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Sarah Sullivan, the new Managing Director of Greater Marketing Solutions, faces the difficult challenge of letting seven professionals go within a short span of time. In doing so she faces two greater challenges: figuring out which individuals to let go and getting her leadership team on board with her plan.

Abby Falik, founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year (GCY), quickly read through the most recent news updates regarding the Ebola crisis in West Africa as she prepared for her board call on July 31, 2014. Based in Oakland, California, GCY was a five-year-old not-for-profit with a fiscal year (FY) 2015 budget of $3.5 million. Its mission was to make it much more the norm for graduating high school students in the U.S. to choose a "bridge year." GCY believed this experience after high school, but before college, would help students build self-awareness, learn about the world, and develop grit. In turn, GCY felt these attributes laid the foundation for success in college, and beyond.

The president and CEO of Providence Healthcare needs to devise a plan to sustain positive change at the health care company. In just four years, she has led the organization through massive change and turnaround, from potential crisis to financial health and innovation. She now needs to consider how to integrate and embed the values that helped her drive change and foster collaboration, both at Providence and with its key partners. What more can she do to sustain positive change at Providence Healthcare through her values-based leadership and to win the support of key stakeholders well into the future? Much of the success thus far has depended on her values and character as a leader.

In September 2012, the vice-president of Internal Audit at Prashanti Technologies, a multinational corporation headquartered in Mumbai, India, was reviewing an external audit team's report before a meeting of the company's ethics committee. The committee had only one item on the agenda: a sensitive case involving a company vice-president, the head of its financial services division, who had been accused by an anonymous whistleblower of conducting a workplace affair with a subordinate. Further, it was alleged that he had unfairly promoted her by giving her additional undeserved responsibilities and that she had taken undue advantage of her workplace romance by giving orders to the rest of the team. The ethics committee was required to decide what action, if any, should be taken against the vice-president and the junior manager.

The Circle Chart is a simple framework that offers users a system to think through complex, multi-party or cross-cultural negotiations, as well as written negotiations. It can also be used to structure debriefing of negotiations.

The Circle Chart is a simple framework that offers users a system to think through complex, multi-party or cross-cultural negotiations, as well as written negotiations. It can also be used to structure debriefing of negotiations.

The case offers a great opportunity to engage in discussion about major theoretical issues, such as the debate about the benefits of effective governance for the competitiveness of firms vis-à-vis the negative effects of excessive regulation. At the practical level, the case opens a window on the efforts of progressive enterprises in adopting behaviors, and building and establishing processes conducive to their competitiveness. The case provides a platform for considering the strengthening of business competitiveness. It encourages reflection about competitiveness whatever the nature of the organization. The lessons drawn from this case, thus, could appeal to any company because they highlight the challenges and opportunities that the search for competitiveness brings.

Marie Trellu-Kane is trying to decide how Unis-Cite should respond to French President Jacques Chirac's announcement in 2005 of a new national voluntary civil service program. Since 1994, Trellu-Kane and her co-founders had been creating and overseeing a civil service program called Unis-Cite, in which youth, particularly from the disadvantaged immigrant population, volunteered nine months of their time to work on community projects. Based in Paris, France, Unis-Cite had begun to expand to other areas. With the announcement that the government would provide funding to mobilize thousands of youth volunteers, Trellu-Kane needed to decide how Unis-Cite would proceed.

This case supplements "Sanford C. Bernstein Goes to Asia." Updates readers on Ghislain de Charentenay's first full year as director of Asian Research at Sanford C. Bernstein in Hong Kong and actions taken by the firm in FY2013.

A new study suggests that rats integrate information more effectively than humans do.

Authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership. But as INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra argues, a simplistic understanding of what authenticity means can limit leaders' growth and impact. All too often, we tend to latch on to authenticity as an excuse for sticking with what's comfortable. But few jobs allow us to do that for long. In this article, Ibarra explains how leaders can develop an "adaptively authentic" style by experimenting with many different leadership approaches. It's OK to change tactics from one day to the next, she says. That's not being fake; it's how we figure out what's right for the challenges and circumstances we face. Three strategies can help you break free from a self-concept that's too rigid: Learn from diverse role models. Growth necessarily involves some form of imitation, but don't copy just one person's leadership style. Borrow selectively from various people to create your own collage. Work on getting better. Set learning goals-not just performance targets-to focus on the value of experimentation. Stretch the limits of who you are by doing new things that make you uncomfortable but help you discover by direct experience whom you want to become. Don't stick to "your story." Jettison outdated self-concepts and draw on personal narratives that fit your circumstances as you're taking on new challenges.

Big data is proving difficult to translate into useful knowledge, the authors write. That's in part because a company's knowledge assets involve so much more: core competencies, areas of expertise, intellectual property, and deep pools of talent. Large-scale, sustainable growth is generally made possible when people take insights from one knowledge domain and apply them in another--when deep technical expertise in one business unit is applied in a different business unit, for example, or when a best-in-class marketing group pulls a product development unit into the 21st century by sharing market insights gleaned from customer data. The authors describe how to map your organization's strategic knowledge and identify where it can help you create value and growth. When knowledge assets are placed in a grid along two dimensions--"unstructured" (tacit) versus "structured" (explicit) and "undiffused" (proprietary) versus "diffused" (shared)--it becomes easier to manage them for future competitive advantage.

Though it's been over a decade since the first wave of post-Enron governance reforms, boards are still failing to provide strong oversight and strategic support for management's efforts to create long-term value. Consider these damning results from a recent McKinsey survey: A mere 34% of directors believe that the boards they serve on fully comprehend their companies' strategies, and just 16% think that their boards have a strong understanding of the dynamics of their firms' industries. Another survey asked directors and C-suite executives where the greatest pressure to deliver short-term results came from. The most frequent response? Boards. In this article the global managing director of McKinsey and the CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board propose measures to strengthen boards and encourage their members to focus more on long-term opportunities and strategy. Companies can start by recruiting independent thinkers and people with the right expertise as directors, fostering high-quality strategic conversations, and instituting key nonfinancial metrics. Engaging deeply with major long-term shareholders, especially about growth strategies, would also alleviate a lot of the pressure to maximize short-term results. And board compensation needs to be rethought: Directors should be paid more (but serve on fewer boards), and the mix of rewards should be retooled to emphasize long-term performance.

Every business decision depends on making a forecast of the consequences of the decision. Although most organizations do forecasting, most do so badly. They ask either for a point prediction-a single "best guess" forecast, when everyone knows that this is an oversimplification of the truth, or for a simple range forecast, which is likely to result in biased predictions more often than not. In this article, the authors propose a better approach, one that takes seriously the uncertainty in forecasting and the most common errors in the way people think about this uncertainty.

With the 2010 FIFA World Cup fast approaching, Johannesburg, South Africa, needs a much-improved public transport system. A bus rapid transit (BRT) system is proposed and the key challenge involves getting buy-in from the minibus-taxi industry, which serves current commuters with 22,000 minibus-taxis, but which sometimes threatens violence to ensure there is little change in its way of operating. The leader of the main Johannesburg taxi association embarks on a process of personal growth to find the courage and capacity to lead the taxi industry away from resistance and into a business partnership with the city. He and his small team undertake a personally risky journey to implement BRT through the Rea Vaya project, thus changing the landscape of Johannesburg and bringing safe transport to hundreds of thousands of residents. But only days after the launch of the BRT system, two people in a BRT bus are shot by a gunman. With the 2010 FIFA World Cup less than a year away, is it worth commuters and Rea Vaya workers being shot and potentially killed? Could anything have been done differently to avoid this? Should the whole project be put on hold? If they stop one more time, it might never get off the ground again.

Susie Mulder must decide how to lead NIC+ZOE-the women's apparel brand she had recently joined as CEO-from its start-up phase into a disciplined growth phase. With growing revenues, a successful product line, and savvy private equity investors, NIC+ZOE seems perfectly positioned for growth, but the company is struggling to execute efficiently, and senior managers are torn about a key decision: whether to go into e-commerce or not.

The third-generation leader of CFR Pharmaceuticals had been successful in executing a strategy of consolidating pharmaceutical firms across Latin America. As part of the company's expansion strategy, the CEO explored opportunities to develop multiple sources of growth and expand CFR Pharmaceutical's footprint in emerging markets; to do this, he found a company in South Africa, Adcock Ingram, to acquire. The combined company would offer CFR product synergy and diversification, improved manufacturing and distribution capabilities and a unique emerging market footprint in 23 countries. In the process of making an offer of approximately US$1.2 billion to acquire the company, the CEO faced increased interest in Adcock from other potential acquirers. He also encountered a series of difficulties when an Adcock shareholder resisted the acquisition, but CFR maintained the consistent support of the Adcock Ingram board.