The founders of Braver Angels, an organization that uses family therapy principles to foster constructive dialogue between conservatives and liberals, consider how to improve its effectiveness and reach.
The case is set in January 2020 and the case protagonist is Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Inc., a fully integrated sustainable energy and transportation company. The case sets up real-world, factual problems that Elon Musk and Tesla face, including how to scale-up production profitably while launching several new models at the same time. Future demand in Tesla's key markets-the United States, China, and Europe-is also uncertain. Tesla, Inc. employed about 50,000 people worldwide and boasted a market capitalization of $150 billion, an appreciation of more than 6,000 percent over its initial public offering in 2010. This made the electric vehicle startup more valuable than GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler combined and the second most valuable auto company globally, only behind Toyota Motor Corp. but ahead of the Volkswagen Group, the world's two largest car manufacturers. To put Tesla's stock market valuation in perspective, in 2019, GM and Ford combined made more than 10 million vehicles while Toyota and Volkswagen each made over 10 million. In comparison, Tesla made less than 370,000 cars.
BusBoard Prototype Systems Ltd. (BusBoard), a company based in Calgary, Alberta, that designed and manufactured printed circuit boards targeted at the electronics hobbyist market, managed foreign-currency transactions on a transaction-by-transaction basis. The company’s general manager had been buying and selling CAD and USD while attempting to maximize the company’s value, timing transactions based on previous experience and professional judgment. This was challenging because she did not have any experience with currency futures or options, and she wondered if she could improve company performance by trading currencies differently. Exchange-rate volatility put constant pressure on her ability to make the best choice. The company paid most of its suppliers and received most of its payments from customers in USD. Highlighted in the case study is a recent transaction in which BusBoard ordered parts and supplies from a Taiwanese supplier, with 50 per cent payment due on contract negotiation and the remaining 50 per cent due on delivery. The general manager knew that developing a more effective way to manage currency transactions could play a big part in keeping the company profitable in the future.
In February 2019, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Daily Bread Food Bank (Daily Bread) in Toronto, Ontario reflected on the charity’s strong performance in the past year. Despite Daily Bread’s success, the CEO felt there were opportunities to do more. Toronto’s food insecurity rate had been rising in recent years, and food banks across the city had been struggling to meet demand. The CEO had several potential ideas for contributing to the long-term sustainability of the food bank and delivering the highest impact in the community. Daily Bread’s underused kitchen could be turned into a social enterprise and used to generate more funds to gain additional engagement with the local community in the fight against hunger; the kitchen could also be rented out for special events after hours and on weekends; extra shifts and truck deliveries would help grow the charity’s operations; or the organization could keep the status quo and let the charity grow naturally. Most importantly, however, the decision would have to align with the charity’s mission and current operations. With the advisory board of directors’ meeting rapidly approaching, the CEO had to make a decision on how to maximize the food bank’s resources.
In early January 2019, a recent Ivey Business School graduate logged into her online trading account to review her portfolio’s performance. As she scanned her investments, she paused at one stock in particular. It was time to make a decision regarding one of her most volatile stocks—Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., recently renamed Bausch Health Companies Inc. The pharmaceutical company was once celebrated for its innovative business approach. However, both its stock price and reputation as one of Canada’s most valuable companies had plummeted in recent years, after accusations of price gouging and investigations for fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Overburdened with significant amounts of debt from a spree of acquisitions, the company was also scrutinized by investors and regulators for using non-GAAP accounting metrics for its financial statements. The recent graduate wondered if she should hold out hope that the stock would return to its historic highs, or if she should cut her losses and divest the stock.
Despite a heavy barrage of advertising, most consumers declare that their purchases are most influenced by the experiences, advice, and recommendations of others, and not by marketers. Interpersonal communication between and among consumers serves as a potent path for influence, and by 2022, marketing managers are expected to spend $15 billion on influencer marketing, a marketing technique in which companies partner with people with specialized knowledge, expertise, authority, social position, and/or personal relationships that enable them to have influence over others to co-produce marketing messages to promote their brands via offline and electronic word-of-mouth. This technical note provides an overview of influencer marketing and discusses the various roles that influencers play for marketers, including delivering marketing messages in a more authentic voice and setting than that offered by more traditional advertising media where messages are authored by firms. It categorizes different types of influencers, explains the social psychological processes that make interpersonal influence work, and provides guidelines on how to identify people with influence. It discusses the opportunities and challenges related to measuring the performance of influencers and assessing the costs and return-on-investment of influencer marketing programs. Finally, it highlights emerging risks in the contemporary influencer marketing landscape.
In 2018, the founder and owner of the Karatu Coffee Company needed to decide what to do next with his company. He was considering several options: increasing the tourism part of the business, growing the original farm, pursuing a property development project in the capital city, or simply selling out and walking away. The company, located in Tanzania, began as a coffee farm, expanded into tourism with a remote, idyllic coffee lodge, and then brought coffee and tourism together with a bustling inner-city coffee house, which also housed a boutique hotel. The final phase of expansion included the purchase of high-quality coffee equipment and highly-prized roasting facilities to capture a larger share of the coffee value chain. The owner's decision would require insights into both the coffee industry and Tanzania itself.
In 2019, the founder of Anjelo's Confectionaries, a commercial bakery in India, faced two difficult situations. The founder had created the Juicy Cakes brand to represent the company's standard cakes, differentiating the product from the bakery's specialty cakes and ice cream cakes; however, the Juicy Cakes name had limited exposure and lacked mass recall for consumers, as a result of poor distribution and reach. The second challenge was the unused capacity of the company's large automated plant. Although cake sales were seasonal, the founder wanted to utilize the company's excess capacity throughout the year. The entrepreneur founder needed to fine-tune the trade-off between a product-based strategy and a place- or distribution-based strategy. How should the founder proceed to ensure his company's future?
Founded in 2016, Critterati was India's first luxury hotel for pets, located in one of the most prominent residential and commercial areas of Gurgaon, India. The basic philosophy of the hotel was that pets provided unconditional love to their owners, so they deserved more than just basic care in return. The number of customers visiting Critterati over the previous three years had increased consistently from 500 in the first year to 1,200 in the second year and 2,600 in the third year. In a short time, the start-up had become a self-sustaining business. By early May 2019, the hotel's top luxury Critterati Suite was already booked for most of June and the overall hotel was nearly fully booked for the next two months. The Critterati differentiator was an annual membership plan that had been carefully crafted to provide a package of services for one year at a cost effective flat rate. However, the number of customers who chose the membership plan was still low, at around 250, but 1,000 memberships were needed to break even. How would pet owners be convinced about the benefits of the plan? Partnering with other service providers would also increase brand awareness, but which partnerships were most important?
In 2019, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group Limited, one of Hong Kong's most popular jewellery chains, had recently adopted blockchain, under the leadership of managing director, to address some of the challenges in the diamond industry. In particular, the company had moved from paper certificates to digital certificates; blockchain also allowed the firm to trace the origin of diamonds, eliminating the problem of blood diamonds. In order to continue as a leader in transforming the diamond industry for the digital age, what other changes should the managing director implement? Should the company emphasize its use of blockchain technology in marketing to end consumers?
In March 2019, Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft were grounded worldwide. This was a consequence of two deadly plane crashes within five months in late 2018 and early 2019. In both the crashes, the flawed design of the aircraft led to an erroneous reading of the onboard sensors. This, in turn, activated the stall prevention software of the aircraft, which kept pushing the nose of the aircraft down. Boeing was alleged to have hastily developed the 737 MAX aircraft in response to the Airbus A320neo. In August 2019, Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, was hopeful that services of 737 MAX could resume within a couple of months. How should Muilenburg deal with the crisis? To what extent should he worry about the increasing competitive rivalry with Airbus?
On October 25, 2018, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dr. Jonathan Broomberg (CEO Discovery Health) and Dr. Craig Nossel (Head of Vitality Wellness) consider their dilemma of how to make Vitality Move more attractive to the lower-income market and increase the programme's uptake. Vitality Move is a wellness programme for the lower-income market, launched in 2017. It has a low membership uptake by the KeyCare benefit scheme members. The two leaders are faced with a challenge to devise ways to strategically target the lower-income group to improve employee productivity, decrease the burden of non-communicable diseases and influence positive lifestyle decisions. The case features the initiatives undertaken towards creating shared value.
Michelin, a tire company with over a century of experience, attempts to develop a digital service platform for its fleet and dealer customers. The case focuses on the challenges of bringing a large, well-established company into the digital age. Concerned about the slow growth in the tire market, Florent Menegaux, Michelin's CEO, set out to redefine the company as a mobility company. As part of this growth strategy, Michelin started offering a host of services such as fleet management and tire-as-a-service. In January 2020, Ralph Dimenna, Global President of its Service and Solutions group, launched its latest initiative called Digital Service Platform, a cloud-based system that connected Michelin with its fleet customers and dealers. However, the program was facing resistance in the market and he wondered what he could do to accelerate its acceptance.
Healthy buildings and superior air quality are increasingly important since people now spend so much time indoors. Indoor spaces drive performance and productivity. Commercial real estate landlords and investors are responding to the demands of sophisticated tenants and end users by making investment choices around indoor air quality and certification, and related expectations for increased rent or increased occupancy. It's anticipated that these learnings will extend to other situations including offices, schools, hospitals, factories, and homes. This case investigates the tradeoffs in several engineering, marketing, and finance decisions. The setting is a billion dollar premier new office building on Park Avenue in New York City, designed by the eminent architecture firm Foster + Partners. The decision factors in the case include health information from CogFX and 9 Foundations of Healthy Buildings research from the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health.
Facing mounting criticism and evidence of widespread racial discrimination on the platform, apartment rental platform Airbnb needed to decide a path forward. For years, Airbnb had given hosts extensive discretion about whether to reject a guest after seeing little more than a name and a picture, believing this was the best way for the company to build trust. While Airbnb ran thousands of experiments per year looking at ways to grow the user base and short-run profit, they failed to track or account for the possibility of discrimination. Should they become more proactive about identifying discrimination on the platform? Should they change the design of the platform to reduce discrimination? If so, how would they decide whether the changes were successful?
This case focuses on Charlotte Blank, the Chief Behavioral Officer at Maritz, as she tries to assist a major automotive manufacturer (CarCo) with increasing their sales by prepaying monthly bonuses to independently franchised car dealers and clawing them back if the sales targets are not reached. This pre-payment structure is what behavioral economists call "loss-framing." Broadly, this prepayment structure is an attempt to increase sales effort by harnessing people's desire to defend their earnings, endowments, and possessions. The case is based on a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper that can be read for additional detail on the underlying theory or empirics.
The case captures the origin and initial years of two restaurants Mirchi & Mime and Madeira & Mime, which exclusively employed Speech and Hearing Impaired persons (SHI) as servers (often called "waiters" in India). It documents how the restaurants were set up, captures significant incidents during this initial period and the impact of these incidents on the working of the restaurants. Further, it describes the challenge of opening a fine dining restaurant and a gastropub staffed exclusively by SHI persons as servers. The case narrates the reactions and impact on the SHIs and their families, co-workers within the outlets and the customers visiting these outlets. Finally, the case lists the recognition received by the organisation and outlines plans for the immediate future.
Circles.Life is the new telco challenger startup in Asia. Securing several rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital, Singapore's EDBI, Silicon Valley's Founders Fund, and Warburg Pincus for its fully-digital technology and business model innovation, it offers cloud-based telecommunications services around simplified data-focused plans, a simple onboarding process, and easy-to-use mobile app. The case explains how its 'fully digital' strategy improves upon established unit economics, enables rapid expansion beyond Asia, and diversification beyond voice and data offerings. Such innovations are often based on improvements in back-end infrastructure that differentiate the disruptor from competitors. In this case, Circles.Life develops a new technology stack with featuries in the e-commerce, network intelligence, and system operations layers that are substantial improvements over other MNVOs (mobile virtual network operators). These eliminate physical retail outlets, cut customer acquisition and service costs through automation, and allow the company to introduce non-telco services such as event ticketing, insurance, games and shops on the platform by early 2020. Meanwhile, 5G is promising to transform the telecom competitive landscape in Asia.
Finding the best people and paying more for them is, paradoxically, the most cost-effective way to optimize IT output. By adopting a new approach to assessing IT competence, companies can nurture engineering talent, boost productivity, and reduce costs.