Satkar Automobiles was a dealer for Hero MotoCorp, located in Chhinwada, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, India. Starting from a humble beginning, the two-wheeler dealership had increased its sales revenue year-over-year—until COVID struck. During the pandemic recovery, Hero MotoCorp’s competitors gained more market share. Amidst a changing market, distribution restrictions, and inventory challenges, the company’s chief marketing officer, a second-generation entrepreneur, was faced with a huge problem: how to regain share in her market and become the number one dealer for Hero MotoCorp in India.
New research suggests that people's judgments of equity depend on their beliefs about the structural causes of success. When they take into account the overlooked structural factors that influence how people work is evaluated and their ability to be productive, their ideas of fairness begin to shift. This finding is particularly salient when evaluating the work of women, who often face invisible barriers. The researchers suggest four takeaways for organizations and managers to address this.
What do organizations that successfully unlock AI's strategic potential have in common, according to recent research? Executives with high AI literacy. Many leaders will be uncomfortable with the need to continually learn about artificial intelligence as the technology evolves, but executives and board members need to embrace that discomfort and make it a habit. This article shares three ways to put that habit into action.
Three payoffs stand out in the use of AI in marketing: increased sales productivity, increased customer satisfaction, and lower marketing overhead costs. That’s according to data from The CMO Survey of U.S. marketing leaders. The amount gained depends on how long companies have been using the tools, their digital transformation stage, and their level of experimentation. The most common uses of AI (content personalization and creation) do not have the biggest payoffs.
Mr. Highfly graduated with an accounting and finance degree in 2023, after which he was hired as an accountant by SG Development Limited (SDL). SDL was listed in the Singapore Exchange (SGX) and had established a reputation as a reliable provider of trading and shipping services in ASEAN countries. It planned to expand its operations to the real estate segment in Southeast Asia. In the first week after Mr. Highfly reported for duty, he was tasked to investigate the accounting treatments for investment properties and their implications on the company's financial statements.
This note is about tokenization and tokenized assets. Tokenization refers to the process of creating a representation of a particular asset on a blockchain via digital tokens. Tokenized assets typically derive their value from the value of the underlying asset. This note explores the benefits and risks of tokenization, as well as use cases. Moreover, it explores Security Token Offerings, considerations for tokenized asset issuers, and the Howey Test. It concludes with a consideration of how possible future trends may affect tokenization.
The Engine, a venture capital firm founded by MIT to fill a gap in the technology funding landscape by commercializing breakthrough science and technology. Led by managing partner and CEO Katie Rae, the Engine's unique approach involved an unusually longer fund life, as well as founder training, lab space sharing, and "tough tech" ecosystem building activities centered at their brand-new headquarters in Cambridge. The firm raised $507 million over its first two funds which had yielded promising results, with many portfolio companies maturing faster than anticipated. As The Engine considered its next steps, it faced several strategic questions that tested its core beliefs in startup ecosystems and commercializing frontier science. Should the Engine's third fund expand geographically or into later-stage companies? And how much should they raise? The Engine team attempted to balance its desire to scale their impact with the need to maintain focus on supporting the most ambitious technical founders.
In November 2023, OpenAI, a prominent artificial intelligence (AI) research lab, announced the unexpected removal of its co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, which sent shockwaves through the AI industry. The case first delves into OpenAI's journey from its inception as a non-profit organization aimed at developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the betterment of humanity, to its transformation into a capped-profit entity, along with the value chain and competitive dynamics of the generative AI industry. In the second section, the case documents in detail Sam Altman's sudden dismissal. In the last section, the case concludes with a look into the broader implications for the generative AI industry, including the race for AGI, the ongoing challenges of AI development, and new developments. The case is suitable for MBA, EMBA, and undergraduate students who are interested in competitive strategy, industry value chain, technology and innovation, entrepreneurship, corporate governance, stakeholder governance, and the AI industry. The case can be used in a core strategy course at different levels as it covers various topics.
Contrary to the typical practice of cutting operating expenses by compromising on employees' benefits, the chairman of Zentaku Kogyo Company Ltd. (Zentaku), David Wu Chongrang, aimed to improve the standard of living of his staff by steadily raising their salaries and benefits. In fact, the key performance indicator David had set for himself was to raise his employees' salaries regularly to a preset target benchmark. Contrary to conventional approaches, over the past sixteen years (2006-2022) David had reduced Zentaku's revenue by 28 per cent and the number of employees by two-thirds, while raising the annual gross profit per employee to 239 per cent. Zentaku had achieved more with less by transforming itself through the rigorous implementation of lean production, inspired by the famed Toyota Production System, but Zentaku's future leadership now faced challenges in sustaining the success Zentaku had achieved. Were the management methods adopted in the past applicable to the younger generation of workers? How could the current management pass the enterprise to the younger generation while ensuring employees remained fulfilled in the workplace?
Bryan Gilvesy, CEO of ALUS, must create a proposal to spend ALUS' $100,000 marketing budget for their brand "New Acre Project". The brand had experienced good growth in previous years, but sales had stagnated for the past two, creating concerns about the survival of New Acre Project. Gilvesy must invigorate growth and reach sales of $6 million by choosing a target market, whether he should offer carbon credits or not, and at what price. He also had to choose a promotional channel and the messaging New Acre Project would use going forward.
In the first two decades of the 21st century, community organizers were increasingly enlisted by progressive foundations to help increase voter turnout among the "low propensity" voters in their communities, especially people of color and young people, groups largely "invisible" to the mainstream election industry. In many ways, the organizers-including those in the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, the group at the heart of this case-welcomed this opportunity, believing that it would support and reinforce their traditional organizing work. With greater voting strength, they reasoned, their constituents would gain leverage to advocate more effectively for their communities. But the OOC soon discovered that the goals and protocols of the election industry diverged sharply from those of community organizers. Organizing work was a long game aimed at creating collective power through trust- and relationship-building. Electoral campaigns were fast-paced and laser-focused on getting to "50 percent + 1." This case follows the Ohio Organizing Collaborative as it worked to find more effective ways to increase voter turnout in target communities and, at the same time, to better align its electoral work with the OOC's community-organizing values. Like other community organizers across the country, they tried to bring the strategies of "relational" organizing into their get-out-the-vote (GOTV) work. Their experiments yielded results that were mixed, interesting, and pointed the way to some new approaches in future. In addition to the written case, the case package includes a podcast supplement in which Prentiss Haney, one of the OOC codirectors featured in the case, describes his own stop-and-start path to community organizing-and how community organizers recruited and supported him, as a young adult, in a way that eventually persuaded him of the value of political activism.
The case examines the transformation of Best Buy under CEO Hubert Joly's leadership from 2012. Facing significant business challenges, including competition from online and physical retailers, Joly implemented the "Renew Blue" turnaround strategy, which focused on improving price competitiveness, enhancing the customer experience both in-store and online, partnering with major tech companies, and investing in employee training and engagement. The case further explores the development and execution of the "Building the New Blue" strategy, aiming to enrich lives through technology by addressing key human needs and expanding services such as in-home advisors and entering the health care market. The case highlights the approach Joly calls "Unleashing Human Magic," which focuses on the importance of aligning company purpose with employee motivation and customer needs to drive business growth and transformation.
The dueling fortunes of two hot sauce manufacturers demonstrate the power of strategic diversification in the areas of supply chain, products, customers, and channel. Managing risk on these multiple fronts early on, McIlhenny thrived while competitor Huy Fong Foods failed to follow suit, rendering the former market leader an also-ran in hot sauce.
Within a single year, Lebanon experienced multiple adversities, from the economic crisis in October 2019, to the COVID-19 pandemic, to the Port of Beirut explosion on August 4, 2020. Many start-ups had to shut down during this period. This case investigates the role of organizational culture in how Toters Delivery, a high-tech Lebanese-based start-up, responded to these challenges and adapted its business model to overcome adversity. Its co-founder believed that organizational culture was a key factor in its survival. The case examines questions such as: How can a start-up maintain its culture in the face of grand challenges? and What strategic changes does a start-up need to make during challenging times, and how?
At a conference in November 2020, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of two exceptional healthcare start-ups—AliveCor Inc. (AliveCor) and Neurobit Inc. (Neurobit)—discussed their paths to innovation: AliveCor, a trailblazing health tech company, had emerged in 2011 with electrocardiogram (ECG) hardware and software that had since garnered global recognition. Neurobit, a digital health start-up, entered the scene in 2018 with sleep biomarker–based health analytics that could predict adverse cardiopulmonary or neurological outcomes. As the CEOs shared their stories, common challenges emerged regarding data acquisition, privacy concerns, and regulatory compliance. Amid their successes, the two companies experienced the necessity of addressing data challenges to achieve AI’s full potential in healthcare. They made trade-offs between time and resources amid a rapidly evolving industry and employed various strategies and solutions, from academic collaborations to extensive data collection, in their quest to determine the best strategy to use to overcome the challenges of efficiently and cost-effectively acquiring and utilizing data to drive innovation and gain a competitive edge.
Atijeevan Foundation was founded in 2013 with a mission to rehabilitate and empower victims of acid attacks. The founder, who was a survivor of an acid attack herself, wanted to ensure that the past traumatic experiences of survivors did not impede their opportunity to make a place in society and lead a meaningful and dignified life. She learned about the challenges through interactions with the survivors she trained and helped find employment. Many of them reported incidents of harassment, bullying, discrimination, and insensitive behaviour from co-workers. The founder was contemplating how to help. Should she support and encourage survivors to independently manage their own workplace challenges at work, which would align with her philosophy of self-advocacy and resilience? Or should she ask the human resources department in each organization to support survivors? She was also contemplating how each organization's equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives could be expanded to integrate the unique challenges and needs of survivors of acid attacks to foster their empowerment in the workplace.
Malaria, a deadly disease transmitted by the bites of infected mosquitoes, had been effectively eliminated from the developed world since the end of the World Health Organization's Global Malaria Eradication Campaign in 1969. In Africa, however, the disease remained a scourge through the early 2000s, killing close to a million people each year, most of them children under five. As a result, the international community set an ambitious goal: reduce malaria deaths in Africa to zero by the end of 2015. Rising to the challenge required the mobilization of a vast network of local, regional, national, and global actors in the for-profit, nonprofit, and public spheres. Local community groups in tiny African villages, national malaria control programs in malaria-endemic countries, national and international non-governmental organizations, faith-based organizations, foundations, individual philanthropists, research institutes, and huge multilateral bureaucracies like the United Nations Children's Fund, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank would be required to work together with focus and vigor to meet the goal. This case describes the history of the global fight against malaria, and the role of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, the Global Fund, the President's Malaria Initiative, the Roll Back Malaria Partnership, and other actors in collectively shepherding the effort. The Harvard Kennedy School Case Program has published three cases on the Mosquito Network. This case is adapted from "The Mosquito Network: Collaborative Entrepreneurship in the Fight to Eliminate Malaria Deaths (A)," HKS Case No. 2071.0, and "The Mosquito Network: Collaborative Entrepreneurship in the Fight to Eliminate Malaria Deaths (B)," HKS Case No. 2072.0, written by Gaylen Williams Moore.