• 2015
• Chapter

More than ever, leaders of nearly every kind of organization view their human resources teams as essential to institutional well-being and long-term growth and sustainability. That's the central and animating theme of "The Rise of HR: Wisdom from 73 Thought Leaders," a new anthology published by the HR Certification Institute. Professor Hill's essay addresses the question of how to develop leadership talent capable of building and sustaining organizations that can innovate time and again to address the challenges we face as a global community.

• Article

Expanding fiduciary duty to leaders of health-related businesses can help leaders meet the challenges of caring for not only the corporation and shareholders but also the patients and medical professionals. How should leaders of health-related businesses weigh the demand for efficiency and profit alongside the care of patients and the professional development of physicians? How might physicians approach these leadership roles to withstand the pressures that can divert behavior away from the espoused purposes and ethical standards of medicine?

• July–August 2014
• Article

In March 2011, Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was devastated by three reactor explosions and two core meltdowns in the days following a 9.0 earthquake and a tsunami that produced waves as high as 17 meters. The world is familiar with Daiichi's fate; less well known is the crisis at its sister plant, Daini, about 10 kilometers to the south. As a result of nature's onslaught, three of Daini's four reactors lacked sufficient power to achieve cooldown. To prevent the disaster experienced up north, the site superintendent, Naohiro Masuda, and his team had to connect them to the plant's surviving power sources. In a volatile environment, Masuda and Daini's hundreds of employees responded to each unexpected event in turn. Luck played a part, but so did smart leadership and sensemaking. Until the last reactor went into cold shutdown, Masuda's team took nothing for granted. With each new problem they encountered, it recalibrated, iteratively creating continuity and restoring order. Daini survived the crisis without an explosion or a meltdown.

• October 2014
• Article

To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But less transparent work environments can yield more-transparent employees. Employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and approaches within certain zones of privacy. Organizations allow them to do that by drawing four types of boundaries: around teams of people (zones of attention), between feedback and evaluation (zones of judgment), between decision rights and improvement rights (zones of slack), and for set periods of experimentation (zones of time). By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can encourage just the right amount of "deviance" to foster innovative behavior and boost productivity.

• March 2015
• Module Note

This module aims to help students understand how power and influence are employed, both to reproduce the status quo and to effect change in society. It first helps them to understand why, more often than not, power is used to reproduce the existing way individuals and organizations operate in society. It then highlights what it takes to implement societal change. This includes a wide variety of initiatives ranging from attempts to change individuals' and organizations' behaviors in a given industry or sector, to efforts to change behaviors throughout a country, region, or even the world. Addressing the issue of power and influence in society in an MBA classroom is critical, especially at a time like now, when the relationship between business and society is attracting increasing attention, and when business leaders are increasingly expected to contribute not only to financial value creation, but also to social value creation. In this context, it is important to prepare business school students to lead not just in their organizations, but more broadly in society. Meeting this aspiration requires equipping them with knowledge and tools that will enable them to understand what it takes to have a positive impact in the world. In line with this objective, this module note focuses on how leaders who are not part of government or other public agencies can spark, organize, and/or guide action to bring about change at the societal level.