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An MBA graduate, 10 years out, reflects on his career path. Randy Haykin is currently running his own venture catalyst organization in the Silicon Valley.

Addresses the career decision-making process of Humphrey Chen as he graduates from HBS with an MBA. In choosing between an offer from a top-tier consulting firm and launching a start-up entrepreneurial venture, Chen must weigh the expectations of many people--family, fiancee, friends--as well as his own desires.

Provides the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test results and the Personal Values Profile (PVP) for the protagonist of the video case.

Companies all across the economic spectrum are making use of teams, but many senior executives and CEOs have become frustrated in their efforts to create teams at the top. Too often, they see few gains in performance from their efforts to be more teamlike. And they recognize that the rest of the organization knows that the senior group doesn't really work together as a team. Nevertheless, a team effort at the top can be essential to capturing the highest performance results possible--when the conditions are right. Good leadership requires differentiating between team and non-team opportunities, and then acting accordingly. Jon R. Katzenbach, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in New York City and the author of Teams at the Top: Unleashing the Potential of Both Teams and Individual Leaders (Harvard Business School Press, in 1997) explains why teams at the top are often ineffective--and when they can be essential to capturing the highest performance results for their organization.

Companies achieve real agility only when every function and process--when every person--is able and eager to rise to every challenge. This type and degree of fundamental change, commonly called revitalization or transformation, is what many companies seek but rarely achieve because they have never before identified the factors that produce sustained transformational change. The authors identify three interventions that will restore companies to vital agility and then keep them in good health: incorporating employees fully into the principal business challenges facing the company; leading the organization in a different way in order to sharpen and maintain incorporation and constructive stress; and instilling mental disciplines that will make people behave differently and then help them sustain their new behavior. The authors discovered these basic sources of revitalization by tracking the change efforts of Sears, Roebuck and Co., Royal Dutch Shell, and the United States Army. This article is one of the first practical revitalization guides to appear anywhere, and it is based not on theory but on actual experience.

In this HBR Classic, originally published in January-February 1989, Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst and the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, observes that many senior executives are substituting the rituals of "psychopolitics"--the balancing of social expectations in the workplace--for the real work of thinking about and acting on ideas relating to products, markets, and customers. In his retrospective commentary, Zaleznik writes that senior executives seem to have established a healthier balance in the 1990s between their real work and psychopolitics. Executives are now leading their companies to deal with external, competitive conditions that require them to cut costs, create products, please customers, and develop markets. What worries Zaleznik today, however, is that under the guise of employee empowerment, senior executives are beginning again to indulge in ritualized actions. For instance, they establish task forces to seek answers to questions they themselves should be addressing. The real work of the executive, says Zaleznik, should always include the thinking that informs and directs action. Zaleznik consults to business and government, and his most recent book, Learning Leadership, was published in 1993. In addition to "Real Work," he has authored five previous HBR articles.

The Washington Post is now headed up by its fourth family member in three generations. The Graham family has somehow transcended the problems and pitfalls that overtake so many family-owned and operated businesses.

Reprinted from John Davis.

Abstract to follow.

This note introduces the notion of "Emotional Intelligence" as described in Daniel Goleman's book by the same name and extends that concept to include Social Quotient or Intelligence and Change Quotient or Intelligence. The general thrust is that IQ alone does not a good leader make, but that EQ, SQ, and CQ are also necessary to be an effective leader.

In the mid-1980s, Asda was one of the most successful retail companies in the United Kingdom. By 1991, the chain of 200 grocery stores had a lack of direction, a demoralized workforce, declining profits, rising debt, collapsing stock price, and was facing bankruptcy. This case describes the company's downfall and introduces Archie Norman, a young, highly talented chief executive, hired to restore the company.

Supplements the (A) case.

Describes Archie Norman's efforts over a five-year period to turn around the company by regaining financial control, delivering management, creating experimental projects where individuals felt free to innovate, instituting a back-to-roots strategy that put customers first, and creating a culture characterized by high involvement of employees and fast innovation and implementation of new ideas.

Supplements the (A) case.

Intended to be used as a supplement to the Introduction to Type and provides an overview of the international uses of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Today, the most urgent challenge for most companies is to develop the managers who must operate in the new delayered, horizontal, networked organizations to deliver on their complex, multidimensional strategic priorities. It is here that most companies are facing the greatest difficulties. The reason lies in the historic "Russian-doll model of management," in which managers at each level are expected to play similar roles and have similar responsibilities, only for a different size and scope of activities. The underlying premise that there is a generic management role is being further reinforced by many companies currently engaged in the new fad of identifying a set of desired personal competencies as the anchor for their management development initiatives. This article challenges this Russian-doll model of management to argue that managers at different levels of the organization play distinctly different roles and add value in fundamentally different ways. Based on field research in twenty major corporations, the authors identify the roles of front-line, senior, and top-level managers in the new organizational form, and how companies can develop these new managerial competencies.

An analysis of many highly successful and "visionary" companies reveals the existence of corporate cultures that emphasize adherence to company goals and cohesiveness within the group. While such cultures can improve effort, morale, and productivity, they also tend to thwart innovation--limiting not only the expression of "original" ideas, but even their production. Research in social psychology suggests that flexibility to changing circumstances and innovation is better served by a "culture" that not only tolerates, but welcomes dissent and minority views. Such dissent--even when wrong--stimulates better decision making and innovation. Thus, the proper harnessing of dissent may provide a mechanism for creating unity without uniformity and for igniting the "spark" of innovation.

Creativity in all fields, including business, flourishes under intrinsic motivation--the drive to do something because it is interesting, involving, exciting, satisfying, or personally challenging. This article presents the Componential Theory of Organizational Creativity and Innovation, which defines the factors--including intrinsic motivation--that determine a person's creativity. This article also shows how the work environment can influence individual creativity.

This note presents an overview of some fundamental characteristics of managing change. Such classic change models as those of Lewin, Beer, and Kotter are introduced. A general model of change is presented, together with predictable stages in the change process and predictable responses to change. Managing change is highlighted as an important part of the skill set of an effective leader so that students are encouraged to become familiar with a model of change and with skills at managing it in order to become better leaders.

This fictitious case study explores the challenges facing CoolBurst, a Miami-based fruit-juice company. For over a decade, CoolBurst had ruled the market in the Southeast. Why, then, are its annual revenues stuck at $30 million, and why have profits been stagnant for four years straight? CoolBurst's new CEO, Luisa Reboredo, knows that the company's survival--and her own--depend on the answers. Reboredo has succeeded former utilitarian CEO Garth LeRoue. While LeRoue had undeniably made CoolBurst into the well-oiled machine it was, he'd also been stubborn in enforcing a culture of tradition, self-discipline, and respect for authority--a culture so staid and polite, it left little room for employees to be creative. LeRoue, for instance, had almost fired two of CoolBurst's most creative employees for inventing four new drinks without his permission. Sam Jenkins, one of those employees, had been so angered by the incident that he left the company to work for CoolBurst's largest competitor. How can Reboredo encourage her employees to start thinking creatively. And how can she nurture any creative individuals who may join the company in the future? In 97511 and 97511Z, commentators Paul Barker, Teresa M. Amabile, Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Gareth Jones, and Elspeth McFadzean offer advice on this fictional case study.