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During the 2013 Indian festival of colours, a young green entrepreneur and owner of Green Horizon Consulting (GHC) faced a plethora of business growth challenges. His former employee, who had quit GHC a while back to work for a major rival, wanted to return. However, the entrepreneur could not figure it out - would rehiring an ex-employee be a sound business decision? Should he take a risk and give the former employee another chance? If he did, he could look after GHC business in India, and be free to work on his plans to start a new venture in Dubai.But, his dilemma didn't end there. Being the eldest son in his family, he realized that besides the aforementioned strategies, there was also the possibility of living and working with his joint family. His father was getting old and his younger brother had joined the family business; merging the two companies (his and his father's) would allow both brothers to take care of the businesses and family between them. If that happened, he would no longer need his old frenemy. Even so, there was no doubt in his mind that relocating to Dubai would be a very lucrative move, especially as prospective clients in this region understood the language of green loud and clear. But, despite his excitement at the idea, he could not forget that there would still be all the usual (yet critical) business problems of low consumer awareness and the need to swiftly catch up to the existing competition. What other factors and options would he need to consider to keep his budding, eco-friendly company afloat and to successfully navigate the contemporary business world?

Small differences in the leadership of teams can have large consequences for the success of their efforts. Many initiatives fail not because of a fatal error in judgment or insufficient ideas, knowledge, motivation, or capabilities to deliver a solution. They fail because, as is so often heard, "we needed to be more of a team to succeed," "we weren't a sufficiently high-performing team," or "our team suffered from a lack of leadership." In a world where most problems faced by organizations are too complex for a single individual to tackle alone, leadership frequently involves designing, launching, and managing teams. And yet teams are fickle. Even as teams become more common at all levels of organizations, a shocking number of them fail to live up to their potential or even to deliver at all. Teams remain the most flexible and powerful units of learning, change, and performance in most organizations but require effective leadership to succeed. This note summarizes the conditions leaders can create to increase the chances of creating, managing, and participating in successful teaming environments.

Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) uses an innovative new approach to procuring outside legal counsel: it replaces relationship-based selection and law firms' traditional time-based billing with data-driven decision making and an online reverse auction. In the case, GSK is hit with a potentially devastating suit and must hire a firm in time to respond. The recently hired managing attorney, Sophia Keating, grapples with GSK's approach. The GSK veterans assure her that the approach drives down costs and improves the quality of work by systematically increasing the rigor in the procurement process. Still skeptical, Sophia runs the process of systematically analyzing and comparing the competing firms' bids. This case also describes the process by which these tools were created and adopted. Beyond the implications for law firms and other service providers, lessons from this case are applicable for teaching about institutional change, procurement processes relevant to many fields, and how to increase rigor in typically informal business processes.

How one company successfully dealt with the e-mail glut: After executives underwent training to reduce the number of e-mail messages they sent, the output of other employees fell, too--even though they received no training or feedback. The result was a 7% gain in productivity.

Research has established that women decide about consumer purchases differently than men do. But does that hold true in a B2B setting? Senior executives at Deloitte, recognizing that an increasing number of potential clients are women but that executives have honed their skills selling to men, decided to conduct some research on the matter. Interviews with experienced buyers of professional services in 18 large organizations--and observations of meetings with hundreds of prospective and existing clients--revealed significant differences between men and women as B2B buyers. For example, women see a meeting with a candidate service provider as a chance to explore options in collaboration with an expert resource, while men see that event as a near-final step in the process, when they are narrowing down and choosing among options. And whereas male buyers expect head honchos to be present at the meeting, female buyers are more interested in talking to the people they will actually be working with. On the basis of these and other findings, Deloitte established a rigorous training program to raise awareness of differences in decision-making styles and of the need to adapt sales approaches accordingly. The training, which Deloitte believes has given the firm an edge in the marketplace, has improved partners' and managers' interactions with all prospects and clients. It has also increased respect for diversity inside the firm.

Craig Pitchell is a young executive who has become director of the board at a local childcare centre. He has discovered that other board memberships do not comply with the by-laws for the centre. He is presenting at a special meeting to oust the current board and replace them with an alternate slate of directors.

After settling a $78-million lawsuit with a St. Louis woman who was struck by one of its drivers, Domino's Pizza decided to eliminate its 30-minute delivery guarantee and transform its business model through innovations in the areas of technology, social architecture, and operations. The company provided consistency of experience for customers by introducing its Pizza Tracker - a web-based application that allowed customers to track their pizza at each stage of the process - standardizing the layout and processes used in each of its stores, and providing more transparency into employee performance. Students are asked to evaluate how Domino's used technology and innovation to improve efficiency, quality, customer relationship management (CRM), and employee relations as well as assess its change management process.

The COO of a global knowledge-outsourcing and technology-services firm has been selected by his company's board of directors to step in and rescue a large-scale digitization project that is in danger of missing its rapidly approaching deadline. The project requires the firm to create digital archives of a daily American newspaper, spanning 150 years. With teams from two different countries paired to work on this significant venture, things quickly go awry on several levels as a result of misunderstandings about client expectations, lack of employee training (both from a standpoint of cultural awareness and with respect to the use of new technology), and poor project management. The COO must quickly develop an action plan to address these issues and ensure the success of the project in the face of an ultimatum from the client: deliver the project on time or lose it completely.In the role of the COO, students must create an action plan to overcome the issues that threaten to derail the project.

A management consultant has been hired to fix the morale issues at a branch of SkillsForTomorrow (SFT) in Pennsylvania, United States. SFT is a government-sponsored organization tasked with helping at-risk young adults gain vocational training toward preparing them for a successful career in one of several areas, including automotive and machine repair, construction, health care and information technology. The program provides support to students beyond technical training, including the development of interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills and skills in effectively conducting a job search and interview - all towards the goal of graduating individuals that are prepared to live independently and become productive citizens (and taxpayers). Several factors are influencing the morale of the SFT management team, some of which point directly to the sponsor of the consulting project, the executive director at SFT Harrisburg. The consultant must identify the root causes of the management discord and derive a solution that can help solve the various issues. The consultant will need to consider the political and interpersonal aspects of the consulting relationship between herself and the executive director.

A multinational company's first senior female leader is assigned to the European headquarters. The assignment is a professional coup, and she is primed to meet the challenge. However, her new colleagues' predominant view is that she is a non-European woman who represents the corporate head office. She has the opportunity to fly high or fail.

By the late 2000s, the law firm Duane Morris had transformed itself from a growing U.S. law firm to a significant global player. The firm's uniquely collaborative organizational culture, which featured a transparent, data-driven compensation system, practice-group integration across multiple offices, and rewards for attorneys who shared responsibility, had contributed to the firm's success as it had expanded into new U.S. and international offices. Yet, amid a shaky world economy and an increasingly cutthroat legal profession, Duane Morris attorneys began to wonder-could collaboration survive as a firm value? Would the firm's culture help it continue to grow in the years ahead and bring in more sophisticated legal work, or would its lawyers inevitably start to keep work to themselves as the firm navigated an ever-more competitive environment?

"This technical note explores leadership through the framework of choice theory. As human beings, we actively engage in four strongly interconnected domains of choice: our activities, our thinking, our feelings, and our physiology. Effective leaders understand the behaviors they are choosing and the potential consequences of those behaviors for others. Choice theory provides a framework for choosing behaviors that solve problems and create value. This note is used as a background reading in Darden's Leadership Learning Lab and in several Executive Education offerings."

What kind of culture does Walt Disney Company (WDC) want to create? This case uses the experiences of a young visitor to one of WDC's resort hotels to set the stage for an analysis of selecting, hiring, training, and retaining and how those practices are governed by the culture of a large American company. The situation provides an opportunity to explore human resource policies, organizational design as well as how all those elements reinforce the culture. The case opens with an interaction between a young Animal Kingdom Lodge guest and an employee (or cast member as the company refers to employees). There were many different ways the exchange could have unfolded yet the experience was magical for the youngster. What made this exchange a memorable experience for this young guest? Would Walt Disney have been surprised?

This case pairing was designed for use in the Darden School's Global MBA for Executives program in the core Leadership and Organizations course and is also suitable for MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education courses in a module covering transformational leadership or human resources strategy. The field-based case uses the experiences of three managers at a big-box retail distribution center to set the stage for an analysis of transformational leadership in a large company. Kevin Henson has worked at big-box retailer SingleStop's distribution center for only four months when he was offered a job at another firm. He had joined the firm in the spring of 2012 while it was undergoing a difficult transformation. His disastrous hiring process and difficult first months are described from Henson's viewpoint and two other management members of the firm. Henson must decide whether to give SingleStop another chance.

This case pairing was designed for use in the Darden School's Global MBA for Executives program in the core Leadership and Organizations course and is also suitable for MBA, EMBA, and Executive Education courses in a module covering transformational leadership or human resources strategy. In this case, Henson's decision whether to stick with SingleStop is revealed.

In April 2012, Jenne Britell, the Chairman of the board of directors of United Rentals, Inc. (NYSE: URI) was preparing her notes for an upcoming stockholders' meeting. It was a meeting unlike most other meetings she had chaired. Stockholders were about to vote on a transaction that was perhaps the ultimate fulfillment of the founders' original vision. She was reminded of the company's founding just 15 years earlier and its meteoric growth. With a considerable sense of achievement and satisfaction, she reflected on her tenure as board chair commencing five years ago. Elected to the board in 2006 and then unanimously selected by her peers as Chairman in June 2008, Britell led the board through the aftermath of a tumultuous period that included senior management and board changes, a SEC investigation, financial restatements, the jilting of the company by Cerberus Capital Management in a transaction to acquire URI, and the deepest recession to hit the global economy since the Great Depression. At the meeting, stockholders would be asked to consider approval of a merger agreement between URI, the largest equipment rental company in the world, with RSC, the second largest equipment rental company in the world and URI's largest competitor. The meeting would mark the triumph of a new governance model and company strategy whose development and implementation Britell and CEO Michael Kneeland had led. As Britell reflected on the hard won gains, she also looked forward to the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead as the company managed the integration of RSC's operations with URI and the integration of three new board members from the acquired company. She also reflected on how governance and strategy could continue to evolve as the company planned for the next five years.

Change is hard, especially in a large organization. Yet some leaders succeed--often spectacularly--at transforming their workplaces. What makes them able to exert this sort of influence when the vast majority can't? The authors tracked 68 change initiatives in the UK's National Health Service, an organization whose size, complexity, and tradition can make reform difficult. They discovered several predictors of change agents' success--all of which emphasize the importance of networks of personal relationships: Change agents who were central in the organization's informal network had a clear advantage, regardless of their position in the formal hierarchy. People who bridged disconnected groups or individuals were more effective at implementing dramatic reforms. The resisters in their networks did not necessarily know one another and so were unlikely to form a coalition. Change agents with cohesive networks, in which all individuals were connected, were better at instituting minor changes. Their contacts rallied around the initiative and helped convince others of its importance. Being close to people who were ambivalent about a change was always beneficial. In the end, fence-sitters were reluctant to disappoint a friend. But close relationships with resisters were a double-edged sword: Such ties helped push through minor initiatives but were a hindrance when attempting major change.

In theory, the risk management groups of two British banks--Saxon and Anglo--had the same influence in their organizations. But in practice, they did not: Saxon's was engaged in critical work throughout the bank, while Anglo's had little visibility outside its areas of expertise. In their study of these two financial institutions, the authors identified four competencies--trailblazing, toolmaking, teamwork, and translation--that help functional leaders or groups compete for top management's limited attention and increase their impact. Anglo's risk managers were strong in only some of the competencies, but Saxon's were strong in all four. They consistently scanned the internal and external environment for important issues to which they could apply a risk management perspective (trailblazing) and then developed tools--such as quarterly risk reports--that spread their expertise (toolmaking). While controlling the tools' design and implementation, the risk managers incorporated business managers' insights (teamwork) and made sure everyone could understand the findings (translation). Ultimately, experts' roles must fit the organization's strategy and structural needs. In some situations, functional experts can raise their profile by cultivating just two of the competencies. But those who are strong in all four are likely to be the most influential.