After hitting an all-time low in 2008, Domino's Pizza underwent a vigorous rebranding, product development, and embraced innovative technologies to become the world's leading international fast-food retailer. Domino's considered itself as much a tech company as it was a purveyor of fast food, with digital orders accounting for a high percentage of sales. Domino's was run more like a Silicon Valley company than a fast food chain and was described by CEO Patrick Doyle as "a technology company that delivers pizza." As it bested rivals like Pizza Hut and Papa John's, Domino's declared itself "The Official Food of Everything." In 2020, as much of the world remained in lockdown Domino's, which offered delivery options from drones to driverless vehicles, saw a jump in sales. How did Domino's become the world's leading restaurant?
The COVID-19 pandemic brought enormous disruption to the movie industry, closing theaters indefinitely by mid-March 2020, halting television and film production, and throwing theatrical release schedules into disarray. Shell had assumed the CEO position at NBCUniversal just months before the beginning of the pandemic and now had several important decisions to make. One immediate decision he faced was how to handle the release of Trolls: World Tour, the highly anticipated sequel to a successful animated film, which had been scheduled to premiere in theaters nationwide in early April. Jeff's decision regarding the Trolls distribution strategy would not only impact the sequel's performance but would also likely have a far-reaching impact on the entire film industry, which had seen studios and theaters battle over the length of the theatrical window for decades. With the pandemic weakening the theater industry's bargaining power, had the opportunity finally arrived for film studios to significantly shorten, or even eradicate, the theatrical window?
The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company's path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company announced two internal issues in August 2019. The case chronicles the founding and expansion of Jumia and the iterations of its business model and describes its competitive outlook. The case then provides a detailed overview of how Jumia built its three pillars-its marketplace, logistics, and payments arms-and how the co-founders decided on the company's strategic, customer, and product scopes over the seven years in which Jumia spread across 14 countries in Africa since its founding in 2012. The case also provides an overview of Jumia's vertical scope, its technology, marketing, and payments systems, and how the company's localization strategy brings complexities to its business model, as Jumia tries to adopt its approach, website, products, and services to each country to increase profitability. While there is for the most part no single competitor that serves the same geography as Jumia does, Jumia strives to educate the African market about shopping online and overcome various infrastructure problems in the continent to improve its margins and become profitable. While its second quarter 2019 financials show continued GMV and customer growth, the co-founders need to convince investors of the company's path to profitability and answer questions such as: Is Jumia's existing product-service mix and geographical coverage the best use of the company's financial and managerial resources, or does the company need to make some eliminations? Can Jumia's expansive approach be sustainable as the geography becomes more developed and the inevitable specialized players come in?
Following the March 10, 2019, crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, en route to Nairobi, Kenya and the October 29, 2018, downing of Lion Air flight 610 as it took off from Jakarta, Indonesia, Boeing's 737 Max jet, the model flown in both instances, was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration and regulators all over the world. During its 20-month grounding, airline customers cancelled or put in question more than 1,000 orders for the Max. By the time regulators allowed the 737 Max to fly again, in November 2020, Boeing faced challenges due to the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on air travel in 2020 and the negative medium and long-term outlook for the airplane manufacturing industry. This case examines the challenges faced by Boeing and CEO David Calhoun as the company sought to recover from the financial consequences of the grounding and the pandemic and to re-gain the trust of passengers, airlines, regulators, investors, employees, and the media.
Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) is a global mining company that has made its first foray into the Canadian far north with its Meadowbank gold mining site. The case describes how AEM has worked with the local government to gain its support, signing an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement (IIBA). This IIBA outlines a number of commitments that AEM must meet in order to ensure equal representation of Inuit people within the mine. The case follows the superintendent of human resources (HR). Facing a turnover rate of 83 per cent and high levels of absenteeism among AEM's Inuit workforce, AEM is dealing with a talent management crisis of unprecedented proportions. The superintendent of HR must remedy the situation while operating within an environment characterized by resource constraints and a diverse workforce.
In 2018, the chairman of Sichuan Mt. Emei Zhuyeqing Tea Co., Ltd. (ZT), a tea enterprise founded in 1998, faced a strategic decision. ZT had become an economic entity in China, having successfully integrated tea plantation, cultivation, processing, and marketing. Since 2013, however, ZT had experienced sluggish growth. According to a third-party research report, the company’s development bottleneck was caused by fuzzy strategy and an out-of-focus operation. The company’s chairman needed to decide the next steps for ZT. Should ZT continue to pursue its cost leadership strategy by developing multiple brands and expanding geographically? Or should ZT adopt a focusing strategy, by building its green tea brand, and moving in stages toward the goal of national market expansion?
In mid-2020, the organizer of the Qingdao International Beer Festival (QIBF) faced a predicament. The QIBF was an annual festival held every August in Qingdao, China; however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the organizer had initially abandoned the idea of holding the QIBF in 2020. By the end of March 2020, the spread of the pandemic in China had been basically contained. The organizer then decided to restart the event preparations. However, on June 12, 2020, a second COVID-19 outbreak occurred in Beijing. Could the QIBF be held as expected in August 2020? What should be done to control the pandemic’s spread and coordinate the planning and design work of the festival? Based on this predicament, could the organizer meet the festival's goals while safeguarding the health of all participants?
Organizations are held back by an obsolescent work operating system that was built for the Second Industrial Revolution, with work defined as "jobs" and workers defined as "job-holding employees." Leaders must adopt and implement a new approach to organizing work that deconstructs jobs into tasks and deploys workers based on their skills, not job descriptions.
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.
While much of the Western world focuses on aspects of China that appear to threaten other nations, we should not ignore the lessons that can be found in China’s remarkable evolution as a marketplace innovator. The first key fundamental lesson to take from China’s digital innovators is the benefits of fully embracing user-driven innovation, starting with unmet customer needs, rather than transformational technology embodied in what you are sure will be a killer product. The second major lesson that Chinese digital innovators can teach us is to go beyond digital functionality and offer users an all-embracing digital lifestyle. While Google and Facebook derive most of their revenues from online advertising, Tencent and Alibaba’s online advertising accounts for a fraction of their revenues, because they follow a different business model, which constitutes the third fundamental lesson that the West can learn from China’s digital innovators. While Western companies fret about growing user bases to grow advertising, most Chinese digital innovators focus on generating profits by selling an ever-increasing portfolio of products and services designed to satisfy unmet customer needs or contribute to a more complete digital lifestyle.
An alarming number of leaders have been failing to serve as role models for future generations at a time when positive examples of leadership have never been more important. Like everyone, leaders make mistakes, which we often attribute to bad morals. But in most cases, these mistakes occur as consequences of poor judgment resulting from weaknesses in character. Most organizations fail to understand the key role that developing and maintaining character plays in improving judgment, and fail to seriously focus on character when hiring. In Developing Leadership Character—which offers a deep dive into Ivey’s research on how the interrelationships of various dimensions of character support good judgment—the case for character development is broken down into four parts. First, individuals can work on developing their own character strengths. Second, organizations can contribute to the character development of both individuals and organizations. Third, these processes must occur if individuals and organizations are to succeed in the contexts in which they operate. Finally, the results from character development will yield critical benefits to individuals and organizations, thereby justifying the effort required. While there are long-established selection criteria for competencies, it’s relatively rare for employers to discuss the character dimensions required to succeed in leadership roles. When hiring and promoting in today’s disruptive world, organizations need to ensure that leadership candidates have the essential dimensions of character required to selflessly lead others.
This article aims to help employers implement equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) training efforts that can make the difference between meeting today’s elevated expectations and falling short by focusing only on select characteristics like race and gender. Understanding the pervasiveness of biases and how they impact our thinking and behaviour can help us try to moderate how we act and communicate, which is why introspection and implicit bias tests are used to detect the strength of a person’s automatic associations between mental representations. But introspection and implicit bias tests don’t eliminate biases or help us avoid falling into the Judgment Trap. According to the research behind the TRACOM SOCIAL STYLE Model, 75 per cent of people with whom you interact have a different behavioural pattern or “Social Style,” including the Driving Style, Expressive Style, Amiable Style, and Analytical Style. Social intelligence training can help those with each of the four Social Styles make adjustments that can enable people to interact more effectively, empathetically, and transparently. By deploying Social Style training to focus on behaviours, organizations empower people to recognize how their perceived strengths can actually impede their relationships with co-workers, while moving them to appreciate diversity of thought and behaviour. This counters the unfounded judgments that our brains ironically make in the name of efficiency, and thus enables us to interact more respectfully and effectively.
Within a workplace, emotional landscapes the collective composition of employee sentiments directly influence how people make sense of situations. Managing these landscapes can help in the pursuit of organizational strategic objectives. Current advice recommends strategies such as encouraging general suppression of emotions or giving generic pep talks. Instead, leaders need to respond to employees' emotional states with more nuance.
In April 2020, the business head and the human resources head at Apturja Power Limited (APL) were anxious about the rising levels of new-hire turnover across all five power plant locations. Out of 2,000 employees hired in the past two years, half had left the organization within a year of joining. High attrition posed an issue for APL's cost-competitiveness strategy by not only increasing hiring costs but also nullifying the time and energy spent in acquainting and training employees to APL's requirements. Both department heads wanted to identify reliable indicators so that they could develop an appropriate action plan to reduce new-hire turnover and thereby strengthen APL's human capital.
This article aims to help employers support women as they pursue their goals and dreams by changing organizational dynamics that prevent progress. There are steps that one can take to balance cross-gender relationships and improve the cultural context in which employees interact. These steps will get organizations headed in the right direction—and faster, while getting them farther, than preaching change by itself. Unfortunately, when an organization decides that it needs to change something like its gender relationships, employees typically have no idea what to do other than talk about the fact that they are being told to change. The following steps can mitigate the pain associated with change by focusing on objectives while letting employees lead the conversation about what needs fixing to achieve them: 1) start at the end and visualize the story you want tomorrow’s organization to tell, 2) set a release date for your new story, 3) build a plan backward, 4) create a pilot team of change agents, 5) create new habits one at a time, 6) measure the right things, and 7) celebrate objectives and reward the right behaviours. Ultimately, firms should not assume their employees will reject change no matter how it is positioned. More often than you might think, an organization’s people really just don’t know what change could or should be.
As the second wave of COVID-19 was ramping up in 2020, a three-day virtual summit organized by the Ivey Academy brought together senior HR professionals from across Canada to discuss working on the front lines of organizational disruption. Day 1 examined equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts. As 2020’s civil rights protests demonstrated, the institutional programs conducted around EDI in the past have failed to deliver what is expected today, not to mention what justice demands. Day 2 was themed “from staying afloat to charting a course.” With remote work leading to problems—ranging from rising mental health issues and Zoom fatigue to increased cyberattacks—most companies are still trying to figure out what level of remote work makes sense for future operations. Summit attendees discussed the need to further develop virtual working skills and leadership empathy, while focusing employees on purpose more than profits, beefing up mentoring/coaching, and breaking down virtual silos. Finally, Day 3 examined the re-humanization of the workplace. The pandemic has essentially stripped the workplace of direct human-to-human interaction as work hours soar. As a result, employee stress is up, along with substance use, which has impacted engagement. HR summit attendees discussed the need to explore new ideas that go well beyond offering flexible hours, technical training, and mental health support programs—these included blackout periods, high-end virtual events, and online food vouchers for team lunches.