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Teladoc and Livongo had ridden the tailwinds of the COVID-19 pandemic-and a merger between the two would offer a "one-stop-shop" for technology-driven care for patients with acute, chronic, and specialty care needs. The case study describes the regulatory history of telemedicine in the United States, and the licensing barriers that had inhibited virtual doctors' visits-until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced urgent changes to the ways doctors and patients interacted. Would the Teladoc business model-and the proposed merger with Livongo-help establish the company firmly in the increasingly competitive telemedicine field? Analysts projected the telehealth space would grow at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 20 percent over the coming years. Livongo, with 147 million members, offered software and personalized health coaching to address diabetes, hypertension, behavioral health, and weight management. Did this acquisition make sense for Teladoc?

In December 2020, Mary Kay Inc. Chief Marketing Officer Sheryl Adkins-Green considered several strategic dilemmas. Founded in 1963 by Mary Kay Ash, Mary Kay was a direct sales company whose Independent Beauty Consultants purchased its beauty and cosmetics products at wholesale and sold them to end-consumers at retail. As the coronavirus pandemic spread in 2020, Mary Kay worked to equip its Consultants with digital tools and strategies to help them run their businesses remotely. Adkins-Green and the Mary Kay team were now looking for ways to continue refining the company's digital approach and product sampling strategy. Looking beyond COVID-19, Adkins-Green and her team had several other big questions to consider around product innovation, the competitive landscape, navigating the digital world and its implications for retail, and communicating its brand values to the next generation-all while honoring and staying true to the rich history, heritage, and culture that had served as the foundation of Mary Kay for the past 57 years.

Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), the Seattle-based e-commerce giant, leaped into China with a buyout of Joyo.com Limited, China's largest online book, music, and video retailer, in 2004. Amazon had the ambition of becoming the dominant online retailer in China by capitalizing on its globally recognized brand, cutting-edge technologies, and advanced business model and philosophy. In the following years, China's e-commerce industry experienced exponential growth, representing a golden opportunity for technology firms. For Amazon, however, many challenges started to surface, including intense competition from Alibaba Group Holding Limited and JD.com Inc., which limited Amazon's growth. In 2018, as China's e-commerce industry quickly became one of the world's largest, Amazon had to determine what its next steps should be.

Concentrix Corporation (CNX), a technology enabled global business services organization, supported a transport solutions company with its customer management services. In June 2019, CNX's global customer services operation manager carried out an assessment and found irregularities in the credit claim process for CNX's client. The manager needed to reduce the number of irregularities so that CNX's agents did not create a negative experience for the client. Random samples for audit revealed that existing guidelines and control procedures were ineffective in capturing irregularities. What strategy did the manager need to select a sample for audit that could capture the maximum number of irregularities within the allowable audit cost?

In January 2016, the founder and chief executive officer of Polycorp Ltd., near Toronto, Ontario, needed to decide whether to cut prices for products produced by the largest of the company's three divisions, the mining division. Polycorp had become a global leader in providing protective rubber liners for mining mills. The liners were consumable products, thus generating a constant stream of revenue. The company's mining division accounted for almost half of the firm's sales, generated the highest margins for the company, and had the greatest potential for growth. It was also the costliest division to run. But the mining sector was in a downturn, with falling prices for various ores. With excess capacity in the industry, customers demanding price concessions, and competitors pricing aggressively, the founder wondered if Polycorp should alter its current premium pricing strategy for mill liners. Lowering prices would reduce the company's margins, and lower margins would, in turn, limit the firm's planned capital investments, which were needed for the company to sustain its growth and profitability. Could Polycorp sustain its premium pricing tactic in a marketplace that was becoming increasingly challenging?

Ashish Interbuild Private Limited (AIPL) was a mid-sized founder-driven turnkey fit-out firm based in India. The firm executed prestigious fit-out projects across the country, and it had been making steady progress every year since its founding. Faced with an increasing workload, Ashish Thakkar, the founder and managing director, had decided to change the firm's operating model from an owner-led model to one that was people- and process-driven. To manage the transition smoothly, he had to decide on the most appropriate management control model for the firm. The two management control models proposed to Thakkar stood in stark contrast to each other, each with its own strengths. It was crucial for Thakkar to select the appropriate control fit for AIPL neither too tight nor too loose. An inappropriate model could lead to chaos, employee dissatisfaction, financial loss, a damaged firm reputation, and even potential bankruptcy. Although there were good reasons to pursue either of the two proposed alternatives, it was vital to determine which control system was best suited to the firm.

Student Spreadsheet for case W21334.

In May 2019, a retail investor in the Philippines had to decide whether or not to immediately sell his shares in Holcim Philippines, Inc (HPI). The San Miguel Corporation had just announced the acquisition of around 86 per cent controlling interest in HPI. The price of HPI had increased considerably in the months leading up to the acquisition announcement, and this investor was anticipating a large gain. Now, he needed to run a fair value estimate of HPI's price using both the capital-asset-pricing-model-based discounted cash flow method and the comparable multiples method in order to decide what to do: Should he sell his shares at the prevailing market price, wait until the future potential tender offer, or hold his shares indefinitely?

Spreadsheet supplement for case W21328.

Founded in 1984 in Vancouver, Aritzia has been a massive success story, expanding across Canada and into the United States with no signs of slowing down. In March 2020, however, with the COVID-19 pandemic spreading rapidly through North America, the women's fashion retailer was forced to shutter all its 97 boutique stores and shift sales to the e-commerce channel, while making other key financial and operating decisions to respond to the pandemic. In May 2020, with Aritzia given the green light to begin slowly and cautiously opening its locations, the CEO and the executive team needed to decide how to move forward in a time of crisis and continue its growth plans.

This case describes the growth of the Asian ports industry between 2015 and 2020 and the impact of escalating US-China trade tensions and rising Chinese direct investments on regional port competition. Throughout the 2000s, the volume of Asian shipping steadily increased on the back of an expanding Chinese economy. The case focuses on how the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and new Chinese-funded mega-ports like the Malacca Gateway Port would affect the competitive dynamic between the Port of Singapore (PSA) and regional competitors such as Malaysia's Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP). The PSA has been the dominant transshipment hub in the region but has been ceding market share and has lost its position as the busiest port in the world to the Port of Shanghai. In planning for the future, the PSA has to work within Singapore's diplomatic framework of balancing Eastern and Western interests on the geopolitical chessboard of the South China Sea region. The case provides an example of how national interests and international relations have to be considered when making business decisions.

The case is about a decision problem facing a young analyst on identifying the relative mispricing in bonds issued by RCom in Indian Rupees (INR) and US Dollars (USD) and its stock price. As RCom's debt troubles had increased over time, with lawsuits filed by some of its largest lenders, its stock price and credit rating had been falling consistently. On the other hand, the yields on its INR bonds had hardly moved in the meantime. After giving a brief background on RCom's difficulties in establishing itself as one of the largest telecommunications operators in India, the case describes the behaviour of yields on RCom's INR and USD bonds over time. It provides additional relevant financial information about RCom, including its stock price, credit rating and balance sheet variables.

The case describes the development of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled recruitment automation software Talkpush and how it leveraged the technology of open application programming interface (API) to address changes in consumer's communication preferences, and create a software as a service (SaaS) business. In 2021, Talkpush was handling 12 million hiring conversations per annum, forming one of the largest conversational databases in recruitment. It applied speech recognition to convert audio to text, and recognized over 45,000 "intents" through natural language processing (NLP). Recognizing the vast amount of data-voice, text, and images-that could be mined for business insights or used as training data for machine learning, Talkpush's founder Max Ambruster was eager to look for a strategy to extract value from the company's growing data assets.

This case explains how a researcher, Javier Marcipar, became an entrepreneur by developing a business idea on the outcome of a research project and founded BuildAir, a company of inflatable structures. However, after 7 years of selling magnificent structure to clients of the event sector, BuildAir was still not economically viable. So, Marcipar needed to look for a way to make his startup profitable. Initially, the case focuses on analyzing different alternatives for making BuildAir's business in the event sector viable. Afterwards, the case centers the attention on analyzing the opportunity of selling inflatable hangars in the aeronautical sector and on the development of a suitable business model to make this new business viable. Furthermore, the case delves into the future growth options of BuildAir.

In November 2018, Sarah Robb O'Hagan is reeling from an unceremonious exit as CEO of Flywheel, a chain of indoor cycling studios. In the past, Robb O'Hagan had led transformational change across companies throughout the sports and fitness industry, including as President at Gatorade and Equinox. As a highly passionate fitness enthusiast, stepping into the CEO role at Flywheel felt like the pinnacle of her career, one that she would be extremely passionate about. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong, though Robb O'Hagan couldn't quite put her finger on it. Her tough experience left her questioning: She was 20 years into her career, had seemingly reached the pinnacle-only to find that this isn't what she wanted. Thinking about the next 20 years of her career was dizzying, and her ideal dream job wasn't revealing herself. What should Robb O'Hagan be looking for? What should the next step in her career and life look like?

In February 2020, companies around the world contemplated their next moves as the pandemic news grew more grim each day. For Savannah Informatics, one of the first information services firms in Africa's health care sector, the uncertainties and immediate supply chain challenges prompted nimble moves to make sure the technology continued to perform, but also served as a call to innovate further, and add new digital offerings. This case study addresses the challenges of new product development in the health care sector, and the complexities of meeting the needs of medical providers, insurance companies, and individual customers. How would the company prioritize its next moves, and expand its technology platform? How could Savannah use its existing data on health care spending in Kenya to map out new products, including health information, telehealth and prescription services, and disease care management? And how could it distinguish its services from new competitors who also saw new demands for innovative health care solutions arising as the COVID-19 pandemic continued.

Cataracts robbed an estimated 65 million people around the world of their vision. In the Himalayas, where hundreds of thousands of people went needlessly blind from cataracts, doctors Sanduk Ruit and Fred Hollows began to tackle this health crisis in 1995 with the Himalayan Cataract Project, believing they could adopt new techniques and lens technology to scale high-quality, high-volume, and low-cost cataract operations in remote communities. This case study details the development of the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology (TIO) in Kathmandu, Nepal, including efforts to establish cost-effective cataract treatment centers and ophthalmic education programs to train current eye care technicians and specialists, as well as the next generation of eye care leaders. Students will also understand the time-driven activity-based costing analysis process, as TIO needed to calculate resource needs as the institute expanded services into rural areas, where eyecare needs were high but patient resources were limited. What would this analysis reveal about ways to ensure safe, effective cataract surgery in other low-income countries-and were there also takeaways that might inform cataract surgery practices in the United States and other high-income countries?

In 2020, just after closing a $34 million Series B financing round, Dave Salvant and Songe LaRon consider how to adjust their business, Squire Technologies, to the new realities posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Their barbershop technology, including tools to run a shop and a mobile app for customers was growing swiftly, but with nearly all barbershops shut down to prevent the spread of the disease and no revenue coming in, should they cut back, or take the opportunity to build up?

Fynd is a fast-growing venture that in 7 years since its founding has become India's largest omnichannel retail company with real-time access to over 9,000 stores' offline inventory. It started as a B2B business supporting retailers who didn't have an online business, but pivoted to a B2C platform that allowed customers to shop directly from nearby retail stores through its website and app. Over time, Fynd continued with its B2C platform, scaled up its organization, and added new B2B platforms. But funding this was difficult, with investors raising questions about the business model and growth. In its next phase of growth it sought and failed to receive funding from venture capitalists. In 2018, the founders took a strategic investment from Google. But the subsequent departure of their sponsor from Google meant they needed to look at other avenues for funding. As they were poised for their next phase of growth, the founders were faced with a series of decisions about the pace of scaling, the business model, and how to fund the expansion. In 2019, Reliance Retail, a subsidiary of one of India's largest private conglomerates, and one of their key customers offered to invest $42 million for an 87% stake in the company, and is willing to negotiate terms of the deal. Should the founders accept the offer? What should the terms of the agreement be? How will this impact their business model, their growth trajectory, and also the future of the founders at the firm?