In January 2024, the LEGO Group (LEGO) welcomed a new chief sustainability officer. The role promised to position LEGO as an industry leader in sustainability but would also bring challenges. For instance, LEGO’s commitment to manufacturing its toy bricks entirely from sustainable materials by 2032 had encountered a setback (and media scrutiny) just months prior, when a promising material sourced from plastic bottles had failed expectations. The fervour evoked memories of the 2014 backlash from environmental activists for LEGO’s long-standing partnership with Shell plc, a global oil and gas corporation. Stube thus had to define a vision that would keep the company on track for its ambitious sustainability goals while avoiding past mistakes.
In May 2024, the National Company Law Tribunal of India approved the merger of Star India Private Limited (Star India) and Viacom18 Media Private Limited (Viacom18). Star India was a broadcasting service owned by The Walt Disney Company and Viacom18 was a media company owned by Reliance Industries Limited. The two companies had been working on an agreement to merge the two media and entertainment businesses since December 2023. A new subsidiary of Viacom18 was planned to integrate Star India with an immediate capital investment of US$1–1.5 billion. Facing financial challenges, Viacom18 and Star India saw this merger as a strategic solution to enhance competitiveness and address profit declines. However, questions about regulatory challenges and potential changes in content and service offerings had to be addressed before the deal to be finalized.
In June 2023, a recruitment scandal confronted India’s largest information technology (IT) outsourcing company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which had been integral to the nation's economic growth since 1968. TCS faced allegations of bribery involving nearly ₹1,000 million. The full extent of the fraudulent activities remained uncertain, but there was speculation that commissions amounting to ₹1 billion (approximately US$13.3 million) had changed hands. While the organization took measures to fortify its system and reinforce its commitment to a zero-tolerance policy against breaches of its code of conduct, the company’s chief human resource officer and executive director faced the dilemma of making an appropriate recommendation to the board of directors regarding strategies that would prevent a recurrence of such events. He had to decide whether TCS’s human resource (HR) practices for tightening corporate governance were adequate or whether there were additional improvements and steps the company could consider implementing.
OpenAI Inc., a prominent artificial intelligence (AI) research company, found itself at a defining moment following the controversial termination of its chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman by the board of directors on November 17, 2023. The decision, citing a lack of transparency, disagreements over the firm’s direction, and concerns about Altman’s management style and alleged “history of manipulative behavior,” ignited a backlash from the public, employees, and investors who put pressure on the board to reinstate him. Over 700 employees signed a letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement, threatening to leave if their demands were not met. Key investors like Microsoft Corporation also worked behind the scenes to reinstate Altman.<br><br>Founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab aimed at developing safe and beneficial AI, OpenAI restructured as a capped-profit company in 2019 to compete effectively against its competitors. Under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI celebrated breakthroughs like the popular ChatGPT model, released in late 2022. However, there were tensions between the founding mission of developing safe and beneficial AI and the financial pressures to commercialize its technologies. Following stakeholder pressure, Altman was reinstated as CEO in November 2023. A new board was appointed, led by chair Bret Taylor, which now had to navigate the fallout from Altman’s termination and rebuild trust with stakeholders. The board faced difficult choices about how to reform OpenAI’s governance, balance the company’s founding mission with the realities of commercialization, and maintain its leading position in the fiercely competitive AI landscape.
This case focuses on a small family business, Mattera Motors, an auto repair shop operating in the challenging operating environment of a South African township. The founder, Marcello Mattera, started as a “necessity entrepreneur” (i.e., an individual pushed into launching their own business due to no other employment options). The business has nonetheless reached a level of stability over the past two decades and is successful by the standards of a township enterprise. However, the company faces dilemmas in the coming years relating to succession and growth. Specifically, should Mattera’s children inherit the business from him? Could the business survive if Mattera shared it between his two children? Or should the family expand the business to seize new opportunities?
This quarterly earnings case set is based on a fictional company, T-Rex Inc., an engineering equipment manufacturer that named its first construction machine the T-Rex because its shape was comparable to that of the prehistoric dinosaur. The once-small family company went public in 2010, growing to over 6,000 employees in three offices by 2024. Customers were typically heavy civil construction companies based in the 20 largest cities in the United States. Beginning in 2023, the company had set a strategic objective to sell machines to construction companies in Mexico and Canada. Maya Hoffman, a member of the family that had started T-Rex, had been CEO since 2005. The case is set as the company prepares for the Q2 2024 earnings call. During the first two quarters of 2024, the company had performed well. But there always seemed to be some cause for concern or stress in the run-up to the earnings report. This two-case set creates two potential activities for students: a role-play and a presentation. Depending on the focus of the course in which the set is used, instructors can choose which avenue to follow.
This case, a follow-up to "Quarterly Earnings Report at T-Rex (A)" (UVA-BC-0304), continues the story of fictional company T-Rex Inc., an engineering equipment manufacturer, and its CEO, Maya Hoffman, as the company prepares for the Q2 2024 earnings call. On July 18, 2024, prior to the market opening, T-Rex released its quarterly earnings. Thirty minutes later, at 8:00 a.m., T-Rex's stock was down almost $2 in pre-market trading. Hoffman, the CFO, and the head of investor relations need to manage the earnings call.
In early 2024, The Body Shop International Ltd. (Body Shop) filed for administration, the UK equivalent of a bankruptcy. Aurelius Group (Aurelius), a private equity firm, owned Body Shop and, soon after acquiring it, filed for Body Shop’s bankruptcy. Experts have criticized private equity firms for destroying the value of firms, especially in the retail industry. The FRP Advisory Group (FRP), which Aurelius appointed to oversee the administration, asserted that it was “exploring all options to take the business forward.” The British high-street fashion chain Next was intending to acquire Body Shop. Experts also recommended that Body Shop appeal to younger shoppers to compete with companies like Lush and other competitors that offered a similar value proposition as Body Shop. Should FRP have considered selling the restructured Body Shop to Next or back to Aurelius? Which company could provide better corporate parenting advantages? How could Body Shop be revived?
Amid turbulent financial times and fierce competition, Joanna Geraghty assumed the role of chief executive officer at JetBlue Airways Corporation (JetBlue) in February 2024. Facing significant losses and gender barriers in a male-dominated industry, Geraghty embarked on a mission to steer JetBlue towards stability and success. Hindered by setbacks such as the failed acquisition bid of Spirit Airlines Inc. and pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, Geraghty focused on enhancing reliability and cost control to fortify JetBlue’s position. This case explores Geraghty’s strategic decisions and leadership approaches in overcoming challenges, with implications for navigating complexity in the airline industry.
The National Hockey League’s (NHL’s) Carolina Hurricanes (i.e., the Canes) were struggling on the ice in 2017–18. The team had not made the playoffs since 2008–09, attendance was at the bottom of the league, and rumours regarding the team relocating were circulating. At the time, the team was not very relevant across the hockey universe, and elements of the Hurricanes brand had been harshly critiqued. A change in ownership that became finalized early in 2018 opened up the possibility of using the long dormant logo and jersey of the Hartford Whalers, who had relocated to become the Hurricanes in 1997. While trends around alternate jerseys and the popularity of all things retro seemed to support embracing the Whalers identity, would any effort placed here be diverted from fixing the underlying issues with the Hurricanes brand? This teaching note guides leadership of a case discussion including themes of branding and secondary brand elements, organizational focus, customer experience and the importance of fun to an organization and its customers. An online assignment challenges students to use artificial intelligence to develop brand elements. Several multimedia resources are suggested to support instructors delivering this case.
The case is about Dhriiti–The Courage Within (Dhriiti), a non-governmental organization founded in 2004 in Assam, India, to help rural communities in northeastern India generate income by producing areca tableware. In 2009, Dhriiti established the for-profit social enterprise Tamul Plates Marketing Private Limited (Tamul) to manage the entire value chain of the tableware. As Tamul expanded, it decentralized its production model to better promote rural entrepreneurs and to supplement its existing centralized factory-based production unit. However, women’s participation in these decentralized units remained low. In response, Dhriiti established Project Pragati, which successfully empowered 29 rural women entrepreneurs and inspired many more. The case highlights the dilemma of the co-founders in December 2022. They can expand the capacity of Tamul’s existing centralized production unit to grow the enterprise, which will generate more direct employment for local women. Alternatively, they can invest in more decentralized production units to establish a longer-term, more empowering model of promoting rural entrepreneurs, which will both engage women and transform them into change agents in their communities.
The "How a Luxury Electric Vehicle (EV) Manufacturer Can Leverage Social Listening" teaching case focuses on how a luxury EV manufacturer and brand, namely the Porche Taycan, can use a social listening platform to gain insights on its new EV car models from user-generated content across multiple social sites. The EV market is dynamic and uncertain, and there is a lot of risk for a traditional luxury car manufacturer to enter the EV field. A social listening platform provides real-time social metrics and visuals, including author profiles, influencer profiles, activity, engagement, sentiment, and competitor analysis, to help navigate this uncertainty. The case walks through an analysis using the Nuvi social listening platform on 2022 Porsche Taycan data collected through Nuvi. A competitive analysis is done with Tesla EV models. The case ends by posing questions on what actions a luxury EV manufacturer like the Porsche Taycan can take from using a social listening platform, and what technological and managerial capabilities would be needed to implement such a platform.
In October 2022, Evan Ehlers, founder and executive director of Sharing Excess, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization dedicated to food rescue, received an unexpected call to help rescue 630,000 avocados from Peru, which were days away from being dumped in the landfill. Ehlers soon understood that it would be a race against time, given the perishable nature of avocados. How could he and his team devise a distribution and marketing plan to match the avocados to people and organizations that could use them before they went bad? The challenge was daunting, and the clock was ticking. What could he do to save hundreds of thousands of avocados from being thrown out in a short time frame of 48 hours?
Set in 2022, this case describes the challenges faced by Singapore General Hospital (SGH), one of Singapore's leading public hospitals, in managing its bed occupancy rate (BOR) to best suit its patient workload pattern and adhere to the government's guidelines, and describes the evolution of its bed management system (BMS) in response to those challenges. Bed management, although a background activity, plays a central role in the effective running of a hospital. While SGH has adopted new technology and best practices in its BMS over the years, there are still frequent mismatches between the available bed supply and incoming patient demand. One of the reasons is Singapore's growing healthcare demand due to its ageing population coupled with a greater awareness of regular healthcare monitoring in the society, which requires capacity expansion. In addition, given that poor bed management in a hospital incurs heavy costs and adversely impacts everyone from patients to nursing staff, doctors and administrators, there is a need for more effective management of the existing bed supply and implementation of new measures to optimise the burden on hospitals. The Bed Management Unit (BMU) at SGH, recognises that the analysis of the workload of the hospital over the previous five years is critical for making many key decisions, such as capacity expansion and class configuration, patient-bed assignment protocols, and the adoption of innovative healthcare processes for effective bed management and healthcare delivery.
"In the summer of 2020, amid nationwide protests following George Floyd's murder, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller faced multiple crises: a police department under a federal consent decree, rising violent crime, and COVID-19-related challenges. In response, Keller and his team launched the Albuquerque Community Safety (ACS) department, designed to handle non-violent 911 calls related to mental health, homelessness, and substance abuse by deploying trained professionals instead of police officers. ACS aimed to reduce the burden on police and fire services while addressing root causes of public safety issues through a social justice and public health approach. Despite political opposition from both conservatives and progressives, ACS became operational in September 2021. By 2023, it was successfully diverting thousands of calls from the police and addressing a wide range of community needs. However, the program faced challenges, including media backlash, staff unionization, and concerns about funding and long-term sustainability. The case concludes with Keller navigating these obstacles as he works to institutionalize ACS beyond his tenure."
The case taps into several contemporary and classical issues in the realm of competitive strategy. Set in the luxury resale business, it explores the business models adopted by The RealReal and several of its competitors, such as Vestiaire Collective, in providing a good foundation for exploring the evolution of different paths to profitability in an intensely competitive environment. In exploring the fortunes of key players in this business, the case helps students to apply core strategy tools such as the Business Model Canvas, and activity mapping to understand the process of creating and sustaining competitive advantage. Focused on The RealReal, the case offers the instructor the requisite details to explore the economics of a business model starting from conceptualization, piloting, and scaling, with particular emphasis on the challenges that firms often encounter at each stage. It touches on a wide range of contemporary issues such as the monetization of AI-based insights to reduce operating costs, digital authentication of valuable luxury products, and promoting circularity and sustainability, in addition to the dynamics of platform models.
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. They 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 enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. In this installment of the series, "Moral Distress and Rationalizations," students will examine Allan Gurganus's "Blessed Assurance," about a 59-year-old man named Jerry who narrates this novella by looking back on a part-time job he held when he was 19 years old, a role that still plagues him with guilt 40 years later. Working for Windlass Funerary Eventualities, Inc., his assignment was to collect weekly funeral insurance premium payments from elderly, impoverished Black people in the fictional small town of Falls, North Carolina. Windlass's practices were predatory: Customers were required to make payments every week or forfeit all compensation for their loved ones' funeral expenses, no matter how many hundreds or even thousands of dollars they had already paid. Jerry tells readers he needed the job to pay for college business courses and to help his parents, who suffered from "brown lung" (byssinosis) after working in a cotton mill for 30 years. Jerry tells the story because he still "feels bad about what went on," and his wife says, "Telling somebody might help." Moral Complexity in Leadership students have consistently found Gurganus's novella deeply resonant. Jerry's complicity in an unethical system over which he has little power and his tortured decision-making and rationalizations about whether to continue or to quit echo situations many students face. Even for those who have not yet encountered such situations, the story likely will be relevant soon.