The rapid, sprawling growth of the Mexico City megalopolis-combined with industrialization, a fast-expanding fleet of gas-fueled vehicles, and a location vulnerable to deadly thermal inversions-led to a serious air pollution crisis in the city in the mid 1980s. Having neglected air quality for many years, government officials prioritized it in the mid 1980s, attacking poor air quality with some energy and a five-year package of reforms to address the problem from different angles. They recognized, however, that most of these reforms would require several years, at least, to yield results. Eager to do something with more immediate impact-and keen, too, to signal to motorists the serious negative consequences of driving-they decided to add a driving restriction program to their package: the Hoy No Circula ("No Driving Today") program. This policy required all private car owners to refrain from driving one workday per week, based on the last digit of their vehicle's license plate. The simplicity of the approach was its selling point. It could be implemented almost at once at very little cost, and, policymakers reasoned, should result in an immediate 20 percent reduction in traffic, Monday through Friday. In fact, the idea was so appealing that many other developing countries followed Mexico's lead, enacting their own versions of Hoy No Circula in the years that followed. In this two-parter, the A case introduces Mexico City's air pollution problem at the time, and provides the rationale for enacting Hoy No Circula. The B case explains what happened once the policy was enacted, and how policymakers responded to some of its unforeseen consequences.

The rapid, sprawling growth of the Mexico City megalopolis-combined with industrialization, a fast-expanding fleet of gas-fueled vehicles, and a location vulnerable to deadly thermal inversions-led to a serious air pollution crisis in the city in the mid 1980s. Having neglected air quality for many years, government officials prioritized it in the mid 1980s, attacking poor air quality with some energy and a five-year package of reforms to address the problem from different angles. They recognized, however, that most of these reforms would require several years, at least, to yield results. Eager to do something with more immediate impact-and keen, too, to signal to motorists the serious negative consequences of driving-they decided to add a driving restriction program to their package: the Hoy No Circula ("No Driving Today") program. This policy required all private car owners to refrain from driving one workday per week, based on the last digit of their vehicle's license plate. The simplicity of the approach was its selling point. It could be implemented almost at once at very little cost, and, policymakers reasoned, should result in an immediate 20 percent reduction in traffic, Monday through Friday. In fact, the idea was so appealing that many other developing countries followed Mexico's lead, enacting their own versions of Hoy No Circula in the years that followed. In this two-parter, the A case introduces Mexico City's air pollution problem at the time, and provides the rationale for enacting Hoy No Circula. The B case explains what happened once the policy was enacted, and how policymakers responded to some of its unforeseen consequences.

On the evening of June 4, 2021, the Nigerian government ordered the suspension of business operations for Twitter in Nigeria, accusing the social media company of spreading misinformation and fake news and allowing activities that could undermine the corporate existence of Nigeria. The suspension caused anger and outrage in Nigeria and sparked reactions around the world. Four months later, on October 1, 2021, the Nigerian government stated that it was ready to revoke suspension if Twitter agreed to certain prescribed conditions. Twitter was keen to resolve the issue and resume operations in Nigeria, but accepting some of the requirements could compromise its core values. Should Twitter agree to the government’s conditions?

The Edmonton Opera Association (Edmonton Opera) was founded in 1963 as a not-for-profit arts organization with the aim of providing audiences with compelling productions that combined music, song, and theatre. Over the years, Edmonton Opera had been successful in providing its services, but, in 2020, it was challenged. Just when it had almost recovered from a deficit, reported in 2012, the global COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and an economic slowdown followed. The board of directors knew that many organizations, in addition to Edmonton Opera, had had to suspend their operations temporarily due to COVID-19 restrictions, and they wanted to know how the pandemic had affected Edmonton Opera’s operations. A newly minted board member with a background in finance and accounting was assigned the task of conducting a financial statement analysis. Because not all members of the board had the necessary skills to provide oversight of the association’s accounting matters, this new board member was also asked to address Edmonton Opera’s specific accounting issues.

As circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic continued to shift and evolve, J.M. Huber Corporation (Huber) remained focused on protecting its employees, maintaining business continuity, and on advancing its multi-year sustainability strategy. The efforts of Mike Marberry, the President & CEO, the Huber Management Council (HMC), the family shareholders, as well as company diversification, helped the company to remain stable. What is more, 2020 brought the strongest financial results in Huber's 138-year history! But new challenges were on the horizon... One of the largest and oldest family-held companies headquartered in the US, Huber had strategically repositioned itself several times since its founding in 1883 as a dry-colors business. Visionary family leaders and a committed senior management transformed the company from a single plant in Brooklyn, New York, into an international player operating in more than 20 countries, with about half of its 4,100 employees based outside North America. Structured as a portfolio managed company (PMC), Huber has become one of the key global players in hydrocolloids, specialty chemicals, minerals, agriculture solutions and engineered wood products, with a turnover of nearly US$3.5 billion in 2021. The succession of Peter Francis, the last family President & CEO and Board Chair had come at the worst possible time − during the Great Recession. Now Huber's first non-family CEO & President, Mike Marberry, is planning his own succession for 2022, unaware of the impending COVID-19 crisis. Would the resilience and experience gained from the last transition provide an effective template to help the company face the next crisis and leadership change more than a decade later? Would the family rally behind Marberry and the company to once again turn this difficult moment into an opportunity to show its resilience? What role would Huber's governance model and sustainability strategy play?

Two strategic factors of any business are customer interaction (how close you are to your customers) and customer participation (how involved customers are in producing the offering). In recent years, we have seen companies increase interaction through servitization and increase customer participation through self-service technologies. Yet, more is not necessarily better. Too much customer interaction can destroy operating efficiencies. Too much customer participation can compromise quality and depersonalize service relationships. This article provides a framework for analyzing customer interaction and participation, including an outline of decision factors, with the goal of identifying optimal and sustainable positioning for any given offering.

This case focuses on distribution, sales, and product decisions as Aphro Beverages reaches an inflection point in its growth trajectory. In 2020, Aphro Beverages, based in Accra, Ghana, successfully launched its brand and brought two new alcoholic spirits products to market. These stylishly packaged distilled liquors were modern takes on Ghana's traditional palm wine, coming in three bottle sizes. Entering 2022, Aphro depended primarily on direct-to-retail distribution, selling to on-trade venues, such as bars, clubs, and restaurants, and off-trade venues, such as liquor stores and other retail outlets. Aphro's marketing strategy leveraged celebrity and social-media influencer endorsements, high-profile events, and digital/online advertising. The case poses questions over whether Aphro should now partner with a distributor and what the characteristics of a good distribution partnership would be. The case presents possible distribution partners, including a partner that would deepen penetration domestically within Ghana, a partner that would broaden reach across Africa, and a partner that would cater to the African diaspora market in Europe and the United States. Additional considerations raised in the case include choosing when and which new investors to take on and where to invest to maximize return on go-to-market investment.

In 2012, Evan Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway (ESH) to address a major problem: though most public K-12 schools in the US had access to the Internet, only roughly 30% had true broadband access that would enable every student to have high speed connectivity. Marwell and his team raised philanthropic capital and worked with schools, telecommunications companies, and local, state, and federal government officials to meet that challenge. By 2019, over 99% of the public schools in the US had true broadband access. Marwell and his team had begun the process of winding down activities at ESH when the pandemic erupted. Students were working from home, not physically at school. They decided to try to help 18 million households with 47 million people to have affordable broadband access at home. In 2020, Marwell and Jessica Reid Sliwerski also launched a program to tackle a pernicious problem in education; by third grade, only about one in three US children were reading at grade level. Ignite! Reading offered students access to an individual science of reading tutor for 15 minutes a day over Zoom while at school. Early evidence suggested that for every week working with an Ignite tutor, kids gained over 2 weeks of reading comprehension. Ignite was organized as a public benefit corporation.

There is no impending threat of large-scale automation and displacement of human labor on the horizon. That's the conclusion reached by the authors after reviewing the research around smart machines in workplaces, and speaking with leaders in hundreds of organizations. In an adaption of their book Working With AI: Real Stories of Human-Machine Collaboration, they lay out where they see limitations of AI in the workplace and where practitioners can expect job continuity for the immediate future.

This three-page case is the second update to Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (A). In this supplement, dated 2015, managers discuss the problems that are emerging with the company's performance management system and offer several potential solutions that students can discuss and consider.

mPharma CEO Greg Rockson is attempting to create the largest pan-African primary healthcare company. He must evaluate a three-year strategy potentially involving three key components: a rapid and extensive expansion of the company's network of 600 retail pharmacies in nine African countries, the future of a recently launched telehealth program, and the creation of a new customer payment plan that will cover the cost of the common prescription drugs that are used for prevalent communicable diseases, such as malaria. Rockson must balance his desire to promote health equity with ensuring that mPharma becomes a profitable company. This case is suitable both as a general business case for MBA students of any level and as a case for courses focused on the healthcare industry, the pharmaceutical value chain, health care systems in Africa, innovation in health care, social entrepreneurship, and African businesses.

When industry conditions are disrupted, planning for the future can be difficult. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the hospitality industry, not only depressing demand during the height of the crisis but also holding implications going forward for hotel demand in a future "new normal." How can mature, established organizations rethink their business models when circumstances demand it? How can firms envision possible scenarios and make plans to deploy resources when accurate forecasting is difficult or impossible? This case is used at Darden in the first-year core Strategy course, often in conjunction with concepts and frameworks such as hypothesis testing and scenario planning (see chapters 10 and 14 of The Strategist's Toolkit). The case would also be suitable for any course or module discussing disruptive innovation, business model change, organizational change, strategic planning, or resource allocation. The case highlights a female executive at the company.

How do firms decide where to compete internationally? What challenges arise when competing across borders? What are different ways to enter a new foreign market? How should the firm compete in that new market? What factors make a foreign market "flat" versus "lumpy"? This technical note follows the format of The Strategist's Toolkit in laying out a framework for analyzing the "where" and "how" of international strategy. Thinking carefully about both local responsiveness and global integration can help managers successfully navigate the tension between these imperatives.

On the morning of October 9, 2021, almost all newspapers in India carried the news of the re-privatization of Air India. They celebrated the move by the Government of India to hand back the airline to its original owner, the Tata group. Tata Airlines was founded in 1932 as India's first airline. The Government of India nationalized the airline in 1953. In October 2021, nearly seven decades after its nationalization, Tata Sons and the Tata group, through its wholly owned subsidiary, Talace Private Limited, acquired Air India again, bringing a halt to the years of effort by the government to re-privatize the national carrier. The re-privatization gave the Tata group full control of Air India and its low-cost airline, Air India Express, and a 50 per cent stake in Air India SATS Airport Services Private Ltd (AISATS), the airport and cargo-handling service company. However, the restoration of Air India as a renowned, profit-making airline was an uphill battle accompanied by myriad challenges. The Tata group ran two airlines in India: Tata SIA Airlines Limited (operating as Vistara), in which it held a 51 per cent stake; and Capital A Berhad (operating as AirAsia) with an 80 per cent stake. In financial year 2020-21, both airlines incurred significant losses. The responsibility of rebuilding Air India at such a precarious juncture could have become yet another adaunting task for the Tata group. Did the Tata group make the right move by acquiring Air India? What should the Tata group do to make Air India regain its lost glory, and how should it prioritize what needed to be addressed to achieve this? How could Air India overcome the industry- and company-level challenges it faced?

In January 2021, Entomo Farms (Entomo), a family-owned Ontario-based Canadian cricket producer, received additional funding to support its growth and prepare for the entry into Canada of what would be its biggest competitor. As Canada's largest and only organic cricket supplier, Entomo generated most of its revenue as a supplier of crickets as raw material to food manufacturers; however, due to anticipated industry changes, Entomo was increasing its consumer-level presence by producing and selling more of its own brands as consumer packaged goods (CPGs). To support this decision, Entomo's chief operating officer needed to develop a strategic marketing road map for growing the revenues from the company's CPG segment.

Data preparation is a necessary pre-processing step in analytics. It aims to clean the data from various resources and improve its quality for better productivity. This process includes many tasks such as fusion, cleaning, and augmentation of data. This teaching note will focus on illustrating data cleaning using the programming language Python, with all codes completed in Google Laboratory. Different solutions using the programming languages R and Microsoft Excel are also provided. To effectively illustrate the data preparation process, the relatively simple dataset Bengaluru House Prices is used. This is a relatively messy dataset with a few variables and many records, making it ideal for explaining data preparation steps.

The meteoric rise of ride-sharing firm Uber illustrates how gig-economy firms can grow to prominence and disrupt older, mature industries. Yet Uber's trajectory has also been rife with nontrivial tensions and controversies. The company has struggled with labor issues for drivers, safety issues for riders, cultural issues for employees, and external costs imposed on communities. How do these frictions matter, and why? What are the implications for Uber going forward? What's the role of effective stakeholder engagement and value creation in organizational success? This case is used at Darden in the first-year core Strategy course, often in conjunction with Chapter 6 of the book The Strategist's Toolkit (""Stakeholder Analysis""), by Jared D. Harris and Michael J. Lenox. The case is also suitable for Darden's first-year core Ethics course. It is appropriate for use in any course or module covering stakeholder management from either a strategic or ethical perspective. Students adopt the role of a female executive in a male-dominated corporate culture.

This case is set in the rapidly changing and technologically emerging industry of on-demand streaming video, which offers Netflix a number of strategic choices. For instance, strategies can involve choices about hosting infrastructure, consumer pricing, and other issues related to a streaming service's business model. In order to achieve global competitiveness, however, some of these choices also involve internationalization. In which foreign markets should Netflix compete? How should the firm enter those markets and compete there? How responsive to local preferences, versus leveraging globalized resources and efficiencies, does it need to be? Along with opportunities to explore these strategic choices, the case offers Netflix as an illustration and contrast to some of its industry competitors, such as Disney+. The material introduces students to Ana Mallett, who, in early 2021, has just been appointed vice president of physical production for Netflix, overseeing production in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) and the United Kingdom (UK). As Mallett looks at growth from abroad, she wonders if the current internationalization strategy is going to continue to succeed. This case is used at the Darden School of Business in the first-year core strategy course, in a strategic growth and value creation module. The case introduces an internationalization analysis framework. The material encourages exploration of the industry, competitive positioning and advantage, and capabilities in the context of international expansion. Case discussion can include industry dynamics, localization, globalization, glocalization, five forces analysis, competitive life cycle, hypothesis testing, and capabilities analysis. This case would be useful for any course or module focusing on international strategy, planning for growth, or technology strategy.

In May 2014, Alex Frommeyer, cofounder and CEO of Kentucky-based Beam Dental, a seed-stage startup that developed connected toothbrushes that tracked brushing habits, needed to decide which strategy to pitch to a venture capital firm. The first pitch deck played to the founders' strengths as engineers and requested funds to develop a market-leading, next-generation connected toothbrush. The second pitch deck requested capital to start a dental insurance company, an industry in which the founders had limited knowledge, that would distribute the toothbrush and offer premium credits for healthy brushing habits. This case is the first case in a two-part series (second case 723-356), and there are two supplements (723-374 and 723-375) for this case.

In May 2016, venture-backed Beam Dental was on the brink of financial collapse. Cofounder and CEO Alex Frommeyer weighed the unattractive terms of a bridge loan offered by Beam's largest investor. Frommeyer needed to decide whether to accept the terms or concede defeat and close the company. This case is the second case in a two-part series (original case 723-355); the A case has two supplements (723-374 and 723-375).