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A recent law-school graduate is delighted to land a job as a junior associate at an up-and-coming legal firm in New Delhi, India. In spite of his initial enthusiasm for the job, after just three months, the young man is on the brink of quitting. The firm has failed to meet its promises with respect to compensation and the nature of the work assigned. After many fruitless attempts to rectify the situation, the young associate is left feeling powerless, cheated and angry. A series of futile arguments with his immediate superior have left him all the more bitter, as he believes that his boss holds some sort of personal grudge against him. He now wonders whether he should quit this job he so desperately wanted, or tough it out and wait for things to get better.

After 16 years in management consulting, Barış Karakullukçu left to become the CEO of Mudo in 2012, one of the best-known names in Turkey's retail industry. She was tasked with leading Mudo's transition from a family business to a more institutionalized, corporate structure and ensuring a smooth handover of the company from the first to the second-generation owner. As CEO, she makes a series of difficult decisions to transform the company. She develops a new performance management system, reengineers most of the operations, and replaces 80% of the management team including several C-level executives. Two years later, the impact on operations is positive, however the company's profitability continues to struggle. Karakullukçu must decide how best to move forward. While the founder seeks rapid and opportunistic growth, Karakullukçu believes that the company should stabilize its cost structure and limit expansion plans.

Mark Verbiest, Chairman of Transpower New Zealand, initiated a performance review of Transpower's board of directors. The review, which took four months to complete, provided board members with individualized feedback on their performance, as well as information on how the overall board functioned as a team. As Verbiest considered the feedback from this process he questioned, was Transpower's board operating at optimal performance levels? Was Transpower's new CEO receiving the support she needed to fulfill her responsibilities? And, in light of the evaluation's findings, what should the board's action plan be?

This case describes the implementation of a results-only work environment (ROWE) at Mabel's Labels, a successful entrepreneurial firm in Canada. Under ROWE, employee performance is managed by examining outcomes and accomplishments, not by measuring the amount of time people spend at the workplace. The case provides details of the change process and ROWE implementation. The change leader views ROWE as a strategic initiative to enhance the organizational culture and is pleased with employee attitudes and productivity under ROWE. She wonders, however, what next steps are needed to mitigate emerging issues, such as employee coordination, team building and the assimilation of new employees.

This case describes the challenges faced by Jerry Richardson, the owner of the Carolina Panthers National Football League (NFL) team, following the arrest of one of the team's star players on domestic violence charges. Domestic violence suddenly was a major issue in the NFL after a video became public depicting domestic violence by another famous NFL player. Richardson needs to decide how to deal with the Panther's star player. His considerations include competing stakeholder interests, financial and performance consequences for the team, as well as consequences for his own legacy. The case allows for discussion of challenging trade-offs between financial performance and tackling necessary but difficult change.

The head of human resources at Attock Refinery Limited was trying to evaluate the company's existing performance appraisal system in the context of the forthcoming refinery expansion project as well as looming changes in industry dynamics. Over the last few decades, the performance management system at Attock Refinery had undergone significant changes as a result of both internal and external factors. The modified performance management system had solved certain issues, but other challenges remained. The company wanted to determine whether the changes in the performance management system were effective in managing several administrative tasks (e.g., promotion and fixing performance increments), development activities like training and, above all, the fulfillment of Attock Refinery's strategic aim to inculcate a company-wide culture of performance.

Managing change is consistently ranked as one of the most critical and difficult tasks that leaders face. This note outlines the key choices that leaders must make when engineering change. It is organized into four sections, offering guidance on how to: 1) diagnose the need for change; 2) determine what sort of change is called for (e.g., radical or incremental); 3) develop a delivery strategy that fosters stakeholder buy-in; and, 4) evaluate impact. Managers, instructors, and students of change management should find this note especially useful for discussing the core tenants of designing and implementing a change initiative. This is an abridged version of the "Leading and Managing Change" note.

A new set of experiments reveals that being let down induces surprisingly collaborative behavior in people.

Agricultural inventions from 18th-century noble estates in France, including a wheat thresher, a tree transporter, and an incubation shed for chicken eggs.

ABB India, the Indian subsidiary of ABB Global, has been lagging behind the parent company's other subsidiaries in terms of its percentage of female employees. To rectify the gender imbalance, the parent company has assigned the head of Diversity and Inclusion for India, the Middle East and Africa with the task of introducing and rolling out diversity and inclusion initiatives at ABB India. In June 2014, the chairperson of ABB has scheduled a visit to India and is looking forward to reviewing the status and progress of the diversity and inclusion program.

In July 2007, after several failed attempts to acquire Huntsman Corporation, Hexion/Apollo prevailed in a bidding war for the company and signed a definitive merger agreement. Apollo had down bid Huntsman during previous attempts to acquire the company, and Huntsman was suspicious. That suspicion, coupled with Huntsman's leverage that resulted from a competitive bid situation, prompted and enabled Huntsman to negotiate seller friendly terms. For example, there was no financing contingency, and although the merger agreement contained both a material adverse effect (MAE) clause and a reverse termination fee, the potential damages if Hexion/Apollo breached the agreement were uncapped. As the credit markets deteriorated in late 2007 and into 2008 and Huntsman turned in disappointing financial results, the Huntsman deal no longer looked attractive to Hexion/Apollo. Hexion/Apollo wanted out. Would the material adverse change (MAC) clause in the merger agreement permit Hexion/Apollo to simply walk away? Even if the MAE clause were not applicable, could Hexion/Apollo walk away by paying the reverse termination fee? Or were potential damages uncapped?

We've long sensed that spending time in green landscapes soothes and restores us. Now new research reveals that people benefit from simply looking at nature--for remarkably short periods of time.

At some point, every company makes a mistake that requires an apology--to an individual; a group of customers, employees, or business partners; or the public at large. And more often than not, companies and their leaders fail to apologize effectively, if at all, which can severely damage their reputations and their relationships with stakeholders. Companies need clearer guidelines for determining whether a mistake merits an apology and, when it does, for crafting and delivering an effective message. In this article, the authors present their framework--the apology formula--to help companies navigate the tricky terrain. Leaders should ask themselves four questions: (1) Was there a violation? (2) Was it core to our promise or mission? (3) How will the public react? (4) Are we committed to change? As a general rule, the more central to the mission of the company the violation is and the more people it affects, the more important it is that the apology be pitch-perfect. Once a company decides that an apology is necessary, it needs to carefully consider the who, what, where, when, and how of executing it. For core violations, the "who" has to be senior leaders, the "what" has to show a tremendous commitment to change, the "where" has to be high profile, the "when" has to be fast, and the "how" must be deeply sincere and demonstrate empathy.

Ever since it became clear that smart design led to the success of many products, companies have been employing it in other areas, from customer experiences, to strategy, to business ecosystems. But as design is used in increasingly complex contexts, a new hurdle has emerged: gaining acceptance of the "designed artifact" into the status quo. In fact, the more innovative a new design is, the more resistance it's likely to meet. The solution, say the CEO of IDEO and the Rotman School's former dean, is to also apply design thinking to the introduction of the innovation itself. This process, "intervention design," grew organically out of the iterative prototyping that designers did to help understand customers' reactions to new products. Not only did iterative prototyping create better offerings, but it was a great way to get organizational funding and commitment, because it improved the chances of success and reduced fear of the unknown. Intervention design uses iterative prototyping to get buy-in too, but extends it to interactions with all the principal stakeholders--not just customers. When Intercorp Group devised a revolutionary concept for Peru's schools, it needed to win acceptance for corporate-run education and for a very different role for teachers. Thanks to intervention design, it now has 29 schools in operation and is rapidly growing.

In large organizations, design is moving closer to the center of the enterprise. This shift isn't about aesthetics and product development, however. It's about imparting the principles of design--collectively known as "design thinking"--throughout the organization. The approach is in large part a response to the complexity of many products, services, and processes. People need help--they need their interactions with technologies and other complicated systems to be intuitive and pleasurable. Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. The principles include a focus on users' experiences, especially their emotional ones; the creation of physical models, such as diagrams and sketches, to explore problems; the use of prototypes to experiment with solutions; a tolerance for failure; and thoughtful restraint in product features so that even a complex piece of technology can be easy to use. Creating a design-centric culture requires understanding that the returns on an investment in design are difficult to quantify, allowing people to take chances, and appreciating what design can and cannot achieve. Design helps people and organizations cut through complexity and imagine the future, but it doesn't solve all problems.

The co-founders/consultants at Maynard Leigh Associates (MLA), an HR consulting firm based in the United Kingdom and India, are in a quandary about how to respond to a couple of ethical dilemmas. In the first case, a client has hired MLA to deliver a series of workshops to a group of employees who clearly do not need any help of this kind, and the workshop facilitator feels the client is wasting its money. In the second case, the CEO of a local IT giant has hired MLA to host a workshop that would brainstorm ways to eradicate all roadblocks to his organization's success, but during the delivery of this workshop, the consultants realized that the biggest roadblock to the organization's success was the CEO himself. Should the partners be open with the client about their findings and risk damaging a lucrative business relationship, or should they simply remain silent on the subject and pocket their fee. What would be the impact of their decision on the future of their company? Importantly, they need to make a decision that upholds MLA's corporate values.

In 2015, Riot Games, the maker of the top PC game League of Legends, considers its growth strategy as it moves into a new campus in Los Angeles.