leadership

• April 2019
• Case

By: Ranjay Gulati and Paul S. Myers

Barber Cardiosystems, based in Melbourne, Australia, designs and manufactures therapeutic devices used for treatment of coronary conditions. Over four decades, it has grown to be among the top 200 medical device companies in the world. It competes against much larger companies through a continuous effort to control costs and increase productivity. It does so by aligning operational and human resource practices, particularly employee incentives, with its strategy. Concerns arise in the face of increased competition about whether the company can continue to reduce costs and maintain its margins while keeping both its generous bonus scheme and commitment to guaranteed employment. The company's executive team must decide how to respond. This case is suitable for use in undergraduate, MBA, and executive courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and strategic management. It is especially useful in a module on strategic alignment or organizational design.

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• 2019
• Book

By: Linda A. Hill

In your career, or anyone's, there is one transition that stands out as the most crucial—going from individual contributor to competent manager. New managers have to learn how to lead others rather than do the work themselves, to win trust and respect, to motivate, and to strike the right balance between delegation and control. Many fail to make the transition successfully. In this book, I trace the experiences of 19 new managers over the course of their first year in the role. I reveal the complexity of the transition, highlighting the expectations of these managers, their subordinates, and their superiors. I hear the new managers describe how they reframed their understanding of their roles and responsibilities, how they learned to build effective cross-functional work relationships, how and when they used individual and organizational resources, and how they learned to cope with the inevitable stresses of leadership. I show that becoming a manager is a profound psychological adjustment—a true transformation—as well as a continuous process of learning from experience.

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• Winter 2019
• Article

By: Nancy F. Koehn

Five great leaders from history (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ernest Shackleton, Rachel Carson, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer), according to Koehn, had their leadership forged in crisis. She writes that “leaders can emerge from many different backgrounds, genders, races, and personality types.” Each leader was made, not born, and faced varying degrees of hardship, from Douglass' escape from slavery to Carson's hardscrabble upbringing. She writes, “Perhaps most significant, each of the five leaders embraced a mission uniquely his or her own.” Koehn elaborates on Carson's sensitivity and the ingenuity of Lincoln and Douglass. She concludes that “the very way that each lived was an act of leadership unto itself, whose impact resonates—and calls to us—in the early 21st century.”

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• January 2019
• Case

By: Christopher A. Bartlett

Describes the entrepreneurial leadership of Jack Manning Bancroft (JMB), a young Indigenous Australian university student who created the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), a nonprofit organization he formed to respond to the problem of Indigenous high school students completing high school at less than half the rate of non-Indigenous students. The case traces the strategic, organizational, and cultural challenges JMB faced in building an organization that eventually offered mentoring partnerships to 8,000 Indigenous students in 350 high schools throughout Australia. Furthermore, the AIME students were completing school and going on to university at the same rate as non-Indigenous students. The case concludes as JMB contemplates taking his successful, sophisticated model to the United States.

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• January 2019 (Revised January 2019)
• Case

By: Ashish Nanda, Eric Van den Steen, Andy Wu, Jeffrey Boyar and Bonnie Bennett Slater

Established in 2007, by early 2014 SoundCloud already boasted the second largest number of active music listeners among all streaming services and was recognized as the go-to platform for new artists. Yet, its founders were questioning the robustness of the firm’s current focus on serving as a lab for emerging musical artists. They were wondering if the firm should instead enter the booming mainstream music streaming market.

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• November 2018
• Case

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Christine Snively

The Eastman Kodak Company (Kodak) was a name familiar to most Americans. The company had dominated the film and photography industry through most of the 20th Century and was known for making affordable cameras (and the “Kodak Moment”) and supplying the movie industry with film. At its peak in 1997, Kodak had a market value of $30 billion. Despite inventing the first digital camera, Kodak stumbled to capitalize on the new technology and by 2011 the company was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In September 2013, Kodak emerged from bankruptcy as a smaller business-to-business (B2B) digital imaging company. The following March, Jeff Clarke took over as Kodak’s new CEO. The company continued to produce and sell film to moviemakers, but Clarke, who needed to reinvent Kodak, wondered if keeping that business line made sense. To some inside the company, film was a “sacred cow” and fundamental to Kodak’s identity. In January 2016, Clarke and his executive team traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where the company unveiled a prototype of its new Super 8 camera—an analog motion picture camera initially launched in 1965 to shoot home movies—with updated features. Over the course of the four-day event, media and other industry players had overwhelmed the Kodak booth, excited to catch a glimpse of the camera, asking when they could expect to see the Super 8 on shelves. While the business-to-business (B2B) side of the company appeared to be growing, the new Super 8 reflected the culture and identity of a firm originally rooted in film and consumer products. Sentiment aside, Clarke needed to decide if the new Super 8 fit into the company’s overall strategy and whether Kodak was focused on the right markets for growth. What was the optimal path to reinvention?

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• November 2018 (Revised March 2019)
• Case

By: Francesca Gino and Lakshmi Ramarajan

In 2018, Mellody Hobson, President of Ariel Investments, the largest minority-owned investment firm in the U.S., was considering how best to divide her time and use her position and personal characteristics to push for positive change at her firm and in society at large.

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• October 2018
• Article

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper addresses primarily two questions. First, when (and why) should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO versus by some outside analyst or other insider? Second, how does strategy interact with vision (in the sense of a strong belief about the right course of action)? The paper studies these questions using a functional definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide other choices.” Among other things, the paper shows that strategy formulation by the CEO leads to both better strategy and better execution, and that a strategist’s vision may improve execution. In the process, the paper also identifies criteria that make a decision strategic and derives explanations why strategies often reflect the background of the strategist.

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