This case presents the situation facing Tony Fernandes, the former Vice President of Warner Brothers, ASEAN region, in 2001, who had to decide whether to venture into the aviation business by acquiring an existing airline or drop the idea altogether. Fernandes was interested in starting a budget airline in Malaysia similar to low-cost airlines in the USA and Europe. He and his two close associates presented a proposal to Mahathir bin Mohammad, Malaysia's Prime Minister (PM), to start a low-cost airline. Mohammad rejected the proposal and suggested Fernandes to consider buying an existing airline. Conceptually it helps the participant to build the concept of entry through acquisition mode as opposed to entry through own creation. In the larger context, it involves the participants in evaluating a strategic opportunity for a new entrant.

Yuser Inc. (Yuser) was a new social networking start-up based in London, Ontario. Well-established social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube had begun to restrict social media influencers' monetization of their user base, and this had opened an opportunity for a new social media network to make three-way interactions among users, social media influencers (SMIs), and corporate sponsors completely stable and transparent. Yuser granted SMIs freedom in terms of the content they posted, allowing companies to identify influencers who helped their marketing efforts and to financially reward them using Yuser's cryptocurrency. Rather than facilitating two-way relationships, as most platforms did, Yuser would help build triangular relationships among companies, target markets, and SMIs. However, Yuser's business concept was complex, making it difficult for the company's chief operations officer to pitch Yuser's value proposition to external investors. In June 2018, she needed to find a delicate balance that would allow her to inform investors of the venture's potential without overwhelming them in a sea of confusing details.

In the summer of 2012, the president of the leisure sector of John Keells Hotels needed to discuss marketing strategies with his senior management team. The company was a well-known brand that operated Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts and Chaaya Hotels and Resorts in Sri Lanka and Maldives. Each of the two hotel brands catered to a different set of customers and offered different value propositions. After the terrorist conflict that had plagued Sri Lanka for 26 years had come to a dramatic close in May 2009, an influx of tourists was expected from both Western and Asian countries. The company had a great opportunity to strengthen its two hotel brands and capitalize on the growing global tourism market. Of the two hotel chains, Cinnamon Hotels and Resorts was the portfolio's luxury brand, whereas Chaaya Hotels and Resorts was the economy brand. The senior management team needed to design a brand architecture for the company that would offer a sound business solution and help the company's hotel sector find its rightful place in the global arena.

In May 2017, an associate professor at Balsam State University (Balsam State), was reviewing the most recent evaluations for her fourth-year elective course, Field Forensics. While she knew that the term had not gone particularly well, she was still surprised by the poor ratings her course had received. This associate professor had been teaching at Balsam State for nearly seven years, and her elective course had previously scored well during evaluations. With only a few months to make changes to the course before the fall semester, she needed to glean what insights she could from the course evaluations and determine what changes, if any, she should make to her course.

In January 2018, the three founders of Lighting Enhancement Corporation (Lightenco), a Canadian turnkey lighting solutions enterprise, were at a crossroads. After building a successful business enterprise over seven years by relying entirely on internal financial sources, the founders of Lightenco now faced a difficult decision. Energy subsidies from the provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario had underpinned part of Lightenco's value proposition to customers, but these subsidy schemes were facing imminent termination in both provinces. Moreover, the financing option that Lightenco's three founders had deployed-relying on internally generated funds and not taking external capital-no longer seemed tenable, and moving to the next level of growth seemed to necessitate new and innovative financing options. Should the founders persist with the bootstrapping that had now become part of their entrepreneurial mindset? Or should they scale the business by either giving up equity or subsuming their operations in a merger with a larger firm? The founders were at a tipping point and had to decide which option to take.

Located in Bengaluru, India, Xoxoday.com was an online marketplace for experiential gifting. The company started by offering social gifting, and selecting corporations as its target market. In 2013, the company decided to cater to both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets and entered into the niche sector of experiential gifting. The value proposition of the start-up was to provide the best gifting solutions for customers while delivering an experience that would build memories. Heading into 2016, Xoxoday.com aimed to grow by acquiring new customers. It promoted its experiences extensively on social media platforms, but the company's hard work was not paying off. Xoxoday.com needed to figure out what changes needed to be made to its social media plan in order to attract new customers.

Sun Quan Education Inc. faced a variety of challenges on its path to expanding its customer base and building profitability through the operation of the We-GO club, a strategic business unit aimed at promoting education and training about the Go game in southern Ontario. Some of these challenges came from the low awareness of Go compared to other more popular intellectual products in Canada, the relatively late entry to the market of educational services, and more critically, the need for the company to develop a comprehensive and effective marketing plan starting with a clearly defined target segment. What was the right direction for the company's marketing plan?

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being "the search engine that doesn't track you," and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.

The case describes Cummins India's journey of implementing a large scale change to bring about gender diversity and inclusion (D&I) in their organization. The case underscores how this journey from 7% female representation (professional cadre) in 2005 to over 30% representation in the span of 12 years necessitated some tough decisions and a strong push by the top leadership. Now that Cummins India has been able to achieve a balance in their workforce gender representation, it faces the challenge of creating a strong systemic and cultural transformation for a truly inclusive culture.

The case centres around the challenges faced by Paytm, India's largest e-wallet, in its transition from a mobile wallet to a payments bank. The shift was the result of a push by Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank of India and regulator of the banking system, in 2015, pending the approval of the new Payments Bill. The transition from Paytm mobile wallet to Paytm Payments Bank had added to the complexity of business for Paytm. Paytm Payments Bank had a target to increase its customer base from 180 million to 500 million by 2020. The road to achieving this target was far from smooth. Paytm Payments Bank had come under the scrutiny of RBI for not abiding by the prescribed Know Your Customer (KYC) norms and for the cashbacks it had offered customers to bring them on board. There were other regulatory challenges that Paytm Payments Bank had to deal with as well. One, the Supreme Court of India had struck down sections of the Aadhaar Act that required the use of Aadhaar cards for online verification and transactions. Two, regulatory uncertainty prevailed with new payments regulation, namely the Payments and Settlement Systems Act, 2018, looming on the horizon. And three, in October 2018, RBI had released guidelines on interoperability among prepaid instruments and bank accounts, creating barriers for the adoption of Paytm Payments Bank. It was in this challenging environment that Paytm Payments Bank had to acquire customers and persuade them to transact actively using its services and to grow from an online financial technology (FinTech) firm in the payments space to a one-stop destination for a FinTech firm in India. The case revolves around the future strategy and marketing tactics that Paytm Payments Bank would have to adopt to become self-sustainable and profitable in the face of various regulatory and customer adoption challenges.

Lean management-in manufacturing, supply chains, healthcare, services-has lost its way. Telling evidence of lean's dissolution shows up for inventory-intensive organizations in the form of worsening inventory numbers. My research of financial records of more than 1,500 global companies over 15 years shows growing inventories since the turn of the 21st century. Reduction of inventory is a concrete and visual marker of leanness and quicker customer response, while inventory growth is one of the more salient factors that degrades financial health. As to what has gone wrong with lean, the answer is nearly everything: ambiguous terms and concepts, trivializing the essence, botching the basics, going through the motions, analysis paralysis, puffery masking action, abetting organizational silos, discontinuity, and losing interest. This article addresses these in more specific terms with reference to key outcome measures, especially those most customer-relevant.

On May 27, 2018, Maryanne Trollope, the Learning and Development (L&D) manager for Anglo American South Africa, was considering her dilemma of handing over her brainchild to her successor. The Building Leaders and Shaping Talent (BLAST) program was a flagship talent management program for young graduates in South Africa, and she wanted to ensure a smooth transition for her successor and to ensure that the BLASTers (BLAST recruits) developed relationships with her replacement. Trollope was meeting with one BLASTer, who had been on an international BLAST placement in London, England. She had to decide when to introduce this recruit to the individual taking over the program and what information and insight she should recommend the recruit share with her colleague. What were the critical success factors of the talent management program, and how could Trollope ensure sustained success and a smooth handover process?

In July 2018, MICA, Ahmedabad, one of the leading management institutions in India, was experiencing bottlenecks in its dining hall that were delaying regular operations during peak lunch hours. The lunch break was for about 75 minutes between classes. The dining hall catered to 480 people at any given time—not only students but also faculty members and other MICA staff. After eating lunch at the dining hall, many students had to rush to post-lunch class sessions, and they risked missing attendance. Most faculty members had zero tolerance for late entrants. A MICA faculty member from the business management area was entrusted with studying the situation, determining the cause for delay, and proposing remedial measures. He needed to identify the weakest link in the chain and then propose an infusion of resources that would buffer this constraint, thereby reducing the total time students and other members of the MICA community spent in the dining hall during lunch hours.

In April 2017, Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd., in Hyderabad, India, was experiencing a rapid growth in demand and needed to find ways to expand its capacity to meet this demand without significantly increasing costs. The company created innovative teaching and learning products for students in grades 1 through 10. Working with these products hands-on helped students understand various mathematics and science concepts such as magnetism, light, and sound. The founder and chief executive officer asked the head of production and stores to evaluate the company’s existing production processes and capacity and to suggest options for improvement at a senior management meeting, scheduled for a week later.

An executive at a North American-based multinational company contacted an old friend and former business associate in Indonesia in hopes of collaborating with him to purchase Asian software companies. After several emails, the two disagreed and disengaged. The North American declined the Indonesian’s advice to invest time in developing the relationships required to access this market. Three months later, after realizing he had closed the door on a huge and growing market, the North American again contacted his Indonesian associate. He realized that his North American style of negotiation was ineffective in this market and that the Asians had their own preferred approach. He planned a phone call to Indonesia to try to restart the process. What style of communication should he use this time in an effort to generate a better understanding and success?

In February 2018, Punjab National Bank (PNB) in India reported a US$1.8-billion fraud related to the illegal issuance of letters of undertaking. The fraud was engineered by one of the leading diamond jewellers of India, Nirav Modi; his uncle, Mehul Choksi; and employees of PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai. Indian investigative agencies found that the previous top management of PNB along with other employees had also been involved in or had prior knowledge about the fraud. PNB's current chief executive officer, Sunil Mehta, was trying to steer PNB out of the crisis. What key challenges did Mehta face with respect to managing the operational risks of PNB? Was Mehta right to consider the fraud a people issue and not a systems issue?

In May 2018, B9 Beverages Private Limited (B9 Beverages), the owner of craft beer Bira 91, reached a total of over US$100 million in funding after receiving $50 million from Sofina SA, a Belgian investment firm. This third round of funding would allow the company to meet the various objectives that the founder and chief executive officer had planned for the company’s new Bira 91. He wanted his India business to break even by 2019 and expand fivefold over the next three years. He also wanted to establish a leadership position in the Indian premium beer market. The company also planned to launch Bira 91 as a public company through an initial public offering within the next few years. His long-term goal was to make Bira 91 a product rooted in India, as well as a global leader in craft beer. As the market and competition continued to grow, B9 Beverages had to develop a strategy to differentiate Bira 91 in the crowded global beer market.

Zydus Wellness Ltd. (Zydus), based in Ahmedabad, India, operated in the consumer goods sector, offering health and hygiene products and brands such as Sugar Free, Everyuth, Actilife, and Nutralite. Zydus promoted its Nutralite margarine brand mainly through television advertising. Its other communication strategies included digital marketing efforts and on-ground activities. Entering a market that was primarily dominated by Amul butter, Nutralite positioned itself in its marketing communications as a healthier alternative to butter. With Amul, Nutralite faced a strong legacy and brand loyalty, which Amul had created in the market over the years. Market research indicated that consumers were uncertain about what kind of product Nutralite was. At the end of 2017, the head of marketing at Zydus faced several challenging questions: How should the brand establish its identity? Having existed in the market for more than a decade, should Nutralite now promise something more than health? Finally, how could the company convert this transactional relationship with its consumers and strengthen its market share?

Presentation to accompany product 8B19C004.

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company's value proposition was quite simple: partner with employers to offer employees affordable loans that were repaid through automatic payroll deductions. Taking repayments directly from salary, and collecting those repayments in one transaction from the employer, dramatically reduced costs, saving employees large amounts of interest when compared to market alternatives like credit cards or payday lenders. For improving access to affordable credit, Salary Finance garnered considerable praise in the media, being named one of the UK's most socially responsible and innovative FinTech companies. Since the beginning of 2018, Salary Finance had introduced a savings product and an earned income advance product that were linked to employee salary. In September 2018, they expanded to the United States, in partnership with the United Way, opening an office in Boston, Massachusetts. Sarkar was excited by the progress but was still pondering how best to accelerate further growth and improve the business. First there was the question of geographic expansion. Did it make sense to pursue other markets like India? Or, should he focus on building Salary Finance's position in the UK and US? In these markets, should he prioritize attracting new employers to the platform or adding new products such as mortgages or investments? Should he register as a bank, tapping into low cost deposits and reducing the dependence on commercial borrowing to fund loans? Finally, he was concerned about how to best maintain Salary Finance's culture - "For People Not Numbers" - during rapid growth. These questions and more weighed heavily on Sarkar's mind as he considered the company's future.