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Good morning Mr. Teichner, After having arrived well in China on May 9 and some intense experiences, observations, and conversations, I see the urgent requirement to talk to you about the situation and next steps. Andreas knew that he was expected to manage the turnaround and get the business unit out of the red. Aiming to describe his action plan to Max Teichner, his mind wandered back to his impressions of the first two and a half weeks as the new sales and marketing director of CWS-boco China.

In August 2018, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. Whole Foods was struggling with high costs and faced growing competition from traditional supermarkets offering more organic products. Prior to the acquisition, Whole Foods began rolling out a new order-to-shelf (OTS) inventory management system that many observers believed had led to shortages. For years, store team leaders at Whole Foods were empowered to make inventory decisions and tailor their stores to meet local needs, but OTS came with strict rules for purchasing and displaying goods which upset many employees. Should Amazon push Whole Foods to improve performance by emphasizing efficiency and standardization? Or should it aim to maintain a sense of empowerment among employees?

ZBJ.com (ZBJ), an online platform that connects knowledge workers to small and medium-sized enterprises, is China's largest outsourcing platform. Founded by Mingyue Zhu in 2006, ZBJ had grown into a unicorn with 4,000 employees and a daily transaction volume of RMB15 million by 2017. During the company's 11-year history, ZBJ had launched ten transformation campaigns to overcome various challenges by changing its products, operations, and business model. For example, it encountered winner-takes-all competition, disintermediation (when service providers and clients took transactions off the platform to avoid the platform's 20% commission fees), the rise of fake transactions, member management issues, and difficulties in delivering satisfactory services to large enterprises. Zhu must decide how to use the next campaign to address challenges that had emerged since the last campaign and how ZBJ should expand globally.

This note provides a very concise (2 page) introduction to game theory.

STRIVR, a company focused on virtual reality training, has decided to shift focus from sports to enterprise customers. The change in strategy requires the CEO to solve a number of issues. The company initally offered training for hard skills, but clients have been requesting soft skills training. Should STRIVR puruse this new opportunity? How should STRIVR price its software for enterprise customers? Was it a good idea for STRIVR to build generic training products that could potentially scale quickly?

In 2016, a young South African left her secure office job to pursue her passion for social entrepreneurship in the youth development field. She had been volunteering with street children, but she wanted to do more by drawing on her entrepreneurial experience from high school and university. She followed her passion, and experienced a number of challenges, but also early successes over her first four years of social entrepreneurship, including the formation of her social business, Beyond the Lemonade Stand. Business was steady but she struggled with getting the commitment needed in poor township schools to make the program a success. She began to question the core purpose of her organization and wondered if she would be better off pursuing opportunities offered by middle-class and private schools that wanted her services.

In 2015, MobilityWorks, the largest mobility dealership and reformer of wheelchair accessible vehicles (WAVs) in the United States, found itself unable to cater to a large enough fraction of the population with limited mobility. With the baby boomers starting to retire, the gap was widening at a pace much faster than the growth of the WAV industry. How could MobilityWorks re-work its business strategy in order to grow across different market segments?

After Amazon.com announced it would acquire Whole Foods, shares of supermarkets in the United States were hit hard; the same was true for grocers in Europe, as investors there worried about the possibility of Amazon moving beyond US borders in the grocery space. Because little had been said regarding the motivation behind the acquisition, the CEO of a large organic-foods supermarket group in Europe decided that the potential impact of this acquisition might warrant some reflection. He wanted to start by looking at the implications of the acquisition on Amazon's consolidated financial statements.

This technical note is employed in MBA, executive education, and undergraduate courses that cover the art of persuasion. It is used in the core Management Communication course at Darden. Employing the canons of rhetoric devised by Aristotle and his classical contemporaries, the objective of the note is to provide students with a clear and usable map to guide them as they seek to understand the dynamics involved in persuading others. Persuasion is a critical management skill that must be mastered at all levels of the organization, but it is especially important for those at the leadership level. Most managerial communication goes beyond the sharing of information and involves elements of persuasion. Along with the five canons-invention, arrangement, memory, style, and delivery-this note also outlines the three primary modes of persuasion: ethos (an appeal to values), pathos (an emotional appeal), and logos (a logic-based appeal). This note often is used in conjunction with the technical note, Leadership Voice and Style.

This technical note is used in management communications or strategic communication courses in MBA or executive education programs where students are learning to develop their ability to persuade others through oral and written communication. It includes a framework for assessing the various skill sets that characterize accomplished communicators and guidance for both extroverts and introverts on refining their particular leadership voice and style. These are powerful tools for managers who wish to distinguish their organization from the competition in part by coaching team members to become exceptional communicators. This technical note is particularly impactful for courses where students have an individual speaking assignment or a group presentation. This note often is used in conjunction with the technical note, The Canons of Rhetoric.

Student spreadsheet for case W18165.

Student spreadsheet for case 218078.

Friday, June 16, 2017, began with a jolt to the US commercial real estate market when Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Stock prices for Kroger, SuperValu, Publix, and discount stores like Costco and Target tumbled. Real estate equity experts jumped into action to analyze the deal. These experts considered what synergies the Amazon/Whole Foods Market combination would create and what impact the deal would have on consumer shopping habits, retail tenants, commercial real estate developers, and real estate investment trusts (REITs). How will this deal change the risk scenarios for all US retail investments? In this case, students are asked to consider the best course forward for real estate investors in the newly changed retail landscape.

In 1994, Chinese Vice-Premier Li Lanqing and then Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew signed the Agreement on the Joint Development of Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). Within the next five years, SIP faced steep competition from the Suzhou New District (SND), a project developed and controlled by the local government. As a result, SIP reported an accumulated loss of US$90 million from 1994 to 2000. Both governments met and agreed for the Singapore consortium to reduce its shareholding from the original agreement of 65% to 35% and to transfer management control to the Chinese consortium by 2001.

Supplement to case NTU163. In 2001, the Singapore government decided to withdraw from the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) investment. The rival Suzhou New District (SND) project had mastered Singapore's approach to developing industrial parks and began to improve its own infrastructure and administrative practices. The Singapore team was a willing teacher to transfer knowledge but the Suzhou municipal officials had engaged in competitive learning behaviour. They did not learn the "why", only the "what" and "how". As a result, SNP faced many problems due to various "software" issues. The Suzhou officials wanted to explore the possibility of selling the problem-ridden SND to Singapore.

In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," which posited that innate biological differences between men and women-as opposed to hiring biases, gender discrimination, or a hostile workforce-were at least partially responsible for the low numbers of women in tech. At the time, 20% of Google's tech workforce, and 31% of its overall staff, was female. Damore also admonished Google for silencing opinions that challenged what he viewed as the company's politically liberal belief system. Reactions to both the memo's content and Google's decision to fire Damore were swift and varied. Some praised the company for signaling intolerance of any marginalization of women. Others criticized Google for terminating an employee for a seemingly innocuous act of expression. Danielle Brown, Google's new vice president and chief diversity and inclusion officer, hired just a few weeks before the memo was leaked to the public, must now advise Google's top leadership team on dealing with the fallout.