In October 2023, the global vice-president of marketing and partnerships at Ball Corporation (Ball), who was overseeing the company’s aluminum cup business, was on his way to a significant meeting. Given a plastic cup for his drink, he thought about his company’s aluminum cups. Despite initial doubts, Ball’s cups had succeeded, doubling sales and gaining recognition within two years. Now, the company was aiming for further growth and found that scaling up posed a challenge. The vice-president believed that a sustainability-focused marketing campaign could assist, but he knew that consumer awareness of the cups was lacking. Ball needed to rethink its messaging to attract more attention. The vice-president wondered how to effectively capture people’s interest and persuade them to purchase his company’s cups.
<p style="color: rgb(197, 183, 131);"><strong> FINALIST - 2024 Fox International Case Writing Competition</strong></p><br/>In April 2024, ZenOnco, known for its successful integrative oncology platform in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, launched a new cancer hospital in Varanasi, India, led by its chief executive officer (CEO) and her co-founder. This expansion brought ZenOnco into the realm of medical treatment in Varanasi, where the company encountered unexpected cultural challenges. The CEO aimed to address these challenges by advocating for early cancer detection, treatment, and supportive care, while positioning ZenOnco as a trusted partner. The question remained: How could ZenOnco effectively bridge these cultural gaps and ensure patients could access necessary care with dignity and support?
In August 2023, the chair of the Pune-based Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI), reflected on the organization’s 20-year journey to empower Dalits through entrepreneurship, independence, confidence, and job creation. Despite DICCI’s efforts, societal challenges and fears of disclosing Dalit identity persisted. As the chair considered ways to boost membership and retain existing members, he wondered whether emphasizing collective identity and solidarity could further empower Dalit entrepreneurs. Could celebrating successful Dalit role models, establishing mentoring programs, or prioritizing skill development further uplift the community?
Amid turbulent financial times and fierce competition, Joanna Geraghty assumed the role of chief executive officer at JetBlue Airways Corporation (JetBlue) in February 2024. Facing significant losses and gender barriers in a male-dominated industry, Geraghty embarked on a mission to steer JetBlue towards stability and success. Hindered by setbacks such as the failed acquisition bid of Spirit Airlines Inc. and pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, Geraghty focused on enhancing reliability and cost control to fortify JetBlue’s position. This case explores Geraghty’s strategic decisions and leadership approaches in overcoming challenges, with implications for navigating complexity in the airline industry.
In October 2022, Evan Ehlers, founder and executive director of Sharing Excess, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization dedicated to food rescue, received an unexpected call to help rescue 630,000 avocados from Peru, which were days away from being dumped in the landfill. Ehlers soon understood that it would be a race against time, given the perishable nature of avocados. How could he and his team devise a distribution and marketing plan to match the avocados to people and organizations that could use them before they went bad? The challenge was daunting, and the clock was ticking. What could he do to save hundreds of thousands of avocados from being thrown out in a short time frame of 48 hours?
In 2021, amidst a world pandemic and escalated racial tensions, Allens Lane Art Center, a non-profit art centre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was losing its leadership and failing to live up to its history-making initiative to promote integration among community members through the arts. The Center's executive director was stepping down and there was no replacement in line. Also, like many small businesses in the West Mount Airy neighbourhood of Philadelphia during this period, the Center suffered low revenue, among other issues. <br><br>The president of the Center's board of directors had to determine how to bring the small non-profit back to life and generate a reawakened commitment from the board. They had to be prepared to make difficult decisions, including determining how the Center could change its business model while holding to its mission of bringing diverse communities together through the arts.
Christina Stembel, the founder and CEO of Farmgirl Flowers Inc., has always emphasized quality, speed, and efficiency in her San Francisco–based online flower delivery company. Her teams have operated like assembly lines, shipping 10,000 bouquets daily during peak periods, which has ensured competitive pricing. Before the pandemic, Stembel expands Farmgirl Flowers Inc. to Ecuador, and when it is forced to close its San Francisco facility, she shifts all production to Ecuador.<br><br>Valentine’s Day 2023 poses a challenge, as shipping the flowers from South America takes three days, while South American prices are higher due to pandemic-related supply chain issues, ultimately resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Stembel aims to regain competitiveness by bringing operations back to North America. But the questions remain: how and where should this happen?
For over two decades, Paul Delp, the President of Lansdale Warehouse, had faced a daunting challenge; the Stony Creek rail line, which provided rail service to his warehousing business in Lansdale, Pennsylvania (PA), USA, had suffered from deteriorating track conditions and poor service. These issues resulted in delayed and disrupted shipments, lost customers, increased costs, and a decline in customer satisfaction, causing Delp to fear for the viability of his business. Despite several efforts, Delp had struggled to gain the attention of the two Class I railroad companies that jointly owned the rail line to his facility. With over 60 years of business under his belt, Delp faced one of his most significant challenges yet—finding a solution to keep his business afloat.
In April 2023, Maxwell Cutler, director of marketing and sweet potato sales at Race-West Company (Race-West), faced a daunting challenge of high demand for produce in the week leading up to Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. With a responsibility to ship 35–40 truckloads per day, Cutler was under pressure to ensure timely deliveries to satisfy and retain customers. Despite his best efforts and collaboration with his cousin Rachel Pisarz, who managed onion sales, multiple incidents disrupted the transportation process. Cutler received phone calls and emails reporting missing drivers, misloaded shipments, late deliveries, truck breakdowns, and extreme weather conditions. These disruptions resulted in significant financial losses for Race-West as well the loss of some customers. Determined to resolve the situation, he wondered what steps he could take to address these challenges and implement measures to avoid encountering similar issues in the future.
Since its beginning in 2021, Stitchwheel LLC (Stitchwheel), a needlepoint canvas painting service, had seen immediate success. From the company’s inception, the co-founder of Stitchwheel had been assessing the advantages and disadvantages of an expansion strategy and wondered what barriers she might encounter. She was also assessing the viability to expand beyond painted needlepoint canvases to achieve substantial growth. Within a short time frame, the company had enjoyed strong brand recognition and offered a meaningful unique selling proposition, but there were still many questions about the company’s next steps, including which growth strategy would be most suitable. Did the company have the necessary resources and skilled management team to adequately monitor and support growth? What marketing and operational issues was the company likely to encounter with expansion?
Lil Mixins was a Philadelphia-based infant health company founded in 2017 with a dual commitment to purpose and profit. Motivated by her experiences as a mother of a son who had several food allergies, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) developed and launched a product line of powders that could be mixed in infants’ diets to immunize them against food allergens. She kept the price low to make it easily endorsable by pediatricians and insurance payers and more available to lower-income households. After three years of operations, however, the adoption rate was slower than projected. The CEO considered introducing a new higher-priced product that could keep the business going, but it excluded the broader market she had hoped to serve. How could she preserve her company’s accessibility and social goals while ensuring Lil Mixins’ viability?
In October 2021, Todd Tucker, senior vice-president of Market Development and general counsel for Arrive Mobility Inc. (Arrive), a Chicago-based provider of last-mile mobility solutions, met with Beth Diaz, innovation director for Sapphire Parking (Sapphire). Sapphire, a parking company based in Seattle, Washington, was struggling to remain in business due to the changing needs of modern society and a shift to a work-from-home culture. While Tucker believed he could generate better business opportunities for garage owners like Sapphire through technology, after his meeting with Diaz, he realized that gaining buy-in from Sapphire’s operational leaders would be an uphill battle. Technology could be confusing, and technological inertia existed. Tucker’s challenge was to convince Diaz’s field team to try new methods for monetizing Sapphire’s parking spaces while bringing the business into a more modern mindset.
Founded in 2013 by sisters Shelby, Jackie, and Amy Zitelman, Philadelphia-based Soom Foods (Soom) aimed to educate US consumers on tahini and make the product a staple in US pantries. By 2021, the business had grown into a multimillion-dollar revenue company and had achieved national distribution through an omni-channel sales effort. However, Soom’s reliance on the single-source Ethiopian Humera sesame seed to prepare its high-quality tahini had begun to pose challenges. When Ethiopia’s inter-ethnic conflicts emerged in 2020, the Zitelman sisters foresaw possible disruptions and uncertainties in their business, especially when those challenges were combined with the supply-chain logistics issues that emerged as a result of the global pandemic in 2021. Soom was forced to reconsider its long-term business strategy: Given the threat of a potentially insufficient future sesame seed supply, should Soom use diversification in its supply chain? If so, how should diversification be applied across the supply chain while still maintaining a good return on investment? Furthermore, how could all of this be done before the next harvesting cycle?
In 2021, the head of cold storage for North America at A. P. Moller–Maersk (Maersk) was assigned the challenging task of meeting cold-storage requirements for a key client. Increasing demand for frozen food, coupled with many consumers adopting “hoarding” behaviour after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, heightened pressure on already-strained cold-storage facilities across the United States. To show the value of adopting Maersk’s end-to-end logistics services, the head of cold storage and his team had to develop a flexible operational plan for the client. The task was especially difficult in such a hot market, but gaining the trust of this client was critical for Maersk’s goal of establishing a strong hold in the US cold-storage market.
In October 2018, Yehuda Katzman, vice-president of marketing and business development at design house Inbal Dror, was attending the 2018 New York Bridal Fashion Week event, where Inbal Dror and its direct competitors revealed their spring lines to distinct buyers. As in previous years, Katzman had lined up meetings with interested retailers and wanted to make sure they appreciated the unique nature of Inbal Dror’s designs and the quality of its craftsmanship and the raw materials it used. Katzman also wanted to ensure that the couture brand was recognized for its dependability, sincerity, and understanding of different cultures. Travelling from Israel to participate in international bridal shows was a costly undertaking, and it was critical for Katzman to identify new retailers to continue expanding Inbal Dror’s global reach. His challenge this time was to successfully penetrate the vast markets of China and the Far East—a challenge that could, if successful, generate incredible growth.
BDP International Inc. (BDP), one of the world’s leading privately-held freight logistics companies, provided chemical shipping services to eight of the top ten global chemical companies. In April 2021, it contracted with a chemical company for two shipping orders, each to a different destination, and each with a set number of containers to be shipped every month for a year. The containers were filled with a chemical used in the electronics industry. This was one of the biggest logistical challenges faced by BDP’s vice-president of Government and Industry Affairs and its director of Transportation, especially because the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had disrupted the global shipping industry.<br><br>After having sorted out and arranged for the shipping, a few containers belonging to BDP’s client were engulfed in a fire that broke during the vessel’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. The containers and their contents were damaged beyond recovery. BDP had to scramble again to plan transportation, this time deciding how to inform the client, deal with possible late penalties and damage fees, and make whole on the order.
Burlap & Barrel was an upcoming and successful public benefit corporation based in the Queens borough of New York City that imported spices from foreign farms and sold them to restaurants, gourmet food stores, home cooks, and other food services in the United States and other markets. In March 2020, when COVID-19 gripped the world and forced most food establishments to close down temporarily, the two co-founders of Burlap & Barrel saw an instant drop in their revenues because half of their sales volume normally came from restaurants. To stay afloat in the pandemic, they changed their focus from wholesale channels to a direct-to-consumer business model. Media coverage in major outlets helped demand increase, but the shift from wholesale to direct-to-consumer raised many supply chain inefficiencies in sourcing, storing, packaging, and transportation. In early 2021, as restaurants began gradually reopening, the two B&B co-founders became concerned about meeting the growing demand from both direct-to-consumer and restaurant orders while retaining their core ethical, environmental, and business values.
In October 2015, the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Tender Greens faced his most difficult decision yet: should the company continue to pay a premium price for sustainably sourced beef, or should it switch to conventionally raised beef to boost profit margins and improve the company’s prospects for national growth? Tender Greens, a thriving fast-casual restaurant chain in California, was ready to expand its operation to the East Coast with backing by equity investors. As the expansion plans grew closer, the CEO began to address the foreseeable supply chain issues that his company would face with the next level of expansion. The company had faced sustainably raised beef supply shortages before, but this time the CEO had more stakeholders to satisfy. He faced a dilemma, one that required him to weigh competing stakeholder interests, the company’s stated values, and significant financial implications to arrive at the best long-term outcome for the company. What would be the best way for the company to achieve scale while maintaining a commitment to food that was local, sustainable, and affordable?
Located in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, RLS Logistics offered temperature-controlled logistics solutions. On a Tuesday morning in October 2019, RLS Logistics’ business development manager learned that a large baked goods manufacturer was seeking a logistics provider who could lower the bakery’s transport costs and alleviate problems with delivery delays. The delays, in particular, were blocking the bakery’s attempts to improve its relationship and scale up operations with big-box retailers such as Walmart Inc.. RLS Logistics’ business manager secured a meeting with the bakery for the following Monday. In the meantime, he and his team needed to analyze delivery data from the bakery and prepare a delivery model that would showcase RLS Logistics’ value and appeal to the bakery.