In December 2023, the 60-year-old weight management industry stalwart WeightWatchers announced the launch of WeightWatchers Clinic, which incorporated GLP-1s , a new class of prescription weight-loss medications, into the company's portfolio of products and mobile app experience. The company's embrace of prescription medications for weight loss represented a bold strategic evolution. Since its inception, WeightWatchers had promoted peer-to-peer support coupled with science-based behavior modifications for weight loss, rooted in the idea that weight management was fundamentally about establishing healthy diet and exercise habits. While the company's core business would continue to center on behavior modification, WeightWatcher's new CEO Sima Sistani believed an expanded "toolkit" could be a game-changer for people for whom the company's traditional weight-loss program was inadequate and who required other kinds of support. Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran, had stepped into the CEO role at a critical moment for the company. Revenue had been declining for years due to slowing member subscriptions, a lackluster digital app, and increasing competition from a host of players. Now, a year and a half into her tenure, revenues continued to trend downward. As she looked ahead, Sistani pondered how to strike the right balance between investing in the "core" business and growing the nascent clinical offering. She recognized that, for the iconic company, there was a delicate balance to be struck between ramping up new products and services and winding down legacy offerings such as weekly in-person meetings, while also fortifying the digital app. She wondered if there were synergies that might offer new avenues for growth in a dynamic market.

Already a leader in the edtech space since its 2008 launch, Khan Academy was now one of the first edtech organizations to embrace generative artificial intelligence ("genAI"). In March 2023, Khan Academy began beta testing Khanmigo, a genAI "guide" and tutor built with ChatGPT, a technology developed by the San Francisco-based AI research lab OpenAI. In addition to simulating historical and fictional characters, Khanmigo assisted students with learning math, debugging code, writing, and completing other learning exercises. Khanmigo was also designed to help teachers develop lesson plans and quizzes, brainstorm creative teaching approaches, and evaluate students' progress, among other tasks. As the Founder and CEO of Khan Academy, Sal Khan felt that Khanmigo might just be "that holy grail we've all been reading about in science fiction for years, about an artificial intelligence that could emulate a human tutor." However, he pondered what the societal-and, for Khan Academy, organizational-risks might be of using OpenAI's ChatGPT. Was it possible that Khanmigo would introduce new problems or exacerbate existing problems in classrooms around the world? If so, what more could Khan Academy do to prevent such outcomes? How might Khan Academy itself need to evolve to support and shepherd this new tool? At the most extreme, might genAI increase Khan Academy's impact manifold, or might the new technology diminish its impact?

Ken Xie, cofounder of cybersecurity giant Fortinet, faced a critical decision that would validate his leadership. Fortinet became the industry's second-largest pureplay cybersecurity firm by developing differentiated hardware and investing in R&D. However, after a stock downgrade despite strong financials, Xie weighed adapting messaging versus remaining steadfast. With competitors like Palo Alto Networks gaining accolades for cloud focus and acquisitions, some advisors pushed Xie to highlight Fortinet's comparable cloud capabilities more. But doing so would diverge from Xie's conviction in hardware advantages in a complex, rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape. As threats became more sophisticated, agility in communication was essential. The impending earnings call forced Xie to consider his conviction with openness to new narratives. Xie grappled with how to amplify cloud messaging without having it overshadow and dilute Fortinet's core identity rooted in hardware expertise and advantage. The case analyzes how cybersecurity leaders make high-stakes decisions weighing competing demands between long-held beliefs and market adaptations in shaping their communication, where a wrong choice could expose customers to evolving threats.

In 2022, senior executives of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies met to consider whether and how to scale a successful technical training program. The program, Akamai Technical Academy (ATA), was launched in 2016 to address a key challenge at Akamai and in the technology industry at large-the need to create an inclusive and diverse workforce. ATA participants came from communities typically underrepresented in the tech industry. They went through six months of in-class training followed by a six-month on-the-job contract working with Akamai project teams. By early 2022, nearly 150 ATA graduates from the U.S., Poland, and Costa Rica had converted to full-time employment, and internal hiring managers were interested in recruiting future ATA graduates. Ultimately, the company wanted to build a robust and diverse global talent pipeline, as well as promote inclusion and diversity in the global technology industry. If ATA were to be a catalyst for these changes, it would need to scale. As they prepared for their meeting, the ATA executives grappled with whether and how to scale the ATA to meet growing internal demand, while also building the platform to transform Akamai and the global technology industry.

In 2012, Evan Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway (ESH) to address a major problem: though most public K-12 schools in the US had access to the Internet, only roughly 30% had true broadband access that would enable every student to have high speed connectivity. Marwell and his team raised philanthropic capital and worked with schools, telecommunications companies, and local, state, and federal government officials to meet that challenge. By 2019, over 99% of the public schools in the US had true broadband access. Marwell and his team had begun the process of winding down activities at ESH when the pandemic erupted. Students were working from home, not physically at school. They decided to try to help 18 million households with 47 million people to have affordable broadband access at home. In 2020, Marwell and Jessica Reid Sliwerski also launched a program to tackle a pernicious problem in education; by third grade, only about one in three US children were reading at grade level. Ignite! Reading offered students access to an individual science of reading tutor for 15 minutes a day over Zoom while at school. Early evidence suggested that for every week working with an Ignite tutor, kids gained over 2 weeks of reading comprehension. Ignite was organized as a public benefit corporation.

This case examines the role of Cisco led by John Chambers in facilitating web filtering in China. It begins with tracing the origins of Cisco as a pioneer of networking equipment. John Chambers, who had worked as a sales manager at IBM and Wang Laboratories, joined Cisco in 1991 and became CEO in 1995. The company expanded rapidly thereafter, acquiring many firms and growing globally, including in China, where it virtually created the internet. The case explores how the firm facilitated surveillance and monitoring of the internet in the Golden Shield project launched in 2000, and in 2004 served as a key participant in the CN2 upgrade which greatly enhanced official capability to filter content online. The case ends in 2007 with Chambers announcing further capital expenditure in China, but facing growing criticism in the US Congress and elsewhere for its human rights record. At the same time Cisco faced a power domestic competitor, Huawei, which had grown rapidly investment in innovation even as Cisco had focused on share buy-backs after experiencing a sharp fall in its share price following the end of the dot.com bubble. The case provides a vehicle for exploring the ethical and human rights responsibilities of corporations in the technology sector, and the impact of the internet on democracy.

Case describes the career of the iconic French fashion designer Coco Chanel who created a transformational business during the first half of the twentieth century. The case describes how she leveraged relationships to build her fashion business and legendary luxury brand based on understated elegance. Chanel famous little black dress was accompanied by many other innovations including the use of jersey as material and her development of the Chanel No. 5 perfume. The case pays close attention to the importance of Chanel's networks among artists and European high society. It explores how she embraced the Anti-Semitism widely found in that society at that time period. During World War 2 Chanel lived in the Ritz hotel in Paris in occupied France in a relationship with a high-ranking German intelligence officer. She herself became an intelligence operative for Nazi Germany. The case ends with Chanel in Switzerland in 1945 after she had left France after the Liberation by Allied forces. This case can be used to explore multiple issues including creating and building an iconic fashion brand; female entrepreneurship; and ethical responsibility of business.