個案總覽

Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product W24483.

Spreadsheet to accompany product W24482.

By the spring of 2021, My Sisters’ Place, a safe, welcoming, and inclusive support centre for women in London, Ontario, had welcomed countless women to Buchan House, a historic Victorian mansion located in downtown London, that had been generously donated by a local family. While it had become a safe haven for so many people in the community, the building’s age and heritage status also meant frequent and high maintenance costs, and the recent roofing repair bill was just another item on a long list of expenses. With strong community support, My Sisters’ Place had many plans for future programs and initiatives, but the organization’s manager was feeling a little overwhelmed by mounting financial needs, including the unexpected roof repair cost. As the manager of a not-for-profit social enterprise with limited funding, she understood that proceeding with the repair would translate into a painful cut somewhere—a reduction in services or in staff hours. Both would heavily impact the vulnerable population the organization was designed to serve, but the manager had to make a choice.

lebua Hotels & Resorts, based in Bangkok, Thailand, and headed by chief executive officer Deepak Ohri, is a much awarded luxury hotel chain. Since the early 2000s, it exposed the traditionally slow-moving luxury hospitality industry to a slew of path-breaking innovations. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Ohri had taken unorthodox paths to defining luxury hospitality. However, as the pandemic began to ebb, he had to convince the industry of his vision of what luxury hospitality was and should continue to be. His positioning strategy for lebua had been very effective, and having won numerous awards in the luxury category, Ohri was contemplating, with his executive team, the next level of innovations needed to bring the company to the top of its post-pandemic peer group.

Ye Ji had a dream: to build a unicorn enterprise. Ji, a serial entrepreneur in his forties, had the experience of setting up three businesses as an entrepreneur. From 2010 to 2014, he owned and managed Dalian Lingdong Technology Development Co. Ltd. (Lingdong), which specialized in developing e-commerce systems. From 2014 to 2017, he was the agent for Baidu Waimai’s Dalian operations. In 2017, he set up Flashfood.Shop, a company providing office workers with affordable and convenient fresh meals, twenty-four hours a day. However, Flashfood.Shop was almost brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. By April 2021, Ji had yet to realize his entrepreneurial dream of building a unicorn enterprise. The time had come for him to make a decision. Should he stick with Flashfood.Shop’s operation and wait for a turnaround? Should he close Flashfood.Shop and return to Lingdong, a business with which he was more familiar? Or should he start over with a new venture? Ji needed to seriously consider how to choose his next step.

On July 15, 2021, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Loctek Ergonomic Technology Corp. (Loctek), located in Ningbo, China, was reviewing the mid-year financial report of his company. Loctek was a global leader in manufacturing and exporting office furniture—primarily monitor brackets and height-adjustable desks. Figures in the report portrayed the company’s solid growth in the midst of the global pandemic; the contribution from Loctek’s cross-border e-business was hard to miss. These figures assured the CEO that transforming Loctek from a traditional exporting business to a cross-border e-business was both correct and rewarding, despite some painful bumps and detours in the process. The CEO now had to decide whether to continue expanding Loctek’s overseas warehouses. If such an expansion were to occur, the resultant warehouse system could be opened to other small and mid-sized firms where international business had been strangled by limited storage capacity abroad. This idea, though never intended, had emerged during Loctek’s digital transformation. Considerable investments—in the millions of dollars—were at stake.

In 2007, JTD Group (JTD) was founded in the port city of Xiamen, China. Within two years, the founder began pursuing business opportunities in Africa. By 2020, JTD owned a 300-square-kilometre stone mine in South Africa. It was one of Africa’s biggest Chinese companies in the stone industry. From 2018, JTD had started to increase its investment in the neighbouring country of Namibia. Despite COVID-19-related challenges, Chinese market demand for stone, especially premium products, was booming in 2020. The founder had been thinking about how to better capture the market opportunity. Many issues needed attention, including the investment decision in Namibia, human resources policy in Africa, and being a responsible community member in both Africa and China.

The founder and executive director of Allswell Productions (Allswell), an amateur musical theatre company based in London, Ontario, and her team had seen tremendous success with their inaugural production, and they needed to determine what show to stage next. With a wide assortment of theatregoers in the London area, she needed to refine her target market and plan a production for the next season. She had to determine which show to stage, in which theatre space to stage it, how to price the tickets, and how to promote the show.

Jeff Henry, owner of and creative visionary behind Schlitterbahn Waterparks & Resorts, created one of the most sought-after water park companies in the United States. He was confident in his ability to create the best attractions and dominate the industry with his unique inventions. Then, at his facility in Kansas City, Kansas, a fatal accident took place after the construction and design of the Verrückt, a waterslide Henry hoped would set new world records. How should Henry have responded to the tragedy?

Vroom Inc. (Vroom) was a video conferencing technology company located in London, Ontario, Canada. The founder of Vroom was reviewing the company’s financial performance for its second fiscal year. He had already reviewed the company’s operating decisions over the past fiscal year and was now eager to review the company’s financing and investing transactions.

King’s Hawaiian Bakery, West Inc. (King’s Hawaiian), a beloved and highly regarded company, produced a line of bread products dating back to the 1950s and was inspired by a Portuguese sweet bread. The business had grown over time, adding more production facilities and expanding from Hawaii to the mainland United States in 1977. King’s Hawaiian had done minimal consumer research related to its development of new products before it hired Troy Figgins as its new head of consumer insights. In October 2018, Figgins was tasked with creating a new consumer insights department; what this department looked like and how it functioned were entirely up to him. He was eager to design a best-in-class insights team to work with new strategies, tools, and partners. King’s Hawaiian knew it had to conduct market research to uncover insights to keep pace with evolving customer needs—but how? Figgins considered his problem and possible solutions to deliver great insights.

In May 2022, a consultant with global management consulting firm Kearney was working on a project for a private equity client, OPW Partners Inc. (OPW). The client was looking to acquire a high-end wine producer in Oregon and had engaged Kearney to complete an operational due diligence of its wine-making operations. The consultant and his team would be flying to Oregon to complete a series of site visits and ask questions directly to the wine-making team. These meetings would allow the consultant to confirm his assumptions and would provide him with an opportunity to investigate possible operational constraints and identify potential solutions. Kearney's due diligence report was expected to evaluate potential longer-term operational issues, specifically whether Silverton would have sufficient capacity to support OPW’s expansion plans, which were expected to start in the 2023 harvest season.

Dual-class share structures offer stakeholders real advantages, but more firms need to follow best practices in deployment to mitigate the risk of abuse. This article highlights four different ways that Canadian firms, including Rogers and Shaw, implement dual-class share structures. It also discusses the related advantages and risks. Advantages include how dual-class shares facilitate the execution of strategy; encourage founders to publicly list stock; insulate the firm and management from short-termism; protect founders from activist shareholders; and protect firms making capital expenditures with long pay-off horizons. Disadvantages include how dual-class shares create agency issues and conflicts of interest, especially when controlling shareholders have minimal economic interest; create an inferior class of shareholders; allow entrenchment of management with directors often elected by controlling shareholders; increase the likelihood of related-party transactions; and reduce the likelihood of independent/non-executive board leadership. The article finishes with some governance considerations, including how the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance developed a dual-class share policy that encourages best practices for companies with dual-class shares. Some of the key principles include subordinated rather than non-voting shares, meaningful equity ownership, and mandatory sunset provisions.

The case describes the family tensions and corporate crisis at City Developments Limited (CDL), a large and well-reputed Singaporean property firm that was the flagship company of a larger family-controlled business group. The gradual transition to the third-generation leader was marked by an aggressive growth strategy in China, which unravelled when the Chinese property sector experienced headwinds and CDL’s Chinese joint venture partner experienced liquidity problems. These events forced the family firm to write off US$1.32 billion in 2021, causing it to report its first loss in decades. Moreover, four board members resigned, with one citing “unresolved differences in opinion” as part of his rationale for his resignation. The combination of a corporate crisis and a family boardroom drama elicited questions as to what steps the company should take to recuperate from the adverse events and resume its internationalization strategy.

On April 14, 2022, Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter Inc. for US$54.20 per share, for a total cost of US$44 billion. Musk hoped to make the social media network a platform of free speech, and the company profitable and cash flow-positive far more quickly than its management team at the time. Musk’s leveraged buyout was mainly funded by a margin loan backed by his own shares in his company, Tesla Inc. On July 8, 2022, Musk announced that he was backing out of the deal. Almost immediately, a lawsuit was filed to force Musk to close the deal as required by the merger agreement. In response, Musk had to decide whether his bid of US$54.20 per share was still a fair valuation for the purchase, if a leveraged buyout with a margin loan was the best financing plan, and whether to confirm or abandon his agreement to buy Twitter Inc. If he chose to walk away from the deal, he would have to consider the potential loss, depending on the outcome of the pending lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

Student spreadsheet for product W30166.

Instructor spreadsheet supporting product W30167.

Pete Anderson, the general manager of Mumbai Dairy Company, is facing several difficult but related challenges. Revenues and profits at the Mumbai, India–based joint venture are in decline. At the same time, worker strikes and disruptions across India have become a major issue. Internally, employees seem to be unmotivated and many—particularly Anderson’s direct reports—appear to be taking him for granted. Employees blame seasonal conditions as the cause of waning performance. Others are complaining that their compensation is too little given the contributions they are making. Anderson needs a plan of action for his upcoming meeting with his Singapore-based boss.

In this Ivey Business Journal Q&A, Ivey Business School Professor Tima Bansal—one of the sustainability field’s most cited scholars—explains why there is nothing anti-capitalist about sustainability, while making the case for old-school capitalists to embrace Ivey’s ambitious Innovation North initiative, which aims to save the planet (and capitalism) by disrupting traditional approaches to innovation. She says sustainability suffers from two issues. First, some people think that sustainability is about asking them to do less. The second issue is that many people, including executives, just don’t know what to do about sustainability and how to do it. Bansal claims we need to reframe the discussion as prosperity—an opportunity to realize better health and community. Instead of talking about sustainability as reforming capitalism, we need to think about sustainability as innovating for prosperity. Innovation North assembles senior business leaders, academics, and world-renowned systems thinkers every three months to discuss how to innovate the innovation process. It is working with partner companies to create a toolkit that bakes systems thinking into innovation—the Innovation North Compass. This uses both ideas (as in the stage-gate model) and solutions (as in design thinking). Ultimately, Bansal says, a systems thinker thinks differently than how we teach people to think in business schools. They work though problems differently, not looking for the right answer but instead looking for patterns and possibilities.

Carlsberg Breweries A/S (Carlsberg) had developed from a local to a global player in the brewing industry, having focused on growth in emerging economies in Europe and Asia. This growth path was against the background of economic transition and political change in Russia—from optimism about opportunities in the new market economy in the 1990s, to increasing regulatory obstacles, political authoritarianism, and increasing local competition in the 2010s. In 2022, Carlsberg, more than other West European consumer goods companies, was exposed to Russia when Russian military forces invaded Ukraine in February. This created complex operational and ethical challenges the company had to address with urgency. The company’s annual general meeting was coming up, on March 14, and by then the executive board had to communicate to shareholders concerned with both the company’s financial performance and its international reputation—as well as to Carlsberg employees across Europe (including both Russia and Ukraine) and the increasingly impatient Danish media—what steps the board would take to address the crisis.