Without action on sustainability, the supply of cocoa beans - and hence chocolate - cannot be maintained. Barry Callebaut (BC), the world's largest B2B cocoa and chocolate company, has gone from taking little interest in "sustainable cocoa production" to embracing it fully. In 2016, it set four ambitious targets to achieve by 2025: to eradicate child labour from its supply chain, to lift more than half a million cocoa farmers out of poverty, to become carbon-and-forest-positive, and ensure 100% sustainable ingredients in all products. Recognizing that it could not bring about change in isolation, BC started a movement, "Forever Chocolate", involving multiple stakeholders. Demonstrating that sustainability must be an integral part of doing business, the case describes its progress over the first two years and illustrates the difficulties encountered. It challenges students to consider whether BC's approach constitutes "radical corporate sustainability" and what more could be done.
Kumar Food Corporation (KFC) was a partnership firm founded in the state of Maharashtra in India by Neeraj Kumar in 2010. The company manufactured, packaged, and distributed pickles, papads, and spices. Kumar, who had previously worked at a multinational company specializing in food processing, quit that job to start his own venture with an investment of ₹1 million. The company flourished and, in 2017, its revenue reached ₹50 million. Kumar then wanted to invest another ₹50 million with the aim of reaching a ₹200 million revenue target by the end of 2018. The company faced cutthroat competition from existing players in the food-processing industry, and Kumar was worried that the Government of India's Start-Up India initiative to promote entrepreneurship would further add to the competition. With a limited budget for marketing and communications, Kumar could take any or all of the following routes to fulfill his expansion ambitions: enhance product category, add new markets, or increase distribution channels. Which growth strategies should the company implement to establish its Shagun brand?
LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products. LOLA's leadership wanted women to come to the company for all of their reproductive health needs (including information and a place to engage in conversation) from menstruation through menopause and beyond. Heading into 2020, LOLA cofounders have determined that to grow the business they need to go beyond the company's current DTC model and have products available in retail stores. The challenge, however, is finding the right retailers to partner with that will help to add value to the brand and not detract from it. The case provides background on the cofounders, the company's start, and evolution, and the challenges of moving beyond DTC.
In 2010, amidst the growth of ecommerce and the emergence of new, purely online, fashion players, Zara launched its first online store, Zara.com. Since then, Zara's online business had grown at a fast pace. By 2018, 12% of Inditex Group's total sales came from the online channel. Since the inception of the first online store, Inditex leadership wanted its online and offline businesses to be integrated. However, the increase of online orders challenged some of its operations. Inditex was committed to the vision of becoming fully-integrated, fully-digital, and fully-sustainable by 2020. How could stores continue to be relevant in a world with increasing presence of online touchpoints? What should the store portfolio look like in the medium term? How should Zara use and advance the integrated model going forward? What other challenges and opportunities would arise with the increase of online sales?
In 2010, amidst the growth of ecommerce and the emergence of new, purely online, fashion players, Zara launched its first online store, Zara.com. Since then, Zara's online business had grown at a fast pace. By 2018, 12% of Inditex Group's total sales came from the online channel. Since the inception of the first online store, Inditex leadership wanted its online and offline businesses to be integrated. However, the increase of online orders challenged some of its operations. Inditex was committed to the vision of becoming fully-integrated, fully-digital, and fully-sustainable by 2020. How could stores continue to be relevant in a world with increasing presence of online touchpoints? What should the store portfolio look like in the medium term? How should Zara use and advance the integrated model going forward? What other challenges and opportunities would arise with the increase of online sales?
This article examines how Siemens's molecular imaging group incorporated design thinking principles into R&D to regain market leadership. Marked departures from its past practice included a "universe of possibilities" for lifetime customer value; multi-iteration "leapfrog concepting" ahead of prototyping; and adherence to an "innovation metric" that enabled simultaneous consideration of customer value and business cost. These elements gave rise to a dynamic capability, "creative forbearance," which supported the innovation team's unbridled creativity while building in patience for introducing new features to its product platform. This case illustrates how design thinking can be integrated in settings replete with technological and customer complexity.
Design thinking has emerged as an important way for designers to draw on rich customer insights to enhance their products and services. However, design thinking is now also beginning to influence how corporate managers bring customer data into their day-to-day strategic planning. We call this integration of design thinking into the practice of strategic management "Design-Led Strategy" and show how it complements but extends current design-thinking perspectives. Adopting a strategy-as-practice perspective, this article identifies four archetypal practices that managers can use to strategize with design-thinking content. Its findings provide insight into the practices associated with situating design thinking within organizational practice.
In August 2019, WeWork filed for an initial public offering; investors in its 14 venture capital rounds were anxious for an exit. Softbank had invested US$6 billion in WeWork, including US$2 billion in the Series H round that valued the firm at US$47 billion; consequently, it hoped for a positive reception from Wall Street. While WeWork had 100 per cent recent sales growth, its net income was US$1.9 billion, and it was on pace to spend over US$5 billion in 2019; it needed capital. WeWork’s chief executive officer met with SoftBank in Tokyo to discuss a “dramatic reduction in its valuation.” Should they proceed with the IPO, even if it required a reduction in its valuation, or should they cancel the IPO and pursue an additional round of private capital?
Today, the information required to make highly technical and complex purchasing decisions is readily available to buyers through online, intelligently enabled self-service tools. So what happens to the traditional B2B sales structure? It evolves. Four disruptive shifts are creating the urgency and change, the root causes of which are deep and permanent: 1) B2B customer expectations are (surprisingly) not following B2C trends, such as Amazon-like shopping experiences, smart product replenishment, and consultative selling. 2) Widely available and extremely sophisticated technological capabilities are automating the selling process and making relevant sales recommendations, and they are always available with a responsive interface. 3) The retail market is consolidating, with traditional concepts of shelf space and brick-and-mortar becoming less relevant. 4) The previous three shifts together are leading to a radically redefined outside salesforce whose relevance, efficacy, and efficiency are diminishing. These shifts will see large B2B selling organizations supplanted by smaller commercial organizations that integrate marketing, sales, and service activities. The authors discern three pillars at the centre of a 21st-century commercial capability: 1) a reimagined customer experience, 2) technology-enabled sales execution, and 3) a digital-ready commercial organization.
The authors’ research examines new models for leadership flexibility recommended by CEOs and board members, including an underutilized resource that CEOs can turn to for help—the corporate board. The board chairs and directors they interviewed expressed a desire to contribute more value and be more involved in high-level strategy and discussions. When boards evolve to become a more strategic asset, CEOs enhance communication with board members and are more focused and effective in their interactions with them. Increasingly, CEOs are realizing that to make the board a strategic asset—a “smart board” and not just a sounding board—they must take the initiative and cultivate these relationships. One consistent theme runs through the authors’ research: board members do not like to be surprised. To lower the risk of surprises, it is usually better to err on the side of more communication with the board, rather than less. Reaching outside the organization to bring boards together can also be a powerful tool in creating tactical synergy and fresh new perspectives. The more deeply the CEO understands each board member’s personality and experience, the better the interactions with the board will be. By influencing what happens between board meetings, CEOs have the opportunity to curate and even co-create a better board experience.
This article examines the increasing need for resilience in organizations, then explains the three underpinnings of individual resilience and how they can be replicated in firms. In the pre-COVID period, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) was the trendy acronym that summed up the four major challenges faced by managers in the Age of Disruption. Unfortunately, the VUCA world has now been disrupted by a pandemic—which has triggered all four dimensions simultaneously for most organizations. As Diane Coutu notes, resilient people tend to possess three core attributes: 1) an unwavering acceptance of reality; 2) a deep belief underpinned with strong values that life is meaningful; and 3) an uncanny ability to improvise. Organizations can build up three pillars of organizational resilience: facing down reality, the search for meaning, and the ability to improvise or bricolage. Within your organization, ask yourself: “Do people really understand and accept the realities we’re facing now?” These questions are important because people and organizations often slip into denial as a coping mechanism when facing adverse situations. It is time for organizations to rethink their people responsibilities if they want to help develop the resiliency that today’s organizations require. Since finding meaning in one’s situation is such an important aspect of resilience, it is no surprise that the most resilient people and organizations possess strong value systems.
Facing constant pressure to reach ever-increasing objectives, people across all walks of life have become dislocated from what is essential and meaningful to a happy life. As a result, many turn to various forms of escapism, ranging from drugs and alcohol abuse to conspicuous consumption. When addicted to acquiring stuff, consumers become anxious between fixes, fueling debt-financed consumption. With the pandemic driving expectations of major change, we have an opportunity to deploy big-picture thinking to instill more sanity into our society. This article proposes ways to address some of our common vices and historical missteps, aiming to improve mental health and enable the pursuit of sustainable happiness through reforms to how we educate our children, manage the business cycle, support entrepreneurs, and provide healthcare. As the article states, education should fight the mental health crisis, not compound it. Using consciousness practices, like yoga and meditation, individuals can achieve a profound state of relaxation that simultaneously alleviates stresses, trauma, and anxiety. In terms of economic reforms, one approach would be to attack the short-term corporate thinking that drives the need for bailouts; another would be to lower corporate taxes for entrepreneurs. Finally, with healthcare costs soaring along with government debt, it might be time to re-visit the decades-old debate around establishing a two-tiered healthcare model in Canada.
Zomato, a leading restaurant discovery and review platform, entered the highly competitive hyperlocal food delivery space in 2014. Though Zomato was a leading platform for search and discovery, it trailed behind the market leader in the delivery landscape. While Zomato’s attempt to increase profitability by implementing a subscription model proved popular among customers, it antagonized a significant segment of its restaurant partners. As December 2019 drew to a close, the key decision-makers at Zomato wondered whether entering the growing delivery market and the subsequent transition would be worth the cost of competition. The startup would have to make a strategic decision with respect to its market dominance and competitive moves in the delivery market. Should it focus on the large, hypercompetitive markets in major cities to build high-density delivery networks, or should it focus on pre-empting the competition by nurturing small-town markets? Would acquiring its competitors help in rapid scaling, or should Zomato engage in another round of business model innovation by focusing on cloud kitchens and private labels?
ExtraCarbon was a company focused on the sorting stage of India’s unorganized waste management industry. The company was founded in 2013 with owners’ capital and some investments from friends and family. In October 2018, one of these friend investors expressed a desire to exit the venture. Although ExtraCarbon had made steady progress since its founding, the company did not have enough money to buy out the investor’s stake, and the company’s valuation was too low for the investor to benefit from leaving the venture. The investor complained that the founders had never taken his advice to scale up the venture more quickly, which would have benefitted all stakeholders by providing a better valuation and attracting more investors to the company. The incident led the founders to review their current scale of operations and make more ambitious growth plans for the company, including setting an ambitious revenue target of US$6 million by 2021. The challenge was to identify resources and ways to achieve this target. What strategy would help the company reach its target in a largely unorganized industry?
Primark was a low-cost, fast-fashion clothing retailer headquartered in the United Kingdom. The company’s low-priced clothing enticed consumers, but it also attracted criticism for exploitative labor practices in the low-cost economies where Primark’s manufacturing was outsourced. However, Primark believed that it created jobs in low-cost economies, and its low prices were the result of efficient initiatives such as no online presence and limited advertising. Experts suggested that the absence of an e-commerce division was a strategic mistake. In October 2019, the company’s chief executive officer was challenged with synchronizing Primark’s low-cost strategy with its sustainability initiatives and deciding on the company’s online presence.
The age of disruption has pushed activism inside the boardroom, where the role of directors is no longer easily defined because changing times require changes in leadership. So, what does an activist director look like? This was the topic of a recent address to The Empire Club of Canada by Rahul Bhardwaj, president and CEO of the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD), included in this article. The Edelman Trust Barometer—which recently polled 34,000 people in 28 countries on how much they trust core institutions—revealed that for the first time, most people believe that capitalism is doing more harm than good. Directors are entering a new era where all directors must be activist directors and act more “nose in, fingers in,” where appropriate. This makes being the chair especially challenging because the chair will have to lead the redrawing of lines between board and management and free directors to speak their minds. When the sightline of a politician is rarely more than one election cycle ahead, when “unknown unknowns” are not the exception but the rule, who better to think of how companies and Canada itself can compete and win in 2030? The ICD has come to view this shift not as an unwanted task for directors, but as an unprecedented opportunity to step up and play a greater role in the direction of Canadian business and of Canada.
With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders across all sectors worldwide face enormous challenges. How they behave and the decisions they make will separate the bad from the great. In 2010, the Ivey Business School established the Ian O. Ihnatowycz Institute for Leadership with a mandate to focus on leader character. Its research resulted in a framework consisting of 11 dimensions of character and supporting behaviours that were identified as foundational to good leadership. COVID-19 is revealing things about the citizens of affected nations as well as their leaders. The singing Italians, for example, serve as a powerful reminder that we can find creative ways to remain connected as medical experts urge us to remain apart. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the dimensions of character with concrete examples of the behaviours that leaders and citizens alike are manifesting during the pandemic. The authors believe it is of paramount importance to raise awareness of the construct of character and its dimensions—not just to ensure it is brought to the forefront of leadership education and development, but so it can be used by citizens in their everyday lives and as a tool by which they measure, vote for, and follow leaders.
With the lives and routines of young consumers disrupted by the global health crisis, brands have unique opportunities to build long-lasting relationships.