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An aftermarket brake component manufacturer, VC Brakes, is bought out by a global automotive parts corporation after the 2008 financial crisis. Unlike its previous parent company, the new owner attempts to change VC Brakes' autocratic management style and finger-pointing culture with a Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Andrew Ryan is a senior manager at VC Brakes. With the guidance of a strong mentor and a reputation as a successful change agent, he is selected as a TQM site instructor. His initial excitement turns to concern when organizational challenges cause the quality initiative to falter. A subsequent restructuring puts Ryan on the wrong side of politics, and he must decide whether to leave VC Brakes or stay with the losing initiative.

In 2011, Sarah Naudé and Matt Stanley sat down with the chairman of Telecom New Zealand, Wayne Boyd. Telecom, a publicly listed company and the largest telecom provider in New Zealand, was being divided into two publicly traded companies, Chorus, a telecom infrastructure company, and new Telecom, a telecom retail services provider. In connection with this split, Naudé and Stanley were charged with overseeing the process of creating two new boards of directors for these companies. As part of this process, the team reviews the roles and responsibilities of a board, defines what capabilities the new boards need, and reduces a preliminary list of candidates to a short list. They must now use this short list to create two strong boards.

This follow up to Chorus and Telecom: Building the Boards provides a one-page description of the new boards that were created at Telecom and Chorus.

After rising through the ranks of Corporate America, Beth Stewart has become a corporate director on the board of General Growth Properties. Stewart is struggling with how to address her mounting concerns over the financial health of the growing large publically traded real estate investment trust (REIT) to her fellow board members and company management. The case explores interpersonal communications, influencing one's peers, leadership style, and board dynamics. The case also chronicles Stewart's career progression focusing on different stages including work/life choices she made as a wife and mother of five children.

This case is used in Darden's core Leading Organizations course and is appropriate for MBA, Executive MBA, GEMBA, and executive education programs. The manager of a baby product company's global customer support center observes friction among her staff about the only non-American on the team, whom the others accuse of increasing their call response rate time-thus effectively lowering their pay. When conflict arises on a multicultural team, to what extent can it be attributed to cultural differences and when should a manager become involved?

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Thriving employees are less susceptible to stress and burnout - and much healthier, overall. When employees are thriving, they are not satisfied with the status quo, and behave proactively to co-create their job environment in ways that enable more thriving. The authors describe three individual and three organizational enablers of thriving, including providing decision making discretion and minimizing incivility.

The search for the secrets of high performance organizations has been intense, yielding countless best-selling books and imitators in the process. However, a newer quest has emerged on the organizational front, for something that cannot be as easily imitated: high integrity. Before you can increase integrity in your organization, the author argues, you must familiarize yourself with the obstacles in your way. These obstacles include greed, fear and rationalization. Once all of this is taken into account, he provides four concrete steps for leaders to take.

The good news is, more and more workplaces are embracing flexible work arrangements. The bad news is, employees aren't. The authors explain why this is, and delve into the 'class' issues associated with workplace flexibility. They also show that employees classified as 'professionals', 'the working poor' and the 'missing middle' face significantly-different challenges in their quest for work/life balance.

Levels of stress, exhaustion, and burnout have become increasingly problematic for employees and organizations alike. Understanding how employees recover from the demands of work is therefore increasingly important. The author focuses on a little-discussed area of resource renewal: within-workday breaks. He argues that not all work breaks are created equal: an individual's personality and job design determine whether a break will lead to increased productivity or not.

Harvard Professor and Thinkers50 member Amy Edmondson introduces the concept of 'teaming' and discusses the critical importance of embracing it and adopting a mindset of 'execution as learning'. She defines teaming and also indicates the importance of continuous learning to effective teaming.

Top talent is an invaluable asset: In highly specialized or creative work, for instance, "A" players are likely to be six times as productive as "B" players. So when your company has a crucial strategic project, why not multiply all that firepower and have a team of your best performers tackle it? Yet many companies hesitate to do this, believing that all-star teams don't work: Big egos will get in the way. The stars won't be able to work with one another. They'll drive the team leader crazy. Mankins, Bird, and Root of Bain & Company believe it's time to set aside that thinking. They have seen all-star teams do extraordinary work. But there is a right way and a wrong way to organize them. Before you can even begin to assemble such a team, you need to have the right talent management practices, so you hire and develop the best people and know what they're capable of. You have to give the team appropriate incentives and leaders and support staffers who are stars in their own right. And projects that are ill-defined or small scale are not for all-star teams. Use them only for critical missions, and make sure their objectives are clear. Even with the right setup, things can still go wrong. The wise executive will take steps to manage egos, prune non-team-players, and prevent average coworkers from feeling completely undervalued. She will also invest a lot of time in choosing the right team leader and will ask members for lots of feedback to monitor how that leader is doing.

We've all heard of (or experienced) the "boss from hell." But that's just one form that incivility in the workplace can take. Rudeness on the job is surprisingly common, and it's on the rise. Whether it involves overt bullying or subtle acts of thoughtlessness, incivility takes a toll. It erodes productivity, chips away at morale, leads employees to quit, and damages customer relationships. Dealing with its aftermath can soak up weeks of managerial attention and time. Over the past 14 years the authors have conducted interviews with and collected data from more than 14,000 people throughout the United States and Canada in order to track the prevalence, types, causes, costs, and cures of incivility at work. They suggest several steps leaders can take to counter rudeness. Managers should start with themselves--monitoring their own behavior, asking for feedback on it, and making sure that their actions are a model for others. When it comes to managing the organization, leaders should hire with civility in mind, teach it on the job, create group norms, reward good behavior, and penalize bad behavior. Lest consistent civility seem an extravagance, the authors caution that just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in an organization can cost millions in lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.

The Roaring Dragon Hotel (RDH), a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), was under pressure to become a profit generating 5-star hotel due to the continued development of the Chinese market economy. As for many SOEs, the RDH was overstaffed, filled with archaic work practices, internal cliques, unsystematic production systems and a dysfunctional motivation system unrelated to performance. During modernization, a number of human resource management problems became increasingly evident; solving these problems had become a priority. In 2000, the RDH's provincial government and stakeholders made their first attempt at modernizing the hotel by hiring a globally renowned company to undertake the upgrade. The disastrous outcome caused the provincial government and stakeholders to lose heart, momentum and motivation until six years later. A new joint venture owner and the RDH board recovered enough confidence to attempt modernization for a second time. They contracted Premium Hotel Services (PHS) to undertake the second attempt at improving operations. The PHS found the quality of older employees, increasing turnover of new staff and policies emerging from the continuing evolution of the Chinese economy were now presenting problems never confronted before at the RDH. How could the stakeholders solve these problems and have the RDH emerge as an internationally recognized five star, commercially viable hotel?

Telefonica, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world and headquartered in Spain, has been issuing a corporate sustainability report since 2002. In its 2011 Sustainability report, the company included a "materiality matrix," and was one of only five of the 97 companies in Spain that produced a sustainability report that year. The case describes the purpose of the materiality matrix, how it was developed, and the opportunities the company sees for improving it.

This case describes in rich detail the change challenge the director of pharmacy services at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) faces in September 2011. She is responsible for implementing project HUGO, an acronym for Health Care UnderGoing Optimization. HUGO is a computerized system that requires a switch from paper and pencil to fully electronic patient records. This project is the most complex and comprehensive one that London area hospitals have ever undergone: the project includes a total of 11 healthcare organizations in London and surrounding region, with expected project costs in excess of $25 million. Implementing HUGO has the potential to save lives in the hospital, where critical errors are often linked to manual processes that involve multiple steps and people. Despite the strong reasons for implementing this project, the director expects significant resistance from nurses, doctors and staff who are used to their way of operating. It is clear that this change challenge involves not just the adoption of new technology but a significant cultural change.

Sooner or later, most companies will need to reinvent themselves in response to disruptive market shifts, technologies, or start-ups. But can a new business model quickly replace all the revenue an incumbent has lost to market upheaval? Only in rare instances, say the authors. That's why they propose that companies under assault pursue two distinct but parallel efforts: "Transformation A" should reposition the core business, adapting it to the altered environment. "Transformation B" should launch a separate, disruptive business that will be the source of future growth. That approach allows the company to realize the most value from its current assets and advantages, while giving the new initiative the time it needs to grow. This article walks readers through the dual transformations of three companies that were facing massive disruption: the Deseret News, which was losing advertising to online upstarts; Xerox, whose copier business had been eroded by Asian rivals; and Barnes & Noble, which was threatened by e-books. In each instance, a key to making the dual transformations work was the establishment of a "capabilities exchange," which allowed both efforts to share resources without interfering with the mission or operations of either. The results to date are promising: At all three firms, the core business is back on track, and the innovative initiative is demonstrating strong growth.

This case looks closely at the management of a branch of the YMCA in Boston during periods of growth and contraction and at the development of Wendy Zinn's career, all in the context of the YMCA's organizational culture. The roles of strategy, decision-making, leadership and organizational culture are described as critical both to the organization's development and to the career development the organization affords. Social capital and networking skills are also critical success factors in the YMCA's growth.

In 2012, Cisco was under intense pressure to show results: growth in its core business was decelerating and a number of exploratory ventures and acquisitions had not proven as profitable as expected. CEO John Chambers vowed to restore the company's health in a way that would support the agility and entrepreneurial mindset required to be successful in emerging sectors while continuing to achieve efficiency and profitability in Cisco's core business. In a world where technologies and customer segments were rapidly evolving, Cisco executives realized that their emphasis on working collaboratively through councils and boards (the company's staple organizational structure in the 2000s) might be impacting the Cisco's ability to be nimble and responsive. This case explores these challenges and Cisco's strategic and organizational response, with a particular focus on Cisco's comprehensive restructuring.

Since its inception, London-based private equity firm Greighton Partners had managed over $15 billion in investor capital. The firm employed about 150 professionals around the globe and had completed over 175 company acquisitions since its founding. Started with a small intimate team in London, the firm had merged with a continental PE firm and was successful, with an increased focus on Asia deals. After a long day of global partner meetings behind them, a group of Greighton partners, eager to unwind, gathered to discuss the firm's success in terms of executing on its recently refined strategy. Opinions ranged across the following strategic issues: growing the firm's Asian footprint versus remaining focused in Europe; aiming to be a top performing mid-market firm or focusing on moving up a tier to compete for bigger deals against larger firms; growth and expansion through organic growth, merger/acquisition, or through lateral hires; and finally, sector mix and client mix/client focus.