In February 2020, Peter Maxwell received his share from the sale of the Australian property development company he had co-founded in 2002: US$115 million. He began organizing his reflections on four of the most significant company decisions that had occurred at the company in recent years and how they had impacted the business. They focused on installing effective board governance; rejecting a move into resort development; maintaining ownership and control; and considering the personal health of the senior executives. Having been invited to speak at his alma mater, Maxwell was planning to ask the students to rank these decisions in terms of importance.
Since its beginning in 2021, Stitchwheel LLC (Stitchwheel), a needlepoint canvas painting service, had seen immediate success. From the company's inception, the co-founder of Stitchwheel had been assessing the advantages and disadvantages of an expansion strategy and wondered what barriers she might encounter. She was also assessing the viability to expand beyond painted needlepoint canvases to achieve substantial growth. Within a short time frame, the company had enjoyed strong brand recognition and offered a meaningful unique selling proposition, but there were still many questions about the company's next steps, including which growth strategy would be most suitable. Did the company have the necessary resources and skilled management team to adequately monitor and support growth? What marketing and operational issues was the company likely to encounter with expansion?
Public service union Local 892 was the union representing faculty at North City College (NCC) in Kingston, a mid-sized city in Canada’s Ontario province. NCC had approached Local 892 to request a local agreement exempting the college from following the collective agreement’s clause forcing it to hire someone permanently if they were on contract for over twelve months. The union had to decide whether to allow NCC to hire librarian Sharrod Alasa for an additional twelve-month contract or force the college to decide to either end Alasa’s contract or hire him to a permanent position.
It was July 2022, and Isaac Morgado, one of the founders of MVMT Strength Inc., wanted to create a comprehensive marketing plan for the fall season. The gym had recently moved to a new location and Morgado wanted to continue growth through promotional campaigns.
In 2020, Banco W was a pioneer in Colombia's microcredit sector. During the previous five years, Diana LucÃa Fernández, Banco W's corporate communications manager, had increased the visibility of sustainability efforts, including those to develop green areas around the bank and to establish social welfare and financial education programs. She had also consolidated internal responsibility for environmental issues and placed greater emphasis on sustainable sourcing. Most importantly, she had worked to incorporate all these activities within the organization's strategy of creating shared value, creating goals and indicators for each sustainability issue. Many challenges remained, however. Banco W had agreed to comply with the Green Protocol it had signed in 2017, which meant both offering a portfolio of green products and integrating the Environmental and Social Risk Analysis (ESRA) in its approval of loans and project financing. Respecting these criteria would mean adopting sustainability as a business strategy, but given the nature of the bank's target clientele, developing green products would not be easy. Moreover, integrating social and environmental criteria in its credit risk analyses could exclude the very people it aimed to serve.
Organizations' corporate social responsibility efforts are facing closer scrutiny today than ever before. In recent years, a new reputation management strategy has emerged: the confession. The authors describe a study in which companies that confessed their inadequacy in confronting racial inequity were rated as more socially responsible than organizations that did not issue such statements. Thus, a proactive approach can be more effective than a reactive strategy for building stakeholder trust.
The case is set in 2022, and the protagonist is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Inc. - an online rental platform. As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in the U.S. in 2020, Airbnb faced an existential crisis. The travel company lost 80% of its bookings and 72% of its revenue in just eight weeks. Airbnb's market cap dropped to $57 billion, down 56% from its high of $130 billion just 18 months earlier. Before the pandemic, 80% of Airbnb's business was cross-border and short-term rentals. This case presents the strategic initiatives Airbnb implemented when executing an emergency pivot. It concludes with the challenges CEO Chesky faces post-pandemic, including a macro environment of high inflation and recession, lack of consistent profitability, and uncertainty as to whether pandemic travel trends and work arrangements are the new normal.
The case is set in 2022. The protagonist is Corie Barry, CEO of Best Buy-a consumer electronics retailer. Corie Barry is the fifth leader since the company was founded in 1966. She is the first female leader of Best Buy and one of the youngest CEOs of an S&P 500 company. Barry had to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath, including furloughing employees, supply chain problems, and dealing with excess inventory. CEO Barry still confronts multiple challenges in ensuring a future for Best Buy, including demand collapsing with rising interest rates and inflation. To adapt and grow revenues, she is attempting to leverage Best Buy's customer service into digital healthcare. However, this corporate strategy initiative comes with unfamiliar competitors and may fail. At the same time, competitive pressures in the core business of electronics retailing are increasing.
The protagonist of the case is Bob Iger, who has been appointed CEO of Disney for a second term. During Bob Chapek's brief tenure as CEO (2020-22), Disney's streaming business lost $4 billion in 2022, and net income fell to $3 billion, down from $11 billion in 2019. Disney's stock has underperformed the S&P 500 index by 56 percentage points. Dubbed the streaming wars, Disney must contend with several competitors, some with deep pockets: Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, and YouTube TV. As employee morale reaches a low point, Iger must decide which organizational structure to put in place to allocate resources and distribute content, given the diversified nature of Disney as well as the ongoing industry transformation.
In early 2023, the entertainment app TikTok reached close to 1 billion users globally, placing it 4th behind the leading social networks of Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Featuring a sophisticated recommendation engine, TikTok mastered the art of keeping users interested over long periods of time. TikTok's business model focused on advertising as the principle source of revenue and, by 2023, the app had become irresistible to many marketers. At the same time, competition in the market for short-form videos intensified when Instagram introduced Reels and YouTube launched Shorts. To the surprise of many, YouTube even decided to share a significant portion of its ad revenue from Shorts with the creators of the videos, a first in the industry. Meanwhile, Instagram appeared to move away from recommending content by accounts the users followed, making the app less social. Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, Liang Rubo, ByteDance CEO, and Chew Shou Zi, TikTok's CEO, had to decide how to respond to these latest developments. Had Meta's Zuckerberg really announced the end of social media? Did YouTube's Wojcicki's move destroy TikTok's business model?
Frida Jassan Haber, second-generation Chief Financial Officer of Haber Holdings, deliberated over the right family office solution for their family's needs. After years of working with trusted private bankers, the family had decided to pursue other options that offered tailored solutions for the family's specific needs. Specifically, they considered joining an established MFO with years of experience, engaging an experienced family office principle to establish a single-family office, or hiring a young finance professional to build a new family office from the ground up. Looking over the family's menu of options, she discussed the various tradeoffs of each solution with her siblings and many members of the next generation, and their implications for the family's long-term financial, succession, and legacy goals.
The protagonist of the case is Robert Joseph (RJ) Scaringe, Rivian's founder and CEO. Rivian designs, develops, and manufactures electric adventure vehicles such as pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). From its peak, Rivian's market capitalization had fallen to $18 billion, down almost 90%. In 2022 alone, Rivian's stock had dropped 82% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index had fallen by 34%. To make matters worse, in the first nine months of 2022, Rivian lost over $5 billion, bringing the new venture's total losses to more than $11 billion. Given persistent post-pandemic supply chain challenges, combined with an adverse macro environment because of high inflation and recessionary pressures, he is fretting about how to produce 50,000 vehicles in 2023. Low employee morale and executive turnover complicate an already challenging situation.
Monifa Porter was in the process of building a product that could work her and her team out of a job. As head of 2401, a subdivision of the corporate innovation and growth company Mach49, Porter was building a technology product that would assist corporations as they designed, built, and scaled new ventures within their existing organization. In late 2022, Porter's team released a minimum viable product of 2401, and was now in the process of designing a product feedback and enhancement cycle that would hopefully turn 2401 into a major revenue stream for Mach49. To do so, Porter would need to run her team with discipline, all while weighing important questions about whether the innovation process could be automated and if so, what implications that had for her team of product managers.
This case discusses how BOCHK utilizes and apply sustainable finance concepts to develop a new service - green mortgage which is the first ever green mortgage scheme offered in local market. The introduction of the scheme was considered as a substantial leap forward in the development of green finance in Hong Kong. The concepts was relatively new in Hong Kong in 2021. Being the first to navigate the uncharted water was not always an easy task, especially in a highly regulated industry and in a highly competitive market. Despite great deal of uncertainty involved in new product development, BOCHK did not diverge from its mission to promote ESG in Hong Kong. To transform a relatively fresh but abstract concept into a feasible product offer, BOCKH conducted extensive research on similar products across different countries, and held thorough communications with partnering property developers and relevant councils. The scheme was finally launched in Hong Kong in phases in September 2021 and received positive feedbacks from various stakeholders. Through the case, students will grapple with the following practical questions: 1) how should BOCHK roll out its green mortgage scheme and extend the scheme coverage? 2) How could management keep promoting this initiative? 3) Could this idea be expanded to other regions, Southeast Asia?
Amy Soler, senior director of direct fulfillment at DonorsChoose, the leading nonprofit crowdfunding platform for public school teachers in the United States, was preparing for the last board meeting of the 2022-23 school year. Soler led the DonorsChoose direct fulfillment team, which had been piloted two years earlier to enable DonorsChoose to integrate more small diverse businesses in its supply chain. Increasing the representation of these businesses in the DonorsChoose supply chain was crucial: it had become a core part of the company's equity mission. However, sourcing from small diverse businesses could be effort intensive, and Soler needed to figure out how to make this process financially sustainable and scalable in the long term. In preparation for the upcoming DonorsChoose board meeting, Soler considered several questions: First, how could her team partner with more small diverse businesses? Were there any technologies that could help the team explore the growing list of potential small diverse businesses? The manual work that her team was doing to identify and onboard them as suppliers was not sustainable for the long term. Second, how much inventory would DonorsChoose need to buy from the small diverse businesses and stock in advance at its warehouses in Pennsylvania and Arizona? How could Soler and her team get better at inventory forecasting? Third, who was the right partner for third-party logistics? Soler and her team had faced some operational challenges with their current provider and were implementing short-term solutions. Was there a different third-party logistics company, or a combination of companies, with which the DonorsChoose team members could work as they continued to source more classroom supplies from small diverse businesses? This field-based case has been successfully taught at the Darden School of Business in the second-year MBA elective on strategic sourcing. This teaching plan assumes an 85-minute case discussion suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level supply chain management courses, in addition to Executive Education programs. It would also be suitable in a first-year MBA or undergraduate course on strategic sourcing, with an emphasis on integrating SDBs in the supply chain.
A financial consultancy analyst received an assignment to assess the long-term performance of Reliance Industries Ltd., a multinational conglomerate based in India. The assignment had resulted from a share price rise for Reliance Industries. On April 27, 2022, the company's share price reached its peak of ₹2,776. Consequently, a few of the financial consultancy's clients had requested information regarding the long-term performance of Reliance Industries. The analyst was therefore tasked with calculating the economic value added in order to evaluate the company's performance.
Tire-building machinery producer Safe-Run Group (Safe-Run) was a second-tier supplier in the automotive industry. Responding to "green supply chain" initiatives in the industry, including by Safe-Run's major clients, the company started working on a new environmentally friendly meridian machine. The results of a pilot test led by Zhijun Li, vice-president and head of research and development at Safe-Run, proved very promising both in terms of energy consumption and productivity, yet senior management remained skeptical. In a meeting with Li, senior executives expressed concerns about the higher production costs and the reaction of Safe-Run's main customers. Li needed to build a better business case for the new machine.
This case describes the journey that led to the creation of Saaf Sehatmand Services (SSS), a business founded by leaders from five consumer goods companies and the largest non-profit grassroots mobilization organization in Pakistan. SSS is a service company focused on distributing health, hygiene, and food products to low-income rural consumers. Its distribution model relies on local entrepreneurs (called Aapas) going door-to-door selling a basket of goods to other women in rural communities. The case tracks the SSS founding story from the viewpoint of the Pakistani operations of Reckitt-Benckiser (Reckitt), one of the world's largest FMCG companies. It examines the challenges faced by two new leaders in mid-2019 as they consider next steps to reach scale throughout Pakistan. These two leaders, Fahad Ashraf (chief executive at Reckitt Pakistan and chairman of the board of SSS) and Ayesha Janjua (head of marketing for English Biscuit Manufacturer and CEO of SSS), are focusing on developing a scalable business as opposed to launching another pilot project. They recognize that a "successful" pilot does not necessarily translate into an enterprise that can scale.