Megan M za is a half-Mexican female entrepreneur who quit her high-paying job in marketing to launch Bandida, a cold-brew horchata beverage brand. As a social enterprise, Bandida aims to manufacture its product using only partners that are women and people of color. M za soon struggles with issues of cultural identity and ponders whether she can launch her product if she hasn''t met all of her social goals. As M za strategizes how to break .....more

Osmo quickly rose to become one of the top Edtech startups after it was launched by Pramod Sharma and Jerome Scholler in 2013. Their innovative toys employed artificial intelligence to combine physical and virtual playing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their sales skyrocket as parents desperately search for solutions to engage their children in at-home learning. However, the founders struggle to keep their toys both educational and fun, and discover .....more

One of the hardest disciplines in business and in life is tearing down what you''ve built to build something better," writes the founder and former CEO of Qualtrics--among the hottest tech companies of the past decade. He explains how the company grew from a family start-up in Provo, Utah, to be acquired by SAP in January 2019 for $8 billion: "the largest private enterprise-software acquisition in history." At its IPO two years .....more

As they deal with a business landscape that is evolving constantly, rapidly, and unpredictably, executives all over the world are full of questions about change: "How much?" "How fast?" "How sustainable?" And sometimes just "How?" They can''t hope to answer those questions unless they understand their companies'' capacity for change--but they''ve lacked good tools for measuring that. .....more

More and more manufacturing companies are talking about what''s often called the circular economy--in which businesses can create supply chains that recover or recycle the resources used to create their products. Shrinking their environmental footprint, trimming operational waste, and using expensive resources more efficiently are certainly appealing to CEOs. But creating a circular business model is challenging--and taking the wrong approach .....more

Today it''s not unusual for corporations that have dominated their markets for decades to be blindsided by upstarts with radical new business models. A lot of young ventures, on the other hand, raise vast sums of money and attract tens of millions of customers, only to collapse when they can''t figure out how to fend off imitators. In these situations and many others, the underlying cause is often a failure to take a holistic approach .....more

Identifying the next big thing is often treated as an exercise in analyzing trends. But that''s misleading. By the time a trend is established, any opportunities it presents have probably been captured by competitors. And although a company may need to reflect trends in its business plans, that may mean catching up with rivals rather than gaining a competitive edge. To take advantage of emerging trends, companies must identify them when they .....more

Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they''ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies. SPACs .....more

To create long-term value, corporate boards must focus on managing talent, strategy, and risk. But they also have to satisfy their shareholders, who often have competing demands. Activists, for example, might press for short-term profits, while index funds and other long-term shareholders are more concerned with the company''s longevity. Drawing on years of work with boards, top executives, and the investment community and on interviews with .....more

Chicanery is common in the start-up world: With so much at stake, founders are apt to exaggerate, obfuscate, and otherwise stretch the truth when courting investors and other important stakeholders. Such deception locks up resources by prolonging the life of doomed ventures and makes it hard for VCs and employees to know where best to invest their money or labor. It also exacts a personal toll on founders themselves. The authors take a multidisciplinary .....more