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This case describes how SAP Labs India, a research and development center of SAP SE introduced and pursued a wide range of diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs across the organization. Set in September 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it narrates the story of Sap Labs' D&I journey of over a decade. Told from the perspective of Shraddhanjali Rao, VP, Human Resources, and other company executives, the case outlines and examines different diversity programs that were instituted around four pillars of D&I, namely, (i) gender, (ii) culture and identity (LGBTQ employees), (iii) cross-generational employees and (iv) differently abled people. The case discusses the company's efforts to promote awareness and adoption of its diversity goals across these four pillars and the challenges it faced along the way through the perspectives of a cross-section of program leaders. The case raises the following questions: Did the programmatic efforts to implement diversity initiatives lead to inclusion at SAP Labs? What were the challenges in promoting these initiatives? Did they degenerate to tokenism? What could SAP Labs have done better to institutionalize its commitment to diversity in the workplace? Beyond diversity, what more could SAP Labs do in the future to embrace an inclusive culture?

After Daniela Riccardi took over as CEO of Moleskine, she determined that the company needed to refocus on its core brand and central organization. With her first formal meeting with D'Ieteren, the company that owned Moleskine, approaching, she needed to decide what her action plan for Moleskine should be.

This case is about the growth of one of China's top design companies. The design trade is a knowledge-intensive and traditional industry. The protagonist Jia Wei started LKK in 2004. Following the industry's traditional organizational model, over 10 years he managed to grow the company's staff size to over a thousand and reach the peak of the industry. Jia's understanding of how the organization structure could unleash output upgraded several times. Owing to the reorganizations, LKK was able to reach 100 per cent annual growth rate. The story begins with Jia graduating from college and tells of the founding and evolution of LKK's organizational structure step-by-step. It allows participants to clearly see the relationship between organizational structure changes and enterprise growth. The goal is to illustrate that there is no ultimate, static organizational structure that necessarily leads to rapid development. The authors also try to use this material to illustrate that organizational culture needs to evolve along with the organizational structure. In addition, this case features change leadership.

Employers rely heavily on self-report surveys and interviews to assess organizational culture. But on their own, such tools provide a flawed view. By combining them with analysis of informal networks, leaders can gain a richer understanding of how new values take root locally. This allows them to see more precisely where desired behaviors are communicated, modeled, observed, and adopted on the ground. With that level of insight, leaders can more effectively target their change efforts in five key ways.

Business leaders are turning their attention toward building prosperity at home, in the communities where they live and work to tackle complex local issues, including health care, early childhood development, and housing. Initiatives that produce results demonstrate five tenets: They tell a clear, purposeful story; combine community priorities with institutional goals; are led inclusively; typically influence the member organizations' own internal policies; and impel company leaders to acknowledge difficult truths.

This exercise puts students into the role of an associate at a marketing and sales agency. They are asked to develop specific recommendations to present to some senior leaders about how the firm can and should become more truly inclusive and just. They also must be specific about the objectives and metrics they believe must be agreed to, and who should be accountable for them, in order to insure progress.

Women and members of other marginalized groups are often excluded from informal professional networks which are critical to gaining access to opportunities for learning and advancement. Based on their analysis of the organizational networks of dozens of companies, surveys of thousands of employees, and interviews with senior executives, the authors have identified specific ways leaders can improve inclusivity at their organizations.

Sardar Patel farm is a 150-acre organic farm located in Kathwada, Gujarat, India with 125 farmers living and working on the farm. Dr Dinesh Patel, a cardiologist and second-generation farm leader, played a vital role in converting the farm from chemical farming to natural farming. Though he was successful in this conversion process, the issue of farmers becoming careless and lazy caused a lot of problems for Patel. He tried many ways to improve the performance of the farmers but did not succeed. The farmers were not even ready to discuss their issues and avoided him as much as possible. Finally, he attended a leadership course, and with the help of an interview method taught in the course, Patel was able to identify and understand their problems and issues. Patel worked towards a solution while also focusing upon its sustainability. The case emphasizes upon interpersonal issues that arise between farm leaders and farmers, and depicts how Patel solved the said issue successfully with a sustainable solution.

Work on a space mission involves extended periods of labor in confined spaces, a tight integration of overlapping personal and professional time, and limited physical social interactions with colleagues similar to the home-based work environments that many hybrid and remote employees are experiencing. The authors found that a focus on routine can help and offer three strategies for building routines that can benefit remote individuals and their teams.

In the past 20 years, Liu Pengkai greatly stimulated employees' initiative and creativity through practical application of a set of unique and flexible management by heart (hereinafter referred to as "MBH") models by different means in specific tasks, which facilitated the enterprise's sound development. MBH model enabled employees to turn ideas into concrete actions and make achievements. It also guided employees to always remind themselves to do things with the right mindset in their work and life, and jointly build a harmonious development environment. When Heisonglin was first taken over by Liu, "11 workers, with an output value of over a hundred thousand yuan, two reaction kettles and more than a million yuan in debt" Heisonglin developed from the beginning of Liu's term from small to a large professional domestic manufacturer of adhesives, with total annual assets value growth rate of 20%, cooperation with many Fortune Global 500 enterprises and renowned enterprises at home and abroad as well as "Jiangsu Famous Brand" products. Liu's MBH model enabled Heisonglin to develop gradually, but such management model mainly relied on the wisdom and emotional intelligence of Liu from the perspective of the current management status of Heisonglin. Accompanied with the continuous development of the company, the number of the company's employees gradually increased, and an increasing number of new employees of the post-90s generation joined the company, which made it impossible for him to engage in all those specific tasks in the future. Meanwhile, Heisonglin's business scale constantly expanded to gradually cover customers throughout the country, which made it hard for him to serve each customer in person.

In 2017, Total Credit Recovery Limited (TCR), an accounts receivables management and debt collection firm, hired a data scientist to analyze the firm's current data analytics practices and create a plan to extend the use of its data. TCR collected more than 1 million points of data per day, and the company's new data scientist knew that with a proper team in place, he could use this data to offer his firm a competitive advantage that was currently non-existent in the industry. TCR's leadership supported the data scientist with substantial resources and the team made notable contributions to the firm's operations. However, one year later, as the firm was preparing to launch a new venture that relied on the contributions of the new data analytics team, the young leader was struggling to build a positive dynamic within his cross-functional team. How could he improve his team's dynamics and thus its ability to add value to TCR?

Long before the pandemic struck, many work environments were becoming increasingly harder to navigate due to higher densities, smaller workspaces, more noise, and less space per person. Given the correlation between workspace and job satisfaction and employee performance businesses should strive to define a new era of people-centric workplaces that produce greater business competitiveness through improved collaboration, culture, innovation, and individual excellence.

The case spotlights Kwame Spearman's career-shifting decision to leave a NYC-based consulting job to return to his hometown of Denver, Colorado, and take over an iconic independent bookstore, The Tattered Cover. The case lays out ways Spearman envisions a new approach to retail. It highlights challenges that can face individuals when they step into a substantive leadership role for the first time. It also examines how local businesses respond to significant threats from online and big box retailers.

The appeal of coworking spaces declined sharply once the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But new research suggests that such workspaces will become even more important and more popular in the post-pandemic world than they were before, not just for entrepreneurs and freelancers, but for large companies. The author points to five benefits that both companies and their employees can gain when remote workers are given the option to choose where they do their work.

Most companies aim for exceptional customer service, but too few are attentive to the subtle discrimination by frontline employees that can alienate customers, lead to lawsuits, or even cause lasting brand damage by going viral. This article presents research about the way bias occurs in the provision of core products and services ("exchanges"), the furnishing of help that exceeds the minimum required ("extras"), and the manner in which service is delivered ("etiquette"). By breaking customer service into these three dimensions, the authors offer a framework for identifying and addressing frontline bias in your own organization. They recommend talking to your customers, examining available data, and running experiments to get a better sense of what biases exist among your customer service workers. Armed with that information, you might try to mitigate prejudiced behavior by broadening employees' exposure to people of diverse backgrounds, giving them standard procedures to follow when they interact with customers, and encouraging a sense of responsibility to act fairly.

In 2016, Nicole M. Jones was hired to lead The Hangar, Delta Air Lines' new innovation center in Atlanta, Georgia. Delta's leadership had intended for The Hangar to catalyze a new approach to innovation at the company. After conducting three months of research on existing corporate innovation lab and accelerator models, Jones learned that most fail to scale impact across the core business. Drawing on her learnings, she established the values, strategy, and methodology for The Hangar to ensure just the opposite. Over the next three years, Jones and The Hangar's diverse team of design thinkers, technologists, and strategists brought together partners from Delta's core business and Atlanta's start-up and academic communities to execute a number of breakthrough innovations. After Delta's debut at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, Jones was invited to share her experience of setting up a corporate innovation lab with a consortium of innovation leaders. In preparation, she and her team are conducting a post-mortem of their three-year journey and reflecting on the lessons learned from one of their earliest projects-a Biometric Boarding Pass prototype they executed with CLEAR, a biometrics identity start-up.

This case is the third installment in a series about the 10-year cultural and digital transformation of Pfizer's Global Clinical Supply organization. In 2011, Michael Ku became Pfizer's Vice President of Global Clinical Supply (GCS) after the company had undergone three large-scale mergers and acquisitions. Ku and his new leadership team set out to build a proactive, end-to-end, digital and physical clinical supply chain. It took three years to get the cultural foundation in place, another three to overhaul GCS's legacy systems and develop its digital capabilities, and another three to instill a culture of innovation. By 2020, GCS had made significant progress toward becoming the agile, innovative organization necessary to support Pfizer's new strategy to focus exclusively on developing innovative medicines and vaccines. GCS was just beginning to pilot a new 24-hour, 5 day a week workforce model with a new team in Manila when COVID-19 struck. The organization found itself on the front lines having to supply Pfizer's vaccine candidate and investigational antiviral studies, while also ensuring continuity of clinical supply to hundreds of other trials across the globe. Because of the 10 years GCS had spent on their cultural and digital transformation, they were ready to rise to the challenge and help Pfizer deliver a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. In August 2021, Ku and his leadership team are preparing to make a number of major changes to GCS in preparation for a new era of scale, agility, and innovation.

Luke Fuszard (MBA 2010) shares the personal details of his life leading up to the moment when he was unexpectedly fired from his job in early 2021.

The post-pandemic era requires a mindset change about jobs and managerial expectations. These considerations will influence decisions on whether and when to allow continued work-from-home arrangements; whether to customize rules for employees; where to locate the business; how to make work measurable and ensure employee focus; and how to position an organization to retain its best talent.

In the short time between October 2018 and March 2019, two new Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplanes in different parts of the world were involved in deadly crashes. In both cases, the aircraft developed difficulties in seemingly calm weather and crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. Preliminary investigations pointed to failures in a new automated software-driven system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that had caused both aircraft to pitch forward and potentially nosedive. The probe also revealed gaps in the documentation and testing of the MCAS system and a lack of adequate pilot training. Case (A) delves into the causes of the 737 MAX crashes, Boeing leadership's questionable responses and poor crisis management, and the fallout from the grounding. It describes the erosion of a culture of integrity and mismatched management expectations that ultimately led to cutting corners and breakdowns in the engineering and development process. Participants have the opportunity to analyze the critical issues in the case and answer the crucial question posed by aviation expert Andy Stephen: How could a disaster of this magnitude occur in an industry so advanced and sophisticated, and so driven by safety? Case (B) looks at the timeline of events surrounding the recertification of the 737 MAX, from the investigations immediately following the first crash to early August 2020, when initial test flights for recertification commenced, following intense internal reviews. The case considers the sequence of events from various angles: regulatory approvals, the company's financial performance, its corporate culture, and how the COVID 19-related slowdown affected Boeing's efforts to get the 737 MAX off the ground. Stephen, having followed the events closely and having understood the gravity of the situation, poses the following key questions: What would it take for the MAX to fly again? And when could it happen?