In June 2022, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Worn Again Technologies (Worn Again), a polymer recycling technology company based in London, United Kingdom, was examining the way forward with a new technology that the company had developed and fine-tuned. The technology had been tested successfully at the company's demonstration plant in Switzerland and was capable of processing fifty thousand tons of material per year. The CEO now needed to find new markets where the technology could be set up and scaled for commercialization.
The case revolves around an entrepreneur, Maggie Fleur, who manages several businesses on her family's farm and who is considering a complementary new business in the burgeoning industry of human composting. The case includes background on the death-care market in the United States in addition to how human composting (which was legal in five US states as of spring 2023) works. It explores the industry leader, private company Recompose, providing details about company history, fundraising, and basic financials.
This case presents a dilemma that professional golfers face when having to choose a target point for landing the ball. Key to this case is to acknowledge uncertainty as reflected in less-than-perfect accuracy. Thus the ball will land in a ""cloud"" around the intended target. On such a cloud, some spots (e.g., the fairway) are better than others (e.g., sand bunkers or rough). There is therefore a conflict between advancing the ball as close to the hole as possible, while at the same time reducing the chance of being in trouble on the next shot. The idea is to find a sweet spot between these two competing goals. To operationalize this problem, we use data from the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tour to estimate the average number of shots to complete the hole as a function of (i) distance to the hole, and (ii) type of surface (fairway, rough, recovery, sand, or the green). The case comes with a companion Excel spreadsheet, UVA-QA-0953X, which shows a map of a classical hole in the PGA Tour (the 10th at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles). This Excel file also displays a heat map of a bivariate normal around any chosen target, and a heat map with the average number of strokes to complete the hole. Students' goal is to understand the model and use it to find a good target.
Autosalon KlokoÄka Holding s.r.o. (Autosalon KlokoÄka), a Czech Republic-based car dealership, needed to change its business ways. A family-owned car dealership, the company was founded in Prague in 1988 by Jan KlokoÄka. In the last thirty years, the company had grown into one of the largest authorized car dealers in the Czech Republic by providing a comprehensive range of services to car owners. But the automobile industry had been among the most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As automotive companies braced for a revival, they had to be prepared to undergo significant modifications to alter how they operated and generated value for consumers. Despite its continuous expansion over thirty years, Autosalon KlokoÄka had been experiencing substantial slowdown and financial losses. In 2020, the company recorded a significantly lower revenue than in the previous years. By early 2022, it was still unclear how long the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic would last and how changes in customer behaviour and capabilities, supply chains, channels, original equipment manufacturer strategic choices, and other crucial factors would affect Autosalon KlokoÄka. As the company found its financial position vulnerable, Jan KlokoÄka needed to determine how to mitigate negative consequences and create growth opportunities. How could the firm adapt its existing business model to improve profits in the next three to five years?
In 2021, Robert, a highly qualified immigrant from the United Kingdom, had recently joined PLT Consulting (PLT), a multinational management consulting company, as a junior consultant in the Tallinn, Estonia, office. This professional services firm had a strong international brand. However, Robert soon realized that the organization catered both internally and externally to more local demands. In particular, his lack of local language proficiency made the organization a challenging work environment for him, both professionally and socially. Robert raised the issue with his boss, who invited him to a meeting with representatives from PLT's human resources department and his work team. What concrete steps could they suggest that would help resolve the situation?
Recent years have brought major technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), and firms are expected to invest nearly $98 B in 2023. However, many AI projects never leave the pilot phase, and many companies have difficulties extracting value from their AI initiatives. To explain this contradiction, this article reports on a study of 55 projects implementing AI in organizations. It shows that organizational challenges in implementing AI projects are a result of a paradoxical tension created by two different perspectives on data science work: craft and mechanical work. Executives, managers, and data scientists should actively manage this tension to enable and sustain value creation through AI.
Marine transport is the most cost-effective way to move large volumes over long distances, and container shipping is the backbone of international trade in goods. Yet shipping contributed 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and the deep-sea segment, which included long distance trade lanes such as Asia to Northern Europe and Asia to North America, warranted special focus because they accounted for 80% of maritime transport's total emissions in 2019. New International Maritime Organization regulations that came into force in January 2023 mandated the annual calculation and grading of each ship of more than 5,000 deadweight tons. Vessels that received a grade of A, B, or C were compliant, while those graded D or E had time limits for getting back into compliance or removal from service. More significantly, the standards for grading required annual improvements in efficiency. This meant that a brand-new vessel built with the latest technology that was initially graded A could over time become graded E and no longer be legally operable if no upgrades were made. This is the supplementary spreadsheet for the case, 623006.
The unique needs of companies at different growth stages are best served by a marketing organization designed to meet the organization's goals and a CMO with the right skills. Early-stage companies need a scrappy generalist, developing companies need a scale specialist, and mature companies need a strategic marketing leader. Based on research and interviews with 100 CMOs, the authors identified three key traps in designing marketing organizations and ways to avoid them.
Founded in 578 AD, Kongo Gumi was a family-owned business until 2006, when the firm went into liquidation to pay its creditors. While its demise is briefly covered, the case study is focused on its longevity. A renowned builder of traditional temples, in a country where these are major tourist attractions, Kongo Gumi has left an indelible mark on Japanese culture and history. Many of the temples built by its carpenters are listed and some are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The "Moral Complexity in Leadership" series of cases and teaching notes help business instructors harness the power of fiction to prepare students for the moral and ethical dilemmas they will face throughout their careers. Meaningful fiction challenges students intellectually and emotionally; it reveals the inner worlds of human players and enables learning that can be difficult to access through case studies, commentary, or reporting. Through literature, students will wrestle with the kinds of problems they will face as leaders looking to make courageous decisions aligned with their moral codes. The works in this series represent a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and cultural frameworks; the characters are complex and contradictory, and the systems within which they operate (whether family, organizational, or cultural) influence them in varied ways. These cases have been taught to executive, full- and part-time MBA student audiences for many years. The series aims to increase students' understanding of moral frameworks and to enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. This installment of the series, "Hubris and Humility," examines the short story "Dead Men's Path," by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In the story, Michael Obi, the new headmaster of the Ndume Central School, hopes to modernize the school and surrounding community, both of which are deeply rooted in traditional ways and customs. However, he ultimately pays a high price for his "misguided zeal," which did not take into consideration the context or the interests of the school's stakeholders. Obi's experience offers powerful lessons to leaders tempted to implement their ideas in--and impose their values on--organizations or communities before taking the time to listen and learn. It highlights what can happen when leaders ignore the risks of hubris and fail to recognize the limits of their perspective.
This background note describes the Amager Bakke waste-to-energy (WtE) plant in Copenhagen, which merges traditional waste incineration with a combined heat and power (CHP) plant and air pollution control (scrubbing) technology, and had plans to add carbon dioxide (CO2) capture technology to become the cleanest incineration plant in the world. The note also provides an overview of integrated waste management, waste incineration, district heating, Amager Bakke's process, and the future of waste management in Denmark.
Lisa LaFlamme was the trusted face of CTV National News. In 2022, she was at the height of her career. It was therefore a shock to her colleagues and viewers when, on August 15, 2022, she posted a video on Twitter to announce that she had been abruptly ousted from CTV by its parent company, Bell Media Inc. (Bell Media). Bell Media was hit with seemingly never-ending waves of negative press, including speculation that sexism and ageism had been the reasons behind LaFlamme’s ousting. The choice to get rid of LaFlamme, and the manner in which that choice was exercised, had lasting negative effects that Bell Media surely had not anticipated. Looking back, was replacing LaFlamme unequivocally the wrong choice? Or could it have been handled in a way that would have prevented such backlash?
<p align="justify">The case describes how Zhuiyi, a leading conversational artificial intelligence (AI) start-up in China, developed its growth strategy and made transitions in the face of product commercialization challenges. The crux lies in the low customer satisfaction rate of AI products, which could be endogenously attributed to mismatched expectations among customers and the founding team in the product development process as well as to the lack of vertical industry knowledge among executives and employees. Zhuiyi needs to make a strategic choice between: a) developing new AI products by making large and risky research-and-development investments or b) devoting more resources to product customization and expanding the market through client diversification.
In May 2021, the majority shareholder and chief executive officer of Ontrak Inc., a US health care services company, established two 10b5-1 trading plans to sell approximately one million shares of stock he acquired by exercising expiring warrants. Before he began the process to execute the first 10b5-1 plan, Ontrak Inc. had just lost its largest client. Three days into the process for the second 10b5-1 trading plan, the company announced that it was losing another major client. On March 1, 2023, two concurrent insider trading lawsuits were filed against the chief executive officer by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and by the United States Department of Justice. The lawsuits contended that he sold his stock the day after filing the plans instead of waiting a set number of days, commonly known as a “cooling-off” period. However, the chief executive officer was arguing that a cooling-off period was not mandatory when he sold his stock, insisting that the “government [had] clearly overreached in this case.” He was forced to prepare a defence against two separate lawsuits filed against him.
Child Rights and You (CRY) was a non-governmental organization (NGO) started in 1979 in India. The organization experienced pan-Indian growth and later expanded to international locations. While CRY was partnering with state governments to increase its impact and reach, the global environment was shifting toward sustainable development. At the same time, the Indian government statutorily mandated companies with a specific turnover or net worth to spend 2 per cent of their profits on corporate social responsibility activities. In 2022, CRY’s chief executive officer, Puja Marwaha, had four focus areas: education, health and nutrition, child safety and protection, and children’s participation in improving their lives. She was looking at scaling up the organization and faced four major challenges: funding, regulatory compliance, employee retention, and technology infrastructure. Marwaha was in a dilemma about how to obtain more support from corporates as well as increase the impact of funding.
In 2013, Aoibheann O'Brien and Iseult Ward founded FoodCloud, a non-profit social enterprise that aimed to address food waste and food insecurity issues. Through its technology platform, Foodiverse, FoodCloud connected surplus food from retailers with community groups in need. By 2022, the company had partnered with Tesco Ireland and Tesco UK, and was rolling out its solution in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. O'Brian and Ward were eager to scale their solution globally, but funding the growth of a non-profit posed a challenge. Options included spinning off Foodiverse into an investment-seeking entity or retaining non-profit status to raise a social impact bond. The founders also sought to amplify their impact in Ireland to position the country as a leader in food waste reduction. The co-founders wondered whether to focus on developing an exemplary local sustainable food system or expand their proven technology solution globally, and where to find the funds for their chosen path.