As a well-established Chinese garment brand, Yangtzekiang Garment Limited (YGM) and its related retail business, YGM Trading Limited, faced the challenges of a labour shortage, stagnant productivity, and the transformation of the traditional garment industry. As China was rapidly developing, Chinese companies were facing new challenges and needed to consider strategies to ensure more sustainable development. In March 2015, the executive chairman of YGM needed to transform the company and develop a sustainable strategy of innovation and transformation that would lead it forward in these new circumstances.
This case discusses the question of the inheritance of power and entrepreneurial spirit in the family run Xinjiang Yier High Technique Agriculture Company and its wine brand and subsidiary Xinjiang Xiangdu Winery Co. Ltd. (Xiangdu). In 1998, the company's founder took her family to break new ground for growing grapes in the vast expanse of the Gobi Desert. In 2002, she founded Xiangdu, and the company's focus gradually shifted from grape growing to wine making and upgrading the grape processing infrastructure. In June 2016, having reached age 65, the founder called a senior management meeting to discuss a number of challenges that Xiangdu was facing. After her departure, could Xiangdu continue to achieve great success? Should the founder fulfill her husband's last wish to make Xiangdu a public company? How should Xiangdu move forward?
A private equity-backed fast food chain has hired McKinsey's new People Analytics group to help it improve performance. As the final client workshop approaches, Associate Partner Alex DiLeonardo ponders the best way to present the team's findings, especially those that conflict with the client executives' long-held intuitions. If successful, the project would help People Analytics build its reputation both internally and with clients. But to be successful, DiLeonardo knows his team must convince the client that their results are credible and actionable. In addition to discussing the specifics of the fast food project, the case also provides an overview of the people analytics field more broadly through the lens of McKinsey's client portfolio.
It is 2014 and Environmental Technologies Fund (ETF) Partners, a U.K.-based venture capital firm, has an opportunity to invest in a privately-held U.K. company that manufactured engineered composition leather extracted from waste leather using an environmentally-friendly process. The end product looked, smelled and felt like natural leather. Scalable marketplace adoption of E-Leather's products looked promising, but was just that-promising. And the company's success would largely depend on management's ability to significantly improve the efficiency of its manufacturing operations. ETF needed to decide to invest in the company and, if so, at what valuation. In addition, ETF needed to decide the structure of the investment and how the firm would assess E-Leather's environmental impact.
Using World Bank data, the note defines the Base of the Pyramid population as the 4.76 billion people living on less than $10/day. It briefly reviews the perspectives of key business articles that address this market, notably C.K Prahalad's work on Bottom of the Pyramid, and Porter and Kramer's article on Creating Shared Value. The note then provides a somewhat more extensive (yet brief) review of the literature from Development Economics literature, before turning to the perspective offered by the HBS, MBA, course on Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP). The note concludes with a brief statistical tour of the key needs that characterize this market segment, namely: Nutrition, Healthcare, Education, Sanitation, Clean Water & Energy, Financial Inclusion, and Affordable Housing.
Using data from U.S. Census and OECD, the note defines poverty as those populations who fall below 50% of that country's median per capita income. It then provides a brief statistical tour of six key challenges facing such populations: Income and Jobs, Healthcare, Education, Affordable Housing, Financial Inclusion, and Incarceration. The note then provides a brief overview of the social safety net programs in the U.S. that are meant to address the identified challenges. It then concludes with a brief statistical tour of the rest of the OECD countries with respect to similar deprivations.
Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS note written for students of the HBS, MBA, class - Business at the Base of the Pyramid, offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the framework of the Logic Model (Theory-of-Change) may be used by businesses, nonprofits, and impact investors to assess the social value they create for their customers/beneficiaries and society. The note concludes with a brief tour of a few impact evaluation methodologies and their applications in areas such as hunger, healthcare, education, and microfinance.
In December 2017, Vincent van den Boogert, CEO of ING in the Netherlands, was reflecting upon the company's "agile" transformation, a reorganization of work which had been critical to respond to and exceed rapidly changing customer expectations. Launched in 2015 at the head office, agile had spread to the rest of the Dutch organization, from client services to the branch network, and permeated the overall company culture. It was now time to rollout the transformation to other units of the ING Group, but some questions remained: could agile be as successful in other countries as it had been in the Netherlands? How fast should ING roll out the transformation? How could they build on the experience acquired so far to improve their methodology?
Supplement to HBS Case 818-077. Together with the agile methodology, innovation at ING was an enabler for the company's purpose of empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and business. The case explores ING's innovation priorities and strategy, as well as the related challenges ahead.
Autonomous vehicles have enormous implications for business and society. But, despite the headline-laden attention paid to the technology, there remain more questions than answers. Students will learn about the complex industry and have explicit discussions about the factors influencing development and commercialization and how various stakeholders might respond. They will also be put in the shoes of decision-makers looking for signals that might help them prepare for the disruptive change ahead.
With ultra-short sightlines to its patient-customers, healthcare should pursue lean in its own way rather than follow the often wayward lean practices of manufacturing, a sector in which few people ever see real customers. Because of the distance in manufacturing from end customers, this sector's lean practices usually focus inward on operational efficiency through waste elimination. The nature of healthcare-with customers up close and immediate-calls for elevating its lean efforts toward customer-focused lean effectiveness: flexibly quick response along the multiple flow paths leading to and involving patients. This article illustrates that approach to lean by drawing from a case study in which widely scattered heart attack patients were transported to a central treatment hospital in a system-wide, highly coordinated program of quick response. This article shows that the keys to success-including high rates of saving lives and lean healthcare in general-boil down to just five lean methodologies, each focused on quick response. Lean healthcare, when practiced in this way, becomes deserving of status as a fixture in strategic management of the enterprise.
Companies are increasingly encouraging employees to use Facebook and other social media to interact with coworkers in order to empower collaboration and knowledge sharing. Yet, there is a hidden problem that has been neglected by managers. The more employees interact with coworkers through social media to facilitate their work in the organization, the more likely they are to learn about and become interested in other companies via social media, form new work connections outside the organization, and engage in job search behaviors. The use of social media to facilitate work and benefit organizations could paradoxically risk fostering withdrawal intentions and turnover, which damage organizations. This article provides evidence of this paradox from an empirical study. After having identified the problem, the article proposes both the solutions to avoid and the solutions to adopt, illustrating best practices from successful companies, comparing their benefits and costs, and indicating the situations in which each solution is best implemented. To conclude, I offer 10 recommendations to turn the problem into an opportunity and use social media as an innovative recruitment tool.
Fintech brings about a new paradigm in which information technology is driving innovation in the financial industry. Fintech is touted as a game changing, disruptive innovation capable of shaking up traditional financial markets. This article introduces a historical view of fintech and discusses the ecosystem of the fintech sector. We then discuss various fintech business models and investment types. This article illustrates the use of real options for fintech investment decisions. Finally, technical and managerial challenges for both fintech startups and traditional financial institutions are discussed.
What's past is prologue. Or is it? The construction of the Empire State Building (ESB) was not only the fastest erection of a skyscraper ever, but the construction company that took on the job allegedly began with no equipment or supplies that would be adequate for the job. The project was completed ahead of schedule and under budget; instead of 1 year and 6 months as anticipated, it only took 1 year and 45 days. The costs totaled $24.7 million instead of the estimated $43 million. So, we ask, how was this possible and is there something we could learn? Based on a review of existing literature describing the history and construction of the ESB, we outline strategic, operational, and contextual explanations for what appears to be a truly successful megaproject. We illustrate how, for example, inspiration from Henry Ford's assembly line technique, the uniqueness of the logistics during the construction period, the economic decline of the Depression, and early ideas of concurrent engineering and fast-track construction enabled the success. Our conclusion is that there are lessons to be learned in going back to basics when tackling a megaproject.
This article introduces an eco-systemic framework to foster innovation for business sustainability. We emphasize the idea of systemic thinking in which the business operates as a system similar to a living organism. In this framework, businesses impact the environment in which they operate in a fluid, dynamic, and interdependent way. This approach contrasts with the linear approach commonly used in business and other disciplines, which tries to explain what might cause an action or reaction but ignores any feedback effect between the subsequent action and its cause. This article offers practical solutions and guidance for business leaders to incorporate complexity science into creating sustainable businesses.
While some organizations swear by the benefits of transparency and are eager to learn and implement transparency practices, many managers are still reluctant or even afraid to use them. Our research reveals that only a few innovative companies have taken steps to leverage a potentially useful form of transparency: the provision of accessible and objective information to customers (e.g., sharing unbiased benchmark data, publishing unfiltered customer comments, or providing candid product reviews that may praise but also criticize the company's products). Our study also shows that many companies remain wary and view greater calls for transparency as a challenge to be managed rather than an opportunity to be traded upon. This is partly due to limited research into the performance benefits of giving customers access to objective information, and lack of practical guidelines on how to actually implement it. This article addresses these shortcomings. First, we investigate whether performance transparency leads to customer outcomes that can be profitable for an organization and, second, we analyze the characteristics of successful transparency initiatives in a wide range of industries. Our research shows that customers exhibit more trust and are willing to pay a premium to deal with transparent businesses. Also, it uncovers seven effective strategies to leverage transparency. This article provides convincing empirical evidence for the benefits of performance transparency and the ways in which management may implement it successfully.
The convergence of communications, information, entertainment, commerce, and computing-combined with a rising number of new services-has caused changes in the way people access and consume media. In recent months, the phenomenon of viewing audiences shifting wholly or partially from cable TV providers to over-the-top (OTT) media, also known as cord cutting or cord shaving respectively, has gained much attention. Despite anecdotal evidence of cord cutting and cord shaving presented in the trade press and industry conferences, there has been little rigorous examination of the true effect that cord cutting or cord shaving may have on TV networks and the media industry at large. In this article, we use behavioral data from a leading cable operator in the U.S. to identify and describe the key viewer segments. We also conduct simulations to examine the effects and implications of cord cutting and cord shaving from a CLV perspective for content providers, content distributors, and advertisers.
Innovation sourcing has become more critical across many industries. As global value chains have become more fragmented, change and opportunity comes from all sides. As a result, companies need to excel at capturing innovation opportunities with existing and potential supply chain members. This article describes a simple framework with three essential innovation sourcing capabilities needed to excel in purchasing: (1) Purchasing needs to explore unmet needs and anticipate future competitive advantages by working closely with other functions and clients; (2) it needs to explore external opportunities beyond first-tier suppliers; and (3) it needs to involve suppliers in innovation projects that consistently deliver results over time. Our framework has been developed based on a combined qualitative and quantitative research methodology that took into account practices and results at the purchasing and company levels. The framework will help C-level managers and purchasing teams benchmark their progress in innovation sourcing and understand what steps need to be taken to achieve excellence.