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

Tsedal  Neeley

Supplement | HBS Case Collection | December 2018

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

Abstract

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;

Language: English

Format: Print

2 pages

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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.

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020 (Revised September 2020)

Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)

Tsedal Neeley and John Masko

With the economy in a freefall, MetricStream is losing customers, hemorrhaging cash and struggling to make payroll. Several board members are threatening to quit. Others are pressing to sell the company even at dismally low valuations. It’s 2008 and lightning has struck for Shellye Archambeau once again. As CEO of MetricStream, she had spent the last seven years turning a tech startup on life support after the dot-com bust into a market leader of governance, risk, and compliance software for businesses. As a black female CEO, Archambeau is no stranger to adversity. Becoming a leader had been her goal since high school and she had achieved it through decades of hard work and skillful decision making. Now she faces her most critical leadership decision. She calls a meeting with her board chairman, Gunjan Sinha, to discuss the best path forward: Sell MetricStream while offers are on the table, or try to save it by looking for a big customer of the company’s risk management software against the backdrop of the financial crisis? Both options have dire consequences. Valuations are plummeting by the day. Cash is disappearing by the minute. Archambeau and Sinha need to decide and act swiftly.

Keywords: Leadership; Race; Gender; Leadership Style; Risk and Uncertainty; Change; Prejudice and Bias; Decision Making; Personal Development and Career; Technology Industry; California;

Citation:

Neeley, Tsedal, and John Masko. "Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)." Harvard Business School Case 420-071, June 2020. (Revised September 2020.) View Details

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As a leader, you will need to master action plans to implement solutions that advance your organizational goals. Here are six simple steps to diagnosing situations and systematically developing action plans.

Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required by a service agreement. Rather than finding a swift resolution to the rapidly escalating customer situation that motivated his trip, he finds himself facing distributed work, global collaboration, conflict, and management issues that are threatening to unravel his team.

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

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