The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its parts. Facing threats to its growth, digital marketing and sales company Clear Link Technologies, LLC (Clearlink) decided to run an experiment to test strategies for improving sales productivity. The experiment compares the efficacy of two interventions: group incentives and management-directed peer learning. The case surfaces some of the mechanisms driving peer effects in the workplace and the managerial levers to tap into peer effects for improving operations. The case also provides an introduction to experiments in organizations and how these experiments may differ from traditional randomized controlled trials in marketing or pharmaceutical development.
Suk Shah, the chief financial officer at Avant, needs to consider the marketplace lender's future relationship with traditional banks: might Avant and the banks be able to work together as complementors to offer loans to consumers, or must they always be competitors? The case describes Avant's operation, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages that marketplace lenders, and more generally fintechs, have relative to traditional financial institutions. Shah's decision must take into account the challenges marketplace lenders face in terms of customer acquisition costs as well as in terms of attracting investors to its platform. Avant faces competition from other marketplace lenders, like LendingClub, as well as competition from banks. Regulation also has an important effect on Avant's ability to directly compete with banks and its need to cooperate with them.
From his time as a young engineer at Microsoft in 1993, to the challenge of building Glassdoor from the ground up until it reached a valuation of over $1 billion, in 2018, Robert Hohman had come a long way. Now, from his spacious office with a picturesque view of Richardson Bay in Mill Valley, California, Hohman confronted one of the most important decisions of his life. Glassdoor, the company he cofounded in 2007 with Rich Barton and Tim Besse, had grown consistently over the years. It had been fueled by multiple different investors and VC firms, under various circumstances and deal structures. Like most start-up founders, they expected to take the IPO route at some point. Then, in early 2019, when it seemed that the company was finally ready to go public, one of its largest competitors placed an offer that was hard to refuse.
From his time as a young engineer at Microsoft in 1993, to the challenge of building Glassdoor from the ground up until it reached a valuation of over $1 billion, in 2018, Robert Hohman had come a long way. Now, from his spacious office with a picturesque view of Richardson Bay in Mill Valley, California, Hohman confronted one of the most important decisions of his life. Glassdoor, the company he cofounded in 2007 with Rich Barton and Tim Besse, had grown consistently over the years. It had been fueled by multiple different investors and VC firms, under various circumstances and deal structures. Like most start-up founders, they expected to take the IPO route at some point. Then, in early 2019, when it seemed that the company was finally ready to go public, one of its largest competitors placed an offer that was hard to refuse.
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.
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.
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?
Can Singapore urban design, policy continuity, and system of laws be exported outside of Singapore to accelerate the effective development of new urban agglomerations? Nina Yang, CEO of Sustainable Urban Development at Ascendas-Singbridge, a large real estate company based in Singapore, was considering whether to build residential or commercial space in one of its sustainable urban development projects, Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City. Could such a long-gestation urban development project be commercially viable? What were the partnership issues working with the Guangzhou government? Could Singapore livability concepts, planning expertise, safety for capital, and comfort for multinational corporations be successfully exported outside of Singapore into large urban agglomerations on a repeated basis?
This case details The Boeing Company's raw material supply chain risks and explores appropriate strategies to mitigate them. Aluminum and titanium accounted for about 75% of the weight of a typical large commercial aircraft, so Boeing and its suppliers bought hundreds of millions of pounds of these metals every year in order to manufacture structural parts. But Boeing's forecasting methodologies for aluminum and titanium consistently underestimated true demand, which cost the company significant time and money. The case describes an ineffective scrap recovery process which failed to recover millions of dollars of precious scrap material, as well as a disproportionately low allocation of risk mitigation resources to raw material mills. Students will analyze purchasing policies pertaining to supplier evaluation and develop new strategies to minimize raw material costs.
On Friday, February 22, 2019, following an unexpected and disappointing earnings report, The Kraft Heinz Company's stock price fell 27%, wiping out $16 billion in market value. CEO Bernardo Hees had announced that the company had taken a $15.4 billion asset write-down, that the company would be cutting its annual dividend from $2.50 to $1.60 and that it was under SEC investigation for accounting irregularities related to its procurement process. $8.3 billion of the asset write-down was related to a loss in value of the firm's intangible assets, specifically its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands. As Kraft Heinz looked ahead to the future, it was time to recalibrate its brand management strategies. With $50 billion in brand assets remaining on its balance sheet, effectively managing its brands going forward was critical to avoiding another brand asset write-down and to regaining the $8 billion brand value the company had just lost. Was Kraft Heinz's brand asset write-down the beginning of the end of the market dominance of "Big Food" brands across the board or was it idiosyncratic and a result of the firm's brand management resources, capabilities, and strategies?
The case is based on a dynamic real-life story. In this case we have examined how Faurecia decorative division has used digital tools and technology, both hardware and software, to first modernize its interior division in Abrera (Spain) plant in 2015 which eventually transformed the plant into a profitable unit while before it was losing 3 M€ every year from 2003.
The case describes the various industry 4.0 options which were available to Faurecia for digital transformation and finally illustrate the process of successful implementation of the digital transformation strategy in Abrera' plant by overcoming various challenges, the value proposition, the execution of the plan, and the costly pitfalls along the way.
The case covers real time experiences of the people involved in digital transformation, capture the lessons learned and explain how Faurecia was able to transform its plant into a culture of innovation for the manufacturing processes.
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and his administration instituted several far-reaching economic policies that had both near- and long-term impacts on such aspects of the U.S. economy as monetary policy, inflation, the tax structure, and the role of government. While observers were divided on whether specific policies yielded positive or negative outcomes, one particular area where Reagan's legacy was debated was the extent to which his administration's actions contributed to growing levels of inequality in the country.
Breakthrough Career Strategies for Women's Success is a 12-chapter book published by Business Expert Press in 2019 and written by Saundra Stroope, who is a consultant and coach with over 20 years of human capital experience. In this book, the author explains how although the number of women entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders in corporate leadership roles is growing, there are still many challenges women face that are different from those of their male counterparts. Women sometimes have beliefs or career myths that may interfere with their personal career satisfaction and success. A survey of more than 180 women, interviews with over a dozen influential women in leadership and professional roles validated career myths that have an impact on their satisfaction at work and career success. The women also provide helpful tips, advice, and recommendations for helping women overcome challenges and achieve career success. This book explores the barriers that women may encounter at work and offers you an opportunity to reflect on your strengths and development areas and create a plan for moving toward greater satisfaction and success in your career. Chapter 1, Career Myths Impact Women's Success, provides an overview of the book and the research behind it, identifies the top five career myths, and offers a guide for how to use the book.