leadership

• January 2019
• Case

By: Christopher A. Bartlett

Describes the entrepreneurial leadership of Jack Manning Bancroft (JMB), a young Australian Indigenous 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 8000 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 nonindigenous students. The case concludes as JMB contemplates taking his successful, sophisticated model to the United States.

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• 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: Francesca Gino, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Alison Wood Brooks

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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• September 2018
• Case

By: Andrew Wasynczuk, Francesca Gino and Karim Sameh

This case revolves around Verisk Analytics' initiatives to drive innovation throughout the firm's many business verticals. Verisk, originally named ISO, started life as an insurance rating agency in the early 1970s, acting as an intermediary between insurance companies and state governments. Over time, the firm transformed from being a non-profit to a for-profit entity, while expanding its lines of business to realms other than insurance. By both exploring the history of the insurance industry and Verisk's unique position within it, the case provides readers with an understanding of the firm's growth strategy and why innovation is so crucial for its success. The case leaves readers to ponder Verisk's innovation and growth strategy, challenging them to assess its strengths and weaknesses.

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• July 2018
• Case

By: Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, Emilie Billaud and Arnold M. Howitt

On November 13, 2015, Dr. Marie Borel, Dr. Emmanuelle Dolla, Dr. Frédéric Le Saché, and Professor Mathieu Raux were the doctors in charge of the trauma center at L’Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière in Paris, where dozens of wounded and dying patients, most with severe gunshot wounds from military grade firearms, arrived in waves after a series of terrorist attacks across the city. The doctors had trained for a mass-casualty event but had never envisioned the magnitude of what they now saw. This case describes how they rapidly expanded the critical care capacity available so as to be able to handle the unexpectedly large number of patients arriving at their doors.

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• July 2018 (Revised December 2018)
• Case

By: Herman Leonard, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman

James “Hondo” Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how would Geurts’s experience running an innovative procurement effort for U.S. Special Forces units enable him to change a much larger—and much more rigid—organization like the U.S. Navy? In one of the most secretive parts of the U.S. military, Geurts founded an open platform called SOFWERX to speed the rate of ideas to Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces, and the like. His team even sourced the idea for a hoverboard from a YouTube video. But how should things like SOFWERX and protypes like the EZ-Fly find a place within the Navy writ large?

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