note discusses the importance of observing process in teams. Specific areas to observe and suggestions on how to observe are outlined.

From his humble beginnings in China as a teacher's son, a refugee, and later as a salesman, Li provides a lesson in integrity and adaptability. Through hard work, and a reputation for remaining true to his internal moral compass, he was able to build a business empire that includes: banking, construction, real estate, plastics, cellular phones, satellite television, cement production, retail outlets (pharmacies and supermarkets), hotels, domestic transportation (sky train), airports, electric power, steel production, ports, and shipping. Teaching Purpose: To examine leadership.

Tyrannical leadership can lead to extraordinary performance and intolerable human effects. When performance matters, its currency soars. Contrary to modern prescriptions for CEO approaches, the phenomenon of managerial tyranny endures in the business world, where performance matters on a quarterly basis. Several celebrated CEOs and leaders who were tyrannical in their methods and yet delivered spectacular results can serve as examples of the paradox. Rather than make moral judgments on a leadership style unpalatable to many, this study presents a typology of managerial tyrants based on their individual traits, objectives, and roles and offers several strategies for coping with them.

A Hispanic executive is considering whether to join the board of directors of a company and receives advice from several more experienced directors. Teaching Purpose: To focus on the issues related to joining a board of directors.

Explores the experience of work-related stress and examines various coping tactics. Pays particular attention to stress related to the job-search process. Teaching Purpose: To help students recognize sources of stress and develop more effective coping skills.

Fast growth is a nice problem to have--but a hard one to manage well. In this interview, Kevin Sharer, the CEO of biotech giant Amgen, talks about the special challenges leaders face when their companies are on a roll. Sharer, who was also head of marketing at pre-WorldCom MCI and a division head and a staff assistant to Jack Welch at GE, offers insights drawn from his own experience--and from his own self-proclaimed blunders: "I learned the hard way that you need to become credible and enlist support inside the company before you start trying to be a change agent. If you think you're going to make change happen simply by force of personality or position or intellect, you'd better think again." And change there was: Under Sharer's leadership, Amgen overhauled its management team, altered its culture, and launched a couple of blockbuster products. How do chief executives survive in that kind of dizzying environment? "A CEO must always be switching between different altitudes--tasks of different levels of abstraction and specificity," Sharer says. "You might need to spend time working on a redesign of your organizational structure and then quickly switch to drafting a memo to all employees aimed at reinforcing one of the company's values." Having a supportive and capable top team is also key.

Entrepreneurial middle managers are the key to innovative growth in organizations and are a source of hope for a slowed economy. In fact, strategic directives from senior executives mean nothing without efficient middle managers just below officer level who are able to design the systems and carry out the plans. Rosabeth Moss Kanter's article, first published in 1982, reports on a study of effective middle managers working in large corporations. It distinguishes between managers who fostered basic accomplishments (those that occurred within existing frameworks) and managers who achieved innovative accomplishments (those that increased long-term capacity). Basic accomplishments differ from innovative ones not only in scope and long-run impact but also in what it takes to achieve them. Innovative accomplishments tend to involve highly problematic situations that require creative solutions, power, and influence. Innovative middle managers are not necessarily extraordinary individuals. They do, however, share several characteristics, including comfort with change, clarity of direction, thoroughness, and a participative management style. Such managers also understand that achieving their goals takes time--and tact. Achieving goals also takes the support of a collaborative organization. Entrepreneurial managers require access to abundant information, support, and resources, and they need the power to go beyond the limits of their formal positions.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For a firm to succeed over the long term, it needs to master both adaptability and alignment--an attribute sometimes referred to as ambidexterity. The concept is alluring, but the evidence suggests that most companies have struggled to apply it. The standard approach has been to create separate structures for different types of activities. But separation can also lead to isolation, and many R&D and business development groups have failed because of their lack of linkages to the core businesses. In an attempt to shed new light on the discussion, the authors develop and explore their concept of contextual ambidexterity, which calls for individual employees to make choices between alignment-oriented and adaptation-oriented activities in the context of their day-to-day work. The authors introduce this as a complementary concept to traditional structural ambidexterity. By means of their survey- and interview-based research--which took place over a three-year period and involved 4,195 respondents across 41 business units in 10 multinational firms--the authors identify the four behaviors displayed by ambidextrous individuals, each of which involves taking independent, adaptive action in the service of overall company goals. They then present a framework for describing and analyzing which organizational contexts encourage or discourage such behaviors. They link organizational context to ambidexterity and, in turn, ambidexterity to high performance. Finally, the authors describe how companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, Oracle, and Renault have been able to create such high-performance contexts, and they offer managers guidance on how to create them in their own companies.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Many companies organize employees into self-managing teams that are basically left to run themselves with some guidance from an external leader. In fact, comprehensive surveys report that 79% of companies in the Fortune 1,000 currently deploy such "empowered," "self-directed," or "autonomous" teams. Because of their widespread use, much research has been devoted to understanding how best to set up self-managing teams to maximize their effectiveness. Interestingly, though, relatively little attention has been paid to the leaders who must oversee such working groups. At first, it seems contradictory: Why should a self-managing team require any leadership at all? But the authors' research has shown that self-managing teams require a particular kind of leadership. Specifically, the external leaders who contribute most to their team's success tend to excel at one skill: managing the boundary between the team and the larger organization. That process requires specific behaviors that can be grouped into four basic functions: (1) moving back and forth between the team and the broader organization to build relationships, (2) scouting necessary information, (3) persuading the team and outside constituents to support one another, and (4) empowering team members.

Examines the changes in corporate governance at WorldCom/MCI as proposed by the company's court-appointed corporate monitor, Richard Breeden. Following the largest bankruptcy ever and the downfall of the company, Breeden wrote "Restoring Trust," a report comprised of 78 recommendations for the future governance of the company. Teaching Purpose: To think about how to improve corporate governance at a specific company.

Provides an orientation and background information for viewing the HBS Kim Malone video.

Discusses moving beyond corporate identity and branding as graphic design to the principle of Voice, defined as an organization's profile that emerges from its values and history. Outlines the design of Caterpillar's Voice as a way of building relationships as well as recognition, about taking advantage of Voice as a guidepost for strategic thinking as well as a guideline for both internal and external communications.

A summer assignment is turning into a nightmare for an intern at a large consulting firm. He has just receive his third reprimand from his boss, and is concerned how this relationship is distracting him from the project he needs to complete and how it could hurt his chances of obtaining full-time employment. He must decide how he can salvage the relationship with his boss and whether this organization is the best fit for him.