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COVID-19 has quickly disrupted how companies market their brands to consumers and the way customers shop for products. The current environment offers an unprecedented opportunity for smaller and midtier brands to compete against their more established rivals for exposure, mindshare, product trials, and market share with a new and broader base of potential customers.

Do you want to lead a bird control company? No? Nevertheless, you might learn from a Case Study about the Director of one such Small-to-Medium-sized Enterprise (SME): someone who was initially a "reluctant boss". This Case helps us to widen our perspective on possible leadership career paths and examine the challenges for leadership of SMEs in general. It is suitable for undergraduates, post-graduates, and executive education participants, because the issues it raises are fundamental to leadership in early careers, and for managers and executives who want to grow their own division/business. After examining and discussing this Case Study, students will: have a better understanding of the various leadership challenges facing leaders of SMEs; be able to think more critically about the role of a leader as his/her organization grows; and have a broader perspective on possible leadership career paths, especially in terms of unusual industries, start-ups, and SMEs.

Gavi has helped immunize over 760 million children in the world's poorest countries over the past 20 years saving 13 million lives. How should Gavi respond to the need for a vaccine for the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic?

In the first months of 2020, a pandemic overwhelmed the world. COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus, spread from China and created a severe public health emergency across countries. While an immediate fear of the disease's impact on human life permeated society, the world battled another concern for the severe economic downturn that was brought about by attempts to suppress the virus. World trade, tourism, capital flows, remittances, and commodity prices collapsed. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the global GDP growth rate for 2020 was expected to be close to 2.3%. As of April 2020, multilateral organizations estimated that GDP would contract by 3% - way worse than the 0.1% contraction of 2009, and the deepest dive since the Great Depression. What policy options existed to mitigate the financial and economic distress of containment, and what factors did different countries weigh in deciding which paths to choose? Was there a terrible choice - either damage livelihoods through extended lockdowns, or sacrifice thousands or even millions of lives to the virus - or were policies reinforcing? What was the role of government, businesses, communities and individuals? After the worst of the health crisis was mitigated, what kind of shape would world economies take?

Noora Health, an India-based non-profit, through its Care Compassion Program (CCP), which was based on human-centred design principles, aimed to reduce readmission rates and complications after patients were discharged from the hospital. While implementing the program in several hospitals across India, the chief executive officer of Noora Health faced several challenges. These challenges included convincing nurses to train patients' family members in caregiving and increasing the scope and scale of the CCP. By early 2019, Noora Health had successfully implemented the program across 110 hospitals in India. What should the company further undertake to prove the program's effectiveness and enhance its scope and scale?

This article discusses the digitalization efforts of 26 leading manufacturing firms, the difficulties encountered, and how they can be handled. It shows that many firms are far from ready to benefit from digitalization and are mainly focused on achieving greater efficiency through digitalization rather than pursuing a growth agenda. This imbalance is because of the difficulties related to identifying profitable configurations of competencies, assets, and data generated from digital technologies, orchestrating them, and exploiting them in an agile organization. Practical implications of digitalization are highlighted, specifically in terms of strategies for supporting the current business and embracing long-term digital transformation.

This case reviews the path to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the subsequent efforts that have been undertaken to repeal it. It focuses on the role of the government and interest groups in shaping policy.

People have a strong innate desire to be in touch with nature. By designing jobs and workspaces that fulfill that desire, organizations may be able to replenish their employees energy reserves in four key ways: cognitively, emotionally, prosocially, and physically. Imagine the impact not only on wellness but also on work performance.

What does it take to set up the next level of schools that encourages academic excellence at an international level in a developing country? How should the school brand itself to communicate that commitment to excellence to prospective students' parents? How can a school provide that level of academic excellence at an affordable cost to the middle-income segment? What are the levers that it can use to scale its school locations over the country? In September 2019, Phan Hu Thuy, CEO of Vinschool, contemplated the above questions as she addressed the managing committee of Vinschool. Thuy had a daunting target ahead of her - to expand Vinschool to double its existing size in a period of five years. Vinschool was established in 2013 in Vietnam, as a directive of Vingroup, to provide schooling facilities for children residing at the Vinhomes real estate complexes built by the group. The school had expanded rapidly, growing from one campus to 31 campuses with over 27,000 students, by 2019. Operating as a not-for-profit entity, Vinschool delivered international standard education to its students, amidst an increasingly competitive private school education market served by a limited resource pool. The challenge was clear: Vinschool had to provide an excellent academic experience with limited resources, and at the same time, focus on uniformity of quality as it established new campuses. How could Vinschool expand holistically? How could Vinschool stay ahead of the competition? Could the school expand its potential consumer market segment? How could the school make it's brand more compelling?

As a 100-year-old cooperative of dairy farms with shared production and distribution resources, Cabot has long championed a different kind of capitalism: one that values good governance, the environment, the community, employers, and customers as much as it does profits. But a marketing chief suggested that the company do more than track and report on ESG measures--that it commit to those five pillars of sustainability by applying for B Corp status, a designation given by the nonprofit B Lab to mission-driven companies that meet or exceed all its criteria. Although the process lasted two years, Cabot passed on its first try and continues to push its scores higher. This article offers lessons for companies trying to do the same or simply to improve their ESG performance: Listen to your in-house futurists; don't shy away from being first in your industry, sector, or geography; and trust that success will come when you work together for the common good.

If a company wants to be fast on its feet, transform end-to-end customer experiences, and continuously outpace competitors, it needs more than lots of agile teams. A truly agile enterprise requires that the company's top officers--most, if not all, of the C-suite--embrace agile principles, too. In this article the authors describe how such an agile leadership team functions, how it differs from the conventional corporate-style executive committee and from other agile teams, and what agile means for senior executives' day-to-day work lives. The job of a conventional agile team is to create innovative solutions to a problem--be it the need for a new product or service, a better business process, or an advanced technology to support new offerings. The job of an agile leadership team is to strike the right balance between standardizing operations and pursuing innovation. Most agile team members dedicate virtually all of their time to their agile roles, but that's not possible for executives. They have to simultaneously build and run the agile enterprise operating system, oversee business units and functions, serve as mentors and decision makers, and handle the crises of the moment.

Brand-new markets are like the wormholes of science fiction, where the usual rules of time and space do not apply. When a market has just been born, the forces of competition there are constantly in flux, it's unclear who your customers really are, and conventional strategies just don't make sense. How then can you navigate this constantly shifting terrain? Over the past few years, two business school professors have interviewed entrepreneurs and corporate innovators in new fields such as genomics, augmented reality, and fintech. They discovered that the most successful ones practice something called "parallel play," exploring and testing the world the way preschoolers do. Instead of trying to differentiate their businesses, they observe what others in the market are doing and borrow ideas. After relentless experimentation, they commit to a single template for creating value. But rather than quickly optimizing that template, they leave it partially undetermined and pause, watch, and wait. As they gather serendipitous insights and the market begins to settle, they refine their models bit by bit.

Why do large corporations sell off business units to PE firms that make a fortune by selling them a few years later? The author, a former Rotman School dean, argues that the answer is rooted in the way many corporations value their businesses and projects. Their basic mistake is to compare estimates of future cash flow with the amount of cash put into a business as a capital investment. Although this sounds perfectly reasonable (and largely follows conventional practices for measuring economic value added, or EVA, and its equivalents), it can anchor performance measurement in a historical number that very quickly loses its relevance. As Martin explains, once an investment has been made in an asset, the company's expectations about the value that investment will create are, in effect, publicized. Thus a company assessing the performance of its investment should base its measures not on the cash put in but on the current value of the asset or capability in question, which--and this is the critical point--includes the value that the market already believes the company will create or destroy with that asset or capability. Martin describes an approach that is grounded in market expectations about future value.

One of the most promising applications of emerging blockchain technology is supply chain management. Blockchain--the digital record-keeping system developed for cryptocurrency networks--can help supply chain partners with some of their challenges by creating a complete, transparent, tamperproof history of the information flows, inventory flows, and financial flows in transactions. The authors studied seven large U.S. corporations that are exploring how blockchain might improve their supply chain operations. Their early initiatives show that the technology can enable faster and more cost-efficient product delivery, make products more traceable, streamline the financing process, and enhance coordination among buyers, suppliers, and banks. There are special requirements for using blockchain in supply chain management: restricting participation to known, trusted partners; adopting a new consensus protocol; and taking steps to keep errors and counterfeits out of the supply chain. But if implemented thoughtfully, the authors suggest, blockchain could pay big dividends for companies in a host of industries.

New CEOs are typically focused on creating and implementing a strategy, building a top team, and driving culture change. Optimizing administrative workflow may not seem to be a priority. But a former CEO who now advises boards argues that many chief executives need a chief of staff (CoS)-someone who goes beyond the executive assistant role to help the office function smoothly. According to one CoS, the role encompasses being an air traffic controller for the leader and the senior team, an integrator connecting work streams that would otherwise remain siloed, a communicator linking the leadership team and the broader organization, an honest broker when the leader needs a wide-ranging view without turf considerations, and a confidant. In this article Ciampa outlines what a CoS does, the qualities one needs to succeed, and the ways companies typically design the role (with varying levels of responsibility) to help make a CEO more focused and productive.

Trust is the basis for almost everything we do. It's the foundation on which our laws and contracts are built. It's the reason we're willing to exchange our hard-earned paychecks for goods and services, to pledge our lives to another person in marriage, and to cast a ballot for someone who will represent our interests. It's also the input that makes it possible for leaders to create the conditions for employees to fully realize their own capacity and power. So how do you build up stores of this essential leadership capital? By focusing, the authors argue, on the three core drivers of trust: authenticity, logic, and empathy. People tend to trust you when they think they are interacting with the real you (authenticity), when they have faith in your judgment and competence (logic), and when they believe that you care about them (empathy). When trust is lost, it can almost always be traced back to a breakdown in one of these three drivers. This article explains how leaders can identify their weaknesses and strengths on these three dimensions and offers advice on how all three can be developed in the service of a truly empowering leadership style.

The huge threat posed by digital technologies and models throws many established companies into a panic. In response, they often make big, bet-the-farm moves that fail badly. It's much wiser to take an incremental approach to digital transformation, say McGrath and McManus. Building on a technique McGrath helped develop in the 1990s--discovery-driven planning--the two advise executives at traditional firms to take things step-by-step. Rather than attempting an all-or-nothing pivot, incumbents should exploit their greater resources and knowledge and explore a variety of ideas at once. By continually finding ways to fix problems with digital technology, testing and refining assumptions about what works, getting new information, and minimizing risks, they can learn their way gradually toward an effective digital response. Consider Best Buy's strategy for striking back at Amazon. Best Buy overhauled its processes so that it could cut costs and match prices; turned its stores into an asset by allowing online orders to be picked up there (avoiding delivery headaches); charged brands fees to be in ministores within its outlets; and built a staff of tech consultants who strengthened customer relationships.

A lot of global health problems can be prevented by persuading people to alter their behavior--something marketers excel at. That's why brands have a critical role to play in tackling these challenges, says Sidibe, Unilever's first social mission director. In this article she offers any brand that wants to achieve a social purpose a five-part framework for success: inspiring individuals to change behavior; winning internal backing; measuring performance at multiple levels; partnering with governments, NGOs, and other firms; and sparking a broader movement. This approach has allowed Unilever's Lifebuoy and Knorr brands to make great strides in reducing disease and poor nutrition in the developing world, while enhancing their profiles and their growth, and it could help other brands, like Carling Black Label beer, which has taken on the task of combating domestic violence.