At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their positions required. Applied used several strategies to encourage clients to rely more strongly on skills assessments.
Companies whose executives are digitally savvy outperform other companies on growth and valuation by large margins. But less than 10% of companies have digitally savvy top teams in place. Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management's Center for Information Systems Research describes the level of digital savviness found in top teams, the business value it delivers, and the actions you can take to increase the digital savviness of your company's executives.
The case opens in November 2020 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, eagerly await the results of the U.S. presidential elections. The case takes us through the challenging times between November 2019 and November 2020, as the confounders navigated Snapp through an increasingly challenging environment of sanctions, stricter restrictions of big tech companies, and since February 2020, through the operational difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that shook Iran to its core. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive and asks how the U.S. election results could change the environment in which Snapp operates, as the two presidential candidates have vastly different approaches to their policy to Iran.
This case traces the rise of James Conant from a working-class neighborhood in Boston to president of Harvard University. The case describes how Conant, as a young man interested in chemistry and physics, embarks on studies to build his academic credentials and the pathbreaking changes that he makes to admissions criteria and curriculums while president of Harvard. The case also describes his pivotal role in developing the atomic bomb that ended World War II. Students will learn how James Conant navigated life's choices to leave a lasting impact on the world.
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative direct sales force model. Jesse Moore, the founder, wished to scale the company through organic growth as well as geographical expansion into Nigeria. The strategy called for decisions on product/service offerings and go-to-market options. On the product side the company had increasingly migrated to larger in-home connected electronic and electrical devices. It had to decide how much further to go. On the go-to-market side its innovative Direct Service Representative network was hard to create and manage, and it had to think if there were viable alternatives.
Provides an overview of the U.S. home improvement sector in 2020, reviewing sources of growth in the decade ending in 2020, with special attention to the impact of COVID-19 on market leaders Home Depot and Lowe's and the spike in online revenues for both. Also noted are ongoing supply chain and efficiency improvements at Home Depot, and ongoing turnaround efforts by African American CEO Marv Ellison at Lowe's.
Dasra, a pioneer in the Indian Strategic Philanthropy space founded by a husband and wife team, had grown and evolved with the fast changing philanthropy scene in India. By 2017 it had managed to raise nearly $100 million of new capital for NGOs and Nonprofits in India. At the same time, the rapid growth demanded internal changes that stretched the organization and raised questions regarding structures, systems and capabilities.
In February 2018, Nayana Mawilmada (Nayana), investment head for the Sri Lankan government's ambitious $40 billion Megapolis project, must weigh an attractive job offer to move from the public sector to the private sector. A massive government project aimed at improving the lives of 5.8 million people living in and around Colombo, the Megapolis was stalled for many years until Nayana took on a leadership role. The case documents what he has learned to do to move things forward across a complex web of stakeholders (vying government agencies, politicians, funding institutions, academic experts, the press, users, and the general public). Just as the project gains official approval and is set to move to actual implementation, Nayana faces a career choice. Alongside that choice, students must determine whether Nayana has been successful or not.
The skills needed in many roles are continually changing--and sources of talent are too. PLUS a silver lining for female founders, bankruptcy in the time of Covid, the psychology of jargon, and more.
In 2019, the pricing manager at the US manufacturing facility for Sparrow GmbH (Sparrow), a chemical manufacturer based in Germany, asked the project manager at Roland Berger, a global management consulting firm, to provide her opinion on the pricing for Sparrow's bid on a basic chemicals contract with Impendium Chemicals. The basic chemicals industry was a highly competitive and commoditized environment; as a result, pricing decisions with respect to formulating bids were very important. Although the company had traditionally relied on the estimates of salespersons for pricing, it needed to develop a more refined approach to its pricing strategy. The project manager had to decide which costing method was most appropriate for this contract and recommend a price for the bid.
Many companies are unable to consistently gain business value from their investments in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. A study of the data science functions and initiatives in three of India's largest private-sector banks identified five obstacles to successful data science projects and suggests remedies that can help companies obtain more benefit from their data science investments.
This case is set in November 2020. Despite COVID-19, Ray of Hope (ROH), a crowdfunding charity in Singapore had grown crowdfunded donations for their clients (individuals requiring financial assistance) six-fold from S$500,000 (US$400,000) in 2019 to S$3 million (US$2.2 million) in the period April to September 2020, without an increase in headcount. The nationwide circuit breaker - Singapore's version of a lockdown, further hampered the work at ROH as no face-to-face meetings could be held with its clients in the two-month period from 7 April 2020 to 1 June 2020. Tan En, ROH's General Manager, was quick to pivot ROH's strategy from focusing on fundraising campaigns that helped individual clients directly (individual campaigns) to serving as the intermediary that raised and administered public donations for the volunteer groups (group campaigns). What were the reasons why ROH could pivot so quickly?
The case guides students to resolve a number of questions when embracing a new technology, with a focus on Blockchain, a radical new technology that has attracted a lot of hype although the adoption rate remains low among firms. Consequently, there are few successful business applications and many challenges, uncertainties and risks to be overcome. The case emphasizes two aspects of Blockchain. How to adapt a business's involvement with the technology to (i) the pattern of its development over time, (ii) to the geographic concentration of investment and development, certain locations being at the hub of development. As a framework for these issues, the case considers a start-up entrepreneur based in Paris as a means to help students/executives consider their own context. Paris is not at the forefront of Blockchain development, but neither is it on the periphery - which should inform their views of whether and how to embrace the technology. The case prompts participants to think about non-crypto-currency-related applications, and how far their options re influenced by the uncertain path of technology development and their own location in the broader global and local network. The issues addressed in the case also apply more generally to executives in large firms considering investment in emerging technologies such as Blockchain.
In 2019, David Behrends, head of Trading and Managing Partner at Sucafina, founded and launched Farmer Connect, a blockchain-based end-to-end transparent solution for the coffee trading industry. Following its successful launch, the tool needs to scale, which means bringing the whole coffee 'ecosystem' on board, analyzing the future structure of Farmer Connect in relation to Sucafina, resolving issues of fundraising and partnerships, as well as incorporating key learnings from a 2020 pilot in Brazil. The case follows the intrapreneurial journey of David, Farmer Connect and Sucafina. It puts managers in the driving seat, asking them to reflect on what it means to create value through innovation, and to disrupt an industry using technology to create positive social impact.
As the chairman of a publicly traded multinational corporation, it's difficult to contemplate replacing a charismatic, visionary CEO who tripled your organization's revenue, increased its net income sixfold, and grew the company from $30 billion in market capitalization to $300 billion during his 10-year tenure. As a chief executive, it's perhaps even harder to think about how to replace yourself with someone who you believe will do the job better than you could over the next decade. But Mastercard found a way to approach its most recent CEO transition thoughtfully and systematically by sticking to several rules: It cast a wide net, considering more than 40 internal employees and a handful of standout externals. It committed to inclusivity in decision-making, asking the entire board to participate. It insisted on solving for tomorrow's problems, not today's, in clarifying what type of new leader was needed. It focused on developing and retaining all its current and future stars--not just filling the top job. Finally, the authors pledged to keep their minds open and their personal opinions to themselves--while discouraging early preferences and groupthink among the directors--until one final candid and decisive debate.
Agile methodology, created to fast-track software development, is now being used throughout organizations by teams that want to execute projects quickly. But those efforts often don't pan out, say Babson's Rob Cross and Alia Crocker and Harvard Law School's Heidi K. Gardner. Their research reveals that many large agile initiatives not only miss their goals but also cause organizational disruption--including staff burnout, the loss of key talent, and infighting among teams. What's going wrong? With the help of organizational network analysis--a methodology for mapping how people collaborate--the authors have identified where unforeseen barriers undermine agile initiatives. The main problem they found: Traditional practices for executing agile projects are ineffective. Companies err by staffing agile teams only with stars, isolating them from the main business, and dedicating members 100% to teams. In this article, they offer alternative approaches: tapping "hidden stars," who will be less overloaded, for agile initiatives, and then identifying and reaching out to highly connected potential resources who can bring in expertise as needed.
For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they've backed--Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more--are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually do and how they create value. To pull the curtain back, Paul Gompers of Harvard Business School, Will Gornall of the UBC Sauder School of Business, Steven N. Kaplan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School conducted what is perhaps the most comprehensive survey of VC firms to date. In this article, they share their findings, offering details on how VCs hunt for deals, assess and winnow down opportunities, add value to portfolio companies, structure agreements with founders, and operate their own firms. These insights into VC practices can be helpful to entrepreneurs who want to raise capital, corporate investment arms that want to emulate venture capitalists' success, and policy makers who seek to build entrepreneurial ecosystems in their communities.