MOVE

Rosabeth M. Kanter

Book | 2015

MOVE: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead

Abstract

Americans are stuck. We live with travel delays on congested roads; shipping delays on clogged railways; and delays on repairs, project approvals, and funding due to gridlocked leadership. These delays affect us all, whether you are a daily commuter, a frequent flyer, an entrepreneur, an online shopper, a job seeker, or a community leader. If people can't move, if goods are delayed, and if information networks can't connect, then economic opportunity deteriorates and social inequity grows. We have been stuck for too long, writes Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author Rosabeth Moss Kanter. In Move, Kanter visits cities and states across the country to tackle our challenges—and reveal solutions—on the roads and rails and in our cities, skies, and the halls of Washington D.C. We meet a visionary engineer and public servant spearheading an underwater tunnel in Miami to streamline port operations and redirect constant traffic from the city center. We see mayors partnering with large corporations and nimble entrepreneurs to unveil parking apps, bike-sharing programs, and seamless wifi networks in greener, more vibrant, more connected cities. And we learn about much-needed efforts—such as dynamic tolls on highways and fees based on vehicle miles traveled—to reduce our dependence on the outmoded gasoline tax in our new electric-car age. It all adds up to a new vision for American mobility, where local leaders shape initiatives without waiting for Congress to act, and ambitious companies partner with governments to tackle projects that serve the public good, create jobs, and improve quality of life while providing healthy sources of investment.

Keywords: transportation; infrastructure; United States; railroad history; airlines; airline industry; air transportation; passenger transportation; cities; urban planning; freighting; Change; change management; leadership; public policy; entrepreneurship; technological innovation; change leadership; public finance; Infrastructure; Policy; Technological Innovation; Change Management; Leading Change; Urban Development; Project Finance; Entrepreneurship; City; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Shipping Industry; Rail Industry; Air Transportation Industry; United States;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Kanter, Rosabeth M. MOVE: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

As a middle manager at a biotechnology company, Sandra Brown harnessed digital tools and social media to engage others and build campaigns for change in the company. This Teaching Note presents strategies for teaching the Sandra Brown case series, which follows Brown's career at NIN Biotech, and describes the challenges she faced as a change agent, working to promote gender equality and improve quality within the company, and build a movement around a new drug developed to fight cancer externally.

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised June 2018)

City Year at 30: Toward Long-Term Impact

Rosabeth Moss Kanter and James Weber

In 2018, City Year was a 30 year old nonprofit that recruited and organized teams of young-adult “volunteers” (corps teams) to provide a year of citizen service. It had 3,100 corps members serving in 327 schools located in 28 U.S. cities. In its early decades, City Year provided a variety of services to a variety of organizations in need. Over its most recent decade, City Year had pivoted to having all corps members serve in low-income public schools to keep students on track to graduation in an effort to reduce the nation’s high school dropout rate. City Year also worked with partners to help schools transform themselves to better meet the needs of low-income students, and worked with policy makers and elected officials to promote the value of national citizen service. In 2012, City Year launched a Long Term Impact strategy (LTI) aimed at making a substantial improvement in high school graduation rates. The LTI required City Year to transform itself over time to create an organization capable of delivering its ambitious impact strategy. The case explores City Year’s history and its efforts to align its organization with its strategy. In March 2018, City Year CEO Michael Brown must examine the state of his organization and its strategy to determine next steps to achieving its LTI goals.

Keywords: Education; Service Operations; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Efficiency; Resource Allocation; Change Management; Social Entrepreneurship; Middle School Education; Secondary Education; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Human Capital; Growth Management; Service Delivery; Organizational Design; Social Enterprise; Poverty; United States;

Citation:

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, and James Weber. "City Year at 30: Toward Long-Term Impact." Harvard Business School Case 318-089, March 2018. (Revised June 2018.) View Details

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CEO Zhang Ruimin must plan how to accelerate the growth of self-managed microenterprises. Platforms were Haier’s business platforms operating in five major sectors: white goods transformation, investment and incubation, financial holdings, real estate, and cultural industry. Platform owners incubated microenterprises on their platforms with the resources Haier had, but they were not the supervisors of microenterprises. His goal was to tear down the walls between the organization, shortening the time the company took to respond to users’ needs, with the ultimate goal of “zero distance” between employees and users. Haier had engaged in a series of organizational changes since 2005, the most recent of which started in 2012. His latest experimentation was turning Haier into a platform for entrepreneurship. Employees and those outside Haier could set up microenterprises on Haier’s platforms. Zhang thought Haier was on the right track, but the model had to prove itself in practice. He set a timetable: the microenterprises must reach the tipping point by September 20, 2018, which meant the microenterprise would have become a platform to which all resource providers would flock and stay loyal. There was no precedent of transformation like this anywhere. Would Haier succeed? What could Haier do to push the microenterprises to get to the tipping point?

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MOVE: Putting America's Infrastructure Back in the Lead

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