The Bank of New Zealand (BNZ)'s market share among Small and Medium Enterprises is declining. The new general manager discovers a pain point among SMEs - they are spending a couple of hours a day compiling information from different apps in order to manage their business. BNZ creates are new information portal with ecosystem partners called MyBusiness Live. This portal makes information available to SMEs in one simple dashboard. BNZ has to decide how to charge for the system and whether to make it accessible only to current customers (i.e., closed system) or also to non-customers (i.e., open system). It also has to deal with internal challenges (e.g., salesforce) regarding the new system.

In March 2020, a physician in southwestern Ontario, Canada began working on the development of an innovative digital application called the Pandemic Population Health Navigator, designed to help mitigate the pressure on Ontario’s health care system due to the rapid increase and spread of COVID-19 infections. The founder worked quickly to engage local health system partners, trusted advisors, the provincial government, and a digital health vendor to support the development of his innovation, which was intended to act as a COVID-19 triage tool. The project garnered widespread support and benefited from unprecedented quick approval times by the provincial government, which was undergoing a provincial transformation to a new health care system. Six months later, however, unexpected issues and risks began to surface. A key stakeholder was threatening to terminate the project’s agreement due to increasingly complex customization demands from users of the Pandemic Population Health Navigator. The physician realized that he quickly needed to find a way to alleviate these complexities and associated risks, while maintaining the trust of his health care collaborators.

Governments are implementing policies to require vaccination for employees in certain settings while rolling out programs that require vaccination passports for public access to certain non-essential services. In this political and legal landscape, employers who are not directly impacted by government orders mandating vaccination are contemplating mandatory vaccination policies of their own. As employers implement a mandatory vaccination policy, the authors recommend the following safeguards: 1) Employees who cannot be vaccinated or who refuse the vaccine for human rights reasons must be provided with accommodation (i.e., regular testing, masking and social distancing measures, remote work options, etc.), unless it would amount to undue hardship. 2) Require vaccination for employees who will report to work at the office. 3) Employers should tread carefully when considering the termination of employees who refuse to be vaccinated. 4) In accordance with privacy legislation in certain provinces and at the federal level, employees must be notified of the purposes for which information on their vaccine status will be used. 5) Employers should minimize the information that they collect.

Late in 2020, ImmunVX, a fictional, multinational vaccine company, was among the leaders in developing a vaccine against the COVID-19 virus. It had accepted several government grants to help with the costs of developing the vaccine more rapidly. The company had a limited in-house manufacturing capacity yet had accepted orders from multiple governments that far exceeded its ability to meet those orders for at least the next three years. The company could increase its output by using contract manufacturing and/or by partnering with another large pharma company, though each option lowered the per-unit profit margin. ImmunVX was proud of its relationships with high-, middle-, and low-income countries and accepted the variable profit margins from these different markets. However, it had taken on significant debt in recent years due to acquisitions and R&D costs. As a consequence, it had incentivized its employees to focus on improved profit margins to repay those debts and improve the equity value to satisfy shareholders. The challenge of this case lies in the discussion of a strategy that reconciles the needs of different stakeholders. An attempt to prioritize stakeholders in a simplistic way illustrates the weakness of thinking in terms of "or" rather than "and". Thinking about "and" reframes the discussion to accept a decrease in short-term profit that might lead to longer-term gains. The case lends itself to a higher-level analysis using the PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Ethical and Legal) framework to identify macro-environmental factors that help guide a decision.

In October 2015, Ho Ren Hua took over as CEO of Thailand-based Thai Wah Public Company (TWPC), a family-owned business supplying starch and starch-related food products. Since then, he had introduced several changes to professionalise the company, which included introducing more independent directors who were highly-qualified with experience in multinational corporations (MNCs), bringing in an end-to-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, formalising a career and personnel development system, and transforming the firm into a data-driven one. In addition, Ren Hua made innovation a hallmark of the company, and developed measures to enable TWPC to become a more sustainable business. He also initiated a formal mechanism to renew the leadership of the company, making sure that his family's role in TWPC did not prevent the company from being professionally run. The case looks into how TWPC transformed to become a professional family business with innovation and a data-driven culture at its core, even as Ren Hua worked to ensure that his family's role in managing the company did not in any way overshadow the work and contributions of the other staff and board directors.

In 2018, Walmart, the world's biggest retailer, launched Jetblack, a concierge luxury shopping service that allowed consumers to explore and buy items via text message. It is a classic example of the danger of introducing a relatively luxurious brand into the portfolio of a non-luxury brand family. Jetblack's service combined artificial intelligence (AI) and the customized attention of trained experts to identify the most appropriate products for its customers. Following the launch of Jetblack, customer enrollments grew and both the frequency and breadth of member shopping increased. Its initial customers also stated that texting was their favorite aspect of the service. However, Jetblack's inability to scale its business operations proved to be a major challenge, with dire financial implications. By 2019, Jetblack was losing around USD 15,000 per customer annually. On February 21, 2020, Walmart announced that it was shutting down its exclusive concierge shopping startup, Jetblack, due to limited end user customer enrollments and inadequate investments.

Set in April 2017, this case centers around the digital technology dilemma facing the protagonist Dr. Vimohan, the chief intensivist of Prashant Hospital. The case describes the critical challenges afflicting the intensive care unit (ICU) of the hospital. It then follows Dr. Vimohan as he visits the Bengaluru headquarters of Cloudphysician Healthcare, a Tele-ICU provider. The visit leaves Dr. Vimohan wondering whether he can leverage the Tele-ICU solution to overcome the challenges at Prashant Hospital. He instinctively knew that he would need to use a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to resolve this dilemma.

Dupden Lepcha started Tingvong Homestay, the first homestay in the remote Dzongu region of Sikkim, India, when the region was opened for tourism in 2006. Initially, the response to Dupden’s homestay was good, improving Dupden’s financial position and earning him the respect of the community. With Dupden’s active encouragement and help, other members of the community also established homestays. Over time, however, a few of these homestays outperformed Tingvong Homestay by creating greater awareness of their offering.<br><br>Despite the government’s intention to develop the region as an ecotourism hub, the pace has been slow, compelling the village council to take proactive steps. They have asked Dupden to play an active role in working closely with government officials, and now Dupden must decide whether to focus on his homestay or take up the role offered by the council and work toward the development of the Dzongu region as an ecotourism hub.

Saudamini Mattu was the chief executive officer of Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla (AJSK), a successful Indian luxury brand specializing in luxe couture, interior design, and wedding decor. The brand had roots in ancient Indian embroidery, and its story was inextricably linked with the personalities of its founders, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, who thought of themselves as revivalists creating luxury products and experiences using designs with an Indian ethos. The luxury brand had deeply resonated with its loyal customer base for over three decades, but AJSK had to now address the relevance and sustainability of its brand story. Mattu therefore had to evaluate whether AJSK’s brand story was relevant in the constantly shifting luxury market, and recraft the brand story for the House of AJSK, while considering missed opportunities and the viability of the business model of a creative organization in a challenging economic scenario.

In 2020, the legal cannabis industry in the United States was emerging. One large player in the nascent industry was Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy Growth), a cannabinoid company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario, that grew cannabis and managed a range of cannabis-related brands. In September 2020, Canopy Growth announced a partnership with Martha Stewart that entailed the development of a mix of cannabis edibles and oils for wellness sold under the name Martha Stewart CBD. Although the legal cannabis industry held tremendous promise, there were a wide range of unique challenges associated with selling cannabis products, including regulatory and policy issues, stigmas associated with illegal cannabis, and other more typical issues associated with selling new products such as the need for consumer education. The partners would need to consider how consumers would respond to the Martha Stewart CBD offerings, what specific obstacles they would have to overcome, and what market segment(s) and products they should prioritize.

In April 2021, the co-founders of the Onyx Initiative (Onyx) were reviewing the progress of their six-month old organization. The co-founders had founded Onyx to expand the Black talent pipeline by offering a scholar program that connected Black students with mentors and offered them online professional development. The initiative had successfully accepted an inaugural cohort of 170 Black students and partnered with numerous corporate, community, and educational partners. Recently, corporate sponsors had approached Onyx with a request to expand programming to their US offices. The co-founders needed to decide if now was the right time for expansion, or if this would be spreading their new organization too thin.

The chief commercial officer of Johnson Controls International, a multinational manufacturer and marketer of security systems, was noticing a change in the buying behaviour of one of its premier customers. As one of the company’s designated strategic accounts, this customer was entitled to multi-level collaborative support. Of late, the customer had been taking a “bid-and-buy” approach to its purchases, ignoring the standards agreed to in the strategic agreement with Johnson Controls International. It also sought a scaled-down version of a security system, and this ran contrary to the original strategic account agreement. The chief commercial officer was examining the way forward with the customer. Should he demote it from the strategic account status to a regular sales account, despite the risks involved in doing so?

Social trading platform eToro was preparing for the launch of its expanded offering in the U.S. The company faced critical decisions regarding product-market fit, go-to-market strategy, positioning and monetization. Moreover, it faced the challenge of how best to make its social features relevant to U.S. consumers. eToro was founded in Israel in 2007, with a mission to democratize investing. The cofounders, the Assia brothers, were determined to open the global markets for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way. By 2020, eToro's customers in most countries were able to trade multiple assets, and in most territories the company offered zero commission stock trading. The vast majority of its users shared their investment strategy, and others in the community could review and even copy their portfolio with a single click. A subset of users were able to garner a large following and become "investment celebrities," enjoying fame and often fortune. Figuring out the best path forward with respect to the U.S. launch was complicated by shifts in the competitive landscape, which had seen consolidation of large players in the U.S. market and the emergence of fintech firms that offered zero commission trading and appealed to millennials. The U.S. regulatory approval was a pivotal milestone in eToro's evolution. But with a limited suite of products, a modest community and a market where zero-commission stock trading was already commonplace, the management team deliberated on what it would take to make inroads in the U.S. and what success could look like.

Elie Girard has taken the helm as CEO of Atos-multinational IT giant-to lead the company into the next era of digital transformation. Noticing that customers' digital needs were evolving to become even more specialized and global in scope, he made a bold first step as leader: restructure the organization from a service-based model to a portfolio built around specific industry verticals, while competitors were moving in the other direction with the conviction that digital disruption had dissolved industry barriers. Underpinning Girard's new digital blueprint were four pillars - the cloud, data, cybersecurity, and decarbonization - which he had fortified with a steady M&A strategy resulting in nine acquisitions. But decarbonization - reducing carbon emissions into the atmosphere through strategic use of digital technology - was a brand-new dimension with big questions about its feasibility. The environmental approach was controversial in different parts of the world. To add to the uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic had suddenly turned the world upside down, forcing organizations to transition into remote work overnight. In the middle of a global health crisis and ensuing economic fallout, could Girard afford to make such drastic organizational structure changes that flew in the face of industry trends? Would his decision disqualify Atos from the race with competitors, or was it the only way to serve customers in even greater need of digital solutions?

In 2019, Egon Zehnder chair Jill Ader and CEO Edilson Camara faced a critical question: how should the global executive search firm approach its burgeoning advisory service offering? Since 2003, the firm's advisory practice had grown as a conglomeration of grassroots experiments driven by the enthusiasm of some partners and the needs of some markets. Yet, in 2019, partners' attitudes toward the practice varied greatly, with some viewing advisory as a natural extension of search that would position Egon Zehnder for future growth, and others perceiving it as a risky distraction from the firm's core business. Ader and Camara believed the time was ripe for EZ partners to develop a shared perspective on the future of the practice within the firm.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India's most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector, globally. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, like many companies around the world, TCS moved to remote working. The leadership of the company saw the myriad benefits of remote work. As the company planned for the future roadmap in the post-COVID world, it decided on a blended model. By 2025, only 25% of TCS employees would need to work in company facilities and no employee would need to spend more than 25% of their work hours in a physical office for the company to be productive. For this work model to be successful, the TCS management team had to brainstorm four key areas: What should the norms be for 25% in-person and who should determine them-senior managers, associates, clients, government regulators? How should the company convince veterans that virtual mentoring was as effective-if not more so-in preserving and further enriching the culture of mentorship? How should TCS deal with labor regulations around the world, if 'Talent on the Cloud' led to workers relocating and living in different geographies? Finally, how should TCS pitch this new model of work to clients once the pandemic eased?

This case introduces a new Amazon program that has consumers upload their receipts from transactions outside of Amazon, in exchange for money. Through the discussion, the case aims to explore issues in customers' privacy in the digital age, the value of customers' own data, and the change in regulations aimed to protect consumers that move companies from using third party data to first party data. In addition, the case offers an opportunity to discuss the power dynamics of online giants such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

The CEO of Serum Institute of India (SII), a $12.8 billion Indian Family business is faced with a risky choice between principles and profit. SII is the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world and Adar Poonawalla, the CEO and son of the founder has to decide how to temper his responsibility to meet the world's need for an affordable, efficacious and safe COVID-19 vaccine with his need to maintain profitability.