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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

  Gregg Kaplan 1997

  Anthony Mayo

  Citation:

  Mayo, Anthony. "Gregg Kaplan 1997." Harvard Business School Supplement 421-009, July 2020.  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | July 2020

  Rosalind Fox at John Deere

  Anthony Mayo and Olivia Hull

  Rosalind Fox, the factory manager at John Deere’s Des Moines, Iowa plant, has improved the financial standing of the factory in the three years she’s been at its helm. But employee engagement scores—which measured employees’ satisfaction with working conditions and enthusiasm about their work— have remained lackluster. As the first Black female factory manager to lead the plant, Fox considers how to build stronger bonds with her staff, who are mostly white men. The case describes how Fox took charge and established her credibility while building and nurturing a diverse leadership team. In addition to discussing Fox’s current role, this leadership case chronicles Fox’s career trajectory from her college years in Missouri through her time at Ford Motor Company and later, rising up the ranks at Deere & Company. The case discusses the pressure Fox has felt to assimilate into the dominant white male cultures and figure out how much of her authentic self to bring to work.

  Keywords: Agribusiness; Change Management; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Diversity; Gender; Race; Engineering; Geographic Location; Globalized Markets and Industries; Leadership Development; Leadership Style; Leading Change; Management Style; Management Teams; Organizational Culture; Personal Development and Career; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence; Status and Position; Trust; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Mayo, Anthony, and Olivia Hull. "Rosalind Fox at John Deere." Harvard Business School Case 421-011, July 2020.  View Details

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• 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;

  Citation:

  Truelove, Emily, Linda A. Hill, and Emily Tedards. "Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting from Within." Harvard Business School Case 421-012, July 2020.  View Details

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