CEO Tim Höttges had successfully led Deutsche Telekom (DT) on an ambitious mission to become Europe's leading telecommunications service provider. All the more impressive, the company had achieved this goal while also navigating the expansion of T-Mobile's network in the United States, and merger with Sprint. What would be DT's next strategic challenge? In late 2023, Höttges and his executive team were scrutinizing the next frontiers in digitalization, as well as assessing ongoing challenges from hyperscalers. It was time to set new goals, Höttges believed, and lead the sector by continuing to build and operate best-in-class, integrated digital networks. This meant investing more in cloud-based service platforms, continuing the rollout of fiber optic networks in Germany, and realizing the full potential of monetizing DT network assets in conjunction with 5G technology. This case describes the strategic challenges facing DT in 2023 and beyond. Boundaries between industries such as telecommunications, software, artificial intelligence, data storage, chip technology, digital security, and cloud platforms were rapidly blurring. How would DT position itself as an industry leader in new areas-and fend off competition from traditional telecom providers?

This case is the third in a series that explores how the storied Swedish media company, Bonnier News, is transforming itself to succeed in the digital era. This case picks up from 2019 and follows the Bonnier News management team as it crafts and implements a strategy to succeed in the rapidly transforming media landscape and increasingly fraught geopolitical environment. Their goals as they do so are to sustain profitable digital growth for Bonnier News; increase the reach and relevance of their papers; bring more value to more readers; and become a leader in European business media while continuing to develop a successful, sustainable, and scalable business. Success was essential, even existential-indeed, in their view, democracy itself was riding on it.

Automation, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI) were driving massive change by the 2020s-and it was perhaps only a matter of time before the planet had billions of digital workers executing standardized, repetitive tasks. In the 20 years since its founding, Automation Anywhere had laid a solid foundation in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which helped companies be more efficient via application user interfaces, application programming interfaces, and database access. In 2023 the global RPA market was around $3 billion-and analysts projected this would hit $24 billion to $30 billion by 2030. Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere, had seen the potential to transform how companies and people worked by letting technology take on repetitive tasks. Shukla had helped pioneer the technology that automated business processes with intelligent software bots - AI powered digital workers. And Shukla had led the company from its early days selling a low-cost software product, to its pivot towards the enterprise market and SaaS model. The company timed its series A funding round in 2018, positioning itself to be a leader in bringing new advances and AI applications to millions of people. By 2023, large and small organizations alike were increasingly open to adopting new technologies-and many companies believed the tipping point for AI had occurred with the emergence of the large language models and ChatGPT. The next five years promised to be exciting. What would Automation Anywhere tackle next in the fast-evolving intelligent automation market? How would it win the innovation battle, and brainstorm the path forward to build enterprise value?

For CEO Elon Musk, Tesla's mission required not only new technologies to create electric vehicles, but innovation on the software that connected every aspect of the organization. Tesla was founded in 2003 with the goal of revolutionizing the automotive industry, by producing electric vehicles that would help accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Twenty years later, Tesla had achieved remarkable progress across multiple dimensions such as production capacity, innovative electric vehicles, customer experience, and financial performance. The case study offers unique insights by Tesla leaders into the company's journey to create a system and a process that would revolutionize the global automotive sector. To achieve its goals, Tesla had to deliver a dramatically different-and superior-customer experience to accompany the company's innovative electric vehicles. The case describes how Tesla's IT team set about custom-building a vertically integrated system operating system (OS) that connected and bound every aspect of the company's operations. In fact, the Tesla OS, a custom-built ecosystem, was far more expansive than a typical company's OS in that it powered all aspects of business planning and customer experiences-this enabled Tesla to go directly to the consumer, and bypass the traditional automotive dealership networks.

How would Cummins Inc., a global leader in internal combustion engines, map out a strategy for the great energy transformation ahead-one that would grow the company while addressing the twin challenges of climate change and the world's insatiable need for power? Cummins Inc., founded in 1919, had become a leading designer, manufacturer, and distributor of internal combustion engines, power generation systems, and related parts and technologies. The case study discusses the strategic thinking behind Cummins' goal of Destination Zero, the company's zero-emissions target for 2050, and the interim steps, partnerships, innovation, and customer education needed to reach that goal. Cummins technology was integral to light-duty trucks, medium-duty trucks, heavy-duty trucks and buses; the company's engines were widely used in industries such as construction, mining, marine, and oil & gas. Major customers included original equipment manufacturers such as Daimler Benz, Navistar, Volvo, Paccar, and Tata. Evolving the Cummins product portfolio would require a series of interim goals, and juggling continual improvements to core engine products while building out zero-emissions solutions.

This case explores the leadership change and corporate revitalization of legendary Silicon Valley corporation Intel, as incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger seeks to rebuild the company's leading edge capabilities, revise its product strategy, and embark upon an ambitious capital plan.

On April 12, 2018, Zuora listed on NYSE under the ticker symbol ZUO, becoming a publicly traded company at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The software company had achieved fast growth in the rapidly expanding subscription economy-and was poised to differentiate itself from the pack by serving both incumbents and disruptors. A subscription company itself, Zuora provided the billing products fueling the rapid growth of the subscription economy. The path ahead meant facing the challenge of innovating to meet an increasingly complex customer base, and rapidly growing companies like Zoom. But sustaining existing customer relationships-in addition to acquiring new customers-was critical for every SaaS company, and Zuora was no exception. The growth leading to the IPO was a clear indicator of the value Zuora's software products provided to customers. How would Zuora differentiate itself from competitors and enhance its subscription business model, but also retain long-time customers by easing the integration of new offerings with legacy enterprise resource planning applications? This ability to compete, to differentiate, and to continue to drive customer success meant it was time for a new blueprint for Zuora's next steps.

Autodesk's new CEO launched three strategic initiatives that would transform the company into a global leader in software products and services for architecture, engineering, and construction. The company would be a customer-centric organization, with the new technologies and apps its customers demanded. How would the company meet the challenge of customer expectations-and their fears about shifting to cloud-native solutions? After all, different customer segments were likely to have distinctly different expectations-but delighting customers with next-generation cloud solutions would power their operations, as well as Autodesk's growth. At the same time, how would Autodesk balance old and new products, and make the transition seamless? This would involve an internal cultural shift, as engineers generally preferred to write new code, and take on new challenges, vs. leveraging existing code. But shared services-in which teams leveraged common, existing services to save time, ensure quality, and move fast-were critical to development the new platforms. As the Autodesk CEO commented, "Perceptions change lightning fast, but it takes a lot longer for people to change."

Infosys Consulting was known for delivering innovative consulting services to some of the world's most complex companies. Launched in 2004 as a separate subsidiary, Infosys Consulting was integrated into a new business unit within its parent company in 2011. This case study examines strategic and operational decisions the global leader in consulting and technology faced in growing the increasingly commoditized-and competitive-systems integration and IT outsourcing business. This path involved several bumps in the road, to be sure, and achieving a healthy growth trajectory would require careful decisions about everything from leadership to client relationships to company governance. And it would take a new global model primed to capture the massive opportunities at the intersection of strategy and technology.

Dr. Robert Pearl, newly elected as CEO in 1999, faced a massive new challenge: saving Kaiser Permanente from imminent bankruptcy. From 1999 to 2017, Dr. Pearl transformed Kaiser Permanente from a dysfunctional organization to one of the largest and most lauded in the U.S. Dr. Pearl strategically shifted the organization from the lowest-cost provider to one with superior quality and service at a competitive price. He achieved this goal by applying an "art to science" approach to drive down operational costs and persuading otherwise reticent doctors.

Tim Höttges was at the outset of his seventh year as CEO of Deutsche Telekom (DT) in 2020. The company served more than 184 million mobile customers and had a presence in over 50 countries. Over the course of the previous 7 years, European telecommunication companies had experienced varying degrees of success. Revenues for telecommunication companies in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain as a whole fell by 14 percent from 2012-2019, while DT's revenues rose by 38 percent, with fully two-thirds of DT's revenues generated outside of Germany in 2019. In late January, 2020, Höttges and his executive team are focused on the challenges faced by European telcos: advances in "digitization," "cloudification" and "softwarization" of the telecommunications network, along with the growth of 5G wireless capabilities, and the emergence of new types of co-opetitive relationships with the hyperscalers, large companies like Amazon and Microsoft that were making efforts dominate the public cloud and cloud services industries and expand into related verticals. This case describes the strategic challenges facing DT in 2020 and beyond that Höttges needs to think about and act upon: (1) the evolution of network technologies to cloud-centric production models, (2) attractive products and services as well as customer interaction through digital channels, synergies, and efficiency levers in internal processes, (3) the battle with the hyperscalers, and (4) the resolution of the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) challenge in Germany.

This case continues the story of Dr. Robert Pearl, who had guided the Permanente Group of Northern California through challenging years in the health care industry. While Kaiser Permanente had a long history and well-established reputation on the West Coast, creating a profitable health care system in the mid-Atlantic region proved difficult for a number of reasons. For one, Kaiser Permanente had not made a mindful transfer of the history, culture, and mission from Northern California to the operations of its Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States. And market dynamics were different on the East Coast, making it difficult for Kaiser Permanente to compete on its core strength: care delivery. To address these problems, Dr. Pearl dispatched seasoned physician leaders from Northern California, assigning them help transform the mid-Atlantic operations. He focused on a strategic and operational plan to provide 15 to 20 percent better quality and service and 10 percent lower price compared to the competition, and on recruiting dedicated primary care physicians willing to be more flexible about their scheduling and the specific hours they worked.

When Anders Eriksson was appointed CEO of Bonnier News in June 2016, he took the helm of a storied Swedish media business in the midst of a momentous transformation. Bonnier News included three of Sweden's most important newspapers-Dagens Nyheter (DN), the national paper of record; Dagens Industri (DI), the top business daily; and Expressen, a tabloid that reached roughly half of the country's population-and the southern Swedish daily HD-Sydsvenskan. But the digital age had presented multiple challenges to each of these entities, and to media enterprises worldwide, and Bonnier had grappled with its response to the changing environment. It was Eriksson's task to set Bonnier News on a growth trajectory that would eventually lead to take-off. This case explores Bonnier's restructuring; group level strategic leadership; development of group-level digital competencies; and business-level strategies.

Bahwan CyberTek (BCT) was an IP-enabled technology company founded in 1999 by Sheikah Hind Bahwan (Hind) and S. Durgaprasad (DP). Over the years, it had grown into a global provider of innovative software products and services and had become a $275 million group with more than 2,950 business and technology professionals. BCT was privately held, based in Chennai, India, with operations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. BCT had worked with more than 1,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, and delivered its innovative software solutions to companies in North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In 2016, BCT began to seriously ponder how it could carve out an identity for itself in the digital space, thereby leveraging and capitalizing on the great and growing amount of knowledge it had created. "From day one we were building our IP," said Hind, "and that is why we are consolidating all our knowledge in the separate company, and that is the company that will go public or get investors: dt360. It is already registered as a separate company. So we have now restructured and are moving forward." In addition to establishing a home for its growing IP, BCT also wanted to build an entity that could best deliver transformation value to its clients along with the capability to scale fast with state-of-the-art and emerging technologies. And, it wanted to enable its own workforce to embrace these new technologies, thereby keeping them current and relevant in the rapidly evolving market. So, with these multiple potential benefits in mind, BCT officially established dt360 (the name was intended to represent digital transformation across 360 degrees) as a wholly owned subsidiary in late 2017. In 2018, BCT's top management was considering the strategic and organizational challenges they confronted in further developing and leading the newly formed company.

Bahwan Cybertek (BCT) was an IP-enabled technology company founded in 1999 by Sheikah Hind Bahwan (Hind) and S. Durgaprasad (DP). Over the years, it had grown into a global provider of innovative software products and services and become a $242 million company with more than 2800 business and technology professionals. BCT was privately held, based in Chennai, India, with operations in the United States, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. BCT had worked with more than 550 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, and delivered its innovative software solutions to companies in North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In 2016, BCT created a holding company for capitalizing on the great and growing amount of IP it had created. The move seemed a natural progression for the company. "From day one we were building our IP," said Hind, "and that is why we are moving all our IP to the separate company, and that is the company that will go public or get investors: BCT Digital. It is already registered as a separate company. So now we need to restructure and move." One year later, in late 2017, BCT Digital had been established and BCT's top management was considering the strategic and organizational challenges they confronted in further developing and leading the newly-formed company.

The case follows PayPal, a digital payments platform that found early success processing online payments for purchases on eBay, which acquired the company in 2002. The case begins by describing the decision by eBay in 2014 to spin off PayPal and the strategic challenges facing its new CEO, Dan Schulman, who encountered significant strategic issues leading PayPal as an independent company. When the separation from eBay finalized in July 2015, PayPal was in the midst of a multi-year technology reconstruction. Additionally, the digital payments landscape had changed dramatically, extending beyond eCommerce into mobile payments, global remittances, peer-to-peer transfers, and offline transactions. The case presents several trials facing Schulman, including how to innovate quickly in a large organization, whether and how to recreate PayPal's vision, and how to both partner and compete successfully with new entrants in the market.

The SurveyMonkey case portrays the evolution of the company from its founding in 1999 through to 2014. SurveyMonkey was launched by Ryan Finley, a young computer science graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to address the dearth of easy-to-use, affordable online survey tools on the market. In 2009, Finley sold the company to Spectrum Equity and Bain Capital Ventures, having recognized the need for a partner to help the company achieve its full potential. David Goldberg, an entrepreneur and former Yahoo! executive, took the helm as CEO and immediately put in place his plan to set the company on track to scale at a consistent and rapid pace of growth. Goldberg's primary initiatives in the early days were to hire a strong management team, rebuild the entire technology platform, and expand internationally. As it made substantial progress on these fronts, SurveyMonkey completed several acquisitions and began to expand its feature set and product offerings to include SurveyMonkey Audience (panels of survey respondents) and survey templates, among others. The company completed an $800 million secondary financing raise in 2012 to provide liquidity to employees and investors in lieu of an IPO and charged forward in its efforts to transform its survey tool to a full-blown platform. Though SurveyMonkey had established itself as the dominant player in the direct-to-consumer market by 2013, it began building out an enterprise offering to compete against the other large players in the growing enterprise feedback management space. Having achieved tremendous growth in its 15-year history, the majority of which took place since the 2009 acquisition, as Goldberg and his team looked ahead to 2014, they faced the critical question of how to prioritize SurveyMonkey's avenues for growth-international expansion, quality initiatives, enterprise, platform growth-so as to best position the company to achieve its full potential.

Dopfner had directed Axel Springer to approach this task with a two-stage digital transformation strategy process. Beginning in 2006, the company focused on organic growth and late-stage digital acquisitions. This stage of the strategy process had centered around profitability and the infusion of digitization into the corporate culture. In 2013, the second stage of the strategy process was driven by Dopfner's formulation of the firm's corporate mission to become "The Leading Digital Publisher" and his defining the company's business as its branded content and not its distribution channels. With this new strategy, Axel Springer intended to espouse early-stage investments and entrepreneurship and grow revenue through three business models: paid content, marketing, and classified advertising. As of 2013, Dopfner's two-stage digital transformation strategy had been a stunning success. Axel Springer had more than 12,800 employees, total revenues of $3.9 billion, and EBITDA of $625 million. The company had exceeded the goals it had set for digital media contributions to revenue and EBITDA, achieved reach in 44 countries, and serviced 98 million unique digital visitors worldwide. Looking forward in April 2014, however, it was clear that the future still held many challenges. Dopfner knew that Axel Springer would need to continue to successfully balance digital and traditional media business strategies, further reestablish the firm's identity, and continue to pioneer the cultural transition within the organization.

CEO Aaron Levie co-founded Box as a student at USC in 2004. Less than 10 years later, Box had become one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in Silicon Valley, serving more than 180,000 businesses including marquee customers such as Procter and Gamble, Panasonic, and Avaya. Despite this success, Levie was concerned about the future. He and his leadership team would need to overcome significant hurdles to turn Box into one of the next great enterprise software companies. This case explores how Levie planned to evolve Box from online storage to a data platform in the cloud. It follows the company's attempt to shift from collaborative sharing of information to becoming a platform for accessing critical data. Issues covered include: managing competitive threats from large, well-funded companies such as Microsoft and Citrix, delivering enterprise-class solutions with consumer-grade ease-of-use, and maintaining Box's distinctive and fun culture as the company grew and added more disciplined business processes.