William Fischer

Few ideas are attracting as much attention as that of ecosystems. Casually described as ‘constellations of partners’ or ‘networks of networks’, these metaphors can blind us to the intricacy of the ...

Over the past year, working with ecosystem development in diverse industries has led to a number of insights into the role of ecosystems as an engine for innovation and learning and the managerial...

Using archival data from two different industries, this paper examines the relationship between organisational slack and new product time to market performance. Prior research has shown that there ...

This case describes how Haier, the world’s largest white goods manufacturer, reinvented its corporate culture, at least three times over the past three decades. The case details the four stages of ...

During the years between its founding in 1984 and 2004, Dell Computers authored one of the great success stories in modern manufacturing. In a business increasingly characterized as a “commodity”, ...

This disguised case traces the engineering of a complete corporate turn-around in a large, European-based, fast-moving consumer goods company’s Indian business unit. The case traces the assumption ...

How many geniuses does it take to completely rethink an industry? If the industry is music, the answer is four! Five, if you throw in Steve Jobs. It’s the iPod, of course, that we’re talking about ...

This opening note is part of the suite of teaching materials which employs China as an illustration of the managerial implications resulted from the so-called War for Talent, and is intended to gen...

This case is part of the suite of teaching materials which employs China as an illustration of the managerial implications resulted from the so-called War for Talent, and is intended to generate in...

This case is part of the suite of teaching materials which employs China as an illustration of the managerial implications resulted from the so-called War for Talent, and is intended to generate in...

This case is part of the suite of teaching materials which employs China as an illustration of the managerial implications resulted from the so-called War for Talent, and is intended to generate in...

This case is part of the suite of teaching materials which employs China as an illustration of the managerial implications resulted from the so-called War for Talent, and is intended to generate in...

The article discusses how lessons applicable to executive education can be taken from the motion picture "Apollo 13," the musical "West Side Story," and the jazz musician Miles Davis. The authors f...

A fascinating example of a great team can be found in the Manhattan Project, which brought some of the most brilliant scientific talent of the 20th century into an isolated campus to design a worka...

In the late 19th century, Thomas Edison revolutionized lighting, motion pictures and sound with a series of inventions that changed the world. He did this by relying on a virtuoso team that worked ...

Eighteen months after mega-star horror-fiction writer Stephen King had, in the summer of 2000, independently launched a new novel over the Internet, and asked his readers to become “big publishing’...

This novel, interactive two-part case series is in the format of a PowerPoint presentation to stimulate class discussion without any pre-class preparation. It describes the international growth jou...

The B case describes the company's choice of options presented in the A case, and the arising governance and operational issues, including: forming the top management team, staff morale, downsizing...

So much of what is done as work by knowledge-professionals in today’s complex organizations is about delivering messages, moving ideas. Be they instructions, directions, opinions, suggestions, less...

Louis Vuitton’s choice of Pharrell Williams as its new creative director for men’s fashions, and to assume the role that became vacant with the tragic loss of Virgil Abloh. In yesterday’s announce...

Maybe, the most important thing that’s up with disruption, these days, is the amount of attention it is receiving. Depicted in the image above, which is derived from searching for “Disruptive Innov...

A recent Microsoft study of 30,000 people revealed that 46% of workers are considering a major career pivot or transition after the Covid years. For many, this search goes beyond just a change of r...

Business model innovation is the hottest topic today in innovation conversations, despite its being so seemingly invisible, even to the point of being overlooked in many innovation-measurement sche...

Disruption continues to be a familiar topic in today’s C-suite; almost always spoken about in hushed tones, with frequent glances over one’s shoulder, as if the inevitable is about to arrive at any...

There may be no more iconic American brand than General Electric Appliances. After all, an American President, Ronald Reagan, built a large part of his public visibility selling the very idea that ...

Ecosystems have become the hottest new idea in managerial conversations today. While the previous favorite, “disruption,” posed problems and suggested despair, ecosystems are all about solutions an...

Today, as this is written, it is impossible to speak of heroism without acknowledging that real heroism has rarely been so abundantly visible as it is, at this very moment, in the streets of Ukrain...

Want to change the culture of your organization; give it a complete transformation? Who doesn't? But, when do you really know that the time is right for such an ambitious undertaking? At the core o...

Blood on the stage, racial tensions turned violent, dissonant music and serious dance: from the beginning, the whole idea of West Side Story was definitely a disconnect from conventional musical th...

The recent announcement by Greg Norman that his Saudi-funded partnership, LIV Golf Investment, will be investing $200 million into the Asian Tour, with a deliberate challenge of a Jeddah start on t...

Serious transformation is not for the faint-hearted, and, so, it isn’t every week that an iconic firm announces such an initiative. The week before this past week, three such organizations, GE, Tos...

The decision this morning by Mr. Zhang Ruimin, Chairman and CEO of the Haier Group, to not participate in the nomination of new directors, has taken many of his admirers by surprise. The long-servi...

It used to be that we could excuse most CEO’s for not being more involved or supportive of innovation, because they typically did not come from a technical background. That excuse became invalid wh...

The importance of the people at the top of an organization to launch or suppress transformational change is hard to deny. Despite a popularity for true bottom-up revolution, the catalyst for change...

We are living in a golden age of business model innovation. Look around, business models are disrupting industries everywhere around you: traditional news media are being challenged by subscription...

It’s been more than a year, now, and the Covid-19 pandemic, instead of just disappearing, is still very much a part of our lives. We are well over one hundred million total cases having occurred wo...