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In 2012, the incoming general manager for AdNike Pharmaceutical's operations in China faced a major challenge. AdNike was a leading global pharmaceutical company that had been in China for over 40 years. However, its performance in the country had been worse than expected. In the most recent half-decade of its operations in China, AdNike faced a changing regulatory environment that was becoming more challenging to navigate. Also, local competitors were making significant inroads into AdNike's business. The new leader was charged with reinvigorating the company so it could achieve the growth and performance that was originally intended. Despite being new to China and not speaking any Mandarin, he had to determine a new strategic direction for AdNike while balancing the needs of external and internal stakeholders.

This industry note details the state of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries in China in 2012. It has details on the size of the respective industries, their growth, their regulation and key political actors, as well as information and analysis on other important stakeholders in the pharmaceutical and health care sectors in China in the 2010s. The level of detail is high, as is the complexity of information presented. The note can be used independently, however, it was written primarily to serve as a companion to W16865.

On July 19, 2013, the documentary Blackfish was released. The movie claimed to have uncovered a series of animal abuses at SeaWorld and alluded to the negative impact of captivity on orcas, known as killer whales, which had resulted in the harm and even death of whale trainers. Whether real or alleged, such negative publicity threatened to affect the company's image, stock prices, profits, and many of the company's corporate relations. SeaWorld now faced several options in terms of responding to the movie release: ignore it, respond to it, or use it as an opportunity to completely rebrand. Which option would be the best for the company in the long run?

May 2016, Singapore. Umesh Shah, the head of Unilever International (UI), was pleased with what his team had been able to achieve since the business unit was created at the beginning of 2012 by merging the operating companies' export units with the purpose to better exploit the "white spaces," i.e. business opportunities created by new global trends and marginal areas not given proper focus and support by Unilever operating companies (OpCos) because they did not belong to key core brands, consumers, channels and geographies. By late 2015 UI had grown into a very profitable business, doubling the turnover it had inherited in 2012, by pushing the envelope of Unilever sales and filling some cracks within its existing markets and channels. This included, for example, growing Unilever's presence in smaller markets like the Pacific Islands, increasing the sales of non-core brands in fringe markets, targeting original subgroups of consumers (such as immigrants, religious and other ethnic categories) in traditional markets or focusing on non-traditional channels such as airports and tax-free outfits. UI faced strong resistance from the OpCos initially, but gradually won them over. He still faced critical questions about UI's future. Would its ambition to almost double turnover by 2020 require making bigger bets and accepting more risk? What was the optimal scale of UI business in the long term? Should it review the working arrangements with the OpCos to remain mutually beneficial? Would the next generation of UI leaders come from within or outside the business? Were changes in the way staff were evaluated and compensated required? Learnong objective: Developing a white space organization, nurturing the internal entrepreneurs, managing fast growth, new business models, intrapreneurship, managing incentive programs, managing brands on the margin, niche marketing, expansion strategies on the fringe.

With Brazil's crisis as the backdrop, the 2016 ALI Fellows, Partners, and guests, traveled throughout São Paulo in June of 2016 and were exposed to social innovations in Heliopolis (the largest favela), the transformation of Vila Madalena (neighborhood), cultural inclusion efforts in Sala São Paulo and Pinacoteca (downtown), and highly respected social change leaders and thinkers throughout the trip. The participants were able to engage with a wide array of projects and understand the challenges on the ground more clearly.

For nearly 75 years, the Johnson Publishing Company has been the most successful African American magazine publisher. Its flagship Ebony magazine was an iconic coffee table fixture for decades in black households of all classes, making founder John H. Johnson the first African American to make the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans. But the privately held company was now in the hands of his daughter, and it faced the bracing, debilitating winds besetting the entire magazine and newspaper industry. Linda Johnson Rice now had to decide what to do with the company's publications and brands.

Mikey Dickerson and Haley Van Dyck found themselves far from home and far from certainty about where to take the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) next. In the summer of 2015, they had landed in London to meet with Mike Bracken, director of the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS). In 2014, President Barack Obama had given USDS a monumental task: transform how the federal government worked for the American people, digitally. The seeds of USDS had grown out of the rescue of HealthCare.gov, the federal website meant to allow consumers to shop for private health insurance. Its launch and crash in October 2013 had threatened one of Obama's signature policy achievements. Dickerson and a small team had been drafted to help fix HealthCare.gov and had successfully done so in a matter of months. While in London, Dickerson and Van Dyck wondered, of the other areas that most cried out for new technology approaches, which should be tackled next? Moreover, GDS had embedded satellite teams into the U.K.'s government agencies to guide, assist, and in some cases control, each agency's digital presence. Did London hold lessons for if, and how, these teams could be successful in the U.S. government? USDS had begun to experiment with this model too, embedding teams in a handful of departments in the U.S federal government. How could USDS best work with the dozens of agencies that were actually doing the work of government?

Rajat Gupta, former managing director of McKinsey & Company, a director of Goldman Sachs, Proctor & Gamble, and AMR, and a well-known philanthropist, was convicted of engaging in insider trading. The case explores Gupta's rise and the later legal problems he faced.

Supplement to case 417010.

In January of 2016, Singapore International Airlines Group (SIA) announced that it had secured more than 90 per cent stake in Tiger Airways Holdings Limited (Tigerair), and would take Tigerair private. Once the buyout offer closed on February 19, trading in Tigerair's shares would be suspended because the free float had fallen below the minimum 10 per cent threshold. Tigerair had been suffering losses amounting to more than SG$600 million from 2012 to 2015. When SIA initiated the buyout offer, Tigerair's shareholders wanted to use the discounted cash flow model, the discounted dividend model, and relative valuation to determine whether the buyout was a fair deal.

In May 2010, Forbes Technosys Limited (FTL) was not doing well. After more than a year, the company's bill payment kiosk business was losing money and no longer seemed viable. The time had come to re-evaluate all aspects of this business line and make decisions regarding FTL's future course of action. Accordingly, FTL's chief executive officer proposed an idea regarding prepaid mobile recharges using the existing bill payment kiosks, along with a new technology platform for this purpose. He hoped that handheld terminals could be used by retail-level franchisees to sell recharges to prepaid mobile users. Essentially, FTL had three options: should the company persist with or pivot the service provider business model, or "perish" the complete solution provider idea entirely and revert to being a product manufacturer? Whichever strategy FTL chose, it would have to limit and balance both operating and capital expenses.

Supplement to case W16853.

In 2014, Alibaba Group (Alibaba), the largest e-commerce platform operator in China, boasted in its New York Stock Exchange prospectus about its e-commerce ecosystem, which was being built over time. Alibaba's chairman and chief executive officer declared that the company's mission was to "make it easy to do business anywhere." However, the ecosystem, which was well suited for people's Internet habits of the past, would not likely be up-to-date in the mobile age, when browsing for information no longer posed a problem and people became fascinated by mobile apps that provided practical and entertaining services. Internet traffic, representing people's attention, started to take on a new pattern. Having thrived on pooling Internet traffic by displaying a huge variety of merchandise on its platform, Alibaba could not afford to now lose Internet traffic to countless customized small apps.

Converting myriad data into a simple, visual conceptual model is the basis for developing the ability to communicate consumer marketing insights up, down, and across the organization. This enables the marketer to persuade others of his or her analysis and helps with alignment of the broader organization. And while throughout the MBA program, students have been exposed to various models, once students graduate and enter the workforce, they will be expected to convert complex data into usable insight, typically through visual models of their own design. This exercise, then, is designed to help the students transition from users of conceptual models to creators or developers of models. The ability to create a conceptual model sharpens the abstract thinking required to convert insight about the market, consumers, competitors, or other entities into an understandable model. The detailed teaching note accompanying this exercise guides instructors through the process of eliciting and evaluating students' visual models, and then proposes a simple, complete model that frames many consumer categories surprisingly well. Additionally, there are videos that can be used to help explain the development of a new-to-the-world conceptual model. This exercise is intended for use in either an undergraduate capstone class or at any point during an MBA, executive MBA, global MBA, or executive education program.

Student spreadsheet for case KEL987.

Quilts of Denmark was a Danish start-up company founded in 2000 with the goal of producing high-quality, functional quilts and pillows that contributed to healthy sleep. The company's open innovation with a space agency and technology company resulted in an "intelligent" quilt that regulated body heat, providing users with an elusive but much-desired experience: a good night's sleep. Selling a premium product in a commodity market was a challenge, and competitors were close behind. In 2010, Quilts of Denmark was preparing to introduce a new generation of temperature-regulating quilts, and the company's founders needed to decide how to introduce their newest innovation to the market.

Founded in 2002, Hangzhou, China-based Beingmate was a major producer of infant formula and related products in the high-demand Chinese market. After an infamous 2008 food safety episode in China, in which toxic infant formula sickened thousands of babies and led to the collapse of several domestic infant formula brands, Beingmate-whose products tested clean-had risen to become a leader among China's many infant formula brands. But while Beingmate was not implicated in the 2008 scandal, the company could not escape the deep consumer distrust of domestic infant formula brands that still pervaded China in 2016. Foreign brands, priced at a substantial premium, were strongly preferred by consumers who could afford them. The field of domestic infant formula brands was crowded and extremely competitive, leading to price wars and intense margin pressure. This case allows students to discuss the keys to Beingmate's past successes and debate its existing strategy in the context of a very complicated market. One key question is how Beingmate might leverage its partnerships with Ireland-based Kerry Group and New Zealand's Fonterra to enhance its competitive position.

This tool can be used to design, or test the design, of any job in any organization. The module introduces four concepts: span of control, span of accountability, span of influence, and span of support and explains how these variable affect job design. JDOT includes four sequential steps to test whether the resources provided to the job being analyzed are sufficient to meet the demands imposed by that job. After determining whether a job is designed for success (or failure), JDOT provides a menu of items that can be changed to improve the effectiveness of the job. While this module is designed to be used alone, it is part of the Strategy Execution series. Taken together, the series forms a complete course that teaches the latest techniques for using performance measurement and control systems to implement strategy. Modules 1 - 4 set out the foundations for strategy implementation. Modules 5 - 10 teach quantitative tools for performance measurement and control. Modules 11 - 15 illustrate the use of these techniques by managers to achieve profit goals and strategies. View the full Strategy Execution series at: hbsp.harvard.edu/strategy-execution.