The Carvajal case is based on interviews with four family members and executives of Carvajal S.A., one of Latin America's leading family businesses. The case focuses on how, over the span of 120 years, the Carvajal family built a holistic family enterprise to govern both its business and its family ownership structure. The system includes the typical governance attributes of a large family enterprise - including a family council, shareholders' assembly and family constitution - and in addition, it puts special emphasis on entrepreneurship and social and economic welfare. Yet, with the family expanding in size and scattering geographically, the Carvajal family must continue to innovate and adapt their family enterprise model. The case explores the particular challenges related to family governance, ownership and CEO succession. It details how Carvajal established NextGen programs and fostered entrepreneurship as a "glue" to bind the family together. It also shows how Carvajal achieved collective impact by aligning the purpose of the business with the purpose of the family foundation, the family council and the wider family enterprise. From a broader perspective, the case illustrates how to manage family governance issues in a multi-generational family enterprise by understanding and applying the mechanisms that are available, and by maintaining a healthy balance between family leadership and independent governance.

The longest corporate takeover battle in the history of Switzerland - and possibly the world - pitted Sika, a Swiss chemicals manufacturer, against Saint-Gobain, a French conglomerate. At the heart of the dispute was a family business. Sika was a very successful family-controlled firm whose fourth-generation descendants decided to sell their stake in the company. The sale created a quandary for Sika's board of directors, however. How could the board reconcile the wishes of the family owners with the interests of the other shareholders and the company itself? The case highlights the governance dilemma faced by Paul Hälg, the Chairman of Sika's board of directors, and discloses how all parties came to an agreement after a protracted legal dispute lasting 41 months.

The case illustrates how Ping An can anticipate digital trends such as cloud computing and evolve from its core business to expand to new areas. Ping An began by selling property and casualty insurance but soon expanded to banking and financial services. The firm then invested heavily in I.T. development in order to take part in the Internet economy, focusing on five verticals: financial services, healthcare, automobiles, real estate and smart cities. In the five verticals, Ping An incubated 11 independent technology affiliates that dwarfed a valuation of $70 billion. By 2020, 3 companies were publicly traded as independent entities. Ping An was no longer a financial institution, instead, it had become a "finance + technology" and a "finance + ecosystem" company. While so many financial institutions and other traditional businesses always talk about digitization and transformation, but the progress is pretty slow. Ping An is in a very different place. The Ping An case is interesting both from a Chinese and a global perspective. As a firmly rooted Chinese firm, Ping An embodies the rise of a traditional company that learned to harness new technologies and compete with China's pure technology players. From a global perspective, Ping An offers lessons in how to develop an ecosystem of technology affiliates: the firm has developed a set of best practices for incubating, funding and collaborating with spin-offs.

While Ping An is so successful to transform and reinvent itself to a tech giant, it discovered the demand of small and medium sized financial institutions to deploy technology. In December 2015, Ping An set up OneConnect, a fintech spinoff, to export its internal technology and repackage them as services to other banks and insurance companies in China. Case (B) is about how Ping An incubated OneConnect and development of OneConnect. OneConnect is in an expansion phase, growing from its Chinese client base to offer its cloud-based services across Asia. At the beginning it relied very much on Ping An in terms of technology, people and other resources, and became more and more independently later on. OneConnect turned out to be a unicorn and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 2019.

Case (C) is about Autohome, which is the only unicorn Ping An acquired, rather than built from the ground up. After acquisition by Ping An, Autohome was transformed form a pure automobile website to develop four key offerings - content, transaction, finance, and lifestyle - all powered by AI, big data, and cloud technology. After the acquisition, in the span of three and a half years, Autohome's stock price quadrupled.

The headline "Quinoa Genome Sequenced" caught the eye of Diego Pelaez, CFO of Coronilla S.A., a gluten-free pasta producer. Scientists had successfully sequenced the genome of the quinoa plant, hailed as a superfood because of its outstanding nutritional value. Quinoa, originally cultivated by the Inca Empire in the Andes, had become hugely popular in the last two decades and it was now grown in over 70 countries. It also happened to be the star ingredient in Coronilla's organic pastas and snacks. Coronilla was established in 1972 in Bolivia by Diego's grandfather, Guillermo Wille. After 25 years, he handed the reins to his daughter, Martha Wille. Unfortunately, the transition happened in difficult circumstances, with the company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Under Martha's leadership, the company successfully pivoted from a traditional wheat pasta manufacturer focused on the local market to a global exporter of gluten-free pastas and snacks made from organically-grown Andean grains. Coronilla not only transformed its business model but also wholeheartedly embraced social responsibility: it established Fair Trade sourcing with local indigenous farmers, hired mostly women and handicapped people in its workforce, and created multiple social programs for staff and their families.By 2017, Coronilla was finally reaping the rewards of its radical change program, with healthy profits and fast growth. But what was next? The news of quinoa's genome sequencing confirmed that Coronilla needed to renew itself and establish sustainability. Three strategic areas required decisions soon: branding; establishing a new production facility abroad; and negotiating a new strategic partnership. Furthermore, Diego's mother Martha was nearing retirement age and the family board had just officially designated Diego as her successor. It was now up to him to set the compass for Coronilla's next phase.

Tunisia has been the only country to emerge from the Arab Spring with a successful transition to democracy. This case focuses on a critical period in this transition process, when the country appointed an interim government. The case zooms in on the leadership and governance challenges of this "caretaker" administration during its one-year mandate in 2014-2015. In order to convey the highly turbulent environment this government faced, the story centers on one of the cabinet ministers and his struggle to deal with students' protests, labor strikes and threats to national security. It also outlines the challenge of making ethical decisions and pursuing much-needed reforms in this context. The protagonist of the case - the Minister of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies, Mr Tawfik Jelassi - is unusual in that he was a business school professor and dean with no political experience, who was plunged into a new environment and expected to "sink or swim." He had to learn to map out the constellation of stakeholders who were important to his decision-making and to understand the dynamics of political conflicts. He was a member of a diverse team: non-partisan "technocrats" coming from different sectors and countries. An esprit-de-corps and high-level coordination enabled the government team to achieve the objectives set by the country's National Dialogue Quartet at the outset of their mandate. In 2015, Tunisia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having built a pluralistic democracy. The Norwegian Nobel Committee stated that: "The ultimate validation of the Quartet's historical effort came in the autumn of 2014, when the parliamentary and presidential elections were carried out. Both the technocratic government and the interim president resigned and were replaced by lawfully elected successors."