By 2021, the mindfulness app wars reached their apex. Over 2,000 meditation apps were available to consumers, but two apps, Headspace and Calm, dominated the space, jointly holding about 70% of the total market. Headspace had established itself as the approachable educator for novice meditators. Headspace also invested heavily in athletics partnerships, business-to-business services, and in creating Headspace Health, which they hoped would gain FDA approval and become the first prescription meditation app. Meanwhile, Calm had earned a reputation as the soothing sleep app. Calm was also known for its numerous partnerships with A-list celebrities such as Matthew McConaughey, Harry Styles, and Idris Elba. Indeed, Calm was focused on becoming the leader in "calmtainment" and making a home for itself in Hollywood. What does the future hold for the rivalry between Calm and Headspace? Will both brands continue to co-dominate the mindfulness and meditation space or will one ultimately prevail? What should the brands do to maintain their co-dominance or edge out the other and claim the number one spot?
Leaders driving transformation often focus too much on how employees' tasks will change but this is less of a hurdle for workers than dealing with the threat to the informal roles they've established. Major transitions cause personal disruption along three different dimensions: role adjustment, task learning, and emotional engagement. To better manage transformative change, leaders need to focus not only on how their own roles need to adapt, but also help employees adapt to new identities.
Plug and Play, a Silicon Valley-based investor in start-ups including PayPal and Dropbox, introduces a match-making model to engage corporates with start-ups. The case discusses the rationale behind the model and the challenges involved in simultaneously facilitating start-up development and corporate entrepreneurship. It looks at the expansion of the model beyond the US and describes how its match-making efforts fared in France and Italy.
The director of the INSEAD Virtual Reality Immersive Learning Initiative, Daniel Landau, must decide what brand of VR headsets to buy for the school and its four campuses. It comes down to a choice between VR devices made by Oculus or PICO Interactive: which is better suited for his small team to create content and deploy it from their hub? Since each brand is embedded in a unique ecosystem, Daniel must evaluate their respective roles and contributions to the goal of delivering an optimal immersive learning experience.
The case provides an alternative view of the antitrust dilemma facing Lina Khan, newly appointed commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission. Her nomination to the FTC by President Biden sent a clear signal to tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google that their enormous power would be reined in by his administration. Khan takes up an antitrust complaint filed against Facebook by her predecessor that its acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014 violated antitrust regulations. This offers an opportunity to review current thinking about the acquisition of start-ups by large technology platforms and discuss the controversy over the privacy practices of social networking platforms. Beyond the legal dimensions, the case examines the growing competitive forces that could pose a threat to WhatsApp and its longstanding domination of the instant messaging market.
Businesses have lacked robust tools to detect, measure, and manage smells in a scientific way until now. Two emerging branches of digital olfaction technology one focused on the digital detection and analysis of different odors, and the other on the digital transmission and re-creation of smells could potentially revolutionize a range of industries. The authors outline a variety of use cases for olfactory technologies, along with actions businesses can take to capitalize on them.
In September 2020, Moovaz, a startup in the tech-enabled relocation space, was at a critical juncture in its evolution. In the three years since its founding, the company had established its business model, shown impressive growth in revenues, raised S$7 million in Series A funding and acquired a portfolio of established magazines in the form of <i>The Finder</i>. Junxian Lee, co-founder and CEO of Moovaz was optimistic about the prospects of the company going forward, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there were a number of caveats to his optimism. Specifically, possible decline in demand if the world economy continues to struggle and challenges in raising the next round of funding in the face of uncertainty.
In May 2020, Usha Martin Limited (Usha Martin), a diversified engineering group based in India, was debating strategies for continued future growth. In April 2019, the company had divested its steelmaking and related operations to reduce its debt load. Though the divestment meant a large decline in the company’s sales for the year ended March 2020, the company managed to reverse the trend of losses incurred in several recent quarters and years to earn positive profits. However, attaining future growth remained a challenge for the smaller, focused company, especially given the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis. It was critical that Usha Martin’s management made the correct strategic choices so that the company could achieve good, long-term, profitable growth.
In February 2020, the president of South African Chefs Association was exploring ways to ensure a sustained revenue stream for the association, which relied primarily on membership fees for survival. As a non-profit organization, South African Chefs Association had a rich history of representing chefs, enabling them to compete on the international stage, supporting their training and education, and providing members with networking opportunities and a community. The association faced several challenges; most notably, it needed to find an innovative solution to sustainable growth in terms of both membership and revenue numbers and the value created for members. The association’s president needed to establish a sense of relevance and community for its members through a range of strategic partnerships and innovative value contributions, ensure its leadership reflected the racial makeup of the country, and reconsider its structure and purpose.
On May 12, 2020, Vedanta Resources Limited, representing the London, United Kingdom company Vedanta Group, expressed its intention to buy all public shares of its Indian subsidiary Vedanta Limited and to delist it from all stock exchanges in India and New York. The chair of Vedanta Group explained that the decision to delist was largely driven by a strategy to simplify the group structure. The indicative offer price of ₹87.5 per equity share represented a premium of 9.9 per cent over the closing market price of ₹79.6 on the previous day. However, there was some doubt that minority shareholders would find the offer attractive. The final exit price, which would be determined through the reverse book-building process, was likely to increase. Exactly what amount Vedanta Resources Limited was willing to pay was a key factor in the quest for a successful delisting. Two other important considerations were the additional amount of borrowing required and future debt servicing constraints.
Innovative US apparel retailer Everlane Inc. (Everlane) employed "radical transparency," disclosing detailed information about the costs it incurred and the factories that manufactured its clothes. The company also claimed to prioritize ethics and sustainability. For example, Everlane committed both to supporting its suppliers by addressing their needs and to eliminating virgin plastics from its entire supply chain by 2021. The company's approach had been successful: since its founding in 2010, Everlane had seen growth in its customer base and revenues. However, in 2020, the company faced a public relations crisis, encountering backlash after laying off a number of employees. While these layoffs were purportedly due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, they coincided with employees’ unionization efforts. In addition, many former employees reported that the company was not, in fact, ethical but was anti-Black and anti-union and had a toxic internal culture. As the company had built its business on its image and its promise of ethics, transparency, and sustainability, the crisis called into question the foundation of the organization. How could Everlane move forward according to its stated values and continue to both meet the needs of its customers and to earn a profit?
After a period of poor stock-market performance, conglomerate Chestnut Foods (Chestnut) faces the acquisition of its stock by an activist investor. The new investor demands the sale of Chestnut's high-growth division, which contrasts with the CFO's turnaround plan to expand this same division. To disentangle the way forward for Chestnut, students are invited to grapple with the risk-adjusted performance of each division and the estimation of division-specific hurdle rates. Students learn to appreciate the importance of using risk-adjusted hurdle rates in establishing appropriate investment policy. This B case is typically taught after having discussed the A case (UVA-F-1736), but this is not necessary. At the Darden School of Business, they are taught in separate years, as independent cases, and the A case has a separate teaching note (UVA-F-1736TN). The B case is set one month after the A case and focuses on the performance of product groups within Chestnut's poorly performing Instruments division. The case is designed as an opportunity to hone skills in performance evaluation.
On March 19, 2020, as Covid-19 swept across the world, Bourla challenged everyone at Pfizer and its partner BioNTech--a German company focused on cancer immunotherapies--to "make the impossible possible": develop a vaccine more quickly than anyone ever had before, ideally within six months and certainly before the end of the year. Less than eight months later, on Sunday, November 8, they discovered that they had succeeded: Their combined second- and third-phase trials showed a 95% efficacy rate. In the spring, thanks to their work and that of the other companies whose vaccines have been authorized, 300 million doses should be available around the world. It took a moon-shot challenge, out-of-the-box thinking, intercompany cooperation, liberation from bureaucracy, and, most of all, hard work from everyone at Pfizer and BioNTech to accomplish what they did in 2020. Organizations of any size or in any industry can learn from these strategies to solve their own problems and to produce important work that benefits a broad swath of society.
Since the pandemic, companies have adopted the technologies of virtual work remarkably quickly--and employees are seeing the advantages of more flexibility in where and when they work. As leaders recognize what is possible, they are embracing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset work using a hybrid model. To make this transition successfully, they'll need to design hybrid work arrangements with individual human concerns in mind, not just institutional ones. That requires companies to approach the problem from four different perspectives: (1) jobs and tasks; (2) employee preferences; (3) projects and workflows; and (4) inclusion and fairness. Leaders also need to conceptualize new work arrangements along two axes: place and time. Millions of workers around the world this year have made a sudden shift from being place-constrained (working in the office) to being place-unconstrained (working anywhere). Employees have also experienced a shift along the time axis, from working synchronously with others 9 to 5 to working asynchronously whenever they choose. If leaders and managers can successfully make the transition to an anywhere, anytime model, the result will be work lives that are more purposeful and productive.
If you're launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six patterns that doomed ventures. Two were especially common: "Bad bedfellows." Other parties besides the founders--like employees, strategic partners, and investors--can all play a major role in a firm's demise. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees. "False starts." Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. Like Triangulate, an online dating start-up, they keep rushing to launch fully functional offerings that don't fit any market needs. The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.
As companies respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges, they ask more and more of their employees. But organizations often have very little to show for the efforts of their talented and engaged workers. By selecting fewer initiatives with greater impact, companies can make their strategies more powerful. A strategic initiative is worthwhile only if it does one or more of the following: It creates value for customers by raising their willingness to pay. As your company finds ways to innovate or to improve existing products, the maximum price people will be willing to pay for the offering rises. It creates value for employees by making work more attractive. Offering better jobs lowers the minimum compensation that you have to offer to attract talent to your business. It creates value for suppliers by reducing their operating cost. As suppliers' costs go down, the lowest price they would be willing to accept for their goods falls. As companies expand the total amount of value created for their customers, employees, and suppliers, they position themselves for enduring financial success.
Many large companies fail to pay enough attention to their leadership pipelines and succession practices. That leads to excessive turnover at the top and destroys a significant amount of value--close to $1 trillion a year among the S&P 1500 alone, say the authors of this article. The biggest costs are underperformance at companies that hire ill-suited external CEOs, the loss of intellectual capital in the C-suites of organizations that executives leave behind, and for companies promoting from within, the lower performance of ill-prepared successors. Companies and their boards can (and must) do better. The solution isn't that complicated: Firms need to start succession planning well before they think they need to; make sure they identify and develop rising stars; appoint the most promising executives to the board to help prepare them to take on the top job; and look at both internal and external candidates. In addition, when working with search consultants, firms should avoid perverse incentives like contingency and percentage fees.
Large digital multisided platforms (MSPs) such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Apple's App Store have made it much easier for sellers to reach new customers, but as thousands of companies large and small have discovered, conducting business on them carries significant risks and costs. MSPs sometimes exploit sellers' dependency on them in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways. They raise fees. They change their recommendation algorithms to put more emphasis on price. They require sellers to advertise to maintain visibility in search results. They compete against sellers by imitating their products. They impose restrictions on the prices sellers can set outside of the MSP. And they change their rules and design in ways that weaken sellers' relationships with their customers. But all is not lost, say the authors. Sellers can employ four strategies to build viable businesses on platforms. They can develop and invest in direct channels, use platforms mainly as showrooms, go deep with highly specialized offerings or go broad with many different offerings, and wage public relations and lobbying campaigns to curb platforms' power.