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Counterproductive Work Behaviour (CWB) is an umbrella term that refers to intentional behaviour by employees that harms or intends to harm an organization or the people in it, including employees and customers. It can run the gamut from nasty interpersonal behaviour (insulting or yelling at someone) to behaviour directed toward inanimate objects (sabotage and theft) to purposely doing work incorrectly or withdrawing from an organization via absence or lateness. The authors describe the individual and environmental factors that increase the likelihood of 'CWB', which include interpersonal conflict amongst employees; job insecurity; and perceptions of organizational injustice. In the end, the authors show that careful selection processes are not a sufficient solution to the problem of CWB: steps must also be taken to reduce triggers as much as possible by reducing unnecessary stressors, treating employees fairly, and mediating disputes between coworkers.

Microsoft Canada CEO Eric Gales talks to Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, about the need for more companies to take a leap of faith with respect to innovation. The two discuss why Canadian companies lag their peers in innovation; the perils of the status quo for companies in any industry; the role of IT in innovation; how the Canadian capital markets discourage innovation; and the importance of having senior leaders who are willing to 'stick their necks out' for the sake of innovation. Martin ends by explaining why 'Prove it' is the most dangerous phrase in the English language when it comes to innovation.

We've seen plenty of unethical behaviour in the business arena over the past decade. But surprisingly, bad behaviour doesn't always lead to reputational consequences. The authors offer a Model of Reputational Loss which explains why, using Arthur Anderson and PayPal as prime examples. The key levers involved, they argue, are the firm's perceived control of the situation; perceived certainty that the event truly occurred; the level of perceived threat to stakeholders; and perceived deviance from established practices. In addition, they show that stakeholder motivation and media coverage also play key roles in whether or not an organization's reputation is significantly damaged by bad behaviour.

Having spent the past five years working with the boards of some of the world's leading organizations, the authors reached a conclusion: boards need to become much more diverse -- not just demographically, but also in terms of the backgrounds, competencies and interests of their members. However, they warn that putting fresh faces onto boards provides no guarantee that benefits will ensue: diversity can also lead to gridlock. The fact is, people often feel threatened or annoyed by colleagues who are very different from themselves and have difficulty accepting, much less appreciating, those colleagues. In this article they describe the costs and benefits of diversity and provide seven recommendations for effectively diversifying boards - or senior teams -- in any industry.

In 2003, the Norwegian Parliament amended the Public Limited Companies Act in order to achieve greater representation of women on corporate boards. According to the amendment, all state-owned companies and public limited companies were required to have at least 40% women on their boards. This case uses first-hand accounts from Norwegian directors to document the Norwegian business community's reaction to the quota, how Norwegian boards sought women directors, and the transferability of the quota law to other nations.

Ren Levy took over Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts when it was a group of warring constituents and has successfully brought a diverse group of arts organizations together.

Kay Sunderland is an account director at Attain Learning Inc., a business training solutions company. In January 2011, one of Attain's most important clients, Juan Nunez of Gramen Equipment Company, contacts Sunderland with a request: Nunez would like Attain content development director Mike Morgan to stop contacting him directly. Sunderland is surprised that Morgan, an experienced and talented contributor, is potentially jeopardizing the account by ignoring Attain's communications policy of restricting client-facing communication to the account director. Now Sunderland must decide how to handle the situation with both the client and her colleague Morgan.

Daniel Kim was considering blowing the whistle on his friend, the CEO of a fast-growing start-up where Kim had spent most of his professional career. When Kim joined the company, called Cardio-Metric, in 2002, it consisted of seven young engineers (including its two 25-year-old founders) working from a one-bedroom Minneapolis apartment. By 2008, when the venture capital-backed company recorded $110 million in revenues, Kim had become close friends with the founders, who served as CEO and chairman. Cardio-Metric's success, however, concealed troubling internal developments. Since 2002, the CEO's management style had progressed from unconventional to questionable to egregious. Kim, Cardio-Metric's on-and-off CFO, had repeatedly confronted the CEO over his behavior-including charging large purchases with no clear business purpose to Cardio-Metric and presenting unrealistic financial projections to investors-but the CEO dismissed Kim's concerns and ordered him not to share them with others at the company. By April 2009, Kim believed the problem had grown out of control, and he was considering disclosing the CEO's actions to the board of directors and a team of external auditors. There was much at stake. Kim's disclosure would undoubtedly ruin his friendship with the CEO, endanger Kim's own role at the company, and even jeopardize the future of Cardio-Metric itself.

Daniel Kim was considering "blowing the whistle" on his friend, the CEO of a fast-growing startup where Kim had spent most of his professional career. When Kim joined the company, called Cardio-Metric, in 2002, it consisted of seven young engineers (including its two 25-year-old founders) working from a one-bedroom Minneapolis apartment. By 2008, when the venture capital-backed company recorded $110 million in revenues, Kim had become close friends with the founders, who served as CEO and chairman. Cardio-Metric's success, however, concealed troubling internal developments. Since 2002, the CEO's management style had progressed from unconventional, to questionable, to egregious. Kim, Cardio-Metric's on-and-off CFO, had repeatedly confronted the CEO over his behavior-including charging large purchases with no clear business purpose to Cardio-Metric and presenting unrealistic financial projections to investors-but the CEO dismissed Kim's concerns and ordered him not to share them with others at the company. By April 2009, Kim believed the problem had grown out of control, and he was considering disclosing the CEO's actions to the board of directors and a team of external auditors. There was much at stake. Kim's disclosure would undoubtedly ruin his friendship with the CEO, endanger Kim's own role at the company, and even jeopardize the future of Cardio-Metric itself.

Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee communication that HPCL introduced as part of its effort to adapt to increased market competition during the early 21st century. (HPCL, previously a wholly state-owned company within a state-controlled industry, had begun to operate in an increasingly privatized environment.) At the center of the new model was a series of "vision workshops"--structured conversations in which employees at all levels of the company took part in developing strategic and organizational visions for their regional offices, for their business units, and for the company as a whole. The case also discusses HPCL's use of digital technology to enhance employee communication; its leaders' increased emphasis on direct, "one-to-one" interaction with employees; and some of the consequences (both external and internal) of this more conversational model of organizational communication. As of 2010, HPCL was a Fortune Global 500 company, with more than 11,000 employees and with annual revenues of more than $23 billion. The question that company leaders now faced was whether HPCL's novel approaches to communicating with employees were appropriate to its next stage of internal development and external growth.

In early 2006, Helen Drinan, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Caritas Christi Health Care System (CCHCS), Boston, received two sexual harassment charges against the organization's CEO and President, Robert Haddad. While she knew she was legally charged with acting, she faced a complicated situation: one, the hospital system was owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Boston with Cardinal O'Malley as the Chairman of the Board for the system; and two, these charges came after the priest molestation cases which rocked the Catholic Church of Boston. In Case A, Drinan presented the well-documented results from an independent investigator into the sexual harassment charges against Haddad. Although Drinan's investigator presented clear evidence as to Haddad's guilt, the Cardinal decided to launch a second investigation, using the Church's lawyers. Drinan, interpreting this action as a delaying or avoidance tactic, decided that she must act. But, what should she say, to whom and how should she frame this critical conversation? In Case B, students read the letter Drinan sent to O'Malley, voicing her values. There is an extensive Epilogue that the instructor can report from or hand out to students that brings the case to a conclusion.

One difference between winners and losers is how they handle losing. Even a winning team might make mistakes, fumble, and lag behind before the game is over. But it recovers quickly and gets back on course. Kanter's Law is "Anything can look like a failure in the middle." The culture that surrounds high performers helps them resist the behaviors that losing can produce: panicking and throwing out the game plan; scrambling for self-protection and abandoning the rest of the group; hiding the facts and hoping things will get better by themselves; denying that anything needs to be learned or changed. Performance under pressure is the key.

Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons)-and that learning from it is pretty straightforward. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and must work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure. Failures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec; unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems; and intelligent ones at the frontier, where "good" failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information. Strong leadership can build a learning culture-one in which failures large and small are consistently reported and deeply analyzed, and opportunities to experiment are proactively sought. Executives commonly and understandably worry that taking an understanding stance on failure will create an "anything goes" work environment. They should instead recognize that failure is inevitable in today's complex work organizations.

What causes so many companies that once dominated their industries to slide into decline? In this article, two Harvard Business School professors argue that such firms lose their touch because success breeds failure by impeding learning at both the individual and organizational levels. When we succeed, we assume that we know what we are doing, but it could be that we just got lucky. We make what psychologists call fundamental attribution errors, giving too much credit to our talents and strategy and too little to environmental factors and random events. We develop an overconfidence bias, becoming so self-assured that we think we don't need to change anything. We also experience the failure-to-ask-why syndrome and neglect to investigate the causes of good performance. To overcome these three learning impediments, executives should examine successes with the same scrutiny they apply to failures. Companies should implement systematic after-action reviews to understand all the factors that led to a win, and test their theories by conducting experiments even if "it ain't broke."

It's hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you'll often get a sheepish "Two-or maybe three" in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn't work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill. The key to reaping these benefits is to foster "intelligent failure" throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast-the longer something takes, the less you'll learn-and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn. These principles won't give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road-that's simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.

In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven organisation had grown into one of Europe's largest biotech firms by revenues. Their success was mainly founded on their orphan indication drug Tracleer, which Actelion sold and marketed worldwide. However, Tracleer's looming patent expiry in a few years and recent late-stage pipeline setbacks had put the company under pressure from investors. While Clozel was confident in their ability to deliver future drugs that could secure further growing revenue streams, he wondered how to maintain their entrepreneurial culture that he saw as a prerequisite for this--particularly their lean hierarchy and researchers' freedom to follow innovation where it led them--in a company of more than 2,400 people which continued to grow.

This case depicts how executives who are holding power in an organization can create chaos due to interpersonal conflict. Rao and Naik, two senior executives at TKC Consulting in India, scapegoated an innocent subordinate during the course of their rivalry. Their actions, not befitting the positions they held, created confusion and misunderstanding in the organization. The chairman of the company understood that their selfish, power-hungry actions could not be explicitly pointed out, as this would merely result in a cycle of blame. Yet he also knew that if the conflict was not addressed immediately, it would cause more discord within the organization.

Today's business leaders are pressed to achieve ecological (eco) sustainable enterprise, but must do so with fewer resources. Given a protracted global recession, our concern is that the motivation for eco-sustainability may not be as strong as hoped for, nor as swift or durable as expected. To create a more explicit discourse on eco-sustainability activities during a recession, we set forth a framework to help business leaders examine their strategic perspective based on their organization's identity. We describe how this may influence how leaders broach change within their organizations, taking a surface or deep approach to achieve eco-sustainability. The intent is to highlight the importance of honestly assessing the firm's purpose and to work toward a more relational orientation in the new economy. To establish eco-sustainability during this recessionary period, we believe a middle path is needed, adopting a blended perspective. To this end, we offer three practical steps to begin this effort: reflection on the firm's values, development of relationships, and cultivation of different forms of change.

AWARD WINNING CASE: Adjudged third best case at the ISB Case Competition 2010 held in partnership with the Richard Ivey School of Business and the Association of Indian Management Schools and sponsored by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.<br><br>ABC Energy Limited (ABCEL) was created in March 2007 by ABC Infra Private Limited and XYG Private Limited. In September 2007, MNP Finance Limited joined ABCEL as an equity partner. In 2010, ABCEL operated in power generation and had plans to diversify into transmission and distribution. It aspired to be a world-class energy company with operations in India and neighbouring countries. Over the last few years, ABCEL had grown by investing in greenfield projects and by acquiring existing operations. The promoters of ABCEL had set a target of achieving a project portfolio of 30,000 MW by 2015, with the current portfolio being 8,655 MW. The chief executive officer of ABCEL wanted to discuss the following issues at the board meeting on July 31, 2010, with regard to the opportunities and challenges in the growing market: 1) the key organizational needs ABCEL might face in achieving its target by 2015 2) the present culture of ABCEL 3) the relationship between the culture and extent of formalization and hence the ramp-up of formalization ABCEL might require, and 4) the method of introducing this formalization.

The a-connect: In Search of Talent Partners (B) case updates company changes since the (A) case. Key updates include leadership and management appointments and organizational changes.