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Provides an overview of the U.S. home improvement sector in 2020, reviewing sources of growth in the decade ending in 2020, with special attention to the impact of COVID-19 on market leaders Home Depot and Lowe's and the spike in online revenues for both. Also noted are ongoing supply chain and efficiency improvements at Home Depot, and ongoing turnaround efforts by African American CEO Marv Ellison at Lowe's.

Updates (A) case by describing the early impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the art market, the renaming of the gallery as the Krakow Witkin Gallery, and the response of its partners and staff to the pandemic.

In August 2019, Harry Markopolos-the forensic accountant known for uncovering Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme-alleged that General Electric had committed accounting fraud totaling $38 billion, coining the term "GEnron" for perceived similarities with the 2001 accounting fraud at Enron that brought down that company and its auditor. Specifically, Markopolos claimed, GE would need to generate $29 billion in reserves against its insurance obligations, and restate its financials to recognize $9 billion in unreported losses on an oil subsidiary. Though GE management rejected these assertions, repeated writedowns and restatements of GE's performance since 2017 had made investors wary. They now scrambled to assess the merits of Markopolos's claims.

The spring 2014 acquisition of U.S. alcoholic spirits maker Beam Inc. by Japan's Suntory Holdings vaulted Suntory from 15th to third-largest international spirits company in the world. Yet Suntory had borrowed nearly the entire $16 billion purchase price, and relied on Beam to fund repayment of that debt. In October 2014, Takeshi Niinami became Suntory's president and CEO, the first outsider to run the family business since its 1899 founding. Niinami immediately faced governance issues-not least relating to his relationship with Beam CEO Matt Shattock-and sought to enhance Beam's production quality and consumer focus without alienating either Beam management and staff or the family that had placed their trust in him to run Suntory.

Supplements (A) case: The spring 2014 acquisition of U.S. alcoholic spirits maker Beam Inc. by Japan's Suntory Holdings vaulted Suntory from 15th to third-largest international spirits company in the world. Yet Suntory had borrowed nearly the entire $16 billion purchase price, and relied on Beam to fund repayment of that debt. In October 2014, Takeshi Niinami became Suntory's president and CEO, the first outsider to run the family business since its 1899 founding. Niinami immediately faced governance issues-not least relating to his relationship with Beam CEO Matt Shattock-and sought to enhance Beam's production quality and consumer focus without alienating either Beam management and staff or the family that had placed their trust in him to run Suntory.

In 2020, augmented reality (AR) was still a nascent technology with blockbuster potential, one which Apple was actively developing as its iPhone franchise waned. But the emergence of AR was uneven, including the disappointing Google Glass and the unexpected viral success of Pokémon Go. AR technology was complex-involving integration of numerous advances in hardware and software-and expensive, dominated by Big Tech incumbents such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, whose AR applications thus far belied the breadth of vision articulated by their leaders. This left the door open for Apple, whose work on AR headsets had generated both internal conflict and continuing questions about where in the value chain the company should play, and how to win amid competing industry visions of the future of AR.

SRS and the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) follows the process by which SRS, a lean maker of remotely-operated submersible vehicles, navigates the DIU's acquisition process. Set up in 2015 to speed the U.S. military's access to promising commercial technologies, the DIU supports U.S. innovation while aiding early-stage ventures in multiple ways: with revenues via prototype agreements, with technology validation for potential investors, and potentially with sizeable production contracts. In 2019, the DIU was looking to augment this effort by investing in pre-prototype startups and commercialization efforts earlier in the technology development cycle, but its limited size and resources begged larger questions of how to build capacity and scale.

The July 2015 spin-off of DuPont's performance chemicals division as the independent company Chemours burdened new CEO Mark Vergnano and his team with perilous challenges. Despite market-leading offerings in several areas, the company faced a glutted market for its primary product, even after its prices had fallen 40% since 2012. The company also owed $4 billion in long-term debt, equivalent to 10 times 2014 earnings. Not least, DuPont had made Chemours financially responsible for chemical contamination at 171 U.S. sites, representing 62% of DuPont's environmental liabilities and 90% of its litigation by number of pending cases. Within six months, Chemours shares had lost 80% of their value.

Supplement to the (A) case 420-001, describing actions taken by Chemours CEO Mark Vergnano and members of his executive team to execute a successful turnaround of the company.

Five years on from the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs remained wounded. Revenues at the global investment bank had stagnated below pre-crisis levels, and the firm had yet to rebound from a substantial decline in securities-trading revenues. Marcus by Goldman Sachs was one response-an effort that operated as a start-up but was sponsored by senior Goldman executives-to grow the firm's revenues by entering consumer banking with digital-only offerings. The move marked a dramatic cultural as well as product shift: the 150-year-old institution historically served only businesses and the wealthiest of individuals. In 2016, Marcus launched unsecured personal loans for the mass market; it rolled out high-yield deposits in 2017 and a credit card in partnership with Apple in 2019. By autumn of that year, Marcus had $5 billion in loans outstanding and $55 billion in deposits. It also faced a dilemma-ceaseless and rapid expansion had strained its people and infrastructure, yet Goldman expected Marcus to generate $1 billion in revenues in 2020. What now was the better bet, to pause to allow performance to catch up with growth or to seize the additional opportunities that beckoned for Marcus to diversify into consumer finance products?

At-Bay was a cyber insurance startup that offered companies coverage against a wide array of cyber risks-exposure to which the firm was able to quickly assess and price on the basis of technical expertise that traditional insurance carriers lacked. In mid-2019, At-Bay was working to build underwriting revenue ahead of a Series B round of venture funding that the company hoped to receive by year's end. This required not only scaling its underwriting capacity and convincing insurance brokers to include the startup among the carriers they quoted to their corporate clients, but also ensuring that At-Bay avoided the temptation to grow revenues by taking on riskier clients than it might otherwise prefer.

Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and backed with substantial and patient seed capital, Aperture seeks to attract both star portfolio managers and assets from mutual funds and hedge funds. Kraus believes that his innovative business model addresses the current dysfunctional fee and incentive structures in the industry, which have led to long-term market underperformance, and that Aperture will address the reasons that are motivating investors to shift to cheaper, passively-managed index and exchange-traded funds.

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in Israel, CEO Lihi Segal and her team are devising a global go-to-market plan for the firm. The team is considering several target markets, ranging from people with diabetes to professional athletes, and distribution strategies including selling direct to consumers or through partnerships with healthcare professionals or insurance companies. Their choices are important because they will affect DayTwo's costs, pricing, positioning, distribution channels, marketing efforts, and product development.

Francesco Cavarero, chief information officer of Miroglio Fashion, Italy's third-largest retailer of women's apparel, was trying to bring analytical rigor to the company's forecasting and inventory management decisions. But fashion is inherently hard to predict. Can artificial intelligence and machine learning replace human intuition in this industry?

With one satellite aloft and in the midst of beta testing in late 2018, Analytical Space founders Justin Oliveira and Dan Nevius turned to critical questions about the pioneering startup's go-to-market, pricing, and business development strategy. Analytical Space aimed to build and operate a constellation of inexpensive satellites that would receive and relay to the ground data gathered by orbiting Earth observation satellites, thereby speeding and increasing the amount of data their operators could collect and sell to clients in the multi-billion market for information on crops, weather, and other observable changes on Earth. The cofounders now needed to select the best initial customers, validate demand for their unique data relay service, and establish pricing that would both spur adoption and impress investors ahead of their next financing round.

In December 2018, the blockchain startup Fluidity was about to participate in its first tokenization deal, which would create digital access to property rights in a 12-unit Manhattan condominium complex. The deal was proof-of-concept for Fluidity, which hoped to develop a business digitizing securities issuance for other real estate assets on the basis of its technical facility with blockchain technology, and in conjunction with its broker-dealer partner, Propellr. A successful transaction would only prompt larger and more urgent strategic questions, however. Among them was the appropriate revenue model for Fluidity-whether to grow by providing its technical services to broker-dealers, by going into tokenized securities issuance, or by harnessing its trading technology to facilitate a secondary market in tokenized securities.

In summer 2016, four of Australia's top five banks petitioned regulators for permission to bargain collectively with Apple over the terms under which they would support its digital wallet, Apple Pay. They argued that doing so would force concessions from Apple that would improve market competitiveness, consumer choice, price transparency, and transaction security for all mobile payments in Australia. The banks stood to benefit as well. If they succeeded in their primary aim of opening the contactless payment functionality of Apple's devices to their own digital wallets-something Apple had thus far refused in any market it had entered-the banks could retain customer relationships that Apple Pay threatened to usurp and limit Apple's free-riding on the contactless payment infrastructure the banks had just spent several years building. This case supplements the (A) case, 619010.

In summer 2016, four of Australia's top five banks petitioned regulators for permission to bargain collectively with Apple over the terms under which they would support its digital wallet, Apple Pay. They argued that doing so would force concessions from Apple that would improve market competitiveness, consumer choice, price transparency, and transaction security for all mobile payments in Australia. The banks stood to benefit as well. If they succeeded in their primary aim of opening the contactless payment functionality of Apple's devices to their own digital wallets-something Apple had thus far refused in any market it had entered-the banks could retain customer relationships that Apple Pay threatened to usurp and limit Apple's free-riding on the contactless payment infrastructure the banks had just spent several years building.

Late in 2017, CEO Ryan Williams and his team debated whether Cadre should become not only a technology-enabled investment manager, but also an online trading exchange providing high levels of liquidity for CRE equity investors. Cadre was a pioneering New York City-based startup, offering investors equity in individual commercial real estate properties that its investment team had sourced and vetted. Traditional private equity (PE) funds required investors in CRE equity to accept an entire portfolio of properties, while imposing high fees and holding periods of up to 10 years. Cadre allowed investors both deal-by-deal selectivity and managed accounts of Cadre properties, at fee levels substantially lower those charged by PE funds.

In September 2008, Robert Steel presided over the sale of Wachovia, a top U.S. bank, less than three months after becoming its CEO. Wachovia's exposure to risky home loans led depositors and creditors to flee the bank on Friday, September 26, after the FDIC seized and sold a smaller bank with similar exposure, whose collapse nonetheless made it the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. Faced with Wachovia's impending bankruptcy, the FDIC intervened again, voting on Monday, September 29 to sell Wachovia's retail bank to Citigroup for $1 a share. Three days later, Wells Fargo offered $7 a share for all of Wachovia. Steel needed to decide whether to honor the terms of the deal and exclusivity agreement already sketched out with Citigroup or to approve a definitive merger agreement with Wells Fargo.