Even in a turbulent environment where employees are facing job insecurity, leadership changes, or reorgs, managers can take steps to give their team members a sense of stability and help mitigate their anxiety. The author suggests seven ways managers can support their teams during times of instability to help restore employees' sense of control and maintain their motivation.
The case documents Fu Sheng Gardening, a Taiwanese flower company that transformed from a wholesaler to a retailer, facing challenges and opportunities. The case suits undergraduate and graduate students taking Operations and Supply Chain Management courses. To answer the case questions, students should apply knowledge in global supply chains, perishable goods, sustainability, e-commerce, supply chain risk, dual-channel supply chains, and transportation. The case can be used for an independent discussion session of 90 minutes to integrate students' learning.
Founded in 1964, Brøndby IF (BIF) was a professional Danish football club located in Brøndbyvester, in the capital region of Denmark, and had won eleven Danish championship titles. In 2015, BIF embarked on a journey of incorporating sports data into its organization and building its sports analytics capabilities. By the end of 2022, sports data had become an integral component of the club's activities and had enabled BIF to establish itself as a leader in sports analytics in Northern European football. However, BIF and its analytics capabilities were contending with the ever-changing landscape of modern sports characterized by rapid digitalization and internationalization.
Often organizations need to apologize for a situation caused by a poor decision or by the actions of one of their employees. There are also times when individuals need to make a public apology about something they have said or done. This case gives students an opportunity to put themselves in the place of Lara Spencer, co-host of Good Morning America, apologizing for comments she made in 2019 about the United Kingdom's Prince George and his grade school curriculum, which included computer programming, religious studies, poetry, and ballet. Critics quickly called Spencer to task for making light of boys and men who dance.
In June 2020, the owner and director of UnityCars Pvt. Limited (UnityCars), a car rental company in Melbourne, Australia, was reviewing his fleet of vehicles and the company's operation over the previous few months. The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns had a negative and severe impact on UnityCars' revenues. The company had expanded rapidly in previous years, becoming highly leveraged, which made it more vulnerable to negative shocks. A sharp reduction in revenues, high expenditures, and the combination of these with the uncertainty of the macro environment had posed a serious threat to the survival of UnityCars. The owner wanted to forecast the company's operating cash flow and decide whether he should borrow or reorganize the fleet to meet his liquidity needs.
A digital twin can be described as a digital model of a real object. But what makes it different from a prototype? How are digital twins being used in business settings outside manufacturing? How do they relate to machine learning and augmented reality? When digital twins meet their fullest potential, they enable businesses to optimize operations by managing their assets more efficiently, generating higher productivity, and reducing costs. This technical note discusses some potential benefits and drawbacks of digital twins; offers examples in aviation, car manufacturing, and agriculture; and helps managers identify where implementing the technology may be useful.
Franck-Erik Flegbo and Cyril Le Terrien were already successful executives in a major multinational when they decided that it was time to dream, and to build their own company, with a culture that delivered performance, created a culture where everyone wanted to work, used the latest technologies, and did its part to save the planet. The opportunity to acquire 40-year-old Drinkotec came to them, and with it, they saw the vehicle for their dreams
The deal is closed; Franck-Erik Flegbo and Cyril Le Terrien become the owners of Drinkotec but discover that the existing team doesn't really have the capabilities or culture to innovate. The Covid-19 pandemic hits, and they discover that their customers need Drinkotec's help.
It is now four years later, and Drinkotec is scaling up fast. They've had to make some tough decisions in order to focus, have the best people and build the culture that they want, but today, major beverage companies are seeking their technology in order to go packaging-free. This case is about leadership, culture, sustainability and taking the leap to follow your dreams.
Although agility is often associated with rapid speed and flexibility, having processes for "deep reflection" is also crucial. This includes the need for collective dialogs across and outside organizations to build greater awareness of, and attention to, strategic issues. How do managers involve a wider range of stakeholder voices in strategy as they pursue agility? This article identifies three practices that synergistically contribute to agility and conceptualizes them in a framework for managers called the "Strategy Making as Polyphony Wheel." The work outlines several implications for managerial practice and research.
In the landscape of low carbon sources of energy, nuclear power stands out as an option that has generated increasing attention and capital investment. Since 2001, nuclear energy production has been in decline, though Clean Core Thorium Energy, led by Mehul Shah, is one of the companies that is bringing nuclear back to the forefront. Founded in 2017, Clean Core is a nascent player in an industry that has a poor reputation among investors. As Shah and his team think about building out the business, they must consider not only the typical competitive pressures of creating a new company but also the unique challenges of nuclear power - safety, waste management, and cost overruns among them. On top of all this, in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine War, more conversations are happening than ever before about reducing the dependence on imported natural gas.
In this second article in a series of four, the researchers behind the 2023 MIT Sloan Management Review-BCG Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Big Ideas research project offer a framework improve-create-establish, or ICE for enhancing strategic measurement with artificial intelligence. Examples from companies such as Wayfair and DBS Bank help illustrate the potential benefits of using AI to improve KPIs.
Wat-a-Burger, a quick service restaurant chain, was incorporated by Rajat Jaiswal and Farman Beig on February 14, 2016. Their burgers, customized to suit the Indian palate, were their unique selling proposition. As envisioned by the founders, from 2016 to 2019 the brand quickly expanded and grew to over 60 outlets in 21 cities and 11 states. In mid-2019, they formulated a plan to expand to 150 outlets and aimed to serve more than 25,000 orders per day by mid-July 2021. The company was in general growing according to the founders' plan until the COVID-19 pandemic hit India and the lockdown was imposed in March 2020. The COVID-19 crisis caused a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) environment. Due to multiple waves of the pandemic, lockdowns, and the associated government regulations, the revenue of the company in the financial year 2020-21 declined by almost 56% relative to that in FY 2019-20. The following questions troubled the founders: Adopt an aggressive expansion strategy as initially envisaged or go slow and survive the VUCA environment for now? See the VUCA environment as an opportunity? How can a win-win value proposition be created at this point so that potential partners continue to get added to the network?
The case documents the challenges of Priya Nadkarni and Digvijay Singh, the cofounders of Mrida Education and Welfare Society (MEWS). Recognizing the need for intervention at a much early stage of learning to alter the mindset and nurture a love for learning, the duo established the Riverside Natural School (RNS) under MEWS in 2016. RNS introduced innovative teaching models drawing on the tribal children's innate cultural capital and core strengths by integrating sports, computers, robotics, and other new-age technologies with the conventional formal education curriculum. The aim was to make the tribal children of the Mandla district in Madhya Pradesh develop a love for learning, gain worldly exposure, develop higher aspirations to become education-oriented, and thus be ready to take up jobs without any inhibitions. In this process, they identified the inherent socioeconomic issues and started addressing them. The program started showing results, beneficiaries grew in number, and outcomes improved.Also, public and private partnerships started building up for MEWS. What started with pre-primary to class four expanded to offer the program up to class seven. As children at the RNS started progressing to higher classes, Nadkarni and Singh felt the need to transition to a fully residential higher secondary school. This warranted extensive investment in infrastructure. With a nearly fully subsidized service model and reliance on donations, predominantly from individuals, Mrida had to mobilize funds for its expansion. In addition to funding, Nadkarni and Singh stared at a formidable human resources (HR) challenge compounded by the project's non-profit nature and geographic location.
Special trains are unscheduled trains run to meet the unexpected surge in demand during holidays and festive seasons, which is generally difficult to predict. Special trains were therefore allocated at SCR using rule-based processes, resulting in suboptimal revenues and occupancy rates. This case presents a data-driven approach to schedule special trains based on passenger waitlist data and application of statistical techniques.
Incubated by two engineering students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. After several pivots, the company focused on home appliances, specifically ceiling fans. The fan-related journey began in 2016 as a Business -to-Business business (B2B) venture, but soon, the company focused on the larger consumer market. In a very short span, it had grown to a revenue run rate of US$80 million in annual revenues by 2022. At the same time, it faced many challenges. To begin with, the company's marketing efforts were mainly through digital channels. 25% of Atomberg's sales were made through online channels, far higher than the industry average of approximately 10%. However, to scale its ceiling fan business to the next level, the company needed to grow its share in the offline market dominated by regional distributors and retailers. While e-commerce will continue to grow, companies such as Atomberg need to have a multi-channel strategy in the short run. They need to focus their marketing and brand-building activities through digital channels and synchronize these with in-store promotions. The case follows the life of a young and successful start-up that pivoted its business model multiple times to reach its current size but needed fresh thinking on its marketing strategy to scale to the next level.
In this short vignette on ethics in consulting, Daniel Lee, a new Associate assigned to work with an important client executive, must decide whether to report the executive's behavior toward his team. Though the executive's style seems harsh and intimidating toward his staff, Lee questions his responsibility as an outsider. Though a Partner on his team advises him to do nothing, he still feels uneasy about letting the matter go.
Cashify, a start-up incorporated in 2013, is a reverse commerce (re-commerce) company in India with first-mover advantage in the re-commerce of electronic goods. In its contribution to the circular economy (CE), it claims to handle 100,000 used smart phones a month and plans to grow the figure to 200,000 by 2023. The company contributes to the CE by adding value to used electronic devices, particularly smart phones, and extending their lifespans. This ensures that products enter into repeat economic transactions before finding their way to landfills. However, the re-commerce model that gave Cashify a competitive edge became obsolete in 2022 because of emerging competition that leveraged technological advancements to create value in the sector. The company's founders now find themselves facing difficult questions: Should they include new electronic products in their portfolio? In 2022, after two years of COVID-19-related impacts on the economy, overall circular growth was slipping, as consumers preferred to buy new products instead of recycled, refurbished, and reused goods. Can consumers be incentivized to return to the CE and appreciate the value of remodelled goods? Should the company diversify into new products entirely, including automobiles, home appliances, textiles, apparel, and plastic packaging?