This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Turkey. It highlights Turkey's economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2023 in the context of its history, culture, and politics. The case gives an overview of some of the main obstacles faced by businesses operating in the country, such as complexity of doing business, slow legal proceedings and a large informal sector and changing regulatory environment, contrasting these with the efforts undertaken by the government to improve the country's business climate. This is illustrated through the discussion of a business dilemma in which Setur is contemplating its business strategy in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and changing consumer tastes and preferences.
In December 2021, Unilever-one of the world's largest producers of consumer goods-was in the midst of a pilot project to digitize its manufacturing facilities and enable remote work for factory employees. This was possible because of an earlier project to retrofit a facility in Brazil with state-of-the art sensors on factory equipment to collect real-time data. The data was then analyzed using machine learning applications on the cloud so that key capabilities of the factory could be run remotely on a laptop in a technician's kitchen. The company hoped expanding this effort would improve efficiency and performance across its network of factories, and result in cost savings and decreased energy consumption for the entire organization. The company's next step was to explore the possibility of further digitizing factory operations with the creation of a global virtual operations room, where operators working remotely could ultimately oversee production at all of its 200 manufacturing sites around the world.
In 2021, public accelerator program Start-Up Chile, which ten years earlier had created a global buzz, might be losing its competitive edge to similar programs or one-year visas for digital nomads offered by other countries. The case follows SUP's CEO, Angeles Romo, as she considers how Chile could remain appealing to world-class entrepreneurs in a post-pandemic world and how to ensure SUP's impact on Chile's economy.
Set up in 2008, VidyaGyan was a residential school for children in grades 6-12 from low-income rural families in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. It was the brainchild of Shiv Nadar and Cabinet Secretary T.S.R. Subramanian, who recognized the enormous potential hidden in the poverty-stricken districts of this state. Nadar and his daughter Roshni hoped that the VidyaGyan effect would self-multiply; that students would inspire not just their family, but their street, their village, and their entire community - creating "spirals of inspiration" that would transform rural India. Regardless of their future career plans, the foundation had decided to fund the college education of any student who scored above 93% in their grade 12 exams and many students received offers from universities in the US and other countries. Having opened the door to the world, Nadar and Roshni wondered was it fair to ask the students to turn their backs on the opportunities in front of them and return home to the rural countryside?
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India's most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector, globally. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, like many companies around the world, TCS moved to remote working. The leadership of the company saw the myriad benefits of remote work. As the company planned for the future roadmap in the post-COVID world, it decided on a blended model. By 2025, only 25% of TCS employees would need to work in company facilities and no employee would need to spend more than 25% of their work hours in a physical office for the company to be productive. For this work model to be successful, the TCS management team had to brainstorm four key areas: What should the norms be for 25% in-person and who should determine them-senior managers, associates, clients, government regulators? How should the company convince veterans that virtual mentoring was as effective-if not more so-in preserving and further enriching the culture of mentorship? How should TCS deal with labor regulations around the world, if 'Talent on the Cloud' led to workers relocating and living in different geographies? Finally, how should TCS pitch this new model of work to clients once the pandemic eased?
As he considered his plans for the future, Glenn Sanford, CEO of eXp World Holdings, Inc., faced an exciting conundrum. He had built the first all-remote real estate brokerage firm, eXp Realty, which had been growing exponentially and was thriving, even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. eXp now had tens of thousands of agents, growing profits, and the potential for expansion into new global markets. Meanwhile, the virtual platform on which eXp was built, Virbela, was rapidly gaining enterprise-scale clients, as a wide range of industries looked to transition to remote operations during the pandemic. Sanford needed to decide how to allocate his company's talent, time, and resources. Should he maximize eXp Realty's growth and profits or focus on promoting Virbela's game-changing virtual platform?
The COVID-19 pandemic had forced a production cut in the factory of Sercomm, one of the world's major telecom equipment producers, in China. The case explores and highlights the challenges that Chief Executive Officer James Wang faced: How could Sercomm recover and ramp up production to meet its U.S. clients' immediate demands? In the longer term, how could it manage the increasing shortage of migrant workers in China? As a supplier of hardware components to the U.S., the company was also caught in the cross-fire of U.S.-China trade tensions due to the tariffs imposed on telecom products. Should the company move its production out of China? Could adopting Artificial Intelligence in the production line be an option?
Goldman Sachs runs an annual internship for over 3,000 participants, spread across dozens of the firm's global offices. In 2020, the team brought all its resources to bear to transform the internship program into a fully virtual format in just a few short weeks. The new all-virtual internship faced challenges, but also benefited from unexpected opportunities. As the program ended, the team reflected on what worked, what they would change, and what the future of the internship program at Goldman Sachs could look like in 2021 and beyond.
Tulsa Remote sought to attract a diverse group of remote workers to the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma-and was willing to put its money where its mouth was, offering $10,000 and a range of wraparound services for its program participants. After a successful pilot year, which saw the program select 100 participants out of more than 10,000 applicants, Tulsa Remote was excited to begin its second round of applications. However, the program faced an ongoing challenge attracting Black men to participate in the program. The team wondered what they could do to make their program-and their community-feel more welcoming. Meanwhile, as the second group of remote workers began making plans to move to Tulsa, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. How would the program deal with the effects of the pandemic, both on the local economy and on remote work in general?
Irfhan Rawji (MBA 2004) launched MobSquad in October 2018 to help American tech start-ups retain hard-to-find talent, many of whom struggled with U.S. work visa issues, such as software engineers with experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science. MobSquad also helped companies fill open roles by tapping into its database of pre-vetted foreign tech workers. While there was growing demand for these specialists, the talent supply in the U.S. was relatively constrained and American companies often filled positions with foreign-born workers using a temporary visa called the H-1B. However, U.S. President Donald Trump temporarily suspended immigration in June 2020, including foreign workers on an H-1B visa during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rawji contemplated what kind of impact this would have on MobSquad and the tech industry in Canada. There was already evidence that a growing number of foreign tech workers were choosing Canada over the U.S. due to Trump's immigration policies. Now Rawji suspected that Trump's latest move would further accelerate this trend, and he wanted MobSquad to be ready to help companies and workers who had been counting on the H-1B.
Although the Covid-19 crisis has halted travel in recent months, geographic mobility has become critical for managers and knowledge workers hoping to advance in today's globalized economy, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. Assignments far from headquarters can pay off financially and can boost your career by improving your problem-solving and leadership skills and building your networks. Yet they also have constraints and costs. Anyone contemplating such a move should think through its full implications first. Research on people in a variety of organizations around the world--from Indian bureaucrats to American consultants--suggests some common principles for getting the most out of relocations: Make moves early in your career, when hurdles are usually lower and you can apply the learning over many more years of work. Step out of your comfort zone to stretch your abilities. Find workarounds for constraints. To minimize the psychological costs, find ways to stay connected to home. Time your trips to HQ strategically, and plan the next step right from the start.
In the summer of 2019 in New Delhi, S K Shahi and his daughter, Meenakshi, faced a difficult problem. India had 19 centers of their non-profit, the Center for Social Responsibility and Leadership. Also called the 'Super 30' program, this offered free training for India's rigorous engineering entrance exam, the Joint Entrance Examination, to 30 - or sometimes 50 or 100 - high school graduates, selected by merit. Shahi and Meenakshi ran these centers using the corporate social responsibility funds donated by large state-owned companies in India, and some private companies. They had been operational for over a decade, with alumni working in academia, top tech companies, and education, having graduated from India's best colleges. They now had a difficult decision to make: should they expand in large metropolis cities - New Delhi; Kanpur; Mumbai - that would attract talented youth from all over India? Or else, given India's remote geographies and uneven distribution of income and educational benefits, was it best to expand to these tough regions to help those who most needed it? An additional source of concern was the operational and logistical cost of running centers in different parts of the country. What was the best way forward: city or town, urban or remote? New Delhi or Kashmir?
GitLab is arguably one of the world's largest "all-remote" companies. Started in 2011 and with more than 1,000 employees at present, it has no physical offices and all employees, including the entire C-Suite, work remotely from all parts of the world. The case highlights the value created for companies and employees from the adoption of the all-remote model. It also sets up a debate for how GitLab should customize organizational processes related to communication, coordination, and socialization as the firm scales up.
This case profiles the early career choices faced by three McKinsey associates. The A case profiles the dilemma faced by each individual and sets up the class discussion. The B case outlines the choices made by the associates in real life and the consequences of such choices.
This case profiles the early career choices faced by three McKinsey associates. The A case profiles the dilemma faced by each individual and sets up the class discussion. The B case outlines the choices made by the associates in real life and the consequences of such choices.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patent and trademark applications. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April 2016, it took roughly 26 months for a patent application to move through the evaluation process, which exceeded the office's processing goal of 20 months. In August 2016, Andrew Hirshfeld, the commissioner for patents at the USPTO, considered the current state of patent examination and future possibilities. In recent years, a number of new and exciting tools enabled by advances in telework, machine learning, and other approaches had emerged. Hirshfeld hoped to maximize these tools' utility in order to enhance patent examiners' work and productivity. Helping examiners become more productive could in turn help the USPTO achieve its joint goals of processing patent applications more quickly and granting better quality patents. But the new tools and organizational changes would bring challenges too. Any changes would have to be implemented at the grassroots of the USPTO organization, and ongoing pilots would not be successful without the buy-in and cooperation of both individual examiners as well as the union.