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On November 16, 1987, the Del Webb board appointed Phil Dion chairman and CEO. This case outlines the development and implementation of a strategy to focus exclusively on real estate development and to liquidate all other assets. Discusses the appointment of two new board members to fill the slots vacated by the directors who followed Swanson out the door. Proceeds to describe the activities of two investors: Ronald Brierly of Industrial Equity Pacific and James Cotter of Webcott Holdings. Independently of one another, these investors had each purchased over 9% of Del Webb stock at a premium just before the stock price plummeted in the fall of 1987. These investors laid low for over a year, waiting to see if the descent in the stock price had been a temporary blip or a sustaining trend. When they concluded it was the latter, each investor approached Dion with the request that he be allowed to put a representative on the Del Webb board.

Dion and the other Del Webb directors were open to having Industrial Equity Pacific (IEP) and Webcott Holdings representation on the board. The IEP representative was perceived as reserved and lacking in sophistication. Cotter of Webcott, however, struck the directors as savvy but antagonistic and disruptive. Cotter's goal was to position the company as a possible takeover target, and he agitated in the boardroom for changes that he felt would open up the company to potential acquirers. He also launched a proxy battle in an attempt to eliminate Dion's golden parachute and the company's poison pill.

Portrays Margaret Thatcher's rise to the leadership of Great Britain's Conservative Party. Thatcher's political career began with her election to Parliament's House of Commons in 1959. Sixteen years later she was elected the leader of her party, and then in 1979, she became prime minister. Thatcher's emergence as a world leader illustrates her unlikely transition from ultimate outsider to powerful insider.

This case is the transcript of a student's report about her definition of leadership and includes some quotations from Frances Hesselbein, former national director of the Girl Scouts of America, to support it. The case is poignant because the author's background includes abuse as a child, and she demonstrates remarkable courage in moving out of that situation and establishing a strong foundation of what it means to be a leader.

Something about management looks so easy that we all think we could succeed where others fail. But management is really not easy. Managers are expected to show skill in finance, product development, marketing, manufacturing, technology, and more. It's no wonder that most managers seem to underperform. Nevertheless, there are a few around who exemplify what it takes to achieve greatness. They aren't the usual suspects we read about. They include the managers many of us know personally. They include the generations of Rosenbluths at Rosenbluth Travel, who demonstrated the indispensable quality of imagination in reinventing their business again and again. They include Bill Sells of Johns-Manville, who personified integrity in the way he applied to its fiberglass business the harsh lessons of his company's experience with asbestos. They include Ralph Stayer of Johnsonville Sausage, whose determination to overcome his own need for complete control helped make him great. And they include the courageous George Cattabiani of Westinghouse Steam Turbine Divison, who threw himself into the lions' den of a hostile labor union and came out with, if not pussycats, at least partners.

How do you deal with the talented manager whose perfectionism paralyzes his direct reports? Or the high-performing expert who disdains teamwork under any circumstances? What about the sensitive manager who avoids confrontation of any kind? Do you ignore the behaviors? Get rid of the managers? James Waldroop and Timothy Butler suggest that you coach them. They have found that coaching--helping change the behaviors that threaten to derail a valued manager--is often the best way to help that manager succeed. Executives increasingly recognize that it is people management skills that are the key both to their personal success and to the success of their business. And being an effective coach is a crucial part of successful people management.

Containing excerpts from Jerry Kaplan's best-selling book, Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, this case begins with Kaplan's idea for developing a handheld, pen-operated computer. It follows Kaplan, who becomes the CEO of GO Corp., as he goes on the road to sell his idea to investors and customers. Closes as Kaplan prepares to pitch his idea to the data--processing administration of State Farm Mutual Life Insurance. With IBM and other established firms as competitors, Kaplan must plan his presentation carefully.

A new supervisor in a managed health care facility created from a merger wrestles with taking charge and dealing with human resource problems for the first time. See also the B case (UVA-OB-0599).

Addresses how to build effective one-on-one work relationships. Spells out the importance of analyzing your network and understanding on whom you are dependent. Also provides some criteria for assessing the quality of your relationships. Finally, it discusses how to manage conflict based on the Senge Model of advocacy, inquiry, and mental models, all of which encourage people to uncover their assumptions.

Resource Link is an in-house temporary firm, supplying managers and technical workers to the 26 business units of AT&T on a contract basis. The challenge facing Resource Link is how to grow, since an increasing number of managers are eager to use variable workers to staff their businesses. Resource Link must decide whether to bring outsiders into the pool or to continue to rely on AT&T employees who choose this way of working.

MacTemps is a provider of temporary workers skilled in computer graphics and database management. Unlike many temporary agencies that treat temps as a commodity, MacTemps has attempted to build relationships with temps through offering benefits and training. This case explores the pros and cons of this strategy by presenting data on the underlying economics of the arrangement and the characteristics of the temp force.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Why do so many organizations fail to learn? According to the author, such failures may be caused not by resistance to change, human nature, or poor leadership, but by the lack of communication among three cultures: operating, engineering, and executive. The culture of operators is based on human interaction. Operators may use their learning ability to thwart management's efforts to improve productivity. The engineering culture represents the design elements of the technology underlying the organization and how the technology is to be used. The executive culture revolves around maintaining an organization's financial health and deals with boards, investors, and capital markets. According to the author, when organizations attempt to redesign or reinvent themselves, the cultures collide and failure occurs. Executives and engineers are task focused and assume that people are the problem. Executives band together and depersonalize their employees. Executives and engineers can't agree on how to make organizations work better while keeping costs down. Each culture must learn how to learn and to analyze its own culture. Then enough mutual understanding must be created among the cultures to evolve solutions that all groups can commit to.

Focuses on InterSoft of Argentina, a growing software company in Argentina. In 1993, InterSoft acquires a Russian software company and Emilo Lopez, the vice president and director of InterSoft's Systems Software Lab, must manage a creative, cross-cultural, "virtual" team. This case illustrates InterSoft's origins and highlights the relationship between the founding partners, Lopez and Felix Racca.

Focuses on InterSoft of Argentina, a growing software company in Argentina. In 1993, InterSoft acquires a Russian software company and Emilo Lopez, the vice president and director of InterSoft's Systems Software Lab, must manage a creative, cross-cultural, "virtual" team. This case reveals a quarrel that arises over e-mail between an Argentine programmer and a Russian programmer. Lopez, as the manager of the development team, must decide how to handle the situation. Since the exchanges between these programmers were preserved in e-mail files, this case provides a unique opportunity to analyze a conflict situation as it escalates.

Supplements the (A) and (B) cases. Designed to be handed out at the end of class.

Supplements the (A) case.

Companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that remain fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. The rare ability to balance continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision. Vision provides guidance about what to preserve and what to change. A new prescriptive framework adds clarity and rigor to the vague and fuzzy vision concepts at large today. Managers who master a discovery process to identify core ideology can link their vision statements to the fundamental dynamic that motivates truly visionary companies--that is, the dynamic of preserving the core and stimulating progress.

Thousands of businesses have reengineered work to focus employees on processes that clearly provide value to customers. They have done away with their functional silos and created process-complete departments, each able to perform all the cross-functional tasks required to meet customers' needs. Although many of those efforts have paid off in the form of lower costs, shorter cycle times, and greater customer satisfaction, many others have resulted in disappointment. What went wrong? In a study of U.S. electronics manufacturers, the authors found that process-complete departments had faster cycle times than functional departments only when their managers had used one or more of four ways to cultivate collective responsibility: structuring jobs with overlapping responsibilities, basing rewards on unit performance, laying out the work area so that people can see one another's work, and designing procedures so that employees with different jobs are better able to collaborate.

Diversity efforts in the workplace have been undertaken with great goodwill, but, ironically, they often end up fueling tensions. They rarely spur the leaps in organizational effectiveness that are possible. Two paradigms for diversity are responsible, but a new third paradigm is showing it can address the problem. Leaders in third-paradigm companies are proactive about learning from diversity; they encourage people to make explicit use of cultural experience at work; they fight all forms of dominance and subordination, including those generated by one functional group acting superior to another; and they ensure that the inevitable tensions that come from a genuine effort to make way for diversity are acknowledged and resolved with sensitivity.

Illustrates: 1) the impact of a manager's leadership style on corporate culture, direction, and performance; 2) the concept of fit between leadership style and the requirements of situations in which managers find themselves; and 3) the need for managers to adapt their styles as situational requirements change. More specifically, it provides an opportunity to look at some of the special issues of: 1) being a black woman manager; 2) the advantages and disadvantages associated with a "family corporate culture"; and 3) managing in a creative business. Does not substantially differ from the (A) case, but it does emphasize more strongly Suzanne de Passe's success. Students have misunderstood the standards of the entertainment industry, and this case makes Motown's accomplishments clearer.