This note describes how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1949, has attempted to create and maintain an official narrative of the country and regime that tilts toward the favorable and minimizes any negative. A key component of the historical narrative has been China's so-called Century of Humiliation, in which China suffered exploitation at the hands of various other nations. Mistreatment by foreigners resulted in China's being disadvantaged in unequal treaties, being impoverished by outrageous indemnity payments, and suffering territorial losses (e.g., Hong Kong and Macau) and violations of its sovereignty (e.g., foreign concessions). In announcing the founding of the PRC in 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong said, ""Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up."" Reference to the Century of Humiliation and China's refusal to be controlled any longer was meant to inspire and motivate national pride in the Chinese people. In recent years, the influence of the national humiliation narrative has become increasingly apparent in China's international actions. The CCP has aggressively responded to perceived offenses by foreign entities, be they governments or companies, with public criticism and mobilization of Chinese netizens. This note was written to accompany ""The NBA, China, and Social Media: What Are the Rules of the Game?"" (UVA-E-0459), which outlines the Chinese reaction to 2019 social media posts sympathetic to protestors in Hong Kong. It gives background on the national humiliation narrative and its ongoing influence on China's relationship with its own people and with other nations.
In 2014, Ifeoma Fafunwa, an award-winning playwright and director, founded iOpenEye, a commercial production company dedicated to driving social change through performance art. iOpenEye's flagship theatrical production was called "Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True," which shared narratives of Nigerian women's struggles. By 2019, "Hear Word!" had debuted internationally, playing sold-out shows at distinguished venues like the American Repertory Theater and at the renowned Edinburgh International Festival. By spring 2020, COVID hit and venues closed, offering Fafunwa new possibilities, such as streaming content and reconsideration of production scale. What steps would it take to have iOpenEye and "Hear Word!" be successful five years down the line? Fafunwa contemplated her next move knowing that whatever it was, it had to be an iOpenEye 2.0 business model.
The case opens in August 2020 as Moulay Mhamed Elalamy (Mhamed), CEO of the Saham Group (the Group), a pan-African investment company that operates a variety of businesses out of Morocco, contemplates the Group's identity, its investment strategy, and how to navigate the existing businesses through volatility. Since Mhamed's father Moulay Hafid Elalamy (Moulay Hafid) had laid the foundations of the Group in 1995, its insurance arm became the largest insurance company in Morocco and expanded into the rest of Africa, and the Group diversified to include call centers, real estate, and agriculture. In 2013, Moulay Hafid Elalmy left his executive duties to take on the role of Minister of Industry, Trade, and New Technologies. The case talks about Mhamed's entering the family business at the age of 23 and his rise through the ranks to eventually assume the CEO position. In 2018, Mhamed decided to sell the insurance businesses, the Group's crown jewel, and the Group became a private equity house. Since then, Mhamed and his sister Anissa Elalamy were focused on making sure that business continued to prosper. While the Group was settling into its new identity as a family office focused on private equity, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the difference between the father and son's risk appetite and management styles: Mhamed was focused on value preservation and risk-reward analysis, while Moulay Hafid's saw opportunities everywhere. This raised questions for the future and the family contemplated its risk tolerance and allocation, governance, and succession. The case introduces the different family members and executives and their points of view and asks: What difficult conversations did the Elalamys need to have to ensure shareholder value and continued success in the upcoming generations?
The case opens in November 2019 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, find out about Apple's and Google's decisions to remove all Iranian apps from their respective application stores. The case takes us through the founding story of Snapp in 2014 to how the company grew to reach two million daily rides in Iran servicing 30 million customers through its two million registered drivers in 100 cities in Iran. The case then goes into detail about how the removal of all Iran-based apps from application stores limited Snapp's operations and its go-to-market channels. Next, the case chronicles how the co-founders focused on finding operational and technological solutions to minimize Snapp's reliance on U.S. technology following the U.S.' withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018 and instating the secondary sanctions on Iran. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive in a market that had been out of reach for Western investors. In 2019, Snapp had become the largest Internet company in the Middle East yet it was increasingly difficult to navigate the operational hurdles. The co-founders could not help but think whether it was now time to reach out to major media outlets and launch a public relations campaign to create awareness around the unexpected decision that had put the very existence of many companies at risk, including Snapp's. Alkassar and Fouz needed to weigh it against Snapp's realities. The case then asks: Should they go public with their story, or would it be better to stay under the radar and focus on efficiency and sustainability of operations?
The global fashion industry was among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, facing major disruptions on an unprecedented scale. On the retail side, challenges included store closures as part of government lockdown measures, as well as sudden shifts in market demand since many consumers were largely confined to their homes and facing economic uncertainty amid a deepening recession. On the supply side, complex and vulnerable global value chains proved to be ill-prepared for factory closures, prolonged shipping delays and reduced labor capacity due to lockdown measures, as well as sudden order cancellations due to a halt in customer demand. While these supply and demand shocks were triggered by the events of the global pandemic, they came on the back of a laundry-list of sustainability issues for which the fashion industry had since long been widely criticized, such as the environmental impact of textile waste and exploitative labor conditions for workers at the bottom of the value chain. A global leader in apparel, PVH Corp. (hereafter referred to as PVH) - parent company of iconic fashion brands Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein - found itself in the same boat as many players in the fashion industry. PVH suffered significant declines in revenue and earnings, and was forced to make difficult decisions, including permanent store closures as well as substantial lay-offs and furloughs. Stefan Larsson, the president of PVH, who would succeed Emanuel Chirico as CEO in early 2021, had major strategic issues to address, not only to get the company through the COVID-19 crisis but to future-proof it in a challenging post-pandemic world.
In March 2020, Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal were in the midst of preparing the annual auction for their student loan assistance startup, Juno. Both current MBA students at Harvard Business School, the duo founded Juno in 2018 to leverage student bargaining power to negotiate better student loan terms with private lenders. Their business model involved soliciting bids from banks through an annual auction; the lender who submitted the best terms then received the right to exclusively market their loan products to Juno's members. The co-founders held their first official auction in 2019, and anticipated receiving several competitive bids from large banks in 2020. However, several weeks before the auction was scheduled to begin, a new entrant to the private student loan market, Eager Bank, expressed a strong desire to become Juno's 2020 loan partner. Eager requested that Abkarians and Agarwal cancel the auction and negotiate directly with them. In exchange, Eager offered several attractive terms, such as involving Juno in the underwriting process. Abkarians and Agarwal must decide whether to partner with Eager, hold the auction as originally planned, or pursue both options simultaneously.
In March 2020, Juno co-founders Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal decided to pitch banks in anticipation of their annual auction while negotiating directly with private lender Eager. Responses from the majority of private lenders-including Juno's 2019 partner-were not encouraging, yet Eager remained keenly interested in an exclusive partnership. The co-founders faced additional pressure following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the uncertainties of the pandemic and its economic impact, the co-founders gravitated towards the Eager partnership. However, they must decide whether to cancel the auction, and whether Eager has the stability to withstand the pandemic.
In May 2020, Juno co-founders Chris Abkarians and Nikhil Agarwal decided to hold the annual auction for their student loan assistance startup. Five lenders submitted bids, and the co-founders ultimately opted to select Eager Bank as their partner for the 2020-2021 academic year for fixed-rate loans. However, a significant portion of Juno's membership expressed interest in variable-rate loans, prompting them to seek out another partner for the variable-rate product. They secured a deal with a major private lender through an intermediary, but are forced to quickly adapt their strategy when the lender refuses to pay for Juno's loan volume. The case concludes with the co-founders considering whether Eager Bank might be a potential long-term partner, and once again wondering whether they should make changes to their auction-based strategy for the coming year.
In 2011, Daniel Herrero, CEO of Toyota Argentina (TASA) since 2010, was about to meet with the Secretary-General of the union representing automotive industry workers in the country. The company produced vehicles in Argentina since 1997 at their plant at Zárate, and, in 2005, Argentina became one of the four countries selected by Toyota Motor Corporation to assemble models using the Innovative Multipurpose Vehicle (IMV) platform. However, Toyota's manufacturing plant in Zárate (Argentina) had been performing poorly compared to similar plants, affecting its competitiveness, and TASA's management held the union responsible for most of the plant's inefficiencies. Anything was possible as a result of the meeting, from shutting down production at TASA and focusing on their distribution business, to complete capitulation to all the union's demands.
Toyota Argentina (TASA) and the union representing automotive industry workers in the country had been working together since 2011 to address the challenges faced by Toyota's manufacturing plant in Zárate (Argentina). The strategy for moving forward was built on an agreement signed by both parties called the "Reborn Plant." In 2015, with slow progress at Zárate plant and the macro-conditions rumbling on, Daniel Herrero, TASA's CEO, reflected on what to do next.
Autonomous business monitoring platform Anodot leveraged machine learning to providing real-time alerts regarding business anomalies. Anodot's solution was used in various industries in order to primarily monitor business health, such as revenue and payments, product usage and customer experience. Every day, Anodot used 30 types of learning algorithms to analyze 6.2 billion data points and 428 million unique metrics. By 2019, Anodot's platform tracked more than 400 million metrics daily, driving four billion autonomous decisions that were translated to less than 1,000 alerts for all its customers. This highly accurate monitoring led to a low incidence of false positives, or false alerts, and customer satisfaction was high. Since Anodot's tool had the ability to identify granular business anomalies in real time, such as an unexpected drop in e-commerce sales for particular products or markets due to a technical glitch, fast detection and resolution of the problem meant that the potential financial damage could not be easily measured. The management team contemplated several strategic issues: How could they help their customers realize the value of Anodot? They had been working on several tools to show the value in different stages of the sales cycle and post-sale, but it was still hard to measure the actual financial value. In 2019, Anodot had adjusted its strategy to focus on client verticals and use-cases that would benefit most from Anodot. Would this make the sales process any easier? An improved product-market fit, combined with an ability to measure Anodot's value, could increase conversion and retention. Should they narrow down the use cases even more? As the team was thinking about their next funding round, it was important to prioritize their efforts.
Using the fictional situation of two brothers facing the challenge of managing a commodity business in central Africa, this note explores different metrics for risk and related considerations for investors. The note considers measures of volatility, including the difference between systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, and how diversification reduces idiosyncratic risk. The note uses these concepts to motivate the foundations of portfolio risk assessment by rational investors and the theory of the capital asset pricing model.
The case describes the creation and evolution of Brazil's first low-cost airline - GOL. From the outset GOL was driven by innovation and within a few years of operating had become the country's leading airline. Although initially a low-cost carrier, over the years it became increasingly customer-centric, striving to improve the customer experience by removing the pain points of air travel. As competition from new low-cost entrants intensified, could GOL maintain its lead in the domestic market? Was it destined to become the Uber of the airways, in a segment between low-cost and full-service offerings, relying on innovation to keep costs down? The case discusses GOL's options for growth, specifically its potential for international expansion.
The case describes WeWork's by-now-infamous fall from grace, during the turbulent autumn of 2019. Governance, financial strategy, and ethics are all prominent themes. WeWork had been a dominant player in the coworking office space market and had tried to create an ecosystem that allowed tenants of its office space to collaborate easily with one another, as well as one that offered third-party services. The case allows instructors to discuss commercialization strategies, boundaries of the firm, and issues related to investors in private versus public markets.
This is a follow-up to case A, which describes Operation "Lava Jato" (Car Wash) in Brazil, one of biggest anti-corruption investigations in the world. It laid bare the shady relationships between government contractors, political campaign agencies and high-profile politicians in what were known as 'pay-for-play' schemes - bribes and campaign contributions paid by major corporations to officials and political parties in exchange for lucrative government contracts that were over-invoiced to 'cover the costs'. Case B describes the latest developments until the end of 2020, including how former Judge Sergio Moro joined, then resigned from President Bolsonaro's government, corruption scandals related to Covid-19, and discusses the changes that Operation Car Wash brought to companies in Brazil, namely Petrobras and Odebrecht.
This case describes the rise of Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower from a small town in Kansas to the pinnacle of power on the world stage. During his life, Eisenhower was leader of the Allied Forces in World War II, president of Columbia University, head of NATO, and president of the United States for two terms. Students will learn how he navigated life's choices to leave a lasting impact on the world.
Updates (A) case by describing the early impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the art market, the renaming of the gallery as the Krakow Witkin Gallery, and the response of its partners and staff to the pandemic.