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Karen Miner is a partner at a management consulting firm, and she is becoming increasingly resentful of another partner who consistently prioritizes their family life, while letting others pick up their slack at their busy office. When Miner vents about it to trusted colleagues, she finds that they agree that it is a big problem, and pervasive throughout the office. With this case, students can role-play the eventual confrontation between these two partners, learn tools and tips for being effective in these types of difficult conversations, and extend the case with an assignment to pitch senior partners possible solutions for workload and work-life balance issues facing partners. The case is designed to surface students' instinctive decision-making and communication tendencies. Thus it is short enough to be read and responded to in class. Students are assigned readings and assignments related to the case after class discussion, in which they are encouraged to reflect on their initial responses. The case is quite flexible and would work in any course that deals with leadership, difficult conversations, decision-making, organizational behavior, human resources, and related topics. It is appropriate for a range of levels and audiences, especially MBA and executive education. It may work best with older students who may identify with the competing demands of family and work, although younger audiences may appreciate discussing these issues as well.

The topic of mindfulness seemed ubiquitous in the health and business sectors in 2018. Both live and virtual mindfulness trainings in the workplace proliferated, becoming an accepted part of employee well-being activities in many organizations. This case profiles how four organizations incorporated meditation-based mindfulness programs into the workplace: LinkedIn, Aetna, Intuit, and the U.S. Forest Service. The case discusses the origins and leadership of the programs, how the companies define mindfulness, how they measure results, the progress they had made, and how they intended to grow. The case also covers the challenges these programs faced and how mindfulness leaders looked to address those challenges. The case asks students to consider some fundamental questions about mindfulness in the workplace: What kinds of mindfulness trainings are valuable, and what are the best ways to implement these programs in the workplace to maximize impact and efficiency? Who should lead these programs, and where might there be employee resistance? What might be unintended negative consequences?

An unlikely but highly effective leader of a traditional bank, Rakefet Russak-Aminoach, simultaneously leads a classic change effort and an unconventional effort to innovate.

In 2015, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) moved from target-driven sales, to a no-sales target regime. This change involved the sales incentives plan and performance measurement parameters of the front line medical sales force of the company. The executive director of Human Resources knew that challenges lay ahead in managing the company's employees and reinvigorating the values of the organization. He was hoping to shift the focus of the sales force to ethical behaviour, dissemination of scientific knowledge among doctors, and customer and patient care. Many people were adapting to the new system while a few resisted, and some left the organization. Though management anticipated this turn of events and accepted the employee turnover, the director knew that more work needed to be done to make the new system more acceptable and functional. How should he address the subjectivity of the system, simplify it for his salesforce, and address the concerns of his managers? Would the new system motivate performance? Could he convince his employees of the potential benefits of the process- and competence-based pay system at GSK?

Student spreadsheet to case W19580

In October 2018, Chef Carme Ruscalleda, the most-starred woman chef in the world at the time, closed the doors of her Restaurant Sant Pau (Sant Pau), as she had on almost every night for the past 30 years-this time for the last time. Ruscalleda had opened the restaurant in 1988 with her husband and partner. Sant Pau had a rating of three Michelin stars, the highest rating available to a restaurant through the well-known MICHELIN Guide to fine dining. Her other two restaurants-Sant Pau Tokyo, a sister restaurant in Japan, and Moments, in Barcelona's Mandarin Oriental Hotel-had two Michelin stars each. Many people-from the village and around the world-were sad to see the iconic restaurant close after so many decades. The case describes her approach to cooking, managing teams, dealing with stress, running a family business and constantly reinventing herself.

In 2018, Changsheng Bio-technology Co., Ltd. (Changsheng), a leading biopharmaceutical company and one of the market leaders in vaccines, was found to have falsified its production and inspection data and to have sold substandard vaccines in the Chinese market. The unethical conduct triggered widespread public anger and immediate government intervention. What actions could Changsheng take to mitigate the effect of this scandal?

By 2018, Netflix had been credited for revolutionizing how viewers consumed entertainment-shifting from ad-fueled linear network programming to a highly personalized, on-demand, all-you-can-consume, ad-free model. The company was riding a long wave of revenue and subscriber growth as it expanded internationally and into original production. From its earliest days, Netflix leadership had fostered a workplace characterized by such values as excellence, maturity, transparency, accountability, candor, and autonomy. The Culture Deck, later dubbed the Culture Memo, documented how Netflix's culture had evolved and enabled the organization to repeatedly innovate, disrupt, and pivot. The case examines the company's history and delves into ways leadership continues to nurture its unique culture through an emphasis on concepts such as "freedom and responsibility," "context, not control," and "highly aligned, loosely coupled." The case allows students to assess CEO Reed Hastings' view that the culture is capable of further scaling even as headcount surges and the company continues its expansion into new geographies and even more content production.

In 2017, Bill Connors, the President of Comcast's Central Division, launched a startup accelerator in Comcast's new Atlanta Regional headquarters. Comcast was America's largest cable and internet service provider, having built a profitable business bundling television content and delivering it via cable networks to more than 20 million households. The business was changing rapidly with the rise of streaming services, and Connors wanted to change the culture and orientation of Comcast's central division. Connors was getting ready to meet Burunda Prince, a candidate for the position of Managing Director of the new accelerator. Is she the right person for the job? The case explores structural questions for corporate startup accelerators, such as whether Comcast should hire another company to manage the accelerator and where the accelerator should be located. It also provides a basis for discussions relating to the role that a startup accelerator can play in a large corporation. This case can be taught as a standalone case, or with its counterpart, "Burunda Prince at The Farm, a Comcast NBCUniversal Innovation Hub (Powered by Boomtown)" which would follow this one and focuses on the operational challenges of launching a corporate startup accelerator.

After a successful inaugural year, Burunda Prince, the Managing Director of Comcast's startup business accelerator The Farm, was getting ready for an eventful 2019. Comcast was America's largest cable and internet service provider, having built a profitable business bundling television content and delivering it via cable networks to more than 20 million households. The business was changing rapidly with the rise of streaming services, and The Farm was an initiative spearheaded by Comcast's Central Division to introduce innovation into the Division's culture. The case describes Prince's approach in building The Farm from her arrival in August 2017, with discussions around how she chose participants for The Farm's programs, how she worked with Comcast and with her employer, Boomtown Accelerators, who was under contract to run The Farm for Comcast, and how she developed her Atlanta ecosystem of startups, investors, and mentors. Should the business accelerator maintain its position as a general business accelerator, or should it focus on areas specific to Comcast? Should it maintain the same curriculum structure for its accelerator programs? This case can be taught as a standalone case, or with its counterpart, "Bill Connors and The Farm, a Comcast NBCUniversal Innovation Hub (Powered by Boomtown)" which precedes this one and focuses on Comcast's rationale for launching a corporate startup accelerator.

This case describes Saudi Telecom Co.'s (STC's) transition from a government-run entity to a business competing on the open market. Early in its transition phase, STC recognized it would need to transform its employee and company culture to succeed. Led by Dr. Khaled Biyari and his immediate predecessors, STC's cultural transformation was widely heralded as successful by 2018. But Biyari left the CEO role that year, leaving Nasser Bin Sulaiman Al Nasser to take over the position. The change at STC's helm represented a critical inflection point for a company that, as the incumbent provider of all telecommunications in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was seen as critical to the success of the country as a whole. The case is intended to show how a management change might be handled during a firm's critical years. Could Al Nasser continue the cultural improvements of his predecessor? And how would he go about building on the legacy of Biyari, whose personal vision and leadership presence was seen as essential to STC's achievements? Could Al Nasser push STC to become the modern, digital company it would need to be to attract talent in the highly competitive technology pool?

This study integrates insights from Self-Determination Theory and Boundary Theory to present scenarios on how flexible workplace designs can trigger multiple motivational processes underlying gendered work/nonwork integration behaviors, and how these affect work/life conflict. We disentangle processes underlying work engagement and work/life conflict, explaining the paradoxical outcomes found with regard to gender inequality in terms of work/life performance, satisfaction, and health. Policy makers and organizations need an increased understanding and a reconceptualization of these issues, realizing that the ideal worker does not exist. Instead, a long-term perspective is needed in order to truly realize the potential benefits of flexible workplace designs for all stakeholders. Organizations need to take responsibility for preventing individual workers' depletion and stimulating the regeneration of workers' resources.

Recent research has developed an in-depth understanding of how workers change their jobs on their own to improve their performance and well-being, a process called job crafting. This research suggests that managers, coworkers, and organizations need a better understanding of how to manage job crafting to capitalize on its benefits and reduce costs. This article will help organizations diagnose the occurrence of job crafting, recognize the differences between goal-oriented approaches to job crafting as opposed to withdrawal-oriented avoidance job crafting, and identify the seven specific types of job crafting: work role expansion, social expansion, work role reduction, work organization, adoption, metacognition, and withdrawal. We conclude with recommendations for managers, coworkers, and organizations on how to diagnose and manage job crafting.

Firms use flexible work arrangements (FWAs) to attract, retain, and satisfy human resource capital, while workers use them to manage work and nonwork demands and to reduce stress and conflict. Yet, even when firms have such policies on the books, employees often do not use them because they perceive a lack of support from their organization or their supervisor. Employees may even feel that they will be stigmatized for using such policies. Using an ecological framework, we examine factors that influence support for FWAs at multiple levels: the organization or business unit, the supervisor or work group, and the individual. We offer recommendations to address the mechanisms that affect FWA support at these levels of analyses and present ways organizational leaders may positively influence a work environment by supporting workplace flexibility.

Females represent just 6% of Fortune 500 CEOs in the U.S. Which competencies, traits, motivations, and experiences drive female CEOs to the corner office? Our study includes interviews with 57 women, all current and former CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, in an effort to explore the common characteristics of female CEOs and record their experiences as well as actions organizations took that supported-and hindered-their leadership ascents. We found common themes of female CEOs' courage, risk taking, resilience, and ability to manage ambiguity. Women need not shy away from tough and unpredictable job assignments that will build these characteristics. To this end, we suggest steps organizations should take to cultivate a robust pipeline of female talent in the workplace.

A majority of mothers with infants less than 1 year old participate in the labor force. Employers can modify the physical and social environments at work to accommodate breastfeeding employees and enable continued participation in the labor force. The purpose of our article is to (1) characterize breastfeeding policies and programs offered at workplaces currently in two Pennsylvania cities and (2) identify improvement areas to support breastfeeding employees in the workplace. We partnered with two business groups on health in Pennsylvania and electronically administered a survey to their employer members. Responses were aggregated into a workplace lactation support score that included scores on physical space, time, policy, and resources. Higher scores indicate that employers offered a large number of workplace lactation supports. We conclude by offering specific improvement opportunities that include a written policy communicated to all employees and the formal communication of lactation services. Employers can utilize workplace lactation support scores to elect interventions that are feasible for implementation in their organizations.

As demonstrated by both empirical and non-empirical research, women are more likely than men to be a target of workplace incivility. This manifests in a variety of negative outcomes for female employees, including turnover intentions, poor performance, and higher levels of stress. The problem is exacerbated for women in STEM fields due to factors unique to these industries. Herein, we outline the unique characteristics of STEM organizations that can foster the creation and sustenance of an atmosphere promoting workplace incivility against female employees. Then, we provide five best practice recommendations geared toward reducing incivility, improving work climate, and promoting overall retention of women in STEM.