Wendy Peterson

Linda A. Hill; Alisa  Zalosh

Case | HBS Case Collection | May 2013

Wendy Peterson

by Linda A. Hill and Alisa Zalosh

Abstract

Wendy Peterson was recently promoted to Vice President of Sales at the Plano, Texas, office of AccountBack, an accounting software and services company. To penetrate a perceived market niche, Peterson hires Fred (Xing) Wu, whose familiarity with and access to Chinese business leaders in Plano is valuable. Wu was born and raised in China, partly educated in the U.S., and immigrated to the U.S. in 2005. Within 12 months, he had signed his regional team's largest client, but Peterson has reservations about Wu's performance and is uneasy about their working relationship. Wu has requested an assistant—unprecedented within AccountBack's flat organizational structure. Peterson reflexively perceives the request as unreasonable, but in responding she must take into account the implications her decision will have on the rest of her sales team, as well as her own career. This case is ideal for courses on managing performance, managing conflict, leadership, cross-cultural differences, conflict and negotiation, employee development, and performance evaluation.

Keywords: Leadership; Conflict Management; Salesforce Management; Rank and Position; Performance Evaluation; Management Teams; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Accounting Industry; Texas;

Language: English

Format: Print

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Citation:

Hill, Linda A., and Alisa Zalosh. "Wendy Peterson." Harvard Business School Brief Case 913-560, May 2013.

In 2005, Vineet Nayar, the former CEO and Vice Chairman of HCL Technologies, and his wife, Anupama Nayar, committed $100 million of their personal wealth to found Sampark Foundation—a grant-making philanthropy with a mission to transform learning outcomes for 20 million children in rural government schools by 2025. By 2013, it was clear that Sampark was never going to reach 20 million children by writing grants. Vineet stepped out of the corporate world and over the next six years, applied the lessons he learned about leading change at HCL to transform Sampark into a “disruptive design shop” that leveraged frugal innovation and a “Teachers First” model of change to revolutionize India’s primary education system. By 2019, at $1 per child per annum, Sampark’s 130 employees had touched the lives of over 7 million students and 200,000 teachers across 90,000 public schools—unprecedented scale in the Indian education context and evidence that their “Teachers First” strategy was working. Demand for Sampark’s program was growing rapidly and Vineet now had the opportunity to reach 50 million children. Vineet had always believed in the transformative power of technology and had to determine whether Sampark could transition to a “Digital First” model.

Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting from Within

Emily Truelove, Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards

When Kathy Fish, Procter & Gamble’s Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer, and a 40-year company veteran, stepped into her role in 2014, she was concerned that the world’s leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady stream of disruptive innovations. This, coupled with intensifying competition from more agile, digitally-savvy direct-to-consumer companies, convinced Fish that P&G needed to renew its value proposition. She believed it was essential that all 100,000 employees see innovation as their job, and that all aspects of the consumer experience—not only the product itself—be “irresistibly superior.” But making this change would require wholesale transformation, which was challenging because P&G’s business units had decision-making rights for their businesses. Thus, when she launched GrowthWorks, an initiative to bring lean innovation to scale at P&G, Fish designed it to be business unit-led and corporately-supported.
Fish and her team tackled challenges as they emerged along the way, such as the need to adapt career systems. Fish took a “pull” versus “push” approach and it caught on like “wildfire,” eventually producing a portfolio of over 130 projects, and momentum that led P&G to headline the Consumer Electronics Show for the first time. While progress indicators were strong, the business units still struggled to incubate innovations, and Fish feared that unless P&G’s overall innovation performance management and reward systems changed, the new approach to innovation would not take hold in a sustainable way. Fish grapples with whether to take a more “push” approach and add innovation metrics to the business unit presidents’ annual scorecards, which typically focused on short term deliverables.

Keywords: female protagonist; Organizational change; organizational behavior; culture change; digital; digital transformation; innovation; lean startup; experimentation; metrics; consumer packaged goods (CPG); Leadership; Leading Change; Change Management; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Disruption; Innovation and Invention;