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In early 2016, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Allergan South Africa had been leading his team through changes resulting from a number of mergers over the past four years. Allergan Inc. (Allergan) had been the third-largest generic drug maker in the United States after it combined with Actavis plc in 2015, and the company was depicted as an example of "merger mania" in the pharmaceutical sector. Operating in 40 countries, Allergan had gone through a total of five mergers between 2012 and 2015-a period that had included a hostile takeover bid, cost cutting exercises, and, eventually, an acquisition. The CEO at Allergan South Africa had been working with his human resources director to build a "supertribe" culture in response to the changes. Now, faced with the challenge of yet another anticipated merger, some of the executive team had resigned, unwilling to go through the turmoil of more acquisitions. How could the CEO keep his people engaged at the regional division? What leadership style would enable him to effectively make the needed changes?

Evan Siddall, newly appointed CEO of Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation, a governmental organization focused on the residential housing market, is charged with leading change at the organization. The case follows this process of change step by step and looks at the challenges Siddall faces. After two years of leading change Siddall questions: should he continue to push forward with a change agenda? Or should the organization pause and catch its breath?

When Tony Tan Caktiong had stepped down as president and CEO of Jollibee Foods Corporation in mid-2014, he had been succeeded by his younger brother, Ernesto Tanmantiong. In 2016, the brothers were working together to realize the company's vision of making JFC a truly international organization with a significant global presence. As they positioned the company for expansion, they thought perhaps the company's eight values should become more succinct, memorable, and aligned with the company's vision. Tan Caktiong was aware, however, that some company executives would view pausing to contemplate values a waste of time; they would argue that values are essentially identical at every company and irrelevant to performance. Others would assert that values should not change. Was it the right time to reassess the company's values? How could Tan Caktiong persuade skeptics that values make a difference? And as the company grew, should values be articulated at the corporate level, or should they vary among JFC's brands?

Cameron (Cam) Barker, founder and CEO of Blake Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear, manufacturers and distributers of sports apparel and accessories, was facing a challenge with his executive team. Their inability to work together on seemingly simple issues was a chronic problem. Although they were a competent group of executives, most of whom had been with Barker for a number of years and had played an integral role in the growth of his company, the team's dynamics were dysfunctional. Lack of communication, mistrust, and refusal to collaborate were some of their biggest challenges. Barker had had enough and was ready to take action, but what action should he take? How could he teach the executive team to work together? Did he have the right people in the right roles? Was the team appropriately structured and managed? How could Barker bring his executive team together in order to maximize performance and face the challenges and opportunities that would be presenting themselves to his young company in the months and years ahead?

Ruwwad was a youth-centric community development organization aimed at empowering and supporting marginalized and underdeveloped communities in the Arab world. It had launched numerous programs revolving around three main components: 1) youth empowerment, 2) community empowerment, and 3) child development. Samar Dudin, regional head and program manager of Ruwwad, was reflecting on the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges that Ruwwad faced in its home operation so that she could present her recommendations to the board of directors (BOD) on Friday. Her main concern was to present to the BOD a reasoned plan on how to expand the Ruwwad model and how to strengthen the partnerships required to scale up the impact of the model in the future.

Infinity Life Insurance Company was a joint venture between two Indian public sector banks and a U.K.-based insurance firm. The company began its operations in November 2009, as the youngest entrant in the life insurance market in India. Within three years of launching operations, it ranked among the top 10 private firms for new business premiums. When the joint venture project started, the senior leadership group identified numerous challenges and various strategies to address those challenges (detailed in this case). The company connected its basic business strategies to a set of human resource strategies, which were then applied through various human resource processes. With the Indian government focusing on further liberalization in the insurance sector, the joint venture needed to be ready for the next leap. Which processes should it continue, and which needed to be changed?

After a year at AW Ltd., a family-owned Indian pharmaceutical company, a change management agent was disillusioned about her ability to add value to the organization or gain buy-in for her change initiative. Although she was adept at information collection, data analysis, and using tools for organizational intervention, she had failed to account for softer issues of change management in terms of people management, handling inertia, breaking power centres, and building influence. Management of group inclusion processes were crucial to build buy-in and a sense of urgency to enact change. Why exactly had her change management process gone so badly? Should she continue at the firm and, if so, what should she do differently?

Supplement to case W16748.

In December 2004, Chinese computer manufacturer Lenovo announced its purchase of IBM's PC division. At the time, few industry observers were optimistic about the merger of these entities with seemingly opposite company cultures. How should the two entities plan to integrate?

An entrepreneur faced a dilemma regarding the flexible work policy in his start-up consulting firm. The leader of the firm struggled with the complications that arose after the implementation of flexible working arrangements, and the various situations caused him to rethink the concept of trying to help his employees to manage their own work-life balance. Since flexible working hours were granted on a role-by-role basis, a perception of unfairness emerged when a valuable subject-matter expert was denied flextime privileges while many of his colleagues were allowed to take advantage of them. The manager was apprehensive regarding the rising sense of detachment between the users of flextime and the non-users. Should the manager scrap the policy altogether, or should he attempt to find a better way to implement his firm's flexible work arrangements?

In late December 2014, one of the founders of the Indian start-up Deltecs InfoTech (Deltecs) was considering the progress of his organization. Deltecs had received several awards for its product, an innovative middleware that companies could use to create their own applications on mobile platforms. Its customers had also received awards for the innovative ways they had deployed the Deltecs product. The company had grown at a rate of almost 100 per cent per year. To sustain that growth, it would need to explore new products or new markets, which would require additional funding. The co-founder also wanted to achieve 10,000 business-to-business customers by 2020. To do so, Deltecs would need to focus on acquiring and retaining employees who could achieve this growth strategy. The co-founder was considering various funding sources, including equity- and debt-baced options. He also wondered whether to outsource some or all of his company's human resources management functions.

In September 2006, the general manager at Norwood Waterworks (Norwood) was faced with a difficult situation. Since his original employer, EMCO Corporation (Emco), acquired Norwood, he had been tasked with trying to turn around the new acquisition. Like Emco, Norwood was a distributor of building products and equipment in the waterworks industry. The company had three locations, all in Alberta. However, the general manager soon discovered that Norwood was suffering due to a poor organizational culture. Employees were unmotivated, overpaid, and complacent. He needed to communicate-clearly and effectively-that the Emco culture was here to stay, and that the Norwood employees needed to find a way to change the way they operated.

In October 2014, the owner of Rajwant Engineering Pvt. Ltd., a small-scale manufacturing business in Jamshedpur, India, needed to make some key strategic decisions. The immediate challenge was that the company had recently been asked for a bribe by the procurement manager of its most important client. The business owner was a highly ethical entrepreneur, so he was tempted to discontinue his relationship with the client on ethical grounds. However, the business was facing major financial difficulties, and the owner felt great responsibility toward his employees. The business owner wondered if he should instead compromise on his values in order to save his business from bankruptcy.

Organizations expect to see consistency in the decisions of their employees, but humans are unreliable. Judgments can vary a great deal from one individual to the next, even when people are in the same role and supposedly following the same guidelines. And irrelevant factors, such as mood and the weather, can change one person's decisions from occasion to occasion. This chance variability of decisions is called "noise," and it is surprisingly costly to companies, which are usually completely unaware of it. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, a professor of psychology at Princeton, and Andrew M. Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and Tom Blaser of TGG Group explain how organizations can perform a "noise audit" by having members of a professional unit evaluate a common set of cases. The degree to which their assessments vary provides the measure of noise. If the problem is severe, firms can pursue a number of remedies. The most radical is to replace human judgment with algorithms. Unlike people, algorithms always return the same output for any given input, and research shows that their predictions and decisions are often more accurate than those made by experts. Although algorithms may seem daunting to construct, the authors describe how to build them with input data on a small number of cases and some simple commonsense rules. But if applying formulas is politically or operationally infeasible, companies can still set up procedures and practices that will guide employees to make more-consistent decisions.

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case provides background of the company, as well as a description of how its culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. Students are asked to prioritize which people practices are most important for Zurich as it tries to shift its culture and more effectively leverage its human capital in order to reach its organizational goals.

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case "Zurich Insurance: Fostering Key People Management Practices" (417-035) provides background of the company and an outline of each people practice, as well as a description of how the company's culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. This case takes a closer look at the implementation of the manager development initiative "Zurich Oxygen."

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case "Zurich Insurance: Fostering Key People Management Practices" (417-035) provides background of the company and an outline of each people practice, as well as a description of how the company's culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. This case takes a closer look at the company's efforts around diversity and inclusion.

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case "Zurich Insurance: Fostering Key People Management Practices" (417-035) provides background of the company and an outline of each people practice, as well as a description of how the company's culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. This case takes a closer look at the implementation of a global job model and how it has enabled the use of data analytics in the human resources function.

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case "Zurich Insurance: Fostering Key People Management Practices" (417-035) provides background of the company and an outline of each people practice, as well as a description of how the company's culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. This case takes a closer look at the adoption of new recruitment practices.

Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after implementing five new people practices focused on: manager development, diversity and inclusion, job model and data analytics, recruitment, and talent pipeline. The case "Zurich Insurance: Fostering Key People Management Practices" (417-035) provides background of the company and an outline of each people practice, as well as a description of how the company's culture was changing and how its allocation of resources was being examined as it tried to improve its position in the marketplace. This case takes a closer look at succession planning at the top of the organization, including a focus on leadership competencies and development.