Today in Globe Business

Thoroughly modern modular

Ask any student assigned to a modular classroom: The cramped units' boxy shapes, cut-rate aesthetics, and inadequate cooling and heating can make them feel more like prisons than schools.

But an entrepreneur and an architect who are looking to spark a "green" revolution in school design are giving modular classrooms a radical revamping. Their version harnesses sunlight to all but replace electric light and uses a garden-top green roof to dispel heat in summer. They have plenty of room, excellent acoustics, and eye-catching designs, too.

Cliff Cort, president of Triumph Modular, a construction company in Littleton, has teamed up with California architect Peter Anderson on a proposal to build a modular day-care center that will effectively reduce energy bills to zero. It will be the third generation of high-tech modular classroom designs produced by Triumph over the past three years.

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Sick bats' PR problem could prove to be deadly

To a public raised on vampire movies, bats are loathsome, frightening creatures - blind, flying rodents that all carry rabies, suck human blood, and get impossibly tangled in long hair.

None of it is true. But scientists trying to drum up a public outcry - and government funding - to stop a mysterious illness ravaging bat populations from Vermont to Virginia believe these myths are thwarting their efforts. The researchers say they are learning a harsh truth about the public's desire to save animals: Cuteness rules.

Despairing bat biologists want to hire a publicist - a kind of public relations batman - to give bats an image makeover and educate people about the night creatures' ecological benefits. If they could get people to care even half as much as they do about polar bears, these researchers say, desperately needed dollars and attention may follow to save the misunderstood animals.

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BLOG FILTER: Big changes apt to require new leaders

When a new CEO is necessary. Can an incumbent chief executive effectively remake a company under extreme market pressure? Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter says it isn't likely, and she used the ouster of General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner as a case study.

In this tough economic environment, if you wait too long to envision and implement transformational changes, you are out of the game. That holds for every industry under attack because of obsolete business models, including newspapers and big pharma.

When organizations are in trouble, transformational change almost inevitably requires new leadership at the top . . . New leaders at the top can bring a novel perspective, unburdened by the need to justify strategies of the past and not stuck in a narrow way of thinking, e.g., that the current plan is the only option. As the saying goes, it takes a new broom to sweep clean. Even when executives who presided over a period of decline admit mistakes, it is nearly impossible for them to stir up the organizational energy needed for a turnaround. Those failed leaders symbolize the weight of past losses. People tend to interpret their actions as self-justifying, chosen to rewrite past history. After all, if the old CEO had wrong ideas in the past, why should people believe he or she has the right idea now? For GM's Wagoner, as the problems got worse, the loss figures got bigger, and little else appeared to change, his credibility slipped into the negative zone too.

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