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In March 2012, the head of compensation for Colgate-Palmolive (India) Limited was reviewing five resumes. He had been asked to determine appropriate pay scales for the five candidates, and he knew that the decision had ramifications far beyond the salary of a few employees. The giant corporation, which was well established in India, had opened other plants in India in the past, but the new toothbrush factory in Sri City had just started operations. The head of compensation would need to define an appropriate pay philosophy and strategy that would enable the organization to attract, motivate, and retain the right talent for the Sri City plant. That strategy would have to be consistent with the existing culture at Colgate-Palmolive (India) Limited.

In May 2019, the vice-president of operations at Danby Products Ltd. (Danby) was concerned that the production facility for the company’s latest product, Parcel Guard, would not be able to keep up with demand. Parcel Guard was one of the most anticipated new products that Danby had produced in years, and if the sales estimates were reliable, the vice-president needed to start thinking about how she could adjust capacity to keep up with new orders. The new production facility was located just east of Toronto, as Danby had determined that making the product locally would enable the company to respond faster to changes in demand while keeping costs under control. In order to meet anticipated demand, the options included adding new equipment to increase the capacity of the two production lines, adding a third production line, or adding additional shifts.

In July 2017, with a proven track record in power distribution in Delhi and Mumbai, Tata Power Co Limited incorporated a new organization called TP Ajmer Distribution Limited using the distribution franchise model in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India. The new company was created in partnership with the state government company Ajmer Vidyut Vitaran Nigam Limited as a strategic partner. One year later, the management team had to overcome various challenges including recruitment from diverse private and public sources, a limited competent talent pool, a lack of administrative and technology infrastructure, many first-time managers, a scattered team concept, a silos working style, a low level of work experience, and a dated distribution network. To ensure a successful transition, the new company had to streamline business processes and establish an organizational culture of safety, excellence, quality, and ethics consistent with the Tata name. The company had to decide whether to adopt the organizational culture of its parent company, create and entirely new culture, or customize its own culture based on Tata Power principles.

On March 14, 2019, the convenience business unit manager of Greenyard Frozen was in his Roeselare, Belgium office preparing for a management meeting that would discuss current challenges facing the company. Greenyard Frozen had to decide on the market positioning of its cauliflower rice and how to promote the new product. The project, which was a great example of co-operation in the value chain and of open innovation for sustainability, had resulted from the unique collaboration of several key contributors: Greenyard Frozen, two cauliflower growers, a machine builder, the agricultural research group Instituut voor Landbouw-, Visserij- en Voedingsonderzoek, and the Flanders’ Food platform. Greenyard Frozen had to decide whether to emphasize the product’s sustainability benefits or simply position the cauliflower rice as a healthy, low-carbohydrate alternative to rice or other food products. What steps could the company take to remain ahead of its competitors, who were innovating at a relentless pace?

A young Canadian entrepreneur had established a digital medical tourism concierge service in Armenia--GetTreated CJSC--and in 2019 was evaluating the opportunities for the company's growth. While the company was experiencing steady growth, the founder felt that the growth rates were not reflective of the potential that was present in the market. Something had to be changed about how the company was acquiring its customers. The company's promotional strategy also needed work in the face of increasing competition locally and globally.

In 2019, the founder of Anjelo’s Confectionaries, a commercial bakery in India, faced two difficult situations. The founder had created the Juicy Cakes brand to represent the company’s standard cakes, differentiating the product from the bakery’s specialty cakes and ice cream cakes; however, the Juicy Cakes name had limited exposure and lacked mass recall for consumers, as a result of poor distribution and reach. The second challenge was the unused capacity of the company’s large automated plant. Although cake sales were seasonal, the founder wanted to utilize the company’s excess capacity throughout the year. The entrepreneur founder needed to fine-tune the trade-off between a product-based strategy and a place- or distribution-based strategy. How should the founder proceed to ensure his company’s future?

In 2018, the founder and owner of the Karatu Coffee Company needed to decide what to do next with his company. He was considering several options: increasing the tourism part of the business, growing the original farm, pursuing a property development project in the capital city, or simply selling out and walking away. The company, located in Tanzania, began as a coffee farm, expanded into tourism with a remote, idyllic coffee lodge, and then brought coffee and tourism together with a bustling inner-city coffee house, which also housed a boutique hotel. The final phase of expansion included the purchase of high-quality coffee equipment and highly-prized roasting facilities to capture a larger share of the coffee value chain. The owner's decision would require insights into both the coffee industry and Tanzania itself.

Founded in 2016, Critterati was India’s first luxury hotel for pets, located in one of the most prominent residential and commercial areas of Gurgaon, India. The basic philosophy of the hotel was that pets provided unconditional love to their owners, so they deserved more than just basic care in return. The number of customers visiting Critterati over the previous three years had increased consistently from 500 in the first year to 1,200 in the second year and 2,600 in the third year. In a short time, the start-up had become a self-sustaining business. By early May 2019, the hotel’s top luxury Critterati Suite was already booked for most of June and the overall hotel was nearly fully booked for the next two months. The Critterati differentiator was an annual membership plan that had been carefully crafted to provide a package of services for one year at a cost effective flat rate. However, the number of customers who chose the membership plan was still low, at around 250, but 1,000 memberships were needed to break even. How would pet owners be convinced about the benefits of the plan? Partnering with other service providers would also increase brand awareness, but which partnerships were most important?

This note describes what leader character is, how leader character differs from leaders’ personality traits and universal values, and how leader character relates to an organization’s culture. Using Schein’s classic definition of organizational culture, the note explains how leaders’ strength of character can help to shape a culture of excellence. The note also follows Galbraith’s model of organizational design to relate leaders’ character to organizational-level constructs, such as strategy, structure, people, rewards, and processes.

Kumar Food Corporation (KFC) was a partnership firm founded in the state of Maharashtra in India by Neeraj Kumar in 2010. The company manufactured, packaged, and distributed pickles, papads, and spices. Kumar, who had previously worked at a multinational company specializing in food processing, quit that job to start his own venture with an investment of ₹1 million. The company flourished and, in 2017, its revenue reached ₹50 million. Kumar then wanted to invest another ₹50 million with the aim of reaching a ₹200 million revenue target by the end of 2018. The company faced cutthroat competition from existing players in the food-processing industry, and Kumar was worried that the Government of India’s Start-Up India initiative to promote entrepreneurship would further add to the competition. With a limited budget for marketing and communications, Kumar could take any or all of the following routes to fulfill his expansion ambitions: enhance product category, add new markets, or increase distribution channels. Which growth strategies should the company implement to establish its Shagun brand?

In 2017, Billy McFarland set out to create an immersive music festival in the Bahamas. He spent eight weeks with rapper Ja Rule planning the Fyre Festival, which, in the end, never brought a single act to the stage. The Fyre Festival became one of the most widely documented festivals of the century, and the subject matter of thousands of news articles, parodies, and memes that poked fun at what was an event planning nightmare. What had gone wrong from an organizational standpoint, and what proactive measures could have been taken to avoid the problems?

In spring 2018, the chief supply chain officer of Traeger Pellet Grills, LLC, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, was visiting a supplier in in Changzhou, China. He was meeting with the supplier the next day but had not fully decided how to manage the meeting. The supplier was responsible for a large portion of the company’s supply of grills but was also positioning itself as a competitor by tooling, designing, and producing knock-off products that were then directly marketed to consumers in the company’s strongest market—the United States. Although the supplier denied any involvement in the knock-off grills, the chief supply chain officer knew the tooling and styling were impossibly similar to his company’s products and there was no other facility in that supplier's area with the capability to make look-alike grills at that level. The chief supply chain officer had to decide how to deal with the rebellious supplier.

Social and political issues in the US health care system, along with near-record employment levels, had led to a high employee turnover rate throughout the industry in 2019. In October, after Brownspeed Health Care, a consultative service, received numerous requests from its clients for assistance, the chief analytical officer was asked to prepare a report on how the company could help its clients address the problem. The first phase of the plan was to use the Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners and clerical workers as part of a low-risk strategy to enhance employee compensation and deploy wide-scale retention strategies and forecasting services.

In April 2018, more than one year after the chief executive officer (CEO) of Danby Appliances Inc. launched a private sponsorship program to support Syrian refugees in their integration into Canada, the CEO and others were starting to raise some questions. Although the program seemed to have had an overall positive impact on Syrian refugees, Danby's board of directors wondered about the impact of the program on the appliance business. The settlement program continued to take up a considerable amount of the CEO's time and may have even been a drain on other Danby resources, such as staff time. With competition intensifying in the appliance manufacturing industry, the board asked the CEO to assess the impact of the settlement program on Danby, the refugees, and the community, and to recommend whether the program should continue. The CEO knew it would be difficult to collect precise numbers and wondered how he should start to quantify the true impact of the settlement program.

China-based Xiaomi entered India’s smartphone industry in 2014. In 2015, it had a meagre market share of 3 per cent, which by the first quarter of 2018 had grown to a 31 per cent market share, making it India’s number one smartphone player. Xiaomi was set to expand its offerings to additional product categories in an effort to disrupt the electronics market in India. How had Xiaomi achieved its phenomenal growth in India in just a few years? Would it be able to maintain its brand image of product reliability as it extended its offerings to additional product categories and continued selling at low price points? Could the strategies that had made Xiaomi the number one smartphone player in India also help it to disrupt other product categories?

In January 2019, eBay Inc. (eBay), a California-based e-commerce company, faced an activist campaign centred on its portfolio of businesses. Elliott Management Corporation, the hedge fund leading the campaign, believed that StubHub and Classifieds, two of eBay’s companies, did not belong in eBay’s portfolio and that their real value was hidden by eBay’s ownership. The hedge fund also argued that the lack of focus in eBay’s portfolio was distracting the company’s senior management from Marketplace, eBay’s core business, which was facing stiff competition from other major online retailers. What should the chief executive officer and board chairman do to address these charges about eBay’s corporate strategy?

Café Meteor Bistro was a newly opened bistro-style restaurant in Haileybury, Ontario. The owners of a nearby lodging business for up to 60 guests had developed Café Meteor Bistro to serve the local market, tourists, and their guests. In January 2019, the owners were each working 80 hours per week, and although their first year of operation had seen sales grow, they were behind their projections and not yet breaking even. Understanding that the situation was not sustainable, they were considering options. Should they sell the restaurant or hire an operations manager? If they planned to sell, they needed to come up with a valuation.

Wow! Momo Foods Private Limited (Wow! Momo), a quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain, was a Kolkata-based start-up that sold a variety of momos, a Tibetan food. The restaurant’s specialty was a pan-fried variety of momos prepared to suit the Indian palate. In late 2018, the founders were reviewing the company’s financials and considering how they could improve the company’s growth. Their goal of becoming a widely recognized brand, both nationally and internationally, seemed elusive. How could Wow! Momo make momos a front-line fast food like pizza and burgers? Should they create a niche market, or should they seek to make Wow! Momo a mainstream fast food? And, ultimately, how could they first make Wow! Momo a national brand alongside other leading multinationals in India before expanding the business internationally?

Igraj Uči Rasti (IUR), which meant “play, learn, grow” in English, was the name of a company in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that produced educational materials to teach basic literacy skills to children aged 3 to 10. The company’s founder and chief executive officer had envisioned IUR products being present in all homes and schools across BiH. However, in May 2019, IUR was at a crossroads, and the founder faced challenges regarding his distribution strategy, operations, product offerings, target markets, and staffing. He was considering several possible options to increase profits and scale his business, but he wanted to analyze potential outcomes and assess how they would affect his personal goals and overall business feasibility. As he considered several possible options to drive additional profits and scale his business, he wanted to use both quantitative and qualitative analyses to determine potential outcomes in relation to his goals and to the business’s long-term viability.

Nuway Software (Nuway) specialized in custom mobile software. While it had procured many contracts over its 15 year history, mostly for the less than truckload and courier sectors of the transportation industry, by the beginning of 2020, it had not found a way to be consistently profitable. Therefore, the goal of Peter Neely, the company’s president, was to develop recurring revenue streams. The question was how best to accomplish this goal. Should the company continue with its current business model of building custom software using its Nulogic framework but focus on a diversification strategy? Should it move fully into the creation of an off the shelf software package? Should it utilize a hybrid approach of customizing off the shelf software?