Farmery's mission was to supply fresh, pure cow's milk, to households in the National Capital Region of India within 24 hours of milking. After two years of operations, Farmery had become profitable and had introduced many firsts in the consumer milk market in India. It delivered raw cow's milk to 5,000 households daily, maintained a cold supply chain, and adopted a capital-efficient business model and end-to-end technology-driven operations and customer service. In early 2018, Farmery was facing a challenge in scaling the business for the next phase of growth. Farmery's funding constraints prevented it from expanding in more than one direction at a time. Co-founder Arora therefore had to choose: should he consolidate Farmery's operations within its existing geographic market and offer customers a wider portfolio of products, or should Farmery continue limiting its offerings to fresh milk products but expand geographically, in order to maximize new customer growth?
In June 2016, Mohammad Arif, the director of Student Biryani, seemed depressed about the all-time low performance of the franchise in Canada. Hard work and persistence not only enabled the company to become Pakistan's first and largest Pakistani food chain but also to establish a presence in global markets such as Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Oman, and Australia. But the all-time low performance of the Canadian outlet had put severe pressure on Arif because the brand image was at risk. Arif convened an urgent meeting with the management team. The meeting continued for three hours, but members seemed divided and the meeting was adjourned for the next day. Arif needed to find the causes of the problem and how to cope with them.
Receiver Coffee (Receiver), a Prince Edward Island-based coffee roaster and café, had found success since opening in 2012. Co-owner Colleen MacKay and her partners were trying to grow the wholesale side of the business, selling high-end coffee to cafés, restaurants, and other businesses outside of their usual trading area, with a focus on Ontario and Quebec customers. Sales growth of wholesale coffee had been limited, despite the overall success of the brand in its home region. Receiver had a clear identity as a high-quality local coffee roaster, a well-defined set of marketing tactics including price and promotion, and ambitious growth goals. Now in 2018, the question for MacKay was how to go about finding a market that could take Receiver to the next level.
This award-winning case explores the challenges facing Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, the CEO of Mirvac, an Australian property group, as she leads a major initiative to 'mainstream' flexible work arrangements across the organization. Spurred by dismal employee engagement numbers, including widespread dissatisfaction with work-life balance, she is determined to extend flex-time opportunities to all 1500 employees, including those in the male-dominated Construction division. The challenges are related to traditional attitudes within the industry and the company, the stigmatization of flex-time as smply accommodating working mothers at head office, and Lloyd-Hurwitz's own legitimacy to lead such a change. Her decision to press the leadership team to roll out the flexibility policy in the Construction division first exemplifies vision and courage. The roll-out illustrates how companies that identify/address systemic barriers can shift attitudes that often block the adoption of change initiatives. The use of male employees to experiment with flexibility in Construction and the support of male champions demonstrate that it is possible to erode stereotypes in programmes for gender diversity, equity and inclusion. The case explores Lloyd-Hurwitz's various leadership styles and the features of the change initiative which create the 'psychological safety' that enable employees to join the collective gamble to implement an unprecedented change.
This award-winning case case explores the challenges facing Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, the CEO of Mirvac, an Australian property group, as she leads a major initiative to 'mainstream' flexible work arrangements across the organization. Spurred by dismal employee engagement numbers, including widespread dissatisfaction with work-life balance, she is determined to extend flex-time opportunities to all 1500 employees, including those in the male-dominated Construction division. The challenges are related to traditional attitudes within the industry and the company, the stigmatization of flex-time as smply accommodating working mothers at head office, and Lloyd-Hurwitz's own legitimacy to lead such a change. Her decision to press the leadership team to roll out the flexibility policy in the Construction division first exemplifies vision and courage. The roll-out illustrates how companies that identify/address systemic barriers can shift attitudes that often block the adoption of change initiatives. The use of male employees to experiment with flexibility in Construction and the support of male champions demonstrate that it is possible to erode stereotypes in programmes for gender diversity, equity and inclusion. The case explores Lloyd-Hurwitz's various leadership styles and the features of the change initiative which create the 'psychological safety' that enable employees to join the collective gamble to implement an unprecedented change.
For the past few decades, Australia has dealt with the benefits and costs of repeated mining booms-inflation, a housing bubble, a current account deficit, and growing dependence on China. Between 1996 and 2007, however, Australia had most of these issues under control and grew at impressive rates, becoming one of the richest of developed countries. Yet competitiveness in its non-mining sectors declined. Since the financial crisis, additional challenges associated with climate change, minerals taxes, migration, fiscal deficits, and currency fluctuations have complicated the issues facing both Labor and Liberal administrations, with a very thin majority. Meanwhile, Australia's non-mineral competitiveness continues to recede.
China's digital commerce platforms engage billions of consumers daily across a number of routine tasks from banking, retail purchases, travel, gaming, payments, and more. These platforms are the most sophisticated/informed and highest performing/capable in the world. While often business leaders refer to Amazon as a leader in digital exchange, this case highlights the vital areas where the Chinese platforms lead. Of special note is the merging of the retailers' on and offline capabilities into a unified consumer experience. Retailers like Walmart China have fundamentally altered their business model and federated with these Chinese platforms to build a better consumer experience, sell more, and manage costs and investment. While not all of these practices are globalizing, the non-china platforms are copying them fast to reach the new global standards. Leaders need to be informed and respond.
This case touches on the topics of project-based work, agile methodology, and skill and talent management through Catalant's evolution as a company. Catalant's journey to becoming a software platform and talent marketplace provides context for students to explore new models of work and ways companies are mobilizing talent internal and external to their organization. This case urges students to contemplate how these considerations might shape the critical decisions business leaders will need to make about how to manage their organizations and use their resources to capitalize on their own vision for the future. This case also provides valuable lessons for technology entrepreneurship, introduces students to important gig economy concepts, and asks students to consider the unique challenges facing companies like Catalant that are selling a gig platform as part of their product or service.
The case focuses on Amanda Tremblay, a recent MBA with a technical background who was recruited by Citrine Software Solutions (CSS). CSS, based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, develops, implements, and supports software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for human resource management and associated business processes. Soon after joining, Tremblay distinguishes herself through her work on a project that analyzed the possibility of accessing a lower-priced market segment through product standardization, and another study exploring opportunities in Southeast Asia by establishing an initial position in Vietnam. Tremblay is then sent to Hanoi to launch a Vietnamese subsidiary and implement the product and pricing strategies as recommended in her study. By offering basic software free of costly customization and by selling it on a "pay-per-product-feature" subscription basis, CSS expects to be more competitive in this price-sensitive market. Tremblay's mentor in top management makes it clear that if this experiment succeeds, CSS intends to use this market-entry approach in other Southeast Asian countries. As Tremblay builds an organization and begins operations, a series of tests emerges that threatens to derail her efforts. When she tries to respond to these challenges, she must also navigate the cultural differences she encounters both as a woman in a male-dominated society and as a Canadian operating in Vietnam. This is a general management case suitable for use in undergraduate, MBA, and executive courses in strategy, leadership, organization behavior, operations, and international business.
At the turn of mid-2000, the news industry saw a tectonic shift in the reading habits of people, driven by developments in digital technology. News industry's traditional business model of relying on advertisement income was majorly disrupted. This led to a steep decline in revenues from the print business. The case describes the strategy and organisation-building initiatives of a leading newspaper in India as it transitioned from a print newspaper media ecosystem to a digital news ecosystem. Anant Goenka, a third-generation member of the family, led the digital foray. While Anant created a USD 20 million digital business in four years, the path towards the next goal of achieving a topline of USD 150 million in the next seven to eight years was not clear. Furthermore, it might entail transforming the Indian Express Group, with close to 90 years of legacy of strong editorial ideologies, to adapt and embrace the rules of the game of the digital ecosystem. This case presents an excellent opportunity to learn the nature and extent of challenges involved in building and scaling up a digital news business, including the transition from a traditional newspaper business.
The case is set in early 2019; and the protagonist of the case is Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Inc.-an online platform that offers global hospitality services. The co-founder and CEO wonders when he should take Airbnb public, and perhaps more importantly, how going public would change the community-based company. In 2019, Airbnb had 5 million listings in over 81,000 cities in 190 countries. Airbnb offers more accommodations than the three biggest hotel chains combined: Marriott, Hilton, and InterContinental. In the same year, Airbnb was valued at $31 billion, making it the third most valuable private company in the world, behind Uber ($72 billion) and Didi Chuxing, a Chinese ride-hailing service, ($56 billion). Airbnb's $31 billion valuation was just shy of that of Marriott, the world's largest hotel chain, that was valued at $37 billion (in early 2019). Airbnb's revenues to reached $4 billion (in 2018), while being profitable for the past few years.
David Cancel and Elias Torres, the co-founders of Drift, scaled their business to thousands of users and hundreds of thousands in revenue. However, they were falling short of the annual revenue target they communicated to the board of directors. Having scaled the business to date with a team of largely product and engineering resources, they contemplated bringing on their first sales hire. Within one week of announcing the plan for the hire, three promising candidates surfaced. Was it time for the team to bring on a salesperson and, if so, which candidate was ideal?
Private companies were being turned to for potable water in the world's megacities due to impacts of climate change including droughts and flooding. Mexico City had endured several water-related crises, with its population suffering from floods, droughts, water shutoffs and disease. Although some access to piped water services was practically universal for Mexico City residents, services were limited or discontinuous. An accommodation that most households had made was in purchasing and installing a water holding tank on the roof or in the ground, with Rotoplás, a Mexican based water product and services provider, enjoying more than 55% of tank market share in Mexico. Rotoplás had ventured into wastewater treatment and recycling in 2016 with the acquisition of Sytesa, a design, construction, financing, operation, and maintenance business for wastewater management for industry and businesses. Market segments included lighter corporate users like shopping malls and heavy users like food processors or mining companies, and maybe "water as a service" would also end up as the place to be to supplement and assist homeowner associations and even municipal governments. However, services revenue was today a tiny fraction of overall cash flow at Rotoplás. The presence of larger competitors like Suez and Veolia and as well as unfavorable pricing and regulations could potentially slow down future growth. Could Rotoplás services be part of the solution to the water crisis in the nation's capital? Or was the situation too intractable for even this local champion company to tackle? What pricing and regulatory changes might lead to financial and technical solutions for Mexico City's water crisis?
In early 2018, Diana Mulhall was undertaking a career change that would eliminate the need for frequent business trips to Toronto. As a result, she wondered whether she should sell her condo in the heart of the Canadian city or keep it as a rental property to generate income for herself. The housing market in Toronto was booming, so Mulhall believed that the condo would fetch top dollar as a sale. She also thought it would be easy to attract tenants if she kept it as a rental. She had invested in rental property before but never outside of her hometown of Chicago, so Mulhall needed to identify the key risks associated with being a landlord in Toronto.
In 2016, Rakuten, the largest e-commerce company in Japan, was at the crossroads of its UK operations. After 2008, Rakuten had accelerated internationalization, mainly by acquiring local e-commerce companies. In the foreign markets, Rakuten leveraged its e-commerce platform model, with which it had achieved huge success in the Japanese e-commerce market in the 2000s. In 2011, it acquired UK-based e-commerce company, Play.com. At that time, Play.com faced challenges in the local e-commerce market because of strong competitors, especially Amazon and eBay. Rakuten tried to boost the competitive advantage by adopting its e-commerce model. However, attracting local users and merchants in the UK market proved difficult for Rakuten. Should Rakuten continue its European expansion program? What should the company do in the UK market and with Play.com in particular? Should Rakuten stay in the United Kingdom?
In 2016, Rakuten, the largest e-commerce company in Japan, was at the crossroads of its UK operations. After 2008, Rakuten had accelerated internationalization, mainly by acquiring local e-commerce companies. In the foreign markets, Rakuten leveraged its e-commerce platform model, with which it had achieved huge success in the Japanese e-commerce market in the 2000s. In 2011, it acquired UK-based e-commerce company, Play.com. At that time, Play.com faced challenges in the local e-commerce market because of strong competitors, especially Amazon and eBay. Rakuten tried to boost the competitive advantage by adopting its e-commerce model. However, attracting local users and merchants in the UK market proved difficult for Rakuten. Should Rakuten continue its European expansion program? What should the company do in the UK market and with Play.com in particular? Should Rakuten stay in the United Kingdom?