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Roger Goodell, commissioner of the National Football League (NFL), needs to determine how the league should proceed in pursuing an international growth strategy. Traditionally, American football has trailed other sports such as basketball in terms of global participation and fan interest. However, under Goodell's leadership, the NFL has played an increasing number of games outside the United States, launched a variety of international marketing programs, and experienced record global viewership. It is Goodell's responsibility to act in the best interests of the 32 league owners who have chosen him as commissioner. The increasing popularity of the NFL outside the United States causes Goodell to wonder just how far the league should go in expanding internationally in the upcoming years. This case focuses on global management, the integration of business strategy, and organizational design in a setting where there is no proven answer or playbook to be followed. The NFL, like many larger and highly successful American organizations, is not lacking for funds, resources, or international opportunities. Yet it is still challenged by the complex task of expanding a highly US-centric product to other parts of the world where people do not have the same familiarity with its offerings. The case offers an opportunity for students to apply fundamental global management skills-cultural and environmental analysis of countries, organizational structure design, and strategy formulation-in an engaging and visible setting. The material in this case also provides instructors an opportunity to compare and contrast the international strategies and operations of the NFL with other organizations. Comparisons can be made to other professional sports leagues (such as the National Hockey League [NHL], National Basketball Association [NBA], Major League Baseball [MLB], Formula 1, and various professional soccer leagues) as well as to prominent multinational organizations of other types.

Bolstered dignity eases the path to constructive problem-solving and collaboration. Four interrelated practices to sustain dignity can help people navigate conflict resolution: deepening acknowledgment, strengthening agency, building reciprocity, and ensuring clarity of path.

Brooke Boyarsky Pratt (HBS '13) enjoyed considerable success in her early career, quickly climbing the ranks to associate partner at McKinsey, and later becoming an executive vice president at Berkadia, a Berkshire Hathaway portfolio company. Throughout these years, she had also felt a strong desire to follow her passion and make a difference but had never been able to determine what that meant for her. However, as someone who had struggled with her weight since she was young, a routine visit to the doctor in 2020 where she experienced weight stigma yet again turned into a clarion call, and led Boyarsky Pratt to consider finding some way to address the problem of obesity care. After wrestling with the idea for nearly two years, Boyarsky Pratt quit her job at Berkadia to start knownwell, an integrated weight and primary care provider that had made business model and service design choices to specifically support people with obesity. In December 2022, knownwell raised a $4.5m seed round, and in the spring of 2023, opened its first weight-inclusive clinic in the Boston area to glowing and touching patient reviews. Looking to the future, Boyarsky Pratt had to make a fundamental decision on how she wanted to grow knownwell. Should she grow slowly and build a small footprint of clinics in the area over the next few years? Or should she scale fast to potentially help millions of people across the U.S. struggling with their weight feel better served by their doctor? This decision had both professional and personal implications. Which path should she take?

This case, a follow-up to "Matteo Hill at Drawn, Inc. (A)" (UVA-OB-1293), continues the debate about sharing the raw responses from employee pulse surveys. The decision becomes more complicated after the company releases a new round of raw survey results that contain three wildly different opinions about Drawn, Inc.'s, DEI efforts. The new results highlight the challenge of summarizing or editing the raw survey data, yet also make it clear that the raw survey data will continue to contain divisive and potentially offensive remarks. At the conclusion of the case, Drawn's leadership team remains divided about the best path forward.

This case documents the origin and development of Together for Sustainability (TfS), a chemical industry initiative dedicated to raising sustainability standards throughout the industry's supply chains. In 2011, six Chief Procurement Officers (CPOs) from some of the world's biggest chemical companies collaborated on a solution that would enable their companies to jointly advance supply chain sustainability-namely, eliminating adverse environmental, human rights, and labor impacts by suppliers. Towards this end, the six CPOs would build Together for Sustainability, a standalone non-profit organization that would coordinate the measurement of member companies and their suppliers' sustainability performance. Over the next decade, TfS scaled from 6 to 50 member companies. TfS has transformed the chemical industry by creating a template for collective action and setting new sustainability standards for supply chains. It must now decide what lies ahead and how it might go about achieving those goals. In 2024, TfS was at a critical juncture in its development. While TfS had earned a reputation as a leader in sustainability both within and outside the chemical industry, representatives from TfS member companies were now immersed in vigorous debates as to how to scale their initiative-and their impact-even further. Members were divided as to whether to expand their initiative into other industries or to remain focused on the chemical industry. Moreover, others were beginning to question whether TfS's non-profit model was truly the best medium for scale, or if a for-profit model would potentially be better suited to maximizing impact. What aspects of their initiative were specific to the chemical industry? What might translate to other industries?

Why the need to proactively counter the impact of hubris on organizational leadership has never been greater.

Zoho Corporation Ltd. (Zoho) was a privately held technology company that provided a suite of software applications for businesses of all sizes. The company was founded in 1996 with the aim of providing affordable, easy-to-use software applications to small- and medium-sized enterprises. In 2021, Zoho announced that it had reached $1 billion in revenue. The founders' socio-economic vision of embracing collective well-being and purpose-driven leadership and following unconventional business practices such as transnational localism had contributed to its unwavering growth. Under the leadership of its chief executive officer, who focused on customer-centricity, simplicity, and doing business with responsibility and accountability, the organization was able to pursue social and commercial objectives simultaneously. In late 2023, Zoho intended to address the grand challenges of the world, particularly the challenges of a developing nation, through its coordinated actions and collaborative efforts. The chief executive officer faced several pressing questions: What should Zoho do to remain afloat amid the global downturn? As a socially responsible enterprise, how can could Zoho balance its business goals with social goals, given the complex landscape of social responsibility?

Venture capitalists' unique approach to investment and innovation has played a pivotal role in launching one-fifth of the largest U.S. public companies. And three-quarters of the largest U.S. companies founded in the past 50 years would not have existed or achieved their current scale without VC support. The question is, Why? What makes venture firms so good at finding start-ups that go on to achieve tremendous success? What skills do they have that experienced, networked, and powerful large corporations lack? The authors' research reveals that the venture mindset is characterized by several principles: the individual over the group, disagreement over consensus, exceptions over dogma, and agility over bureaucracy. This article offers guidance to traditional firms in using the VC mindset to spur innovation.

More than a third of large organizations have some type of transformation program underway at any given time, and many launch one major change initiative after another. Though they kick off with a lot of fanfare, most of these efforts fail to deliver. Only 12% produce lasting results, and that figure hasn't budged in the past two decades, despite everything we've learned over the years about how to lead change. Clearly, businesses need a new model for transformation. In this article the authors present one based on research with dozens of leading companies that have defied the odds, such as Ford, Dell, Amgen, T-Mobile, Adobe, and Virgin Australia. The successful programs, the authors found, employed six critical practices: treating transformation as a continuous process; building it into the company's operating rhythm; explicitly managing organizational energy; using aspirations, not benchmarks, to set goals; driving change from the middle of the organization out; and tapping significant external capital to fund the effort from the start.

With organizations of all sorts facing increased urgency and unpredictability, being able to ask smart questions has become key. But unlike lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, business professionals are not formally trained on what kinds of questions to ask when approaching a problem. They must learn as they go. In their research and consulting, the authors have seen that certain kinds of questions have gained resonance across the business world. In a three-year project they asked executives to brainstorm about the decisions they've faced and the kinds of inquiry they've pursued. In this article they share what they've learned and offer a practical framework for the five types of questions to ask during strategic decision-making: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. By attending to each, leaders and teams can become more likely to cover all the areas that need to be explored, and they'll surface information and options they might otherwise have missed.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author reflects on how literature shapes us and more.

Being seen, known and heard in our relationships-personal and professional-requires us to use our voices. But how many of us actually do? The fact is, for minorities in the workplace, there are often incentives to stay silent-particularly for people with traditionally marginalized identities. Many of us are guilty of not listening to others when we disagree with what they're saying or they aren't communicating in our preferred style. We assume, rebut and tune out. In short, we silence - even when we're going through the motions of listening. In an excerpt from her latest book, the author, a Harvard Law School professor, shares insights about 'voice' and tactics for leaders and individuals to encourage voice in those around them in their everyday interactions.

While the existence of workplace discrimination has been firmly established, individual employees often feel uncertain about classifying a negative personal experiences as such. For example, if a woman is passed up for a promotion in favour of a man, she may wonder whether her colleague's performance was simply superior to hers, and may never resolve whether or not it was discriminatory. The authors refer to such experiences as 'ambiguous incidents,' and in this article they describe what these look like and their implications for women at work. In the end, they show that understanding and addressing gender inequality demands considering not only overt discrimination, but ambiguous incidents, as well.

Everyone wants to continue developing over time, in a variety of areas of our lives. But certain aspects of the self are particularly important for attempting self-change. The author, a psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, presents her framework, the Wheel of Self. She explains that the self has five distinct parts: motivation, behaviour, emotions, mind and body. When most of us try to change, we often focus only on our behaviour, forgetting that behaviour is influenced by the other four parts of the self. In the end, she provides key insights about how the self really works-and how to facilitate its development.

This case takes the perspective of Dane Barnes, cofounder of Shibumi Shade, Inc., a North Carolina start-up that created and sells an innovative beach shade. In particular, the case highlights Barnes's and his cofounders' decisions in forming and growing their company, and it presents an inflection point for students to recommend future actions to the cofounders to maintain Shibumi's growth trajectory. The case explores such experiences and decisions as transitioning the venture from a side hustle to a full-time pursuit, protecting intellectual property, seeking outside funding, outsourcing, and growing the venture.

This case takes the perspective of David Merrill, an entrepreneur and cofounder of Elroy Air (Elroy), a San Francisco start-up in the advanced air mobility (i.e., autonomous flight) industry. Elroy's business model depended heavily on innovation, not just in terms of developing new technology, but also doing so within a still-nascent industry. Elroy was a capital-intensive venture, due to high research and development costs and the long time horizon to reach profitability; it also faced risky and uncertain business and regulatory environments. The case provides an integrated profile of the company and Merrill and also contains the information needed for students to identify and understand the components of the business model canvas in the context of a start-up venture.

In December 2022, Dr. Tomislav ("Tom") Mihaljevic, CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic, was reflecting on the last few years at the hospital, marked both by unprecedented challenges and remarkable achievements. Cleveland Clinic had recently been ranked the world's second-best hospital. Dr. Mihaljevic was especially proud of the special recognition given to Cleveland Clinic's COVID-19 pandemic response and attributed this to the hospital's 77,000 "caregivers" (defined as all clinical and nonclinical personnel at the hospital). Despite ongoing challenges, from an anticipated operating loss in 2023 to extreme burnout for caregivers across the hospital enterprise, Dr. Mihaljevic was contemplating ambitious Objective Key Results (OKRs) for 2023, particularly for caregivers. Dr. Mihaljevic and his executive leadership team grappled with the latest pressing issues in their weekly team meeting. They had missed their caregivers targets two years in a row, but Dr. Mihaljevic still thought it was best to set stretch goals for 2023. As they thought about the need to attract and retain caregivers, they recognized how imperative it was to accelerate their digital journey. The executive team was now considering how to achieve this by leveraging technology and data to improve patient and caregiver experiences. It was not clear what 2023 would bring for the hospital, but Dr. Mihaljevic remained optimistic about the year ahead and delivering on Cleveland Clinic's four care priorities: patients, caregivers, organization, and community.

Previous technology breakthroughs did not upend organizational structure, but generative AI and LLMs will. We now face a challenge like that of the original railroad operators: how to rebuild an organization around a fundamental shift in the way work is done, organized, and communicated. What is your organization’s vision about how AI makes work better, not worse? Managers must start answering that question. To guide your thinking, use these three principles for reorganizing work around AI.