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Supplement to case CU243

This fictionalized case explores an increasingly common challenge for private equity firms in the 21st century: how to drive shareholder returns via strategic repositioning and operational improvements, and not rely solely on financial engineering. Set in the "100-day planning workshop", a full-day conference typically held shortly after a deal closing, the case follow Sarah Chiang, VP at New York-based private equity firm Cahill Freeman Partners as she convened management, board, and industry advisors to examine important questions. The deal itself was a bold "twofer", a simultaneous leveraged buy-out and merger of the $1.7 billion Dallas-based Foster Industries and the $1.3 billion Cleveland-based SmartServices-in the outsourced facilities management (OFM) space. Despite a strong investment thesis and financing scenarios, the deal faced substantial strategic, governance, and managerial challenges. How would they pursue growth and margin when the two companies had different business models? How would they trim costs? Did management need outside support to execute? Did it make sense to reorganize company across its sprawling footprint? What about the social issues-at every level up to and including top management-between two companies that were fierce rivals for years? And finally, what should the PE firm and management prioritize as the best use of cash-reinvestment, acquisitions, or returning cash to shareholders? The investment committee saw a perfect deal on paper, but was this indeed the "perfect deal" or did it have the potential to turn into the "perfect storm"?

Mobileye was an Israeli company, officially headquartered in The Netherlands, which was a Tier 2 supplier to the global automobile industry. This short case updates Mobileye's business performance and strategy, following the acquisition by Intel in 2017.

In 2019, Bill Cummings, founder of Cummings Properties and Cummings Foundation and billionaire signer of the Giving Pledge, is winding down his roles at his company and foundation. How should the management move the company forward?

Striking the right balance between competence and credibility is essential to digital leaders' success, but it depends on what a company expects its CDO to do. While external candidates can bring critical digital competence and experience to organizations seeking a better digital footing, they may struggle to build the necessary credibility for organizational change.

Jane Joins the Club is a fictional case that presents a crisis - and an opportunity - at the peak of the career of an ambitious executive. The setting is the boardroom of a US manufacturing company, but the problems apply to any team environment where cultural rigidity, stereotypes, and process dysfunction threaten good decision-making. The case raises important questions about the value of diversity in a team environment, and will engage any student who has been an outsider on an insular, club-like team.

Amazon's initial request for proposals for a second headquarters (HQ2), released in September 2017, attracted great attention and, ultimately, proposals from 238 cities and regions in North America. This case discusses the company's decision to split its HQ2 between two locations, and the ensuing response from local politicians and the public.

On April 1, 2017, Flashfood.Shop, a new brand in self-service retailing of fresh meals, was founded in Dalian, Liaoning province, China. The self-service retail platform provided office workers with affordable and convenient fresh meals 24 hours per day. Flashfood.Shop used intelligent self-catering machines as its physical sales terminals and it used an intelligent self-catering system as its online service interface. By the end of June 2018, Flashfood.Shop had launched 51 catering machines, where customers could buy fresh meals. The company had 14 catering suppliers, 135 different types of catering products, and over 500,000 customers. However, along with its success, Flashfood.Shop incurred a loss in five consecutive quarters. After its establishment, the only source of income for the company was the sale of its catered products. However, operating costs were high due to the instability of the hardware and software systems, as well as low operating efficiency and other factors. Faced with these issues, the start-up's founder and general manager was wondering how to resolve his company's ongoing losses.

In early 2016, ChimpChange Limited, a financial technology (fintech) start-up, had started operations in California and already had more than 80,000 customers. The company needed capital to acquire more customers in order to become cash-flow positive, as was the case with most start-ups. ChimpChange Limited should have been able to attain the break-even number of customers within another year or so, but it needed capital to execute a marketing campaign to attract these customers. It had already undergone several series of funding rounds. At this point, should it return for a series C funding round or should it raise funds through an initial public offering (IPO)? If it were to opt for an IPO, where should this take place?

On Wednesday, March 1, 2017, Jean-Louis Chaussade, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Suez SA (Suez), a French utility company that primarily operated in water and waste management, had to decide whether or not to acquire General Electric Water & Process Technologies. During the negotiations between Chaussade and the CEO of General Electric Company (GE), there had been many drastic changes, including the January 2017 inauguration of a US president with no political experience and an agenda that did not favour international co-operation. The deal represented a significant investment of US$2-$3 billion, and Suez would have to rely on an external partner to have even a chance of winning the bid GE had launched only a few weeks earlier. The complex negotiations were also fraught with risks due to increasing political interference from the new US president. What should Chaussade do?

Naledo Foods and Beverages Inc. (Naledo) was a small start-up headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, that operated as a social enterprise in the Toledo District of Belize. In 2018, Naledo's operation in Belize produced about 500 jars a day of wildcrafted turmeric paste. With large orders sometimes taking up to six weeks to fill, it was imperative for Naledo to find a way to increase production, and for that, the company needed capital. Naledo's chief operating officer was thus considering ways to raise the necessary capital.

Founded in late 2014, Xinke used a crowdfunding café model to provide a platform for communication among entrepreneurs and investors. In June 2015, Xinke co-operated with a leading real estate company to create a crowd innovation café, and in August 2016, it received A-round financing that led to the establishment of a crowd innovation fund and the creation of a self-access media platform. Xinke had opened a high-end shared office to provide all around services such as funds, publicity, and venues for settled enterprises. It had a network of crowd innovation space (CIS) platforms in various cities across China and was beginning to build a nationwide CIS platform. Could the crowd innovation ecology designed by Xinke inject new vitality into the development of the CIS? How should Xinke's crowd innovation eco-strategy be improved? How could Xinke realize professionalization in and improvement of the crowd innovation ecology?

In November 2018, Five Guys, a fast-casual restaurant chain based in the United States, faced an important decision related to its future promotion strategy. Five Guys had started in 1986 as a small company with limited resources. The company had always avoided traditional advertising media, such as television, radio, print, and billboard advertisements. As a result of the company's success over the years, the founder and chief executive officer had a significantly larger promotional budget than ever before; he needed to develop a promotional strategy for the future. In particular, he needed to determine how to allocate the company's promotional budget. In which promotional media should he invest the company's promotional funds?

Tourism has been an important economic pillar for Singapore for decades, contributing 4% to Singapore's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). While Singapore is a well-known destination with Asians and Europeans, the country has yet to become a popular choice for US travellers who lived outside the gateway cities on the eastern and western coasts. Being the second largest economy in the world, the US presents huge potential for tourism in Asia, and specifically Singapore. Under the premise of the 'Passion Made Possible' brand for Singapore, jointly launched by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) in 2017, STB collaborated with Warner Bros. in promoting the film Crazy Rich Asians, a Hollywood romantic comedy based on a book by the same title. The film's huge success has helped raise the profile of Singapore in the US market. However, there were some misalignments in the interplay of STB's city branding vision, the cultural connection to Singaporeans and the image that US travellers had of Singapore.

It was January 2018. Nora Abd Manaf, Group Chief Human Capital Officer, Maybank, the largest bank by market capitalisation in Malaysia, is contemplating future challenges that the bank has to address in terms of artificial intelligence, the gig economy and a new generation of millennial employees. Since her joining the Bank in 2008, she and Dato' Sri Wahid, the then Group CEO of Maybank, have spearheaded a transformation strategy to grow Maybank from a strong local bank to a regional player. Her efforts have led to a revamping of the organisational structure of Maybank to facilitate its regional aspirations. The Talent Management Framework was renewed to drive a high-performance culture, and actions aligned with the Bank's objectives needed to be fairly recognised and rewarded. On the back of stellar results achieved in the implementation of the Maybank transformation strategy, Nora set her sights on maintaining the bank's lead against the new headwinds of digitisation and automation in the industry.

This case, set in June 2018, chronicles the challenges that Jack Sim, self-made millionaire and founder of the World Toilet Organisation (WTO), encountered in his decades-long quest to clean up dirty public toilets in Singapore's coffeeshops and hawker centres. A key obstacle he faced was the lack of quantitative data on toilet cleanliness, and the means to obtain it. Moreover, the majority of coffeeshop operators were resistant to investing in toilet cleaning. In November 2015, Sim visited Rosie Ching, a senior statistics lecturer at Singapore Management University (SMU), and after lengthy discussions, Ching developed a rigorous toilet cleanliness survey and a Toilet Cleanliness Index (TCI). TCI received great attention from the media and the public, but now in early 2018, Sim was doubtful: Could Singapore's dirty public toilets be cleaned up in the foreseeable future? Would the TCI effect a change for good and convince stakeholders of the necessity to act on the matter?

June 20, 2016. It was the day Magic Pony Technology galloped to fame after Twitter announced its acquisition of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up for a reported US$150 million. Co-founded by Rob Bishop and Zehan Wang in London in 2014, Magic Pony specialised in using machine learning, a branch of AI, to optimise image-processing technology that greatly enhanced the quality of video streaming over the Internet on mobile devices. Along with a team of highly-skilled computer and neuro-scientists, Magic Pony brought critical technology in video compression to Twitter which would strengthen the microblogging service's live streaming capabilities. To battle against stagnant subscriber growth, one of Twitter's best bets perhaps was to rely on high-quality live video streaming in an attempt to draw a larger user base from a broader cross-section of the society. On the other side of the deal, the successful exit of the 18-month-old start-up was engineered by its founders based on a mix of strategies which included securing investment from venture capitalists and resisting acquisition offers from smaller players while perfecting the technology until a sizeable offer (i.e., Twitter) came along. Looking back, was there a better time to sell? Why was Twitter successful in acquiring Magic Pony while others failed? What made Magic Pony a favourite acquisition target?

This case is set in October 2019. Masami Komatsu, CEO of Music Securities (MS), had received a request from Toyomi Electric Co. Ltd. Toyomi Electric had suffered damages to its factory and workforce in the 2011 earthquake that had struck Japan, and needed urgent financing to rebuild its production capacity. It sought help from MS to raise funds on its online crowdfunding platform, Securite. Securite was an investment crowdfunding platform with a focus on empathy-based financial inclusion. Among the several hundred funds it managed, Securite had previously set up disaster relief funds aimed at providing financial aid to businesses destroyed by natural disasters. As a victim of the 2011 earthquake, Toyomi Electric would qualify as a potential recipient of this financial aid. However, Toyomi Electric had a reputation for generating negative social impact by releasing pollutants into the air and water, harming the well-being of neighbouring populations and environment. Investment decisions in Securite were guided by three criteria: social returns, strength of the business model and expected investment returns. Before deciding to raise funds for Toyomi Electric, MS must evaluate the potential impact of its decision and the alignment with the MS' objectives.

Preparing for a potential interview, an MBA graduate reads extensively about Daimler AG. She learns about company's longtime presence in China manufacturing luxury automobiles and its continued investment in manufacturing and R&D capacity in that country. She also learns that the company financed part of its operations and growth in China by issuing bonds in both China and Hong Kong and wonders whether the company would return to those bond markets.