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Private equity firm XAF Partners, created out of the 2003 merger of Shanghai-based Xuan Partners and AF Group, a spin out of the Shanghai-based, emerging market-focused private equity arm of a large European bank, had grown steadily over the last decade, establishing offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, Seoul and Singapore. At the end of their day-long partners' retreat, several firm partners discuss the challenges they face as they juggle three roles in their business life: deal makers in their own sectors; managers of younger associates and directors across their sector teams; and as leaders in their young but successful firm.

Over the past decade, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) had developed a unique set of benefits and cultural amenities for its employees, including a beautiful residential campus, known as the Living Quarters (LQ), and an award winning international school from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade that by 2012 enrolled over 2,000 students. These amenities allowed the company to attract and retain high-quality employees at modest pay; however, the company had recently experienced some financial difficulties, a shrinking number of new available living spaces, and questions about how relevant it was for a semiconductor firm to be operating a school. Thus, these benefits now presented significant dilemmas for the SMIC management team, including how the company can justify the costs of these benefits to investors in the face of the company's other financial challenges.

This case showcases the 30-year career of Naina Lal Kidwai, Chairman of HSBC India, a leading woman business leader globally. It demonstrates how Kidwai spent a lifetime overcoming barriers as a woman in a male-dominated profession and as an Indian in the global marketplace. Now, as opportunities to play a role in the environment are beginning to open up, she has to decide the next direction to take in her career.

Learning Resources is a family-owned educational toy company that, by late 2011, was facing a myriad of challenges, including increased competition, entry into new markets, new distribution methods, rising costs of production in China, and changing customer behavior. The company lacked a clear strategy and suffered from organizational misalignment. Rick Woldenberg, the former CEO of Learning Resources, is called back to the helm after a four-year absence to address these issues, increase performance and set a direction for the company, all while remaining true to the values of his family's business.

The owner and general manager of a large retail establishment faced a dilemma about whether his long-time yard manager was still the right person for the job. The business increasingly depended on providing superior customer service in order to compete in the market. Recently, the owner had placed a personal friend in the operation as an assistant to the yard manager. This new addition had shown a real talent for developing employees and driving performance improvements. As a result, customer service feedback had drastically improved. The owner realized that the assistant had become the real leader of the yard. He wondered how to keep the momentum of the changes going while still showing due respect to a loyal employee.

A fourth-year science student at The University of Western Ontario must provide the manager of Infection and Prevention Control her recommendations to improve staff compliance with the hand hygiene requirements of the medical and support staff at London Health Sciences Centre and the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The Province of Ontario's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care had implemented an initiative called "Just Clean Your Hands" to improve hand-cleaning rates that would directly affect the number of infections acquired by patients while in hospital. The task is complicated by the large number of employees working at LHSC and the many different employee groups, ranging from physicians to cleaning staff. Hand-cleaning procedures must also be followed by the patients' families and friends who visit. In addition, workplace sub-cultures have historically not enforced compliance with discipline. Essentially, the challenge is to change the behaviour of a large group of people in diverse roles. Students should realize that because health care is publicly funded in Ontario, any plan of action to improve hand-cleaning compliance will need to be justified financially and implemented at a reasonable cost.

The old ways of setting and implementing strategy are failing us, writes the author of Leading Change, in part because we can no longer keep up with the pace of change. Organizational leaders are torn between trying to stay ahead of increasingly fierce competition and needing to deliver this year's results. Although traditional hierarchies and managerial processes--the components of a company's "operating system"--can meet the daily demands of running an enterprise, they are rarely equipped to identify important hazards quickly, formulate creative strategic initiatives nimbly, and implement them speedily. The solution Kotter offers is a second system--an agile, networklike structure--that operates in concert with the first to create a dual operating system. In such a system the hierarchy can hand off the pursuit of big strategic initiatives to the strategy network, freeing itself to focus on incremental changes to improve efficiency. The network is populated by employees from all levels of the organization, giving it organizational knowledge, relationships, credibility, and influence. It can liberate information from silos with ease. It has a dynamic structure free of bureaucratic layers, permitting a level of individualism, creativity, and innovation beyond the reach of any hierarchy. The network's core is a guiding coalition that represents each level and department in the hierarchy, with a broad range of skills. Its drivers are members of a "volunteer army" who are energized by and committed to the coalition's vividly formulated, high-stakes vision and strategy. Kotter has helped eight organizations, public and private, build dual operating systems over the past three years. He predicts that such systems will lead to long-term success in the 21st century--for shareholders, customers, employees, and companies themselves.

The case describes the evolution of 3M as an innovative organization over its 110-year history. It highlights the early challenges faced by the founding entrepreneurs that had an impact on the tolerance for failure in the 3M culture, and also the entrenchment of its innovation philosophy in the ''William L. McKnight Management Principles''. Further, it describes the role of structures, processes, rewards and people in continuously sustaining the innovativeness of the company over its lifetime. The case then describes 3M's approach to innovation across its global subsidiaries, wherein innovators from subsidiaries in different geographies are expected to drive innovation for their context based on their understanding of local user needs. 3M's strategy for innovation among its subsidiaries is somewhat different from that of most other multinationals that still rely largely on innovation from their home country organization. The case throws light on the efforts by the parent company to transfer and entrench its innovative culture at 3M India, its subsidiary in India. While 3M had a presence in India for over 20 years, for much of this period, the emphasis on innovation was rather limited. However, with the inauguration of its new 3M Research and Development Centre in 2011, 3M India, with the full support of the parent organization, has provided a renewed thrust to innovation for the Indian market under its "In India for India" strategy. At the end, the case highlights some of the challenges faced by 3M India and some potential challenges that it might face as expected by analysts.

The case starts in 1973 when Pina Bausch stood at the turning point of her professional career: the transition from being a celebrated dancer to becoming a choreographer. Reflecting on what made Pina Bauschs career as a dancer exceptional, the case then elucidates Pina Bausch´s leadership and working style during her years as artistic director at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Not only did Pina Bausch become famous for her artistic work and creative productivity, but also for her way of leading people and making them grow long-term. Her capability of leveraging the diversity of her dancers - the collective genius - made her choreographies inherently innovative and ground-breaking. Demanding highest performance, she created one of the most successful companies worldwide. She died 2009, leaving behind a dedicated and outstanding dance theater.

Carolina for Kibera (CFK) is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote youth leadership and gender and ethnic cooperation in Kibera, the largest unstructured settlement situated in the heart of Nairobi, Kenya. CFK's programs constructively leverage the power of the community, offering an exemplar of participatory development. CFK's affiliation with the University of North Carolina offers a new model of social enterprise. After eight years of success under the founding leadership of Salim Mohamed, Rye Barcott and Kim Chapman, CFK is at a critical juncture. Mohamed, Executive Director of all operations in Kibera, is leaving to go to graduate school. Barcott, Founder and President, has a new career and a growing family and can no longer play an active role in CFK's operations. Chapman, Chair of the U.S. Board of Directors, has accepted a full-time faculty position and must step down from her roles at CFK. These departures come at a time when the Gates Foundation has just awarded CFK a two-year, $1 million grant. The case ends as CFK begins to grapple with impending changes in organizational leadership and activities.

"With a global leadership and sustainability perspective, this case uses SNCF, a state-owned railway and public service company based in France, to set the stage for an analysis of change management in a large company. It also allows for an exploration of sustainable development within the context of a large company. Written from the field, it depicts the firm's overall strategy to adopt sustainable practices and provides an opportunity to introduce basic leadership, strategy, sustainability, and operational terms that can be explored in subsequent classes. The case opens with a summary of urgent issues that include an influential employee who resists new policies, a public scandal around a supplier that employed undocumented workers, and pressure to present the accounting department with financial metrics to evaluate the sustainable procurement efforts. In a big-picture view, Olivier Menuet, directeur délégué achats durable et solidaires, and his boss, Pierre Pelouzet, directeur des achats, want more visibility around sustainable development not only within the procurement function but throughout the organization. How might changes already made at SNCF be driven deeper into the company? "

Make mistakes faster. This slogan, and others like it, can be seen prominently displayed on posters throughout Menlo's office, a software-development company known for its casual Mondays and extreme interviews. Menlo's founders are considering opening a new branch to keep up with the demand for Menlo's services, but wonder if they can preserve the culture they have so carefully cultivated within the walls of their Ann Arbor, Michigan office and transfer it to another location. This case studies the work culture of a highly unorthodox company that designs very usable, practical software.

As 2012 approached the woes of the financial crisis seemed to be fading, companies were resuming business as usual and some of the scrutiny on corporate governance practices began to recede as well. That is until another major financial scandal emerged in Japan in the fall of 2011. It was slowly revealed that the 92-year-old camera and medical photo-imaging company, Olympus, had been hiding its losses for more than a decade - to the tune of $1.7 billion - long before the current economic pressures, slow job growth, and poor investor confidence plagued the global economy. The fraud renewed the focus on corporate governance policies world-wide, but especially in Japan, where the lack of board independence and a deep-rooted corporate culture entrenched in personal loyalties fostered an environment that made it difficult for scandals such as this to be unveiled, let alone for whistleblowers to come forward about them.

This case outlines Michael Woodford's awards and honors, after having been fired from Olympus in October 2011. It discusses the repercussions following an investigation into the fraud and the report which was released thereafter. It also discusses the lawsuit that followed (filed by Woodford against Olympus), its settlement, and the new Olympus board and the fate of the Olympus executives who were at Olympus while the scandal occurred.

Jess B. represents a strategic communications firm in the Washington, DC, area. He is currently considering his options for responding to a federal Request for Proposal (RFP) and negotiating with Change Analytics, a strategic partner with whom he would partner in responding to the proposal. The contract offering has been earmarked for an 8(a) certified small business.

Describes the challenges and successes encountered by GE's Aviation business in implementing a teaming work structure and culture in plants across its supply chain. GE Aviation leadership had seen dramatic gains in productivity, quality, and worker satisfaction in manufacturing plants where it had implemented teaming, which was designed to move decision-making as close to the product as possible by delegating authority, responsibility, and accountability to front-line workers. The case describes what teaming looked like in two of GE Aviation's plants and discusses the benefits realized in teaming sites. It also describes the challenges GE Aviation leaders had encountered in implementing teaming in the face of an entrenched work structure and culture in one particular plant, and discusses the difficulty management had faced in moving forward in transforming the culture of the plant.

David Liniger, cofounder of RE/MAX, LLC., wondered if his business was prepared to exploit the next wave of business opportunities in the real estate market. This industry had moved from one in which broker/owners controlled all of the consumers' access to information, to an industry in which the agents were empowered as independent contractors with a fee-based obligation to the brokers, to an industry in which the buyer and seller have direct access to and control of information. Could RE/MAX use the next wave of IT to support its agents while also reaching out to today's well-informed and tech-savvy home buyers and sellers? Would a shift towards direct consumer support jeopardize RE/MAX's franchise sales and agent recruitment and retention?

This is one exercise in a 4-part series entitled Job Offer Negotiation Exercises. This exercise gives participants the opportunity to act as the Maximum Motivation candidate in a job offer negotiation. The purpose of this role-play case series is to give participants the opportunity to experience a job offer negotiation as both the job candidate and the employer. The exercise involves two distinct negotiation scenarios, allowing participants the opportunity to play both roles and to practice and apply concepts and skills learned in the first negotiation session. If desired, only one of the two scenarios can be negotiated if only one hour is available for the activity. One negotiation occurs for a job with a company called Maximum Motivation (A and B cases) and the other is for a job with a company called People Power (C and D cases). Participants work in pairs, with one playing the role of the job candidate and the other playing the role of the company representative. In both scenarios, the company considers the candidate to be the top applicant and would like to finalize the hire. Also in both scenarios, the job candidate has an acceptable alternative - another job offer from a rival company called PerformanceMax - and needs to accept or decline the PerformanceMax offer the next day. Thus, it is important that both sides reach an acceptable employment arrangement during this negotiation, or the candidate will not be hired. When both sides have negotiated an acceptable agreement, or when either partner decides to end the negotiation, the negotiation is over. After group discussion, participants find a different partner who last played the opposite role, switch roles, and complete the second negotiation scenario.

Supplement for case W12227,

Supplement for case W12227 and W12228