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In April 2018, two black customers were arrested at a Starbucks Corporation (Starbucks) outlet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after one of the two men asked to use the restroom while the pair were waiting to meet someone. After a video of the arrest went viral on social media, Kevin Johnson, the chief executive officer of Starbucks, immediately apologized to the men and, further, announced that the company would hold racial bias training across all Starbucks stores in the United States. Johnson was criticized for the presumption that a half-day training session could possibly resolve racial bias issues. Employees also expressed their dissatisfaction with the training program. Johnson also announced an open-toilets policy, which was also criticized, raising several questions: Had Johnson managed the crisis appropriately? How could he make such training effective? Should Johnson change his open-toilets policy? Should he reconsider his decision to conduct such training at the cost of future revenues?

Jordanian entrepreneur, Nour Al Hassan, founded Tarjama in 2008, tapping into an underserved and high demand need: Arabic translation service. Its lean model comprised of hiring full-time employees, mainly women, who worked from home. It steadily grew over the following decade to become a three-office, 140-employee company. In January 2017, Al Hassan launched a second business, Ureed.com, which encompassed a scalable, competitively priced online model. It was a linguistics marketplace, bringing companies and freelancers together. By October 2018, Ureed.com had significantly grown, having over 14,000 freelancers using the platform. As Al Hassan looked ahead at the ambitious growth plan they had in place, which included geographic expansion, diversifying the language offering, and monetizing Ureed.com's proprietary training and language tools, the main challenge she foresaw was maintaining the quality of the work performed by the freelancers while ensuring they remained motivated and loyal to the platform. Was the company ready for this growth plan or was it too ambitious for a company relying almost exclusively on freelancers? Would the training tools and technology add-ons suffice to sustain quality levels as the number of clients and freelancers grew? How could Al Hassan continue to create loyalty with an ever-growing number of freelancers? What were the other imminent challenges of adding new offices and languages simultaneously with only a small team of full-time employees?

This case was written in 2019, 10 years after Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group Co. Ltd. (XCMG) initiated its SAP ERP project in 2009. The digital transformation of XCMG has been so fast, that within less than 10 years, it developed from this internal IT project to a digital platform that provides services to many external enterprises. This case is to discover the factors that enabled this rapid digital business transformation. The case study shows the digital transformation of XCMG, the leading construction equipment manufacturing company in China. Established in 1943, before the establishment of the People's Republic of China, for past over 66 years, XCMG was a traditional manufacturing company, and enjoyed the dividends of the China's economic development. XCMG was so successful in its manufacture b2b business not only domestically, but also internationally, by learning from oversee companies and continuous innovating. Until recently, China's economic development slowed down, and the China-US trade friction emerged, however, XCMG had already prepared for this situation, and started its digital transformation 10 years ago.

The advent of design thinking as a tool for innovation has led to its adoption in a range of organizations. While proponents of design thinking continue to focus on the principles and practices of their method, little is known on the organizational conditions required for design thinking to attain a long-term impact. This article explores seven empirical case studies to identify the conditions required in organizations seeking to integrate design. It identifies four conditions-strategic vision, facilities, cultural capital, and directives-and examines their relationships.

This case considers the state of telehealth, or the remote delivery of healthcare services via telecommunications technology, in 2019. Doctor On Demand, a promising start-up in the space, sought to solve the four main challenges that the telehealth industry had faced historically. First, although most Americans who had health insurance coverage through their employers also received telehealth benefits, very few knew about these services, and an even smaller number had tried them. Second, the right incentives for payors, such as health plans and large self-insured enterprises, were not in place, a situation that kept utilization rates for telehealth services at stubbornly low levels. Third, Doctor On Demand and its peers needed to add more providers and offer a broader range of healthcare services to patients if they hoped to drive the next leg of growth for their platforms. And fourth, the regulatory environment in which the platforms operated was incredibly complex, and if history were any indicator, other stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare system who felt threatened by telehealth would do whatever they could to impede its rise. The stakes were high, and not just for Doctor On Demand. If CEO Hill Ferguson and his team could address the industry's four major issues, they could unlock the potential of telehealth to deliver better medical care for more people at lower cost.

GoDaddy had long been known for polarizing television commercials that were focused on generating attention and buzz-CNBC called its brand "synonymous with controversial advertisements with scantily clad women." But the company decided that the ads did not appropriately reflect its internal culture and in 2013 undertook a transformation intended to shift its external brand to reflect its actual culture and to champion its diverse customers. In the process, GoDaddy partnered with the VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford University and set out to make their company a top workplace for women in technology. Among the key issues it worked to address were the calibration, or talent review, sessions at which the performance of GoDaddy employees was discussed; performance ratings that resulted from these meetings impacted career trajectory, promotion, equity, and salaries. GoDaddy decided to pursue the "Holy Grail:" helping with career advancement through equal access to top performance marks.

Supplement for Case SM318A

Supplement for Case SM318A

It was end-2019 and seven years into the founding of Carousell, a Singapore-headquartered peer-to-peer online classified advertisements marketplace started by three friends, Quek Siu Rui, Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo. Valued at US$550 million, Carousell had gained wide popularity with a presence in seven markets across Asia Pacific. However new challenges that surfaced continued to confront the pioneer and market leader of mobile classifieds in Southeast Asia. Back in 2012, the opportunity and challenge the three young founders were facing was much simpler - to simplify a cumbersome and lengthy process to sell pre-owned items online. The trio built a smartphone app at a hackathon that reduced the time taken to list an item from ten minutes to 30 seconds. On a mission to inspire others to start selling, they adopted a mobile-first approach targeting young adults and gradually built a strong community of Carousellers over the years. With successive rounds of equity funding and scaling-up, soon came the question of monetisation. Carousell adopted a freemium business model, and began to roll out paid premium services for used-goods sellers to increase the visibility of their listings, and subscription services for professional sellers (such as real estate agents), to promote their properties. Having evolved from paper press to web desktop and mobile versions, what was next for the classifieds industry? Carousell reckoned Classified Version 4.0 would be AI-driven. How then could Carousell compete with new entrants, such as Facebook Marketplace, contending for a slice of the classified platform business? How could Carousell combat the increasing prevalence of online fraud on its platform to offer safety and assurance to its users? Would the monetizing efforts by providing paid services on the platform derail the community building effort that had been critical to Carousell's early success?

This case is located within the multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis, as key managers decide what kind of monitoring and evaluation to implement for one of its social business programs, Novartis Access. This new program will expand the company's reach into traditionally underserved markets in low- and middle-income countries using a basket of 15 medicines for non-communicable diseases offering them at public and faith-based facilities at a lower price than sold in the private market. Novartis Access is being launched in late 2015 in Kenya, with a long-term goal of operating in 30 countries. The case focuses on Michael Fürst, Senior Manager for Corporate Responsibility Strategy and Innovation, who must prepare a plan for monitoring and evaluation for Novartis Access to present to Harald Nusser, Head of Novartis Social Business. In order to prepare for his first meeting with Harald Nusser, Michael Fürst needs to identify the value and risks of monitoring and evaluating (and their differences) and make a proposal about what kind of monitoring and evaluation to adopt (if any), and how to overcome internal and external challenges.

External pressures from an increasingly saturated industry were forcing the president of Crème Couture Bridal Inc. to contemplate the future of her business. Crème Couture operated as a retail outlet for memorable lifestyle events, selling wedding dresses, bridalwear, formalwear, and various accessories to women of all ages. The president wanted to develop an expansion strategy that would best position Crème Couture for long-term success. Specifically, she wanted to assess the profitability of each revenue segment to determine which segments should be further enhanced or eliminated. She wanted her expansion strategy to align with her long-term goals of attracting more clientele, providing exceptional customer service and increasing net profit.

In December 2019, Jon Hu (Harvard Business School MBA, 2019) and Dr. Samantha Dale Strasser, co-founders of Celata Bioinnovations, were raising $1 million to launch their company. They had founded Celata less than six months earlier with the aim of redefining the drug discovery process. Celata's platform used novel data types and a unique data integration process to generate hypotheses about proteins that were involved in the formation and progression of disease. They believed the platform was better and faster at identifying actionable biological targets, increasing the speed of discovery and reducing the chances of failure, promising to lower costs and bring drugs to market more quickly. Their platform had achieved proof of concept during Strasser's PhD research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), when it helped identify and validate a target related to Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) in mouse models. However, full validation wouldn't come until their platform was used to develop a drug that successfully treated a disease in humans, a process that could take several years. In the first instance, Celata's platform was best suited to identify targets for cancers, inflammatory diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases, which collectively presented a global market opportunity of over $200 billion. However, Hu and Strasser were debating which opportunities to pursue. Should they try to improve the efficacy of current drugs, or go for brand new opportunities, indications for which there were no solutions on the market? And if they focused on the latter, should they just look for large market opportunities, or include "orphan" diseases, for which there was a relatively small market? Should they look for small molecule drug candidates, or include large molecule biologics in their search? And where should they operate in the drug development pipeline?

The July 2015 spin-off of DuPont's performance chemicals division as the independent company Chemours burdened new CEO Mark Vergnano and his team with perilous challenges. Despite market-leading offerings in several areas, the company faced a glutted market for its primary product, even after its prices had fallen 40% since 2012. The company also owed $4 billion in long-term debt, equivalent to 10 times 2014 earnings. Not least, DuPont had made Chemours financially responsible for chemical contamination at 171 U.S. sites, representing 62% of DuPont's environmental liabilities and 90% of its litigation by number of pending cases. Within six months, Chemours shares had lost 80% of their value.

Supplement to the (A) case 420-001, describing actions taken by Chemours CEO Mark Vergnano and members of his executive team to execute a successful turnaround of the company.

Organizational leaders are increasingly turning to design approaches as a panacea for uncertainty and disruption. However, frictions between design and typical engineering and management practices make integrating design into organizations difficult. To do this well, it is necessary to foster the coevolution of two types of design capabilities: deep expertise in design practices and wide understanding, application, and scaffolds of design. Underestimating the coevolution leads to three typical "pitfalls" that can limit the effectiveness of investments in design. This article examines each of these tensions in the context of large technology companies and presents practical recommendations on how to avoid them.

This case provides a cautionary tale of the one-size-fits-all approach to organizational culture. Despite the success of Zappos.com and Southwest Airlines, not all companies' culture achieves its intended outcomes for employers and employees. Through the eyes of fictional protagonist Roxie Steele, founder of StyleForYou.com and StreetFashion.com, students learn about issues that entrepreneurs face when they scale a business from startup to full-fledged enterprise. Although Steele launched a new fashion e-commerce site in 2019, StreetFashion.com, the case is largely based on Steele's past experience as StyleForYou's CEO from 2000 to 2015. Students gain insights into the entrepreneurial challenges StyleForYou.com faced within the competitive and fast-paced fashion industry. Students apply a framework (i.e., leadership congruence model) to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of StyleForYou's management practices, with a focus on organizational culture and structure. Students also develop solutions for Steele regarding how to establish StreetFashion.com as a sustainable enterprise in the future.

New research shows that market leadership is increasingly temporary. Just 17% of companies are able to significantly outperform their industry average for five years. The ones that do continually find new sources of competitive advantage by reinventing their businesses and adapting to evolving market conditions. Their example offers lessons for leadership teams trying to fight the relentless pull to the mean.