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Club Sportif MAA (the MAA) was an iconic fitness club and athletic institution in Montreal and the oldest fitness facility in Canada. In early 2017, the club's president and general manager faced a changing market and pressure to ensure that the club evolved and remained competitive. Consumer and fitness trends had increasingly fragmented the market in this area, and the MAA membership declined since 2016. The MAA, which traditionally served a fairly exclusive clientele, needed to examine its fitness, health, and social offerings to determine how to meet the evolving needs of a wider and increasingly diverse customer base without sacrificing the character of the brand. The president needed to decide how to preserve the MAA's upmarket image while expanding its appeal. He needed to determine which market segments to target and how best to communicate the MAA's offerings to these specific groups.

In 2016, the owners of Styles Inc. (Styles), a bespoke tailoring company in Toronto, Canada, needed to decide whether to discontinue the least profitable of the company's seven clothing lines or to increase that clothing line's retail selling price. Over the previous six years, Styles had been financially successful, and customer retention was a major factor in this success. However, competition was increasing and profits were shrinking. Should the owners drop the clothing line that had the lowest margin or increase its retail selling price? If they chose to increase the price, they would need to decide on the amount of the price increase. The owners wondered whether increasing the price would still enable them to meet their target contribution margin.

Rougir Cosmetics International (RCI), founded in 2010 and with headquarters in California, experienced double-digit growth for several years. At a board meeting in June 2016, RCI's chief executive officer (CEO) announced a large new order that represented a major opportunity to further expand into the ever-growing home shopping cosmetic business sector. However, the firm did not have the capacity to meet this transaction along with its normal business production schedule. Therefore, the only short-term possibility was to outsource some work to a third-party supplier. RCI had tried to avoid this in the past because of the proprietary nature of the company's product line. The board cautioned the CEO and asked how much of the pending order might have to be subcontracted out. The CEO had one week to complete an analysis using RCI's new analytics-based resource management system, and provide a recommendation.

In 2011, the UK founded a new government agency known as the "Government Digital Service" (or GDS). Facing significant budget challenges, several high profile IT failures, and growing demands to "modernize" government services, the government set a mission for GDS to champion a "digital culture" in government, ideally unleashing a wave of both cost savings and innovations. By 2012, GDS had identified billions of pounds of potential savings, centralized the government's web presence into a single domain (called GOV.UK), and received wide acclaim from technology commentators. However, the leaders of GDS felt there was significantly more work to be done--not only modernizing government services, but also convincing civil service to focus more on implementation, user needs, and digital services. This case provides an overview of GDS's work up to 2012, and considers the strategy and change management questions facing the agency as it seeks to expand. Case number 2106.0

Argentina's macroeconomic crisis of 2001-02 is a classic case of the interaction between exchange rate policy, fiscal policy, banking and external finance. It makes for a highly engaging teaching case because of its many layers. It was at one level a product of the hard peg of the Argentine currency to the dollar, and the loss of competitiveness with changing international conditions. The proximate cause of crisis was a run on reserves and bank deposits and dramatically country risk premium. But these symptoms were also intricately linked to fiscal policy, to IMF policy, to financial conditions and to Argentina's underlying political economy. The case is designed as a simulation, focused on the key moment of end-November 2001, with roles of Domingo Cavallo (Minister of Finance), the Argentine industry association, representatives of households, and the IMF. Students have to get inside the role to understand and defend the position of each group, drawing on tailored background material for each role. Case number 2086.0

For many years, renowned urbanist Richard Florida has married his long-held interest in urban economic development with the insights of urban sociologists on the corrosive effects of concentrated poverty, mapping the deep new divides that isolate the classes and tracing the growth of economic disadvantage in the suburbs. In this excerpt from his latest book, he presents some of his key findings, showing that 'urbanism for all' is contingent upon seven principles-including: building more affordable rental housing; investing in infrastructure; and making 'clustering' work for us.

This technical note provides hands-on instructions for searching, classifying, and obtaining documents from the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC) official document repository, EDGAR. It helps students become familiar with the different types and classifications of SEC filings available for public companies registered with the SEC.

This case was written for the EC course "Managing with Data Science." The course provides MBA students with no programming experience an introduction to the field of data science and its applications in business. Students learn to (1) carefully articulate the business ask, (2) reason carefully from the ask; through metrics and models, and outputs; and (3) evaluate outputs from models to (4) develop a plan for action. In this case students explore the challenges of using sentiment analysis to monitor and understand public perception around brands. Technical topics include building a filtering classifier using naive Bayes and sentiment analysis.

The Medium Corporation seeks to change how people author, consume and engage with content on the Internet. Founded by Ev Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, the company developed a digital publishing platform and set of social network tools that allow people to spend substantive time with weighty issues facing society, business and politics. Fighting the trend of quick engagement with short-form content on the Internet, Medium wrestles with how to deliver an experience that advances important topics with ease, flexibility, and meaning, while working to build a large and successful company. The challenges of building a successful digital media company, balancing tool development with content curation, and developing a successful monetization model are the core topics facing the firm's leadership team.

Following the announcement of the merger of the Turkish Economic Bank (TEB) and Fortis Bank AS, Varol Civil, TEB's CEO, is faced with the task of executing the merger of these two entities. First, all parties must agree to the economic terms of this merger; a process that is challenging due to the complex ownership structures of these banks. Second, Civil and his team must find a way to combine the operations of the banks. With meaningful overlap between the two franchises the potential for cost savings and synergies is significant. However, the risks involved are also significant.

Shirdi Infratech Pvt. Ltd. was in the wooden furniture manufacturing business and dealt with a wide range of diversified products such as modular kitchens, furniture, and doors. With its normal profit margin, the firm was growing, but not at a rate that satisfied the owner. At the same time, the business faced personnel management issues. The dilemma began in 2015 when the owner learned that one of his top performers had potentially leaked confidential information to a competitor and was offered employment by them. The owner recognized this employee's importance, as well as the critical timing of the project he was working on. In light of this, would the best option be to retain that employee or let him go? The owner was also concerned about social capital management, and how to use the employee's intellectual skills to develop others in the organization.

In January 2015, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Canaan Group, a privately owned logistics conglomerate of businesses in Vancouver, Canada, was considering how to capitalize on opportunities in the freight forwarding industry. The first thing he needed to do was stabilize the Export Cargo Specialist (ECS) division. The ECS division focused on ocean freight forwarding-helping customers coordinate and ship goods from origin to destination. To counter a glut of shipping capacity and fall in demand over the past few years, the CEO had restructured the roles and assignments in the division. He attempted to create a cross-trained workforce capable of performing a range of functions for clients. However, issues emerged with the restructuring, leading to employee departures and, along with the industry changes, a net loss in operations. The CEO was looking to turn things around and avoid further mistakes. He wondered if he should give his restructuring experiment more time, bring in an experienced project manager, or promote a current ECS staff member to find a solution.

While donating blood on campus, a management science graduate student noticed that the mobile blood donor clinic set up at his university's community centre was a congested tandem queuing system. Finding one-and-one-half hours too long for donors to wait, the student considered how the process could be reduced by at least half an hour. He needed to devise a reasonably precise model to represent the donor flow in the clinic. Using either the mode or the average service times supplied by the nurses, the student could build a relatively straightforward discrete-event simulation model to identify bottlenecks and improve the donor flow.

BrightView Plumbing and Heating (BrightView) was founded in 1997 to provide plumbing services for both residential and commercial customers. The founder's son joined the company in 2008 and implemented a new operational strategy. However, he soon discovered problems in the process and procedures. Although he was able to apply an effective system for warehousing products internally, by 2015, the day-to-day policies and operational activities were not proving to be efficient, and the cost of goods sold was rising at a higher rate than the increase in sales. The company encountered miscommunication between the appointment scheduling (dispatching) and the availability of parts. BrightView needed to resolve the issues by analyzing the current situation and developing recommendations for improvement.

On January 3, 2011, the Canadian Competition Bureau was reviewing a recent business merger. CCS Corporation Inc. (Tervita) had acquired Complete Environmental Inc. (Complete). Prior to its acquisition by Tervita, Complete had received regulatory approval to operate a secure landfill site in Northeastern British Columbia (NEBC). However, a complaint about the purchase was filed by SECURE Energy Services Inc. (SECURE), one of Tervita's competitors. The complaint claimed that the price Tervita paid for Complete was well above fair market value, and that the purchase would eliminate a competitor in the NEBC market. At the time, only two secure landfills operated in NEBC. Both were owned by Tervita, which provided a wide-range of waste management, recovery, and disposal services to the North American oil and gas industry. The Canadian Competition Bureau had to evaluate the economics underlying Tervita's decision to pay a premium price for Complete. It also needed to determine whether the acquisition violated the Competition Act, or whether the complaint was merely a frivolous case of "sour grapes" stemming from SECURE's own failure to acquire Complete.

Supplement to case W17521.

This case explores the strategic decision-making process of premium power tools manufacturer Hilti in 1999, when the company was considering implementing a fleet management system in the construction industry. Fleet management would involve a shift from selling power tools to leasing them as a service. For Hilti, it represented an entirely new business model, which would substantially differentiate the company from its competitors. While fleet management had the potential to significantly improve the customer experience, Hilti was already a successful firm under its extant model, and had to decide whether the restructuring of its business model was worth the risk.

The case briefly describes the 112 year history of the organization, and focuses particularly on the changes wrought by its new leader David Yarnold who was brought in by the board in 2010. Under Yarnold's leadership the organization went through two strategic plans (2012-2016 and 2016-2020), and brought about many changes. At the start of 2017, Yarnold declared his goal of making Audubon the most effective conservation network in America. What actions should Audubon take to get to that goal?

This case was written for the EC course "Managing with Data Science." The course provides MBA students with no programming experience an introduction to the field of data science and its applications in business. Students learn to (1) carefully articulate the business ask, (2) reason carefully from the ask, through metrics and models, and outputs; and (3) evaluate outputs from models to (4) develop a plan for action. The case features the work of LP Maurice (HBS '08) as he decides to launch an online business to unify the scheduling data of a fragmented bus industry, only to find that the data he needs simply does not exist. The case follows him and his team as they take on challenges as the start-up evolves and develops. Topics include acquiring data, web-based prototyping to understand customer preferences, and customer acquisition and retention metrics (SEO & SEM).

Narayana Health, an Indian private healthcare provider, was established with the aim of providing affordable healthcare services without compromising quality. Over the years, its growth and expansion was financed by private equity investors. In August 2015, private equity investors of the company decided to go public through the offer for sale route. Private equity investors had to decide the value of the initial public offering (IPO) and whether the time was appropriate for Narayana to go public. To do so, they needed to consider the company's financial performance, the pros and cons of the company's strategy and business model, the industry's future growth potential, and macroeconomic factors.