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Vanir, a young community bank dedicated to serving small-business owners, prides itself on the personalized service it delivers to customers. That approach has helped it grow quickly, but now competitors are circling. A new system that uses algorithms to speed up decision-making is ready to go live, but employees are worried that it will destroy the bank's special sauce. What should Vanir's CEO do? This fictional case study by Leonard A. Schlesinger features expert commentary by Bob Rivers and Chris Yeh.

Vanir, a young community bank dedicated to serving small-business owners, prides itself on the personalized service it delivers to customers. That approach has helped it grow quickly, but now competitors are circling. A new system that uses algorithms to speed up decision-making is ready to go live, but employees are worried that it will destroy the bank's special sauce. What should Vanir's CEO do? This fictional case study by Leonard A. Schlesinger features expert commentary by Bob Rivers and Chris Yeh.

LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products. LOLA's leadership wanted women to come to the company for all of their reproductive health needs (including information and a place to engage in conversation) from menstruation through menopause and beyond. Heading into 2020, LOLA cofounders have determined that to grow the business they need to go beyond the company's current DTC model and have products available in retail stores. The challenge, however, is finding the right retailers to partner with that will help to add value to the brand and not detract from it. The case provides background on the cofounders, the company's start, and evolution, and the challenges of moving beyond DTC.

The June Oven was a smart oven which was capable of identifying food and cooking it accordingly. This type of smart oven represented the next step in the long history of oven and stove development. Due to the widespread use of traditional ovens, the market for the June Oven was potentially large. The June Oven was primarily a direct-to-consumer product, available through the company's own website, but it was available through some retail stores. June faced challenges from a relative decline in retail sales, the turn to online shopping, potential smart oven competitors, macroeconomic factors such as the U.S. China trade war, and internal problems such as software malfunctions.

Boll & Branch is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. It was the first Fair-Trade Certified manufacturer of linens. The case provides background on the company, its start, business model, and evolution through 2019.

Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch banking, and tighter lending standards. Athena has an aggressive growth goal-"to grow to 15 branches, with loans and deposits increasing by threefold over the next five years." However, the bank's operating philosophy centers on a high-touch approach, and it relies on dedicated, highly-capable employees who are willing to work long hours. Burnout is setting in at the branch level and morale is declining. Daniels and her leadership team are struggling to hire enough employees to execute this strategy. The case illustrates a company whose success is driven primarily by its human resources (HR) strategy. It also highlights the opportunities and challenges of operating a service business with a high performance/high commitment culture. The case can be used to discuss topics such as leadership, management, organizational culture, strategy, motivation, and entrepreneurs. It is recommended for upper-level undergraduate students or MBA students in courses focused on organizational behavior, general management, human resource management, leadership, or entrepreneurship.

The case takes students through the creation and evolution of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program - a public and private partnership to provide education, a network of support and capital to small businesses across the U.S.

Pho Hoa is a traditional, family-owned Vietnamese restaurant in Dorchester, Massachusetts that opened in 1992. As he approached retirement in recent years, the founder-owner has scaled down his involvement in the day-to-day operations, leading to a number of operational and financial issues, including variable food quality and deficient wait staff service. The restaurant is about to transition from 1st to 2nd generation ownership, Tam Le, the son of the founder, realizes that major operational and financial changes are required to maintain the restaurant's long-term viability.

The Chairman of the Priceline Group is considering the actions he must take to confront an evolving external environment, new direct competition, disintermediation and substitute offerings. Does his response require an increased coordination of each historically autonomous division or some other approach?

The development and utilization of an intentional Field learning strategy developed for the Obama for President campaign in 2012 following an after action Review calling for it after the 2008 elections

Team Rubicon, a military veteran volunteer disaster relief organization, has experienced significant success in attracting attention and support in its first four years of operation. The challenges of managing the volunteer base, the cost of responding to disasters, and the evolution of the organization raise significant strategic and organizational issues for the founding team.

A review of the process utilized by the Obama administration to create the Health Care.gov exchange and the problems that resulted from the implementation effort. This case provides the follow on strategy and processes utilized to get the site up and running after the initial failures of implementation.

A review of the process utilized by the Obama administration to create the Health Care.gov exchange and the problems that resulted from the implementation effort. There is a B case that provides the follow on strategy and processes utilized to get the site up and running after the initial failures of implementation.

They were part of leading a high-profile global consortium aimed at, in the words of Rwandan Minister of Health Agnes Binagwaho, creating "a critical mass of health professionals" and transforming Rwanda's health care system. HRH paired United States faculty from more than 20 institutions-including Dartmouth, University of Virginia, Duke, and Yeshiva-with Rwandan college faculty counterparts. A discipline-specific "twinning model" sought to provide a two-way learning experience that would help support and develop a sustainable health care system in Rwanda. The HRH Program held not only great promise for the country of Rwanda, but it also held personal promise for Dr. Ntakiyiruta's day-to-day life and work. Since joining the University of Rwanda in 2008, where Dr. Ntakiyiruta taught undergraduate as well as post-graduate courses in addition to maintaining a full clinical schedule at the University Teaching Hospital of Kigali (CHUK), there had never been more than four permanent university-employed faculty in the Department of Surgery. If the HRH program achieved its ambitious human resource growth targets, it was reasonable to conclude that the professional lives of devoted physicians like Dr. Ntakiyiruta would witness desired improvements with the opportunity to serve more patients and to educate the next generation of surgeons in Rwanda. It would also provide more time for published research and academic inquiry. When the HRH program was launched a little more than two years earlier, news of the Rwandan effort was accompanied by great fanfare. "This is the boldest effort I've seen to make good on a central promise of global health," said Dr. Paul Farmer, the Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. "The fruits of science serve everyone, especially those that bear the highest burden of disease," he also noted.

Because improved surgical care leads to better health outcomes, multiple groups of surgeons have developed metrics and tools for monitoring the availability and quality of surgical care. However, a critical barrier to monitoring quality in surgical care is the need to include a risk-stratification model to account for differences in case mix and patient comorbidities between hospitals. Researchers in developed countries use protocols for risk-stratification in surgical care, but staffing and resource issues have prevented researchers from using these protocols in low-income countries. To improve the quality of surgical care in Mozambique, a partnership was developed between the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane Medical School and the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, with guidance and support from the Mozambican Ministry of Health. The immediate priority of the research team was to define the epidemiology of surgical conditions and evaluate local capacity to meet that need at three pilot hospitals across the country. This case explores the process of implementing a risk-stratification model for low- income countries and challenges students to critique the model and set direction for future work.

In 2011, Dr. Paul Firth, an anesthesiologist from Massachusetts General Hospital, began to explore methods for capturing and utilizing clinical data for quality improvement at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital (MRRH) in Mbarara, Uganda. Partnering with Dr. Stephen Ttendo, head of the anesthesia department at MRRH, Firth obtained funding from the Harvard Milton Fund and from the General Electric Foundation in 2012 and established an electronic medical record database, now known as the SQUAD (Surgical Quality Assurance Database) initiative. Case A discusses the challenges of implementing an electronic medical record system in a public hospital where patient data had not previously been prioritized, and where resources for providing even basic care are limited. Case A explores the process of determining what to measure and how to measure and validate data.

In 2000, Dr. Benjamin Warf, a pediatric neurosurgeon, became the medical director and chief of surgery at CURE Children's Hospital in eastern Uganda. He quickly noticed a high incidence of hydrocephalus among his patients. Frustrated by the lack of options for these patients and by the limitations of shunts in a low-resource setting, Warf pioneered an alternative low-cost, one-time treatment for hydrocephalus using endoscopic techniques. This new approach, ETV/CPC, combined two procedures: endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) and choroid plexus cauterization (CPC). Through rigorous clinical trials, Warf showed that ETV/CPC was at least as safe and effective as ventricular shunts but required much less medical infrastructure and post-surgical maintenance. In addition to his clinical work, Warf started the International Program to Advance Treatment of Hydrocephalus (IPath). He also designed a training program for neurosurgeons from developing countries around the world to learn this new hydrocephalus treatment. After his return to the United States, Warf began investigating the role ETV/CPC might play as a hydrocephalus treatment in both developed and developing countries.

In a predictable world, getting a new initiative off the ground typically involves analyzing the market, creating a forecast, and writing a business plan. But what about in an unpredictable environment? The authors recommend looking to those who are experts in navigating extreme uncertainty while minimizing risk: serial entrepreneurs. These business leaders act, learn, and build their way into the future. Managers in traditional organizations can do the same, starting with smart, low-risk steps that follow simple rules: Use the means at hand; stay within an acceptable loss; secure only the commitment needed for the next step; bring along only volunteers; link the initiative to a business imperative; produce early results; and manage expectations. Momentum is gained by continuing to act based on what is learned at each step. The launch of Clorox's Green Works product line is discussed as an example.

The rapid rate of change in the world of management continues to escalate. New government regulations, new products, growth, increased competition, technological developments, and an evolving workforce compel organizations to undertake at least moderate change on a regular basis. Yet few major changes are greeted with open arms by employers and employees; they often result in protracted transitions, deadened morale, emotional upheaval, and the costly dedication of managerial time. Kotter and Schlesinger help calm the chaos by identifying four basic reasons why people resist change and offering various methods for overcoming resistance. Managers, the authors say, should recognize the most common reasons for resistance: a desire not to lose something of value, a misunderstanding of the change and its complications, a belief that the change does not make sense for the organization, and a low tolerance for change in general. Once they have diagnosed which form of resistance they are facing, managers can choose from an array of techniques for overcoming it: education and communication, participation and involvement, facilitation and support, negotiation and agreement, manipulation and co-optation, and both explicit and implicit coercion. According to the authors, successful organizational change efforts are characterized by the skillful application of a number of these approaches, with a sensitivity to their strengths and limitations and a realistic appraisal of the situation at hand. In addition, the authors found that successful strategic choices for change are both internally consistent and fit at least some key situational variables.