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After a period of poor stock-market performance, conglomerate Chestnut Foods (Chestnut) faces the acquisition of its stock by an activist investor. The new investor demands the sale of Chestnut's high-growth division, which contrasts with the CFO's turnaround plan to expand this same division. To disentangle the way forward for Chestnut, students are invited to grapple with the risk-adjusted performance of each division and the estimation of division-specific hurdle rates. Students learn to appreciate the importance of using risk-adjusted hurdle rates in establishing appropriate investment policy.

Bridj, a Boston startup that provides Big Data-powered, "pop-up" bus routes that respond to transportation demand, has been in operation for a little over a year and has recently launched service in Washington, D.C., its second market. Despite media acclaim and positive relations with a wide range of stakeholders, Bridj faces challenges controlling costs, driving adoption, and improving its technology.

Swedish electronics accessories retailer Kjell is considering several issues as it plots its next stage of growth. How should it balance opportunities to expand retail stores into a new market (Oslo, Norway) with additional growth in its home market-Sweden-with decisions about investments to build out its nascent online channel? Simultaneously, the company is piloting a new sales associate performance management system: should store associates be measured by monthly targets, or will daily targets prove to be more useful?

This case is a study of the transnational collaboration in China's motorcycle industry from the 1980s to 2010s between Chongqing Jianshe Motorcycle Co. (CJM), a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), and Yamaha Motor Co. (YMC), a Japanese global motorcycle company. It examines the implications and outcomes for the joint venture (JV) arising from differences in the JV partners' organisational cultures as well as from different industry practices, and highlights the systemic influence of political and economic factors in a fast-changing business context on each partner's strategic imperatives. It also discusses the impacts of these factors on the JV operations and outcomes. The case study provides an opportunity to explore the issues and challenges confronting cross border joint ventures at various phases of development and to identify key factors that could shape the prospects and potential of such collaborations.

By 2015 Google's Android operating system had been deployed on over one billion units worldwide. The firm had been happy with the high market segment share achieved on mobile phones, but new challenges were arising: advances by traditional competitors such as Apple and Facebook, potential fragmentation of the Android OS, new market dynamics in China and India, and the complexity of managing a large organization which sometimes had diverging goals in different product groups. This case explores how Google confronted the strategic opportunities facing the company around Android, including maintaining strong performance while being nimble enough to expand into new markets.

This note is a brief introduction to the logic and practice of using stock options to compensate executives. The Black-Scholes option-pricing model is used to estimate the value of option grants for a company. The note affords the opportunity to apply options valuation in the context of executive compensation, and serves as a companion to introductions to options that expose the reader to the Black-Scholes option-pricing model.

In early 2020 Walmart Stores, Inc., the world's largest retailer, faced several strategic challenges. The company had just been ranked number one on the Fortune 500 list, but its growth rate lagged its competition. International expansion had turned out to yield uneven results, and Walmart lagged in online sales. To foster continued growth, the company was considering a strategic shift: looking outside the store's traditional customer base to attract more upscale consumers. Walmart's past efforts to move upscale had not been successful. What are the strategic risks and benefits of the company's latest efforts to improve sales?

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 organizing a firm in the 21st century are at the core topics facing the firm's leadership team.

In February 2021, Amazon announced 2020 operating profits of $22,899 million, up from $2,233 million in 2015, on sales of $386 billion, up from $107 billion five years earlier (see Exhibit 1). The shareholders expressed their satisfaction (see Exhibit 2), but not all were happy with Amazon's meteoric rise. Many traditional retailers in the United States were going bankrupt, while major competitors such as Walmart and Best Buy were forced to invest aggressively in online retailing to prevent their market share from eroding. Every retail sector appeared to be under threat, fueling anxieties that Amazon and America's other tech giants were becoming too big and powerful. These anxieties were only exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which Amazon grew rapidly, while most traditional retailers foundered. Amazon's increasingly clear ambitions in healthcare and autonomous vehicles were also causing concern. In early 2021, Amazon was drawing criticism from across the political spectrum in the United States, with calls for it to be broken up. The European Union was also investigating its practices. Meanwhile, on February 2, 2021, Amazon reported that company founder and CEO Jeff Bezos would step down from his role and become executive chairman of the board. Andy Jassy, the leader of Amazon Web Services (AWS) would become the new CEO. How would Jassy navigate the many challenges to come and continue Amazon's record of success?

Case A, the subject of this particular teaching note, traces Gazi's personal and business journey, and contains ample material to evaluate Gazi as a person, as an entrepreneur, and as a leader. Ostensibly, the case issue is the degree to which Gazi should now scale up from the approx. €10 million of current revenues, but this issue is best set aside until the B case discussion. In fact, the B case includes substantial bottom-up information from each of Gazi's key managers allowing this scale-up question to be tackled from both top-down and bottom-up perspectives. The A case raises much more the question what does it take to be a successful and exemplary entrepreneur, and how, when, and from where such capacities are acquired. The case lends itself not only to a detailed discussion of Gazi's entrepreneurial capacities and their origins, but also prompts participants to ask themselves to which degree they themselves exhibit such capacities, and whether they can and should embark on an entrepreneurial career.

The Gazi B case focuses on two issues: First, it provides a bottom-up perspective on each of Gazi's main lines of business, namely, the Avis/Budget car rental and other vehicle and leasing businesses, in-bound tourism, outbound tourism and ticketing, conference and event business, and cruise ship landings. Detailed plans are presented for each of these business lines and can be contrasted with plans and figures presented in the A case which provided a top-down perspective. The two perspectives remain far apart. Gazi's top-down vision is to have overall company revenues of €100 million within five years; bottom-up estimates range from €50 million overall downwards. The case invites a debate of how to reconcile these two disparate perspectives. It allows students to understand that the real issue behind these disparate growth goals is to decide first and foremost on the overall corporate business definition and scope, and whether the previous pattern of continuous diversification is sustainable in the long run. Also worth debating is whether Gazi's focus on top line revenue growth, and on employee projections, should not be tempered by a parallel concern for the bottom line, for example profitability. The second in the B case is to decide on a possible brand name to replace Albanian Experience for the incoming tourism and conference business. This existing brand's credibility and utility has been overtaken by a substantial de-facto expansion of tourism destinations to include virtually all of the Balkan area, Greece to the south and parts of Italy to the north, as well as destinations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Although the corporate scope and focus issue and the branding issue appear to be separate, they are of course related. A new brand name must be found which if possible reflects the overall business scope as well as the new tourist sources, destinations, and USPs.

Ostensibly there are two issues to be resolved: How to organize for the future, and the future roles and responsibilities of Gazi himself as the organization embarks on its next step of substantial growth. The larger issue behind these apparent issues is how to find the right balance in the future between the two extremes of a top-down strongly led, fast, entrepreneurial organization (as at present), and the growing need to institutionalize and decentralize the organization with both strategy and leadership pushed to levels below Gazi-all the while retaining an entrepreneurial culture and speed. Such new balances go beyond organizational structure and involve processes, systems, culture, people, and leadership. All are open for discussion in the C case.