Follows the journey of lawyer Marsha Simms from her childhood in racially-segregated St. Louis to the upper echelons of the New York legal community. Describes her education, career choices, accomplishments, and setbacks. Highlights significant moments such as her decision to attend law school; discovering a practice area she excelled at; failing to advance to partner at one firm; moving firms and achieving partnership; and joining her first board of directors. Explores how she navigated a majority-white, male-dominated industry as a Black woman and contextualizes Marsha's career trajectory within the history of racial and gender discrimination in the legal field.
In November 2021, US Foods CEO Pietro Satriano must decide his company's trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic. US Foods suffered due to business closures and social distancing during the height of the pandemic. While the situation improved following the return of indoor dining and in-person learning, an industry-wide shortage of truck drivers and warehouse selectors threatened to dampen its post-pandemic recovery. The US Foods team must determine the appropriate strategy for attracting and retaining new drivers and selectors. Meanwhile, the company planned to build additional locations for CHEF'STORE, its cash-and-carry warehouse brand, which promised to increase its geographic footprint and product offerings. Satriano must decide how to support the CHEF'STORE expansion in light of the foodservice distribution industry's continued supply chain challenges.
Massachusetts General Brigham (MGB) Chief Innovation Officer Christopher Coburn had overseen a period of exciting transformation and growth in healthcare innovation at MGB. In November 2019, the health system was the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding in the world. The Innovation Office sought to capitalize on that funding. Their team aimed to help the organization's 3,505 Principal Investigators translate and commercialize their research, with the goal of both producing revenue and improving patient care. Despite the success of Coburn and the Innovation Office over the last decade, MGB CEO Anne Klibanski and other key stakeholders had a serious concern. Although women comprised approximately 40% of the medical researchers and physicians it employed, the percentage of women participating in innovation activities lagged behind--in some categories, by a ratio of 4:1. Coburn knew that change would require an understanding of the main sources of disparities, the right strategy to address those disparities, and an equally robust execution. How could MGB expand and diversify its community of innovators?
In March 2020, as COVID-19 spreads rapidly across the U.S., Everlywell founder Julia Cheek considers how to respond as a small start-up specializing in at-home lab testing. After making dramatic budget cuts, she decides to pivot the organization to address the country's testing shortage. But after a hectic few weeks building capacity at her partner labs to 30,000 COVID daily tests, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) releases a statement warning the public that it has not granted approval for at-home tests. Cheek must decide whether to return to her core business or persist in focusing her nascent organization on COVID-19 tests, an opportunity whose commercial merit is unclear.
This supplement to Facelift at Olay (A) explains the major steps Procter & Gamble's skincare brand Olay took to reverse several years of declining sales.
By October 2017, Procter & Gamble's skincare brand Olay has been struggling with declining sales for several years. The team has tried many remedies, but none has returned the brand to growth. As pressure grows from Olay's competitors, including hundreds of new direct-to-consumer brands catering to millennial women, North American Skin Care General Manager Chris Heiert must identify a winning marketing strategy that will appeal to women of all ages.
Rosalind Fox, the factory manager at John Deere's Des Moines, Iowa plant, has improved the financial standing of the factory in the three years she's been at its helm. But employee engagement scores-which measured employees' satisfaction with working conditions and enthusiasm about their work- have remained lackluster. As the first Black female factory manager to lead the plant, Fox considers how to build stronger bonds with her staff, who are mostly white men. The case describes how Fox took charge and established her credibility while building and nurturing a diverse leadership team. In addition to discussing Fox's current role, this leadership case chronicles Fox's career trajectory from her college years in Missouri through her time at Ford Motor Company and later, rising up the ranks at Deere & Company. The case discusses the pressure Fox has felt to assimilate into the dominant white male cultures and figure out how much of her authentic self to bring to work.
In the fall of 2019, Sprint's Chief Digital Officer Rob Roy reflected on the telecom's efforts to improve the effectiveness of its digital marketing campaigns. Digital media buying had long been handled by an outside agency, but in 2017, Sprint brought those functions in-house to enhance the company's ability to respond to the market in real-time. Early results suggested the plan was working, but Sprint continued to face fierce competition from its rivals. Sprint's subscriber losses mounted as it attempted to merge with T-Mobile. Could digital marketing stem the losses and win consumers' hearts?
In 2012, Reshma Saujani founded Girls Who Code (GWC) with the mission of closing the technology (tech) industry's gender gap. While GWC offered coding education programs to middle- and high-school-aged girls, the organization also sought to alter cultural stereotypes surrounding women in tech through books, advertisements, and social media campaigns. Saujani remained active in promoting her organization's message through a TED Talk, a best-selling book, and frequent media appearances and interviews. By 2019, GWC had served approximately 185,000 girls, expanded its programs to all 50 U.S. states, and reached hundreds of millions of individuals through its advertising and media campaigns. However, the tech gender gap was still significant. Saujani claimed that the organization was on track to close the gender gap among entry level tech roles by 2027. Would GWC reach its goal? If not, were there new initiatives that it should consider to increase its effectiveness?
Voi Technology, a fast-growing start-up out of Sweden, is competing in the highly contested European e-scooter sharing market. With a presence in nearly 40 cities in Europe by February 2020, the firm is working hard to improve its unit economics to reach profitability. In the meantime, Voi must also edge out its rivals to claim market share. As cities begin to regulate the space, Voi's leaders hope their strong relationships with government regulators will allow them to secure the few permits cities are expected to grant.
With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the "valley of death," unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem. At the beginning, Prime's role as a financial intermediary involved seeking out the most promising market-based technology solutions to climate change and recruiting foundations or philanthropists to fund them. In 2019, Prime changed course, adopting a portfolio approach with its Prime Impact Fund. By the end of the year, Prime had raised $40 million in philanthropic capital for its new fund. Once the funds were invested in promising energy startups, Prime planned to try its hand at recruiting traditional investors to back the same companies. Could Kearney convince traditional investors that these investments were worth the risks?
In December 2018, GRIT Fitness was a growing chain of boutique fitness studios offering a variety of workout classes, including weightlifting, high intensity interval training, and cardio dance. With 400 members and three Dallas studios, CEO Brittani Rettig believed her business had found a niche in a crowded industry by promoting female empowerment and psychological resilience through fitness. Rettig wanted to extend GRIT's reach to impact more women. What was the best path to growth?
Synthetic biology start-up C16 Biosciences wants to solve a big problem: replace palm oil, a major contributor to deforestation and climate change, with a lab-grown substitute. CEO Shara Ticku has ambitious plans to supply her lab-grown palm oil to food manufacturers, who use palm oil liberally in a variety of products from ice cream to margarine. In bringing her product to market, Ticku faces a tough decision. Should she roll out the product first in the personal care market, which has lower volumes and premium prices, or go straight for food? The meteoric rise of lab-grown meat company Impossible Foods has caught the attention of an investor, who wonders if C16 should tap into excitement about lab-grown foods to raise a Series A funding round. But are there merits to starting small?
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its parts. Facing threats to its growth, digital marketing and sales company Clear Link Technologies, LLC (Clearlink) decided to run an experiment to test strategies for improving sales productivity. The experiment compares the efficacy of two interventions: group incentives and management-directed peer learning. The case surfaces some of the mechanisms driving peer effects in the workplace and the managerial levers to tap into peer effects for improving operations. The case also provides an introduction to experiments in organizations and how these experiments may differ from traditional randomized controlled trials in marketing or pharmaceutical development.
This case explores the evolution of Nike's global product sourcing strategy, in particular ongoing efforts to improve working conditions at its suppliers' factories. When the case opens in July 2018, Vice President of Sourcing Amanda Tucker and her colleagues in Nike's Global Sourcing and Manufacturing division were focusing on three key supply chain challenges: sourcing from suppliers that meet compliance standards, challenging and encouraging suppliers to improve capabilities, and being responsive to consumer demand across the world.
By December 2018, entrepreneur Joe DeLoss's fried chicken company, Hot Chicken Takeover, has opened three restaurants in Columbus, Ohio using an unconventional employment model that helps people with criminal records get back on their feet. DeLoss is proud of the supportive employment environment he has cultivated, but wonders how to scale it beyond Columbus.
In April 2003, entrepreneur and MBA student Christy Jones was planning a new venture to help women preserve their fertility. Her company, Extend Fertility, would commercialize a technique known as egg freezing, in which a woman's eggs were extracted and stored at low temperatures until she was ready to become a mother. To date, the emerging technology had mostly been used to preserve the fertility of cancer patients whose treatment course could damage their eggs. Jones's business would target a massively broader population: healthy women wishing to postpone motherhood. Before Jones could launch Extend Fertility, she needed to answer two pressing questions. What, exactly, would an egg-freezing service be selling? And to whom?
Accomplice, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Boston, is raising its second fund in November 2017. Since 2009, the firm has followed a seed-led investment model, investing in tech companies at the earliest stages, often when products and business models are still experimental. The firm's partners are pleased with their preliminary returns and the deal flow they've been able to cultivate, in part by empowering local entrepreneurs to invest in promising new ideas on their behalf. The partners are confident their long-term returns will validate their investment strategy and positioning in the increasingly competitive VC market. Will investors agree?
Supplement to Knowledge Sharing at REMA 1000 (A). Chief Human Resources Officer Tore Høylie was proud of REMA 1000 (REMA)'s strong employee engagement with Workplace, Facebook's corporate social media platform, however some users complained that the corporate social network had disrupted hierarchical structures, and that the site was overloaded with information. To begin to remedy these problems, Høylie's team modified the group architecture and issued guidance for platform use.