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In March 2021, Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Mobileye, was preparing to meet with Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently. Mobileye was the global leader in vision technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) with a 70% market share and $1 billion in revenue. However, for Shashua, ADAS was just the first step towards his dream of leading the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution. It was this vision that led Intel to acquire Mobileye for $15.3 billion. Shashua's challenge was that consumer AVs were still years away due to concerns over safety, regulation, cost, and consumer acceptance. A nearer term use case for AVs was the robotaxi market-fully autonomous, driverless taxis. Shashua and his team were excited about the potential of robotaxis to change the future of mobility, projecting that the market would grow to $160 billion globally by 2030. Mobileye believed that it could generate at least $15 billion in annual robotaxi revenue by the end of the decade. Equally important, Shashua viewed robotaxis as a necessary first step toward consumer AVs. Mobileye could use its experience in robotaxis to improve AV technology, address regulatory challenges, and build high definition maps. The long-term question facing Mobileye was whether to: 1) invest billions of dollars to build-out a global, vertically integrated robotaxi business; 2) use robotaxis as an opportunity to learn and then revert back to a horizontal supplier of AV chips and software; and/or 3) do both? During most of Intel's history, the company had been a horizontal semiconductor company which avoided vertically integrating into its customers' businesses.

This case explores how a creative agency in Southeast Asia created the region's first virtual influencer. The client, a prominent global sports and lifestyle brand, wanted someone to run a campaign to promote its new line of sneakers. Because Southeast Asia is an incredibly diverse region, the agency struggled to find an influencer who would appeal across all markets. Eventually, it decided to create its own influencer, using artificial intelligence and the latest 3D-rendering techniques. Through the case, students will study the factors that led the agency to make such a decision, and examine how virtual influencers compare with traditional flesh-and-blood ones, in terms of marketing appeal, cost, and other factors. They will also consider the question of how sustainable virtual influencers are as a marketing tool for future campaigns.

This note provides an introduction to corporate governance from a managerial perspective, covering key aspects of board responsibilities and board composition, the regulatory environment and legal duties of directors, and changes in governance systems over time, with a focus on publicly traded firms in the United States.

Just before Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc, acquired H. J. Heinz Company on February 14, 2013, rumors had been circulating that the Omaha investing oracle had set eyes on the condiment giant. By the time the official acquisition was announced, questions had arisen about some unusual trading activity in financial markets. A very profitable trade was made on the option market just a few days before the announcement: a $90,000 trade that resulted in profits of around $1.8 million. The case puts students in the shoes of a fictional SEC analyst in charge of investigating rumors of insider trading in the context of Berkshire Hathaway's acquisition of Heinz. Which market would an informed investor with limited capital choose? Which option contract would the insider choose, and why? The case allows the instructor to introduce option "Greeks," measures of sensitivity of option contracts to underlying risk factors. The Greeks are presented in an intuitive fashion, and the analysis provides an applied, true-to-life setting to a topic that students often consider very abstract.

Spreadsheet Supplement for Case UV8265

Where should leaders focus when managing multiple, simultaneous change initiatives? Recent research by the authors explores the experiences of a global technology company that attempted two concurrent large-scale change initiatives. In this scenario, consistency around content, procedure, and normative expectations as perceived by employees stood out as the pivotal success factor.

The core of every great strategy is a valid argument. The authors have developed a flexible system of three activities constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization to help leaders arrive at such arguments. They offer tips to help savvy leaders conduct strategic conversations, analyze potential options via strategy maps, and test the logic of strategic arguments in order to make sound decisions that will result in sustainable success.

In this interview, the first in MIT Sloan Management Review's Leading With Impact series, Tassilo Festetics discusses his role as vice president of global solutions at Anheuser-Busch InBev with coach and consultant Chris Clearfield. Festetics describes the benefits of building cutting-edge applications in-house to improve the brewer's products and service, and the value of fostering an environment that encourages open communication.

Established in 1969 as a cosmetics lab in the city of São Paulo, Natura grew briskly over the ensuing decades and by 2004 it had become Brazil's largest beauty company. Unlike its competitors, Natura was built on the principle of reconciling socioecological sustainability with value creation. During the 2010s, Natura evolved from a strong regional player focused on a single brand and direct sales to a multinational, multi-brand, multi-channel group and renamed itself Natura &Co. Its three business units, Natura, Aēsop and The Body Shop, operated independently, with decision-making autonomy and their own CEOs and executive teams. Each unit continued to grow and operate sustainably, but group profitability plummeted. In May 2019 Natura &Co announced that it had agreed to acquire mass-market beauty company Avon in a transaction worth $3.7 billion. The takeover would present several challenges, from turning around underperforming Avon to developing a coherent corporate strategy without betraying Natura's sustainability ethos.

The outbreak of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease, 2019) posed unprecedented challenges to the global supply chains. As a leading and innovative supply chain that achieved just-in-time manufacturing, Apple's performance was put in the spotlight. This case describes how Apple's supply chain has coped with the COVID-19 pandemic. Apple's supply chain has weathered natural disasters, such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and SARS; the risks and challenges brought by the outbreak of COVID-19 were unprecedented and complicated. Unlike the symptoms of SARS patients with high fever, the symptoms of COVID-19 varied; some patients had no symptoms at all, which made them difficult to identify. Moreover, the pandemic complicated supply chain planning because it was difficult, if not impossible, to predict where the next epicenter would be and what measures local governments might take to prevent the further spread of the virus. Social distancing was effective to control the pandemic, but it brought both challenges and opportunities for companies like Apple. On the one hand, social distancing slowed the manufacturing process and had a negative impact on the economy, which could dampen consumer confidence and reduce demand. On the other hand, social distancing boosted the demands for electronic devices, as many people had to work at home. Using this case study, students will understand the importance of risk management in supply chain management and learn the challenges and opportunities of the disruption posed to business operations. The case provides an opportunity for students to discuss and understand why some companies can recover from the disruptions better than other companies and how a resilient supply chain can improve a company's competitiveness.

The case is inspired in the real story of Scott Stiles and the Fair Employment Agency, a non-profit employment agency, founded in Hong Kong, with the purpose of eliminating forced labour. The Agency aims to address this issue with the introduction of a new business model in the domestic worker employment agency industry, which addresses social aims while allowing companies to be profitable. In the business model of the Fair Employment Agency, the hiring of domestic workers is made through transparent pricing and ethical practices, and foreign domestic workers are not required to pay placement fees to find jobs in Hong Kong. This allows foreign domestic workers to be free of debts, therefore being less susceptible to exploitation by employers and employment agencies.

In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world's resources-bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the "stuff of science-fiction," teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an "avatar service platform"-a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin's eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA's support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporates, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services-for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the "ANA AVATAR" program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, "avatarin." Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations?

In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world's resources-bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the "stuff of science-fiction," teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an "avatar service platform"-a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin's eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA's support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporates, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services-for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the "ANA AVATAR" program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, "avatarin." Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations?

The Peerless Potato Chip Company (Peerless) is a private-label, family-owned-and-operated, national potato chip manufacturer specializing in organic chips. The CEO, Kate Kelly, had been with the company from the beginning-since her uncle had first started making chips more than 25 years earlier on his farm in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. In fact, she'd been the primary architect of its growth and expansion. For the first time since its founding, the company's profit margin had been declining steadily-to almost one-third of what it had been just seven years earlier. Kelly admitted that much of the downturn stemmed from her lax, even absentee management. As she came to grips with the situation, Kelly identified an array of missing or incomplete metrics, unquantified performance indicators, and uncontrolled variable costs that were severely impacting the company's bottom line. The case, designed for an MBA or non-MBA audience, is about management, especially of performance-indicating metrics and operating data. Students are asked to consider a number of options Kelly is looking at: determining key manufacturing data, making cuts to the product line, ""going green,"" and other potential cost-cutting and profit-generating possibilities to reverse the downtrend in profits and regain control of the company's finances.

In January 2020, the chief executive officer of the family-run business Scak Textiles LLP (Scak), based in India, was thinking about how the company could achieve a new milestone of ₹500 million in revenue by 2025. He wondered why the company, after coming so far, could not achieve that number with a sustainable margin. What else could he do to help Scak reached this target, and how could he solve the bottleneck of resource constraints?<br><br>The bright next-generation entrepreneurs of the family were taking an active interest in the business and had strategic plans for enhancing the effectiveness of both business and revenue models while navigating the ever-changing business ecosystem. The promoters of Scak wanted an outline of the entrepreneurs' recommendations with adequate assumptions and a business valuation. The promoters would expect a 15 per cent return on additional capital invested; the corporate tax rate would be 30 per cent. The next-generation family members saw three possible options: add manufacturing operations, establish e-commerce platforms for business-to-business and business-to-consumer businesses, or enter the business of exporting. Could they take up all three options, or should they maintain the status quo? The value and future of Scak would depend on their decision.