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Scanteak Corporation was a furniture retailer founded in Singapore in the 1970s. By 2010, it had established more than 100 stores around the world. It had also become the first furniture company to be listed on the Taiwan OTC (Over-the-Counter) Exchange. The two founders had invested a great deal in developing the business and preparing their children to become their successors. In 2003, the two founders' daughter joined the company to help grow the family business, achieving great success in brand promotion and market expansion. In 2010, the two founders' son was asked to help with the business in Singapore or Taiwan but rejected their offer, stating that he would only agree if he could independently run the Japan division of the business, which was in deficit. The two founders questioned whether their recently graduated son could handle the business in Japan, and wondered how to respond to his bold request.

Supplement to case W19053 This part (B) of the case follows Scanteak: The Making of Successors in a Family Firm (A) to disclose how the founders of Scanteak Corporation responded to the proposal put forward from their second child, as described in part A of the case. While part A focuses on the issue of succession at the company, part B follows the business developments and discusses the transfer of management rights and family wealth to the next generation.

In 2016, the promoters of Savourites Hospitality Private Limited, which owned the fine-dining restaurant 6 Ballygunge Place, in Kolkata, were visiting London to explore possible future growth plans. Their foray into the market of Bengali cuisine through 6 Ballygunge Place had been successful and had developed into a strong destination brand. With a view to growing, Savourites' promoters had ventured into newer product offerings and had tried moving into new geographical markets. In order to expand the brand's range, they had launched a pan-Asian restaurant; launched the Bengal Lounge, which revived the Bengali penchant for never-ending chat sessions; and started fixed-menu outlets as variants of their core offering, hoping to tap into the middle-class market. They had also moved into other locations within Kolkata and to other cities. Their various expansions and diversifications had gone well, and the team found that the bulk of the growing consumer base was the Bengali customers that they had hoped to attract. They wondered how to keep the growth momentum going while still appealing to this clientele.

On October 10, 2017, the co-founders of Snapper Future Tech Private Limited (Snapper) were discussing the solutions they had proposed at a recent blockchain business conference. Snapper's initiative envisaged digital solutions for smooth land registration, adding transparency, accountability, and good governance at every stage of the process. Snapper had developed a proof of concept for land records on a private blockchain in a cloud-based environment. Its live demonstration of the proposal was well received by the conference attendees; the challenge was whether the government would consider the solution and engage on a long-term basis with the company for blockchain solutions in land registrations. Would Snapper's journey be acknowledged in the annals of the country's digital revolution?

After finishing a PhD in immunology and working for a few years for a large pharmaceutical company, Eric Lafferty entered an executive MBA program intending to reorient his career toward more meaningful work. Thus he leapt at the chance to work in a significant leadership position at a government agency where he would be in charge of a group that vetted academic proposals to work toward experimental vaccines and drugs. However, he begins to reconsider it all after a series of bad experiences with a direct report whom he cannot fire. The case is designed to surface and explore students' instinctive decision-making and action tendencies around a complicated problem. Thus it is short enough to be read and responded to in class. Students are assigned readings and assignments related to the case after class discussion in which they are encouraged to reflect on their initial responses. The case is quite flexible and would work in any course that deals with leadership, difficult conversations, decision-making, organizational behavior, human resources, and related topics. It is appropriate for a range of levels and audiences, including undergraduate, MBA, and executive education.

How do our senses affect which products we like and don't like? How can products be made more sensorially engaging? What should managers consider when devising sensory marketing strategies? As companies are becoming more aware of consumers' subconscious responses to products and services, they are relying less on traditional advertising and marketing and more on the products, themselves, to influence customers by stimulating an emotional response. This conceptual note defines sensory marketing, its theoretical foundations, and how it can best be used to shape consumer perception and behavior. It explores how deliberate sensory inputs can impact customers on a subconscious level by triggering positive emotional responses to products and brands through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. The note also discusses advances in neuroscience and neuro-imaging techniques that have enabled more effective use of sensory marketing.

Spreadsheet supplement for case IMB761

The first company under the Amara Raja Group (ARG) was established in 1984, i.e. Amara Raja Electronics Limited (AREL) followed by Amara Raja Batteries Limited (ARBL). Its founder leveraged the presence of his family in Renigunta, a rural village in South India, and chose to start the industry there to create employment opportunities. Preference is given to local population in all ARG enterprises. Despite its strong people orientation, the HR department/function at ARG got strengthened only after Jaikrishna strived to make it central to business. The department's evolution has been demarcated in three phases. The first and second phase saw few initiatives, and during the third phase the HR department was structured according to the Dave Ulrich Strategic HR Model. While this structure had been successful until now, certain sections in ARG still doubted its sustainability.

Researchers have learned to mine a unique set of data that serves as a slow-motion replay of how an organization and its people function: the company's e-mail. Although e-mail analysis has largely focused on internal communications, a new study uses it to examine how employees interact with clients. Researchers studied the e-mail behaviors of teams working with key client accounts at a global professional services firm. Each month during the study, team leaders attended a "virtual mirroring" session in which they were shown key metrics from their team's e-mails--measures of such things as the simplicity of language in the subject line and the speed of responses to client messages. The feedback from these sessions led to positive changes in team members' e-mail behavior and boosted client satisfaction. In an accompanying Q&A, the firm's head of innovation discusses the research and the company's response.

When a research team tracked the help managers gave their colleagues, it discovered something surprising: Offers to lend a hand weren't always appreciated--particularly if they weren't solicited.

Set in 2018, the case describes the evolution of New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) in the Indian news broadcasting industry. Starting as a news production company in 1988, NDTV ventured into general entertainment, media consulting, and e-commerce over the next three decades. Students analyze how the firm tailored its activities to pursue a differentiation strategy in news broadcasting. They also assess the challenges faced by NDTV when it diversified into new businesses and its ability to leverage core assets (star journalists) in these businesses.

The case on Siwggy, Foodora,and Yelp analyzes the hyperlocal food delivery business models that are popular in their respective markets. These multi-sided firms bring together local businesses such as restaurants and salons with their patrons through assistance in service discovery and delivery. This case elaborates how the foodtech space is evolving in countries such as India, Germany, and the United States, and how each of these hyperlocal platforms are adopting different strategies to sustain their business in their primary markets. When used as an introduction to multi-sided platforms, this case can help the student understand the hyperlocal space, the logistics challenges that food industry faces and how these delivery service platforms help address the same. This case also looks at what threats these platforms pose to its different sides and how envelopment possibilities emerge. It should help the students appreciate how a technology platform brings differentiation to the traditional food industry, and how a platform business model can provide significant competitive differentiation. By presenting three different hyperlocal platforms in as many geographies, the case study helps illustrate the commonality of business models while bringing forth the nuances of each market and its operational complexities.

Organizations large and small must source a variety of items and services in order to sustain their quotidian operations. This activity takes centerstage with retail outfits, where sourcing constitutes a primary business activity. This case illustrates the problems faced by a fledgling online start-up called Fiesta Gifts, which caters to a clientele of retail stores that are spread across continental United States. Under pressure from its investors, the firm's management is faced with the option of turning around the loss-making operation or shutting shop. The case begins by familiarizing the reader with the context of the US gifting and novelty sector. It then describes the complexities of Fiesta's operations, which involves sourcing thousands of items from hundreds of suppliers and routing them to customers through distribution centers that are located across the country. Despite fulfilling a steady stream of customer orders all year round, the company has accrued substantial losses; inefficiencies in its supply chain are largely to blame. Taking note of this, the CEO has demanded concrete action steps from the senior management. The CFO and CPO have initiated a strategic sourcing exercise, with a vision to curtail spend by rationalizing item categories and suppliers, and to improving lead times. Working from a dataset of purchases that have been made by Fiesta's customers since the launch of the online portal, the duo has employed analytical tools like ABC analysis to arrive at a grand list of decisions; implementing them could address the problems that the firm is facing. The CEO must deliberate the proposal points and decide on further action.

The case is about inflation and how it is computed in the category of food price indexes. The case also covers the tracking and the value of using price data from online sources. The case extends to understanding if it was better or not to formulate inflation through a median CPI. The case provides learning stimulations through rich data sources.

Janarthanan Balasubramanian, Division Head, Information Technology and online Communications at ISKCON wanted to understand the visitor feedback so that appropriate measures can be taken to improve the visitor experience at ISKCON. The primary problem at hand for Janarthanan was to reduce the existing manual effort for his team. Currently three resources are involved in collecting the reviews from social platforms and labeling each review into one of the four classes, viz. positive, negative, neutral and mixed. Two other resources convert the reviews from paper feedback forms/feedback registers placed at different points inside the temple, to an Excel file. The team begins its day by manually collecting, labeling and collating the reviews in an Excel file. At the end of the day, these labelled reviews would be stored in the database. At the end of the week, the total count of reviews for the four classes, viz. positive, negative, neutral and mixed was calculated to understand the overall sentiment. This was an extremely time-consuming manual process from data collection, that is, manually copy pasting the comments from social mediums to data collation and labeling. Janarthanan wanted his team to spend time and effort on analyzing the data and working on remedial actions. He wanted to understand the issues/topics that ISKCON should work on, rather than manually classify reviews and get the count of each review type. Janarthanan felt that getting only the split of positive/negative/neutral/mixed classes is not enough to draw inferences.

The case analyses an opportunity of risk arbitrage associated with stock buy-backs (repurchases) available to retail shareholders in India. The opportunity arises from a differential treatment of small (retail) and large shareholders by Indian stock buy-back regulations. There has been strong anecdotal evidence of individuals taking advantage of this opportunity to make significant returns. The case illustrates the mechanics of the transaction, explores various sources of risks that differentiate it from a pure arbitrage play and the impact of these risks on the profitability of the transaction. The case also analyses the systemic checks that prevent arbitrageurs from making large abnormal profits using this opportunity. Finally, the case touches upon the motivation underlying this regulation and the regulatory considerations involved in remedying the risk arbitrage opportunity.

The case describes the contract selection issue by an embedded product manufacturing company towards the procurement of a component. The manufacturing manager is evaluating various procurement contracts. Currently, the company sources the component through a long-term wholesale contract combined with sourcing it from an alternate online platform. The supplier firm has suggested an options-based contract. The manufacturing manager is also planning to discuss buyback-based sourcing contract with the supplier.

This case, Amara Raja Group (B): Vision 2025 is set in 2019 where the HR department has gone through multiple interventions commencing in 2017, including building a business specific recruitment strategy, making HR digital, and development of an employee value proposition. With changes in external environment including increased digitisation, automation, and industry 4.0 along with the internal shift of leadership of ARG from the founder RNG to Jay Galla to the newer generation, Jaikrishna ponders upon the way forward for the HR function of the group.

"It's a celebration of the diversity and inclusion this project represents from its design, to its contracting, to its nonprofit partners," he said, referring to the process that Massport, the land's owner, had undertaken to select a developer for the hotel. Massport required that bidders incorporate diversity and inclusion (D&I) plans into their bids and announced that the plans would be considered alongside more traditional evaluation criteria such as building design, construction experience, and financial capabilities. On May 22, 2018, executives from the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) along with Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh gathered in the Seaport District of South Boston for a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the start of construction on a new hotel in Boston's Seaport District. The hotel, when completed in early 2021, would be the fourth largest in the state. "Today marks more than just a groundbreaking," said Mayor Walsh. "It's a celebration of the diversity and inclusion this project represents from its design, to its contracting, to its nonprofit partners," he said, referring to the process that Massport, the land's owner, had undertaken to select a developer for the hotel. Massport required that bidders incorporate diversity and inclusion (D&I) plans into their bids and announced that the plans would be considered alongside more traditional evaluation criteria such as building design, construction experience, and financial capabilities. The move was so unusual that some in the Boston development community doubted Massport was serious about giving so much weight-25%-to bidders' D&I plans. Nevertheless, at the groundbreaking of the $550 million hotel, Massport CEO Thomas Glynn told a Boston Business Journal reporter that Massport intended to use the new selection model for future projects.

When the Hong Kong billion-dollar revitalization of a set of derelict cotton mills in Hong Kong was first conceptualized by property heiress Vanessa Cheung, the project had a clear direction around which it was to be oriented. The Mills was to be a social institution: a space in which an otherwise poor and fragmented local community could connect with both its past, as a center of textile production, and its future. Financed by Nan Fung Group, Vanessa's multigenerational family business and one of Asia's most valuable property development companies, the Mills was underwritten without the diligence that might proceed projects of a comparable scale. Three years from project inception but still several months away from the facilities opening to the public in late 2018, the Mills struggled to operationalize the three business models it had evolved to encompass, namely, an incubation platform including co-working space; shopping space targeting pop-up stores and smaller retailers; a heritage center to operate as a non-profit museum. Vanessa also wondered how her project will deliver on its original vision of creating shared value for its stakeholders.