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After having proven its base technology (3D printing) through NASA solicitations and contracts, Made In Space was searching for a viable commercial application. But the business case for the leading candidate, high-quality fiber optic cable for use on Earth, remained uncertain. In 2019, Made In Space secured a major contract from NASA for early work on a much grander project, called Archinaut, to build architectures in space that would enable off-Earth habitation. Was that opportunity a more promising path for Made In Space, or did its ambition risk distracting Made In Space from its more managed, incremental strategy? Which strategy would enable MIS to retain its central place in facilitating the development of the space economy?

When deciding how to be good and act well, we often seek outside help. Many of our oldest and most frequently consulted sources of ethical guidance are our religious traditions. Just as one might consult a thoughtful friend, countless people seek direction from their own religious leaders, texts, and customs on all sorts of matters, including those related to business. To help shed light on what might constitute a "Hindu approach," this case presents three dilemmas encountered by Gurcharan Das (former CEO of Procter & Gamble India) and pairs them with stories and teachings drawn from Hinduism. How does one manage an incompetent boss? What can an individual do to combat social inequity? Should the Ganges and Yamuna rivers be granted legal personhood? In the epic Mahabharata, questions of duty and decision-making are articulated through the Hindu concept of dharma, or the principle of pursuing righteous action while discharging one's worldly duties. This case asks: Is dharma too subtle to be of any use? Or can it point us toward a theory of ethical action for a complex world?

This case explores the use of advanced out-of-court restructuring techniques from the perspective of a company facing looming debt maturities and an overleveraged capital structure. The decade that followed the global financial crisis was characterized by rising corporate leverage with increasingly forgiving debt covenant packages. These looser covenants enabled borrowers to pursue a range of novel transactions to avoid bankruptcy. The 2016 exchange offer conducted by J.Crew paved the way for the use of a particularly aggressive form of restructuring, where valuable assets that had provided collateral and/or value support for loans and bonds are separated from the company and used as a bargaining chip to obtain more favorable terms in a restructuring negotiation. The protagonist in the case is a restructuring advisor, contemplating the proposal of a similar type of transaction for Neiman Marcus Group. These transactions have significant financial, strategic, commercial, legal and ethical implications, which the case explores in depth.

This case is part of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. To see other material in the GVV curriculum, please visit http://store.darden.virginia.edu/giving-voice-to-values. In this case, Timothy Brennan is the founder and CEO of technology company Northpointe, Inc. (Northpointe), and the creator of its flagship software program, COMPAS, an artificially intelligent software tool for US court systems that predicts a defendant's likelihood to reoffend and informs bail, parole, and probation sentencing decisions. Brennan originally created COMPAS in order to standardize decision-making within the criminal justice system and to reduce the likelihood of human error or bias impacting court rulings. However, years after COMPAS's public release and widespread adoption within the US court systems, an investigative journalism report claims that COMPAS is more likely to mislabel Black defendants as higher risk and White defendants as lower risk of recidivism. To complicate the matter, any coding adjustments that Northpointe would make to uncover or address the bias-causing programming might reduce the software's performance or reveal sensitive operational information to competitors. In this A case, Brennan's challenge is to organize a response to investigate bias within the COMPAS software, while still protecting the complexity and intellectual property of the product. In the B case, students read a synopsis of Brennan's actual response and review its implications for Northpointe and the US criminal justice system. They are encouraged to consider how Brennan could have responded more creatively and constructively.

This case is part of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. To see other material in the GVV curriculum, please visit http://store.darden.virginia.edu/giving-voice-to-values. In this case, Timothy Brennan is the founder and CEO of technology company Northpointe, Inc. (Northpointe), and the creator of its flagship software program, COMPAS, an artificially intelligent software tool for US court systems that predicts a defendant's likelihood to reoffend and informs bail, parole, and probation sentencing decisions. Brennan originally created COMPAS in order to standardize decision-making within the criminal justice system and to reduce the likelihood of human error or bias impacting court rulings. However, years after COMPAS's public release and widespread adoption within the US court systems, an investigative journalism report claims that COMPAS is more likely to mislabel Black defendants as higher risk and White defendants as lower risk of recidivism. To complicate the matter, any coding adjustments that Northpointe would make to uncover or address the bias-causing programming might reduce the software's performance or reveal sensitive operational information to competitors. In the A case, Brennan's challenge is to organize a response to investigate bias within the COMPAS software, while still protecting the complexity and intellectual property of the product. In this B case, students read a synopsis of Brennan's actual response and review its implications for Northpointe and the US criminal justice system. They are encouraged to consider how Brennan could have responded more creatively and constructively.

This case provides an opportunity for students to consider and discuss the multifaceted responsibilities of an executive education (EE) custom program faculty leader. The case suggests that such a faculty leader has responsibilities and tasks paralleling many of the protagonists involved in building a custom home (i.e., builder/general contractor, designer/architect, site supervisor, county inspector, and key operations client liaison). As a starting point, students can identify what is involved in each of these familiar roles for building a custom home and then extrapolate those into the custom EE program setting for a faculty leader.

After only two years on the job, a successful young female engineer encountered a critical and independent decision-making scenario in a profession traditionally dominated by males. She identified a safety risk in a construction project as she was driving to work and decided to ask the crew to stop their work for a safety assessment. The issue raised several key factors that she had to address in her attempt to manage risk. Her decision to shut down a field project in a residential neighbourhood was based on various considerations, given her assessment of an imminent threat to public safety. Was she right to stop the construction project? Could she have done things differently?

In December 2017, the Electrical and Mechanical Services department (EMSD) held its first Innovative Technology Day in collaboration with Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation at EMSD's Hong Kong headquarters. The event, which brought together government departments and related organizations as well as developers of innovative technologies, was a first step in responding to the new policy direction outlined by the chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in her first policy address and to the challenge issued to EMSD staff by the director of Electrical and Mechanical Services. Supervising engineers at EMSD were directed to develop a strategic roadmap and implementation plan to move EMSD forward to implement the organization's new mandate: to be a promoter and facilitator of innovation and technology (I&T).

On March 21, 2017, Downer EDI Limited, a leading provider of engineering, construction, and infrastructure management services in the Australasia region, announced an unsolicited offer for Spotless Group Holdings at A$1.15 per share, to be funded largely by a fully underwritten renounceable two-for-five rights issue at A$5.95 per share. Although an offer for Spotless Group Holdings was not unexpected, the market was surprised at the considerable premium of 58 per cent above the previous day's closing price of A$0.725. With the institutional portion of the rights offering due to close the following day, an equity analyst with a large institutional fund that was a major shareholder of Downer EDI Limited, had little time to complete a thorough valuation analysis of Spotless Group Holdings. If the analyst determined that Downer EDI Limited was overpaying for Spotless Group Holdings, she would recommend that the fund turn down the rights offering and sell its stake in Downer EDI Limited.

Student spreadsheet supplement to case W20959

California-based Vivos Group (Vivos) built and sold luxury bunkers designed to withstand catastrophes. The founder himself had acknowledged that the majority of US residents could not afford them: while competitors offered bunkers with down payments as low as a US$1,300 -which middle-income consumers could afford-Vivos's $35,000+ bunkers were for the rich. By May 2020, several of Vivos's bunker properties were sold out, but it was uncertain whether this indicated some permanent change in consumers' buying behaviour or an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Vivos's founder now faced several challenges: should he focus on constructing more luxury apartment-based bunkers or low-cost, community-sharing bunkers to provide consumers with protection from COVID-19? What aspects of bunker management should he improve, given the criticism that bunker companies had made false claims about the air filtration systems in the bunkers? How could he help Vivos achieve growth in the long run?

Data accessibility has emerged as a challenge in taking AI out of the lab and into the business. Although it is often treated as an IT problem, in reality it is a management problem aggravated by misconceptions about the nature and the role of data accessibility in AI.

Leaders must identify the causes of collaborative failure in their organizations and teams before they can mitigate consequences such as poor productivity, stifled innovation, overload, and burnout. This article describes six patterns of dysfunction (revealed through organizational network analysis), a number of the drivers that create them, and a set of remedies for addressing them.

A hidden driver of workplace loneliness is teamwork and it is not just because people are teaming virtually more than ever. Loneliness can be triggered by the structural aspects of teams, even when people work face-to-face. But leaders can address the problem by thinking more systematically about team design.

You might assume that shifting from in-person to remote brainstorming and ideation sessions is taking a large toll on teams creativity, given the loss of face-to-face, spontaneous connections and interactions. But collaborating virtually actually has the potential to improve group creativity and ideation. Here's how you can maximize the upside.

The LiveRamp in 2020 case follows the story of Anneka Gupta as she rises from one of LiveRamp's first product managers to president and head of products and platforms, responsible for overseeing the company's product, engineering, marketing, and general and administrative functions.

Founded in 1905, SAE International, a global association of over 200,000 engineers, technical experts and volunteers, is a leader in technical learning for the mobility industry. Ongoing feedback from industry partners indicated that companies struggled to find engineering graduates with knowledge and skills required to work in robotics and automated vehicles. Many employers cited participants in SAE's Collegiate Design Challenge as delivering candidates that are ahead of the curve, having succeeded in designing, testing and racing their vehicles as part of a team. SAE's challenge was to find an innovative way to meet industry skills gaps and build the pipeline of engineers. These cases explore the vision of the Chief Growth Officer and the research and partnerships that fueled the development of a robotics boot camp program whose pilot was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Case Supplement for Case CU326

Shared beliefs on digital readiness among management and employees are a precursor to successfully guide and implement organizational change. There is, however, little examination of how digital knowledge and skills are distributed among managers and employees, or whether their perceptions of digital readiness systematically differ. The findings of a survey of the banking industry reveal that, while there are similar perceptions of attitude and empowerment toward change, perceptions of individual readiness, competences, and innovation barriers differ significantly. This research advances the framework of change readiness toward digital readiness with theoretical as well as practical implications for digital transformation management.

In 2020, Luke Minion and the leadership team at Riverstone, a hog producer founded in 2013 in Shandong, China, were evaluating Riverstone's strategy as it rebounded from outbreaks of African Swine Fever (ASF) in two of its three farm complexes. Riverstone was a joint venture between Minnesota-based private equity firm Proterra Investment Partners and agricultural services firm Pipestone Holdings, the third-largest U.S. pork company by sows managed. The vision for Riverstone was to apply Western hog production systems in China, where-despite being the world's top hog producer and consumer-most production was fragmented and inefficient. Just as Riverstone was ramping up capacity in 2018, China's hog industry faced a devastating ASF epidemic that wiped out tens of millions of hogs and bankrupted countless small producers. Riverstone had been able to recover by implementing strict biosecurity practices, and as it rebounded, it was benefiting from surging pork prices. From March 2019 to March 2020, Riverstone's profit per weaned pig rose from $80 to $250. In late 2020, Minion and the Proterra team were considering options for the exit of Proterra's Food Fund 1, which owned 70% of Riverstone. There was the possibility of an all-out sale, an IPO, or as Minion hoped, selling some portion of the Fund's equity to the U.S. farmers who were shareholders in Pipestone's U.S. operations. What was the best option?