Crisis management

“It’s three a.m. and the phone rings. Who do you want to answer it?” asks a baritone voice over an image of a red phone. Walter Mondale first used this scenario in an campaign ad in 1984. Hillary Clinton just used the same image in her campaign against Barack Obama. The inference is that it […]

A step-by-step guide to tailoring your crisis response.

Here’s a leadership challenge for the ages. Let’s imagine that you were appointed to turn around a business that was in very deep trouble. It was awash in red ink, shedding employees like leaves in fall, at risk of losing its access to capital, and staffed by employees who were terribly demoralized. And let’s suppose […]

The news that one of the company's senior managers is leaving comes as a complete surprise to Paul Simmonds, CEO of Kinsington Textiles, Inc. (KTI). Ned...

Traditional methods of managing supply chain risk require estimations of how likely a disruption is to occur. For fairly common risks--poor supplier performance,...

An airline’s social-media contest backfires. How should the company respond?

Three counterintuitive lessons in resilience.

The demands on company leaders have never been greater. CEOs are expected to be not just operations experts and good financial stewards but corporate...

Reframing a challenge can help you cope with it.

A 30-day plan to contain the outbreak and treat the infected.

For a long time the law has dealt with corporation as if they were persons. More recently, behavioral scientists, public relations practitioners, and students of business administration have also thought in terms of the “personality” of an organization. As John W. Gardner wrote: “Like people and plants, organizations have a life cycle. They have a […]

Now that Toyota is on the ropes, people are lining up to get their punches in. Analysis and advice are coming from people who’ve probably never visited the company, let alone have deep expertise in the Toyota Production System. The result is a growing mythology about what went wrong at Toyota and what other companies […]

How you respond to a crisis will have repercussions for years to come.

"Should a pandemic emerge," wrote Dr. Jeffrey Staples in HBR's 2006 special report on avian flu, "it would become the single greatest threat to business...

GM needs to create a safety culture that encourages employees to speak up about large, small, and potential failures.

Environmentalists of every stripe disliked the Vermilion Paper Company. Even in an industry notorious for pumping rivers full of noxious waste and clear-cutting woodlands in county-sized chunks, Vermilion had a reputation for insensitivity. At one time or another, almost every jurisdiction in which it owned forests or mills had taken legal action against it for […]

A three-step approach.

When building peace and building business go hand in hand.

March 13, 2009 was the day AIG mailed out $165 million in bonus checks. As this event may well politically prevent AIG from getting another dollar of bailout money, history books will mark that day as the “Black Friday” of our generation’s depression. That is, unless someone decides to try the AIG executives who got […]

BP doesn’t need an engineer at the helm. It needs a leader. Of course engineers matter, when the task is stemming damage from the largest oil spill in U.S. history. BP needs all the talent it can get. Scientists, engineers, and technicians, including the 2500 BOP employees sent to the Gulf from all over the […]

SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company...

On July 7, 2015, a power fault during the evening commute led to a system-wide disruption on SMRT, Singapore's heavily used mass rapid transit lines....

The case describes how Pret a Manger-a London casual-dining institution-was significantly adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how they tried...

Considers the predicament of Richardson-Vicks in 1985. After 80 years of growth and independence, the company is the object of takeover rumors. The objective...

On June 25, 1950, the US Ambassador to the Republic of Korea received an alarming call from his deputy chief, E.F. Drumright, warning him that the communists...

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On October 21, 2001, a postal worker from a mail sorting facility in Washington, DC, died of inhalation anthrax-a disease virtually unseen for a century....

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook based on the idea that connecting people was a fundamentally good thing-and a way to turn a handsome profit. But from...

Diamond Technology Partners, a consulting firm based in Chicago, was founded in 1994 by Mel Bergstein and Chris Moffitt, with investment from founding...

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Bob Beall is the Chief Executive Officer of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation ("CFF"). CFF is an extremely successful organization, but Beall has to determine...

Ray White is an Australian real estate business that has been owned and operated by the White family for four generations. The business has expanded and...

In March 2019, Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft were grounded worldwide. This was a consequence of two deadly plane crashes within five months in late 2018 and...

An abstract is not available for this product.

Supplements the (A) case.

The case opens in November 2019 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, find out about...

The credit crisis of 2008 placed compensation practices at publicly traded firms in the United States under scrutiny. This case examines perceived excessive...

The case represents a role-play simulation in which a team of up to 7 participants acts as a board of directors of a privately-owned company. The board...

This case allows instructors to lay out the challenges of providing universal access to safe drinking water in some developing and emerging countries-one...

ChemRe EU was incorporated in 2008 in the Netherlands to support its Chinese client companies in registering chemical substances in their exports, in...

“It’s three a.m. and the phone rings. Who do you want to answer it?” asks a baritone voice over an image of a red phone. Walter Mondale first used this scenario in an campaign ad in 1984. Hillary Clinton just used the same image in her campaign against Barack Obama. The inference is that it […]

A step-by-step guide to tailoring your crisis response.

Many technology experts believe the internet cannot be shut down as it was built by the military to be redundant. Organizations have accepted this premise...

Here’s a leadership challenge for the ages. Let’s imagine that you were appointed to turn around a business that was in very deep trouble. It was awash in red ink, shedding employees like leaves in fall, at risk of losing its access to capital, and staffed by employees who were terribly demoralized. And let’s suppose […]

SIAM was born in 1910, in Buenos Aires (Argentina), as a manufacturing company of bread making machines or bread mixers. In only a few decades, the company...

The news that one of the company's senior managers is leaving comes as a complete surprise to Paul Simmonds, CEO of Kinsington Textiles, Inc. (KTI). Ned...

The importance of planning for a product recall can be seen in the large number of recalls, their increasing frequency, and the overall costs they incur,...

On July 7, 2015, a power fault during the evening commute led to a system-wide disruption on SMRT, Singapore's heavily used mass rapid transit lines....

Traditional methods of managing supply chain risk require estimations of how likely a disruption is to occur. For fairly common risks--poor supplier performance,...

Harvard Business Review publishes new and authoritative ideas for improving the practice of management. Written by leading business thinkers and executives,...