Industria de Diseño Textil, SA (Inditex), primarily through its flagship brand Zara, had grown to be the world's number-one fashion manufacturer and retailer with the introduction of what many considered a disruptive fast-fashion business model. However, Inditex's chief executive officer insisted that this term failed to describe the company's business model accurately. Like other successful business model innovators, Inditex in 2019 was faced both with new competitors who had successfully copied and enhanced key components of its approach and with the growing desire of fashion conscious consumers to shop online. Inditex needed to find a way to continue to differentiate Zara in this evolving industry while capturing more than its share of the tremendous market growth anticipated for the future.
Atikameksheng Anishnawbek was a First Nations community near Sudbury, Ontario. The reserve, described in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, encompassed much of the Sudbury mining camp, which produced an estimated CA$1 trillion of mineral resources. At issue was the boundary of the reserve, which was much smaller than agreed upon, and whether Atikameksheng could claim a share of the value. The reserve had not been surveyed until 34 years after the treaty was signed, which resulted in discrepancies, the most significant being that the surveyed reserve boundaries were much smaller than agreed upon and described in the treaty, thus excluding a great deal of the mineralized land. Atikameksheng did not have any agreements in place, nor was the community receiving compensation from the two largest companies mining the land, despite the high value of extracted minerals. In 2018, in the context of the ongoing boundary and compensation disputes, the chief had to decide how best to focus his energies to facilitate community economic development.
Service systems are inherently subject to variability, whether through customers, service providers, suppliers, or unexpected events. Yet customers demand excellence and consistency regardless of this variability. In general, there are two ways to handle this variability-through people or through processes. We use the concept of robustness to describe these two approaches. This case uses an inventory mishap at a pet store to explore the need for robust people in a service system subject to variability. The case gives students the opportunity to explore the implications of lack of robustness when people face unexpected variability. A day-shift manager at a pet store, Martin Fesmire, thinks nothing of selling two rabbits to his best customer. But when the rabbits have a litter of bunnies overnight, Fesmire's professional world is thrown into turmoil that will grow to involve his boss, the corporate legal department, the CEO, the highest court in America, and an ever-increasing number of disputed rabbits. This tongue-in-cheek story allows for a discussion of the strategic tradeoffs between investing in robust people versus investing in robust processes.
Barber Cardiosystems, based in Melbourne, Australia, designs and manufactures therapeutic devices used for treatment of coronary conditions. Over four decades, it has grown to be among the top 200 medical device companies in the world. It competes against much larger companies through a continuous effort to control costs and increase productivity. It does so by aligning operational and human resource practices, particularly employee incentives, with its strategy. Concerns arise in the face of increased competition about whether the company can continue to reduce costs and maintain its margins while keeping both its generous bonus scheme and commitment to guaranteed employment. The company's executive team must decide how to respond. This case is suitable for use in undergraduate, MBA, and executive courses in organizational behavior, leadership, and strategic management. It is especially useful in a module on strategic alignment or organizational design.
In October 2016, Wilf Blackburn, the CEO of Prudential Assurance Company Singapore (PACS) started an organisational transformation journey to reposition PACS as the number one insurance company in Singapore. Earlier that year, PACS' market share had fallen from 22 per cent in the previous year to 17 percent, pushing the company to the number two position. But plummeting market share was not the only reason for concern. There was brimming dissatisfaction amongst employees within the organisation over long work hours, a hierarchical work culture and dwindling bonuses. PACS was a subsidiary of Prudential plc (Prudential), and had a long successful history in Singapore. It had been the performance powerhouse of the Prudential Corporation Asia (PCA), but in 2015, the company lost two key bancassurance partnerships. As a result, PACS annual new business premiums dropped by US$ 82.7 million, and its market share slipped by almost five percentage points. The following year, PACS lost a long-standing high performing agency to its competitor. Once, considered the fortress of Prudential's business in Asia, PACS had many challenges to overcome. The company hardly relied on its regional office (PCA) due to its previous stellar performance, and, there was undoubtedly little trust between the regional office and Singapore office. Internally, there was discord between departments, and each unit preferred to work in silo. Hierarchy was pervasive and performance was sales driven; targets set were not aligned to expectations. Moreover, PACS had seen five CEO appointments over a span of 10 years. Each CEO had his own unique, quite contrasting style of leadership, and this quick succession of changes yielded different business strategies, with many not seen through their full completion. As the incoming CEO of a troubled first world business, what approach could Blackburn take to turn around the organisation?
Flipz is the pseudonym for a Hong Kong-based mobile classified app for consumer-to-consumer selling and buying of new and second-hand goods. Despite the initial skepticism towards their venture, the founders managed to gain traction with their app and eventually succeeded in raising venture funding at a valuation of US$500 million six years after the company was founded. In January 2016, Lee Ju Ning, the co-founder of Flipz, a peer-to-peer online selling platform for second-hand goods, ponders about the important decisions she has to make in the wake of being confronted with multiple setbacks in her entrepreneurial journey. Eighteen months earlier, Lee and her fellow university classmate, Caden Chan, had returned to Hong Kong, feeling energised after a one-year immersion programme in Silicon Valley. Shortly after, Lee and Chan spotted a business opportunity and brought their idea of simplifying the cumbersome process of online listing and selling second-hand items to a hackathon competition. They eventually emerged the champion and with the winner's prize, Flipz was founded, despite disapproval from Lee's parents. The entrepreneurship journey was indeed not as smooth as expected, and there were many lessons to be learnt from the school of hard knocks. Successive challenges began to dampen the initial high spirits - funding rejections, technical difficulties during product development, and dwindling user downloads following a successful launch. Lee faces a common dilemma encountered by many budding tech entrepreneurs - whether to channel the remaining limited funds to marketing or product development. She also begins to cast doubts on the future: Should she hang on to the start-up or call it quits?
Aparigraha Yoga was founded in 2012 as a sustainable entrepreneurship venture in Ontario that sought to balance the environmental, social, and financial components of the triple bottom line (3BL) while providing high-quality yoga classes in its community. The founder intended to utilize synergistic solutions, which fully integrated each 3BL component, to address any business problem. In 2018, she identified two issues at her studio that challenged her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and the reality of always finding synergistic solutions. The founder needed to either develop new synergistic approaches to these issues or modify her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and select which components to favour in which situations.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a goliath enterprise that had grown tremendously over a half century, had never paid a dividend. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway inc., advocated an investment policy of reinvesting in existing assets, acquiring diversified assets, and buying back shares in the company, but never paying a dividend. However, in 2017, excess cash and short-term reserves were earning a yield value that was less than the inflation rate, effectively decreasing the real value of the reserves. The company was not finding suitable new acquisitions, and shares in the company were trading above the company's limit for repurchase. Amid public speculation, Buffett began musing that perhaps the best course of action for Berkshire Hathaway Inc. at that point was to pay a dividend after all.
The chief executive officer and founder of Global Metal Company (GMC), had been in the business of antique reproduction hardware for more than three years, having quit his successful corporate career to start GMC in his hometown of Aligarh in northern India. After seeing the initial response to the business, he was confident that within three years, GMC would realize the annual revenue of US$1 million he had envisioned. In 2018-2019, upon completing three years in business, GMC closed the year with $0.15 million in annual revenues. The CEO wondered what had gone wrong in those years. Had his target of $1 million been over-ambitious? Or had his assessment of the overall market potential been off the mark? During those three years, he had expanded his operations in baby steps from Europe-which was overly price competitive and served by a large number of exporters from Aligarh-to the United States. Now he was wondering whether he should plunge deeply into the US market to grow GMC, or seriously consider quitting this business and moving back into his corporate career.
Boxed.com ("Boxed") is an ambitious e-commerce retailer start-up, founded by visionary CEO Chieh Huang in 2013. From starting in Huang's garage in 2013, to winning Emerging E-Retailer of the Year in 2016, to having 4 operational distribution centers in 2018, Boxed used a variety of strategies in order to gain customers and grow its presence. This case explores the journey that the scrappy, new entrant navigated as it competed against large, goliath players in an already established retail and e-commerce industry.
Aparigraha Yoga was founded in 2012 as a sustainable entrepreneurship venture in Ontario that sought to balance the environmental, social, and financial components of the triple bottom line (3BL) while providing high-quality yoga classes in its community. The founder intended to utilize synergistic solutions, which fully integrated each 3BL component, to address any business problem. In 2018, she identified two issues at her studio that challenged her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and the reality of always finding synergistic solutions. The founder needed to either develop new synergistic approaches to these issues or modify her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and select which components to favour in which situations.
The chief executive officer and founder of Global Metal Company (GMC), had been in the business of antique reproduction hardware for more than three years, having quit his successful corporate career to start GMC in his hometown of Aligarh in northern India. After seeing the initial response to the business, he was confident that within three years, GMC would realize the annual revenue of US$1 million he had envisioned. In 2018–2019, upon completing three years in business, GMC closed the year with $0.15 million in annual revenues. The CEO wondered what had gone wrong in those years. Had his target of $1 million been over-ambitious? Or had his assessment of the overall market potential been off the mark? During those three years, he had expanded his operations in baby steps from Europe—which was overly price competitive and served by a large number of exporters from Aligarh—to the United States. Now he was wondering whether he should plunge deeply into the US market to grow GMC, or seriously consider quitting this business and moving back into his corporate career.
Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a goliath enterprise that had grown tremendously over a half century, had never paid a dividend. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway inc., advocated an investment policy of reinvesting in existing assets, acquiring diversified assets, and buying back shares in the company, but never paying a dividend. However, in 2017, excess cash and short-term reserves were earning a yield value that was less than the inflation rate, effectively decreasing the real value of the reserves. The company was not finding suitable new acquisitions, and shares in the company were trading above the company's limit for repurchase. Amid public speculation, Buffett began musing that perhaps the best course of action for Berkshire Hathaway Inc. at that point was to pay a dividend after all.
The case explores the journey taken by GE, at the instigation of Jeff Immelt in 2008, towards transforming itself from a global industrial giant to becoming an Industry 4.0 leader, by harnessing the nascent promise of the Industrial Internet of Things. The case illustrates the different initiatives launched including: 1. Fastworks - lean methodology including design thinking and agile-lite approach to creating new products. 2. Business analytics and sensors for products. 3. Creation of GE Digital in San Ramon, combining analytics with a platform - Predix - and working under full agile methodology. 4. 2015 - introduction of Chief Digital Officers in each industrial vertical reporting to Bill Ruh at GE Digital. 5. Digital Foundries - to help GE customers with their digital transformations. Immelt had invested more than $4 billion into GE's digital transformation. The case uses examples to illustrate the transformation and the challenges GE faced. Challenges included: the initial decision to create a separate division rather than embedding digital into the verticals upfront, culture change, different skill sets and time horizons, different recruitment and remuneration practices, and communication strategies. During the transformation, Immelt retired early due to falling stock value and what the market judged as previous bad decisions. He was replaced by John Flannery, a GE veteran, charged with overhauling GE by focusing on financials and spinning off parts of GE. Flannery announced he was supportive of GE Digital and the changes, but it was clear that the focus was on the industrial verticals. The markets were unhappy with the speed of progress under Flannery and a year later, he was also replaced. This time by Larry Culp, a GE-outsider. The case ends in 2019 with Culp's announcement that GE Digital, the digital 'home' of GE was to become a separate enterprise, although wholly-owned by GE.