Fortune Magazine Research Articles

National Stock Exchange: Failure of Corporate Governance

The case explores the corporate governance challenges that arose at the National Stock Exchange (NSE), India’s leading stock exchange. Chitra Ramkrishna served as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (MD and CEO) of NSE from 2013 to 2016. In 2013, she was recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the most powerful women in business. In 2015, following a whistleblower’s complaint about preferential access given to certain brokers, Indian regulators launched investigations. Further allegations in September 2016 claimed that the appointment of Anand Subramanian, a close associate of Chitra Ramkrishna, violated the code of conduct. Anticipating potential dismissal over these alleged lapses, Ramkrishna resigned from the board in November 2016. Subsequent investigations revealed ongoing preferential access for select brokers during Ravi Narain’s tenure as NSE’s MD and CEO from 2010 to 2014. Narain had been a key mentor to Ramkrishna and strongly supported her appointment as CEO. It was also discovered that Ramkrishna continued to share confidential NSE information with Subramanian even after his termination. Despite these serious irregularities, the NSE board remained notably inactive. This case is significant as it highlights the NSE board’s failure to uphold its core responsibilities, allowing misconduct and irregularities to persist. It concludes by presenting the dilemma NSE’s new CEO and board of directors faced: how to address investor concerns while enhancing the organization’s leadership and governance structure.

DOES THE INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT AFFECT SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING? WORLDWIDE EVIDENCE

This study aims to examine the association between the institutional environment and the adoption of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. The research sample covers the largest 500 companies in the world, based on Fortune magazine’s 2020 ranking. A logistic regression is conducted to examine the relationship between the institutional environment and GRI adoption. The findings reveal that companies from countries with high environmental development and social progress and strong governance are more likely to release GRI-based sustainability reports. This study implies the significant role of country-level institutional factors in corporate reporting.

How exponential organizations outcompete(d) their traditional counterparts (in the past eight years)?

PurposeExponential organizations (ExOs) are purpose-driven companies that leverage exponential technologies and exponential business practices to grow and scale rapidly, transform industries and create massive value and impact. In contrast, non-ExOs follow a linear approach to business and organizational strategy design and execution. This study aims to validate the hypothesis, based on financial metrics, that ExOs outperform their competitors and linear counterparts. Furthermore, it also brings a new understanding of the gap raised in the past eight years about how ExOs can achieve significantly better performance, measured with financial metrics.Design/methodology/approachFor measuring how exponential an organization is, this study elaborated a completely new assessment tool called Exponential Quotient (ExQ). This study applied ExQ to the 100 largest US headquartered companies as ranked by Fortune magazine in 2014. Calculating the ExQ enabled this study to rank these Fortune 100 companies and identify the most and the least exponential firms. This study tracked these companies as to how they performed on different financial metrics over the eight years of 2014–2021 and analyzed the results.FindingsThrough the analysis, this study revealed that the top 10 ExOs have significantly outperformed their bottom 10 non-exponential peers, delivering 40x higher shareholder returns, 2.6x better revenue growth, 6.8x higher profitability and 11.7x better asset turnover. Furthermore, this study could identify commonalities and similarities between the two groups. This means that ExOs can thrive even in tough times and that accelerating technologies unlock abundance and allow every organization to become a disruptive innovator and stay ahead of the competition. These are novel results in the research focusing on the gap between exponential and traditional organizations.Research limitations/implicationsUsing the ExQ diagnostics tool, every organization can see how flexible, scalable and agile they are, which is the starting point for an exponential transformation program. Although this approach has already found its way into practice and is applied globally by thousands of organizations (startups, scaleups and incumbents), so far, the academic establishment is in its nascent phase. With this research, the authors wanted to extend this field of science. On the other hand, because of its novelty, no appropriate previous studies existed to compare the results.Practical implicationsThe possible implications showed that there is a plannable way for significantly increasing an organization’s ExQ and advance it from a linear toward an exponential organizational model.Originality/valueThe results validated the robustness of the ExO framework and philosophy and shed light on the importance of exponential transformation – a proven method to increase an organization’s ExQ. This framework is not a “how to be successful” guide. Instead, it uncovered some of the previously unknown and universal mechanisms of scalability – which, in turbulent times, make companies successful (based on financial metrics). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was among the first kind of in-depth analyses to validate the whole ExO model.

PPG Is one of the world’s most admired companies according to FORTUNE magazine

PPG Is one of the world’s most admired companies according to FORTUNE magazine

HOW LEADERS CAN BUILD COMMON UNDERSTANDING, PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY, AND PROSOCIAL PURPOSE

AbstractThe author, an “organizational psychologist by training, and now a writer and keynote speaker who helps organizations understand and apply evidence‐based leadership insights,” discusses the importance of teams and especially team cultures. He notes that “creating high‐performing teams through culture is the goal, but many of us are uncertain about the approach.” He explains common or shared understanding, illustrated with an example from Chris Hadfield’s leadership during Expedition 35 on the International Space Station (ISS). He builds on Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety construct, with an example from Maggie Wilderotter, who turned around Frontier Communications in 2004. Another construct is prosocial purpose, building on the research of Wharton professor Adam Grant. Within this example the author explores KPMG and two of its highly successful internal campaigns, the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” and “We Shape History.” One positive result from the campaigns: “KPMG ascended seventeen places on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 Best Companies To Work For, surpassing all other “big four” accounting firms.” Regarding leadership behavior within teamwork, the author cautions that “leaders who advocate for teamwork but fail to acknowledge their own imperfections (and thus the team’s growth opportunities) quickly lose credibility and the trust of their team.”

Kelly Chibale: Learning to Fail Your Way to Success

A portrait is given of Professor Kelly Chibale, the driving force behind H3D, the drug discovery and development centre at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is dedicated to the development of new drugs to fight infectious diseases of poverty that are prevalent in Africa, including MMV390048, the first anti-malarial drug ever to be validated in a Phase I trial in Africa. In 2018 he was recognized as one of Fortune magazine’s top 50 ‘World’s Greatest Leaders’.

Economics as a “Story Engine”: John D. McDonald and Business as Game and Gamble

John D. McDonald was a writer and editor best known for his work at Fortune magazine in the 1950s and 1960s and as the ghostwriter of the memoirs of Alfred P. Sloan. McDonald was also the first person to popularize game theory. In this article I argue that game theory played a key role in McDonald's transition from documentary writer to business journalist. Game theory gave McDonald a journalistic device to discover business stories and to give those stories a driving tension; he called it a “story engine.” After decades writing with game theory, it began to serve a different purpose for McDonald. By coding business stories as games, McDonald gained insight into the characters, corporate executives who were often brief in explanations and shallow in self-understanding. McDonald's career gives us a glimpse at an extraordinary transformation of how a set of scholarly ideas can become a literary resource for vividness (of stories) and depth (of characters).

In Case You Haven't Heard…

New York's legal recreational marijuana industry is not going well. The huge state has opened only 12 dispensaries. The black market is rampant. Farmers who replanted their food crops with marijuana now have more product than they know what to do with. Last year's harvest is still waiting to be sold, and it's time for another harvest. Farmer's markets may be the next best option. It's not only New York — other states have the same problem. But in New York, dispensaries were only going to be awarded to people who could show they had been jailed for marijuana possession, which took time, so even though recreational use was legal, there was no legal dispensary. “Unlicensed shops rushed in to fill the void,” Fortune magazine reported last week. Now, it's a losing battle for farmers, as last year's “flower” may soon become too old to even sell. For the Fortune magazine article, go to https://fortune.com/2023/06/05/pot‐farmers‐going‐broke‐growing‐new‐york‐legal‐weed‐market‐not‐taking‐off/.

Analysis of Toyota's Operations to Maintain its Brand Position During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Toyota is a major multinational corporation dedicated to the manufacture of automobiles and transportation equipment, with sales ranked among the world's top and named a Number 1 Motor Vehicle Company on Fortune Magazine's 2020 "World's Most Admired" list 2020. The main purpose of this article is to analyze how the strategies implemented by Toyota during the COVID-19 pandemic period (late 2019-2022 in this article) have helped it regain its business viability as soon as possible and to assess the feasibility of these strategies for other automobile manufacturing companies through three aspects: actual cases, financial analysis, and SWOT analysis. According to the author's research, most business analysis articles only start from a company itself or give an appropriate opinion of this company, but this article wants to give an opinion to other car companies by analyzing Toyota's strategy to give an opportunity to the current trend of economic globalization.

Opportunities and Challenges in Singapore under the COVID-19 Pandemic

Singapore Airlines is a typical state-owned enterprise and the only airline on Fortune magazine's list of the world's 50 most admired companies. This paper first summarizes and analyzes the basic situation and background information of Singapore Airlines; Then, based on the profit and loss data of the annual report, it pointed out the main impact of the epidemic on airlines, and analyses the impact of policy, economic, social and technological factors based on PEST analysis. Finally, based on the observation and practice of the development trend of Singapore Airlines, the author puts forward countermeasures and suggestions for the future development of airlines in the post-epidemic era, including continuous innovation, careful listening to customers' opinions, standardized corporate governance, and so on. Collect existing research literature on Singapore Airlines, consolidate relevant theoretical knowledge, and conduct empirical analysis based on annual report data to further enrich the study of enterprise value Singapore Airline's PEST analyzer Operational Capability Analysis Liability Analysis

Effective practices for improving service professionals' ethical behaviors: A multiple method study.

Enhancing frontline professional service employees' ethics has been an increasingly important issue for organizations in sustaining their reputation and long-term profitability. While many organizations have implemented general ethics programes such as ethics codes and ethical training, unethical scandals regularly still appear in many service organizations. This research offers new insights into the practices that can effectively enhance marketing practitioners' ethical behaviors and the pertinent contextual factors that have a bearing on the effectiveness of ethics programes. It uses a multi-method methodology to conduct two studies in the Chinese banking setting. Based on the rank of revenue and profitability published by Fortune magazine of year 2021, in Study 1, we choose five main Chinese banking organizations to conduct case studies to explore the framework of effective ethics programes of banks. In Study 2 we use the valid instruments from the literature to measure the involved constructs and employs data from randomly selected 146 frontline banking teams in five main Chinese banking organizations to examine the effectiveness of three specific ethics practices and ascertain the moderating role of role stress in such effectiveness. Our findings indicate the effective behavior control practices within organizations' ethics programes and the implications of having a stressful workplace when adopting such practices. In addition, we integrate organizational concepts regarding behavior control and employee ethics, and use two empirical methods to systematically explore the effectiveness of ethics programes. This paper advances the management and marketing literature and has significant managerial implications for improving frontline service professionals' ethical behaviors.

Star Analysts’ Voting in Emerging Market: A Perspective of Analysts’ Optimistic Bias

ABSTRACT We examine the effect of fund managers’ voting on the optimistic bias of sell-side analysts by exploiting the exogenous event of New Fortune Magazine suspending the Sixteenth Star Analyst Contest. Our results show that the disappearance of voting makes analysts face less pressure from funds, which leads to less optimistic bias and lower error in earnings forecasts. Moreover, the effect is more pronounced in the samples of analysts who work in small brokerages and have less star experience. Further, we find that analysts reduce listed firm joint site visits with small fund managers but still conduct single site visits, suggesting analysts are diligent but not catering to small fund managers anymore. In addition, we find the opposite result as the effect of the cancelation reverses. In general, our findings indicate that the voting right of the star analyst ranking has become a self-interest tool for fund managers, driving analysts to provide biased reports and soft services, becoming another source of pressure for analysts.

Last word

A few weeks ago we were the fortunate recipients of Clicking by Faith Popcorn, proclaimedby Fortune Magazine to be “the Nostradamus of Marketing”. The subtitle of the book is“16 Trends to future fit your life, your work, and your business”. Nostradamus, here andnow telling us about our future?As part of our strategy consulting work, we also read through a variety of magazines,journals and e-zines covering a wide range of disciplines, such as business, economics,politics and technology. Perhaps being more attuned to the trends we picked upbecause of Clicking, it dawned on us that almost all of the articles illustrated in someform or another a real shift in social patterns. This awareness raised a concern thatperhaps what Clicking was doing was simply illustrating the surface of a much moresubstantial “social revolution”. Could it be that these trends are nothing more thanthe symptoms of a much more profound change?

Financial Performance and Sustainable Corporate Reputation: Empirical Evidence from the Airline Business

A good corporate reputation is essential, and it is becoming increasingly relevant for both companies and stakeholders. In this context, Fortune magazine publishes an annual ranking of corporate reputation, therefore listing the most admired companies in the world. Since corporate reputation is considered an intangible asset, it is difficult for competing firms to create similar products or services in the long run. Numerous researchers have concluded that financial performance is strongly connected to corporate reputation. The purpose of this study was to elicit the importance of financial performance in determining an adequate sustainable level of corporate reputation. Using financial indicators and the VIKOR method for a sample of airline companies, we compared the rankings generated by the VIKOR method to the ones published by Fortune. Empirical results showed that when introducing additional financial indicators in the VIKOR method, the VIKOR ranking tends to become similar to the Fortune one. When we introduced 10 financial indicators in the VIKOR method, we obtained similar rankings in 8 of the 10 years of analysis. Our study addresses stakeholders who follow corporate reputation details and may assist them in formulating investment decisions by relying on financial results.

Dr Li Wenliang: Wuhan “Whistleblower” and Early COVID-19 Victim

Dr Li Wenliang: Wuhan “Whistleblower” and Early COVID-19 Victim

CEO as “Chief Crisis Officer” under COVID-19: A Content Analysis of CEO Open Letters Using Structural Topic Modeling

ABSTRACT This study seeks to explore how business leaders should respond to COVID-19. In advancing theoretical development of strategic crisis communication, we incorporated theoretical frameworks of organizational resilience, social support, and values-centered communication to make sense of CEO’s COVID-19 responses. Using structural topic modeling, this study analyzed 192 CEO open letters from 152 multinational corporations that are listed on the 2020 Fortune Magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies. Fourteen valid topics and four general themes were identified and discussed. Results suggested that in those letters, CEOs demonstrated organizational resilience by giving sense to current crisis situations and expressing their self-efficacy and response efficacy in handling challenges, which supported the conceptualization and operationalization of organizational resilience in this new crisis context. Additionally, both emotional and instrumental support provisions were found in CEOs’ letters. A values-centered and care ethics communication approach was widely taken in CEOs’ messages, highlighting the importance of social solidarity in facing a public health crisis. This study also explored how topic prevalence varied by business sectors and CEOs’ genders and associated with companies’ financial performance. These summarized communication strategies and narrative topics shed light on crisis communication practice and theory, especially in the context of a global public health crisis.

A unique approach to achieving organizational excellence: The Cube One Framework

AbstractIn this article, I present the rationale and evidence pertinent to the utility of the Cube One Framework for achieving organizational excellence. Three factors contribute to the uniqueness of the Cube One framework: (1) the reliance on measuring the frequency of enacted practices (as contrasted to the traditional emphasis on stated policies, leadership philosophies, and mission statements); (2) the empirical examination of practices directed toward satisfying the needs of three separate stakeholders—funders, customers, and employees–customers consistently being neglected from lists of High‐Performance Work Practices which focus solely on productivity and employee satisfaction; and (3) the capability of performing an empirically‐based diagnosis of organizational strengths and opportunities for improvement. I offer three types of evidence: survey data collected in four studies conducted in three countries–where results are (surprisingly) slightly stronger for organizations in the nonprofit/government sectors as compared to for‐profit companies; longitudinal stock market valuations using a sample of America's Most Admired Companies per Fortune Magazine; and seven case studies of prominent organizations such as Google, Four Seasons Hotels, and Mayo Clinic.

Investigation of Impression Management Tactics Exhibited by Powerful Businesswomen in Turkey by Content Analysis

In this study, it is aimed to evaluate the post sent by businesswomen who are managers in different sectors by using social media in terms of impression management. In accordance with the study aim, the official Twitter accounts of 50 businesswomen in the list of the most powerful 50 businesswomen of business life in 2020 prepared by Fortune Magazine including the dates of March 11, 2020-January 28, 2021 through the content analysis method. In the study, it was presented the date the businesswomen joined Twitter application, the number of their followers and the accounts they follow, and their number of posts. The posts sent by the businesswomen were grouped according to contents, and the groups were designated according to impression management tactics. The posts in the accounts were interpreted in terms of aggressive and defensive impression management tactics, and it was found in the study that the businesswomen have generally been using the impression management tactics of Self-promotion (SP), Ingratiation (IN), and Exemplification (EX) among the aggressive and defensive impression management tactics. It can be said that the studies in this scope have importance in terms of increasing and supporting the participation of women to business world by presenting the influence of women in business world. Besides, because of that the Covid-19 period is a period during which the institutions face crisis economically, analyzing the attitude of businesswomen at this point has importance also in terms of management.

Exploration of Women's Leadership Development Challenges and Transformational Learning: A Positional Paper

My review of the positions that involving decision-making roles shows that women still hold less than 26% of the decision-making roles within Fortune Magazine’s list of Top 500 companies, higher education, and politics. Fortune 500 boards of directors and entrepreneurs show increasing rates of women in decision-making roles. Surveys related to the division of labor in households show that women are still responsible for the majority of the work needed to keep the household running. These factors, along with challenges such as a lack of positive social feedback for aspiring women leaders, gender stereotypes, educational methods, and a lack of prominent role models, can affect women’s development as leaders and the number of women in leadership roles. This paper explores social feedback, gender stereotypes, conditional teaching, and lack of role models as affecting women’s potential and development as leaders. This review also explores applying lessons from the transformational learning literature to women’s leadership development process. Keywords: transformational learning, leadership development, identity development, women's leadership development, gender stereotypes, social constructs

Firms that prosper in all weathers: surviving recessions and plagues

Purpose: Whether they support long-term growth companies, entrepreneurial firms or turnarounds, top teams need to make bold strategic investment choices in times of boom, bust or pandemic This paper aims to discuss firm strategies, as evidenced by their investment choices, over a 21-year period during which they led firms committed to growth through times of crisis and disruption Design/methodology/approach: The starting point for this research is Fortune magazine’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies, published in 2018 and updated in 2019 The list is based on the magazine’s ranking of the world’s top three-year performers in revenues, profits and stock returns for the four quarters preceding publication Inclusion on the list is all about growth, not starting size (the smallest and not renown) The classification of firms by industry sector follows Fortune’s nomenclature Comparing these firms with industry peers in the same period, the authors look at Fortune’s 100 Fastest-Growing Companies of 2018 from the vantage point of their financials from 1999 to 2017, years that included the tech boom and bust, the mortgage meltdown and the Great Recession This period also saw a relatively long expansion which was, paradoxically, punctuated by a trade war with China and recession fears that have impacted spending for growth Only 32 of Fortune’s 2018 list made it to Fortune’s 100 Fastest Growing Companies of 2019 The authors call them the Persistent 32 and examine their investment and performance metrics from 2018 through 2020 Findings: The Persistent 32 – companies that have survived multiple recessions, including the COVID-19 recession, and continue to grow – have lessons to teach, although there is no silver bullet or secret formula, even within the same industry It was found that in the group of 32, the average company lifespan is 28 75 years and astute, decisive leadership matters Companies that persist make unique, strategic resource choices They postpone expenditures on marketing and sales, fixed assets or RDthey comb the evidence for spending and performance shifts in good times and bad from 1999 to 2020;they categorize firm strategies by spending patterns versus industry;they examine the findings for insights;and finally, the authors identify key actions that set still growing firms apart © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited