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In 2014, as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) has just brought former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on as chairman of the board, Jean Rogers, founder and CEO struggles with how best to ensure the nonprofit's financial sustainability while pushing for broad acceptance of its nonfinancial accounting metrics.

The human resources department at China Sunwah Bank had to decide on 22 new appointments - only 12 of which were officially advertised - to Sunwah Bank's 28 branches. More than 4,000 applications had been received and the final list of candidates based on merit had been reduced to 48. The department members had spent many hours reading applications and conducting interviews; however, some members had been coping with specific endorsements for certain applicants from government officials, friends, former teachers and bank managers in a system known as "guanxi," which was based on a reciprocal exchange of favours that bound individuals together. The challenge was how to choose the most qualified and talented recruits for the new positions at Sunwah Bank, keeping in mind the guanxi-based requests for favours from important stakeholders and friends - including some who had granted significant favours to Sunwah Bank executives in the past. The choice would require sensitivity and cultural awareness. Who would the department hire and why?

In 1999, IBM India became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM Corporation and established a presence in 14 cities across the country. True to its integrated philosophy of corporate citizenship, as the parent company expanded business operations to growth markets around the world, it rolled out citizenship initiatives in those markets. In 2011, IBM International Foundation awarded a grant of US$100,000 to IBM India for Smarter Villages, an India-specific project whose goal was to bring rural Indian villages to technological parity with cities by setting up supply chains and introducing micro financing and other services to create opportunities for an increase in farmer incomes. IBM India management hoped that, if successful, the project could be embedded in the organizational fabric of the global company and thus would reflect its own responsible leadership. The question was whether it would be possible to inculcate a spirit of stakeholder engagement and inspire volunteerism among the company's young workforce.

Jeff Davis, director of Space Life Sciences Directorate at NASA, has been working for several years to raise awareness amongst scientists and researchers in his organizations of the benefits of open innovation as a successful and efficient way to collaborate on difficult research problems regarding health and space travel. Despite a number of initiatives, SLSD members have been skeptical about incorporating the approach into their day-to-day research and work, and have resisted Davis's and his strategy team's efforts. The (A) case outlines these efforts and the organization members' reactions. The (B) case details what Davis and the SLSD strategy team learned, and how they adapted their efforts to successfully incorporate open innovation as one of many tools used in collaborative research at NASA.

Jeff Davis, director of Space Life Sciences Directorate at NASA, has been working for several years to raise awareness amongst scientists and researchers in his organizations of the benefits of open innovation as a successful and efficient way to collaborate on difficult research problems regarding health and space travel. Despite a number of initiatives, SLSD members have been skeptical about incorporating the approach into their day-to-day research and work, and have resisted Davis's and his strategy team's efforts. The (A) case outlines these efforts and the organization members' reactions. The (B) case details what Davis and the SLSD strategy team learned, and how they adapted their efforts to successfully incorporate open innovation as one of many tools used in collaborative research at NASA.

In fall 2009, the new president and chief executive officer of PAR Springer-Miller Systems, based in Stowe, Vermont, is tasked with leading the most significant innovation effort the company has undertaken since its founding in 1984. The company is a leading provider of property management, point-of-sale and spa management systems for high-end hotels, resorts, spas and casinos worldwide, but its legacy products are based on outdated technology and subject to increasing customer complaints; at the same time, the global recession has negatively affected the high-end market. In his first year, the new president has made significant progress in restructuring the organization and shifting its culture to a more entrepreneurial one. He is ready to begin the development of an entirely new product but has to decide on strategy, in particular deciding on the best market on which to focus the new software product and then mapping out a plan to execute its development and launch. How can he elicit a radical innovation from a team of management and employees so culturally rooted in their past accomplishments and legacy products? Should he look for a technology partner and develop the new product in a different location? Can the legacy products be kept up and running long enough for the new product to generate sufficient sales that they can be retired? These are the issues that must be addressed or the company may well face a dire future. See B Case 9B14C023.

A new study suggests that as the day wears on, people's tendency to be dishonest goes up.

Bill Hurt, the new CEO of Hillside Hospital, knew that the forecast was grim. The hospital's service volumes and market share were dropping precipitously. The direct causes of the problems were numerous, but an indirect cause-and major barrier to addressing the declines-lay in the poor relationship between Hillside's management and its physicians. To engage the physicians in problem-solving, he considered a consultant's suggestion: turning the clinical planning process over to the physicians, with management involved only at their request. This approach was risky but Bill thought sometimes you got power by giving it up.

Dr. John Niff, co-chair of the Medical Advisory Panel (MAP) to Hillside Hospital, waited for his colleagues to join him to review the recommendations for The New Hillside Hospital that the panel had developed over the past six months. When Bill Hurst, Hillside's CEO, had first suggested creating a committee of doctors (the MAP) to develop recommendations for clinical programs at the hospital, Niff was skeptical. But as the clinicians worked together to identify problems and set priorities, they developed their management skills as well as a greater appreciation for the challenges facing the hospital. Trust between management and physicians grew as the hospital implemented some of the panel's recommendations. Although the MAP's list of recommendations had not yet been formally accepted by the Board, all participants reflected on the benefits already gained through this process.

Most companies have elaborate procedures for managing capital. They require a compelling business case for any new capital investment. They set hurdle rates. They delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. An organization's time, by contrast, goes largely unmanaged. Bain & Company, with which all three authors are associated, used innovative people analytics tools to examine the time budgets of 17 large corporations. It discovered that companies are awash in e-communications; meeting time has skyrocketed; real collaboration is limited; dysfunctional meeting behavior is on the rise; formal controls are rare; and the consequences of all this are few. The authors outline eight practices for managing organizational time. Among them are: Make meeting agendas clear and exclusive; create a zero-based time budget; require business cases for all initiatives; and standardize the decision process. Some forward-thinking companies bring as much discipline to their time budgets as to their capital budgets. As a result, they have liberated countless hours of previously unproductive time for executives and employees, fueling innovation and accelerating profitable growth.

It's one thing to set goals--and entirely another to get the people in your organization to actually accomplish them. To make the leap from vision to execution, you can't just define what needs doing; you also need to spell out the details of getting it done. One motivational tool that enables this is "if-then planning," which helps people express and carry out their intentions. If-then plans work because contingencies are built into our neurological wiring, says social psychologist Grant. Humans are very good at encoding information in "If x, then y" terms and using such connections to guide their behavior, often unconsciously. When people decide exactly when, where, and how they'll fulfill a goal, they create a link in their brains between the situation or cue (If or when x happens) and the behavior that should follow (then I will do y). This creates powerful triggers for action. To date, most of the research on if-then plans has focused on individuals, but new studies show that they're very effective with groups, improving performance by sharpening focus and prompting members to execute key activities in a timely manner. If-then planning helps organizations avoid poorly expressed goals, groupthink, the tendency to cling to lost causes, and other problems. It pinpoints conditions for success, increases everyone's sense of responsibility, and helps close the troublesome gap between knowing and doing.

Since the start of the 21st century, a new breed of shareholder--the activist hedge fund--has frequently played a decisive role in interactions between corporations and markets. The game of these activists is simple: They buy stocks they view as undervalued and pressure management to do things they believe will raise the value, such as giving more cash back to shareholders or shedding divisions that the activists think are driving down the stock price. With increasing frequency they get deeply involved in governance--demanding board seats, replacing CEOs, and advocating specific business strategies. The authors have identified six ways in which to fend off activist challenges or use them to improve your organization: (1) Have a clear strategic focus and stick to it. (2) Analyze your business as an activist would. (3) Have your external advisers lined up in advance and familiar with your company. (4) Build board chemistry. (5) Perform in the short run against declared goals. (6) Don't dismiss activist ideas out of hand.

Even in an age of relentless self-promotion, some extremely capable professionals prefer to avoid the spotlight. "Invisibles" work in fields ranging from engineering to interpreting to perfumery, but they have three things in common: They are ambivalent about recognition, seeing any time spent courting fame as time taken away from the work at hand. They are meticulous. And they savor responsibility, viewing even high pressure as an honor and a source of fascination. Something else unites Invisibles: They represent a management challenge. The usual carrots don't motivate them; however, managers can take several steps to ensure their satisfaction. Leaders should recognize who their Invisibles are; decide if they want more Invisibles on the team; reward them fairly, soliciting reports on their accomplishments; make the work more intrinsically interesting; and talk to the Invisibles about what works best for them. These actions are well worth taking, as Invisibles not only bring exceptional levels of achievement to an organization but quietly improve the work of those around them, elevating performance and tone across the board.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

An education-gaming firm that has relied largely on volunteer developers has to rethink this strategy as it prepares to pitch investors for a new round of funding. Expert commentary comes from Noam Bardin, CEO of the crowdsourced-mapping company Waze, and Verena Delius, cofounder and managing partner of Fox & Sheep, a company that develops apps for kids.

The case follows the story of Brazilian business leader, Ricardo Semler, who took the family marine-pump business, Semco, to multi-national, multi-sector success. To do so, Ricardo Semler dramatically changed his own leadership style by relinquishing control and working less hard, and subsequently transformed the culture at Semco via a radical process of workplace democratisation. Finally, he applied the same leadership principles successfully to other industries: hotels, education, and banking.

In 2006, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals was a fast-growing biotechnology company. Its leadership team was divided over whether to keep R&D organized in functional departments or transition to interdisciplinary teams. As a small company, Merrimack's R&D organization had established a culture of collaboration across scientific disciplines that some worried would diminish with larger functional departments. Others were concerned that an interdisciplinary team-based design would be inefficient and difficult to manage. This case describes the two proposed organizational designs and presents the arguments within Merrimack's leadership team for and against each. It highlights the tradeoffs associated with each design as they relate to accountability, efficiency, innovation, product orientation, and people management at every stage in the R&D process. Students will explore the relationships between task complexity, collaboration, and organizational design in R&D.

Zingerman's co-founders Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw have a non-traditional approach to growth, allowing employees that receive extensive training through the organization to fulfill their wildest aspirations. Charting a partnership path to ownership, the pair allows employees to forge the businesses of their dreams while benefiting the greater Zingerman's Community of Businesses. The strategy has resulted in the creation of eight successful businesses, with several more in the pipeline and annual sales of approximately $50 million. Students assess this non-conventional approach and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of such a strategy.

In most industries, quality has never mattered more--but with cycle times compressing and output gains outpacing employment growth, the likelihood of error is higher than ever before. Traditional "total quality management" tools are not enough; companies must make quality their employees' passion. Here are four actions that can achieve this.