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In the 1880s, William James argued that individuals do make a difference in history, and that the study of influential people is a defensible academic pursuit. The literature on leadership today raises three distinct challenges to his position: (a) that everyone is a leader, (b) that no one is a leader, and (c) that leadership is self-leadership. To avoid confusion, educators should look closer at the arguments, not only for historical reasons. There are sound theoretical, conceptual, and psychological reasons, for teachers and students alike to look closer at his argument.

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.

Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.

This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.

The purpose of this paper is to use tenets of the complexity theory in order to study the effect of various determinants of firm’s performance, such as CEO’s compensation and age, for the case of 72 insurance companies.

The authors identify the asymmetries in the data set by creating quantiles and using contrarian analysis. Instead of ignoring this information and use a main effects approach, all the available information in the data set is taken into account. For this purpose, the authors use qualitative comparative analysis to find alternative equifinal routes toward high firm performance.

Five configurations are found which lead to high performance. Every one of the five configurations is found to be sufficient but not necessary for high firm performance.

The research findings contribute to a better understanding of the determinants of firm’s performance taking into account the asymmetries in the data set. The authors identify alternative paths toward high firm performance, which could be vital information for the decision maker inside a firm.