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• Case | HBS Case Collection | December 2018

  The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with “International Values and Local Roots" (A)

  Tsedal Neeley

  Vittorio Colao, CEO of telecommunication giant Vodafone, must respond to reports of disturbing accounting practices at two of Vodafone’s operating companies. In one case, €60 million have been misreported due to a series of failures to check manual accounting processes. The situation has been escalated to Vodafone’s audit committee, which expects Colao and his team to act drastically. In the second case, €7 million have been misreported through deferred recognition of costs into the future. The two cases challenge Colao’s organizational model of International Values and Local Roots that aims to maintain productive tension between global mandates and local practices. Colao meticulously designed his model based on the key value of trust, his unwavering convictions earning him the moniker of the ‘benevolent dictator.’ Colao is acutely aware that his response to the accounting discrepancies will be a referendum on his leadership for over 120,000 employees worldwide. If he doesn’t make the right decisions, the consequences will reverberate throughout the organization and erode confidence in the value of trust that he relentlessly worked to establish.

  Keywords: GLOBAL-LOCAL; organization culture; global identity; local identity; accounting discrepency; Globalization; Leadership; Trust; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Organizations; Identity; Local Range; Global Range; Values and Beliefs; Accounting Audits;

  Citation:

  Neeley, Tsedal. The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with “International Values and Local Roots" (A)." Harvard Business School Case 419-031, December 2018.  View Details

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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | December 2018

  The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with “International Values and Local Roots” (B)

  Tsedal Neeley

  Vittorio Colao, CEO of telecommunication giant Vodafone, must respond to reports of disturbing accounting practices at two of Vodafone’s operating companies. In one case, €60 million have been misreported due to a series of failures to check manual accounting processes. The situation has been escalated to Vodafone’s audit committee, which expects Colao and his team to act drastically. In the second case, €7 million have been misreported through deferred recognition of costs into the future. The two cases challenge Colao’s organizational model of International Values and Local Roots that aims to maintain productive tension between global mandates and local practices. Colao meticulously designed his model based on the key value of trust, his unwavering convictions earning him the moniker of the ‘benevolent dictator.’ Colao is acutely aware that his response to the accounting discrepancies will be a referendum on his leadership for over 120,000 employees worldwide. If he doesn’t make the right decisions, the consequences will reverberate throughout the organization and erode confidence in the value of trust that he relentlessly worked to establish.

  Keywords: GLOBAL-LOCAL; global identity; local identity; accounting discrepency; Globalization; Leadership; Trust; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Organizations; Identity; Local Range; Global Range; Values and Beliefs; Accounting Audits;

  Citation:

  Neeley, Tsedal. "The Global-Local Tension: Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao Leading with “International Values and Local Roots” (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 419-032, December 2018.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review

  What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools: Avoid the Common Pitfalls So That Your Organization Can Collaborate, Learn, and Innovate

  Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley

  Workplaces have adopted internal social tools—think stand-alone technologies such as Slack, Yammer, and Chatter, or embedded applications such as Microsoft Teams and JIRA—at a staggering rate. In an ambitious study of 4,200 companies, conducted by the McKinsey Global Institute, 72% reported using them to facilitate employee communication. We have studied internal social tools in various work settings, including banking, insurance, telecommunications, e-commerce, atmospheric science, and computing. The mounting evidence is clear: These tools can promote employee collaboration and knowledge sharing across silos. They can help employees make faster decisions, develop more innovative ideas for products and services, and become more engaged in their work and their companies. Over the past two decades, organizations have sought some of these benefits through knowledge management databases but with limited success. That’s because determining who has expertise and understanding the context in which it was created are important parts of knowledge sharing. Databases do not provide that type of information and connection. Social tools do. But we have found that companies that try to “go social,” as many of them call it, often fall into four traps. In this article, we look at those traps and share recommendations for capitalizing on the promise of social tools.

  Keywords: leadership; management; social tools; Social and Collaborative Networks; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Improvement; Management;

  Citation:

  Leonardi, Paul, and Tsedal Neeley. "What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools: Avoid the Common Pitfalls So That Your Organization Can Collaborate, Learn, and Innovate." Harvard Business Review 95, no. 6 (November–December 2017): 118–126.  View Details

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