The case focuses on the transformation of OCP, a state-owned monopoly that mined and exploited Morocco's phosphate reserves. By 2021 it had become an organization with a mission to contribute to the sustainability of food security as the custodians of 70% of the world's phosphate reserves. Phosphate is one of three vital ingredients in fertilizers that are used to grow healthy, drought-resistant plants, and contributes to sustainable agriculture. This is nowhere more urgent than in Africa: sub-Saharan Africa has the world's fastest-growing population, but an impoverished agricultural system and only one-third of its arable land is cultivated. Helping smallholder farmers to cultivate more land with robust crops could improve the continent's sustainable agriculture and better feed its population. In 2016 OCP Group's Chairman, Dr Mostafa Terrab, launched "the Movement," a vaguely defined initiative to "liberate energy" and develop collective intelligence to build a more purposeful sustainable future. The Movement's goal was to continue the group's transformation from a hierarchical phosphate producer to a global, digital and learning organization with a mission to create sustainable growth for everyone. The case describes the Movement's philosophy, intention and principles: self-organization, an advice process, and collective intelligence based on a shared vision that all people can contribute to the organization and its ecosystem through collaboration. The Movement brings people together to anticipate future challenges and stakeholder expectations and to bring innovative ideas to life. By 2019, the Movement had launched 60 projects involving 9,000 people that have diversified the group's business activities, enhanced the employee experience, created growth opportunities and community engagement in Morocco and across Africa. Several of these projects have been anchored into the Group and have increased its focus on inclusive business and sustainable development.
Case (A) describes the situation facing John Davison after joining the company in December 2014 as the new CEO. A failing ERP implementation had led to serious operational issues in Singapore (its home base) and the Philippines (its biggest and most profitable market). Affected hospitals and doctors had complained directly to the Zuellig family, who owns the company. The board fired the two Co-CEOs who had been running the company and brought John in to turn it around. The company had lost ground with the ratio of operating profit to Gross Operating Revenue (GOR) dropping from 30% in 2009 to 14% in 2014. Increased competition leading to falling margins had contributed to this, as had a lack of focus on improving productivity. The company's most important clients, such as GSK, were threatening to take their business elsewhere if Zuellig Pharma did not fix its operational problems. The organization was fragmented, with a very small head office, disparate processes across the country operations, and no central leadership of key functions such as operations and quality assurance. The board had lost confidence in the leadership team which, in turn, felt that the board was interfering too much and not giving them the freedom to address the problems at hand. The company had invested in a number of businesses it saw as complementing its main distribution core, but these were sub-scale and (with one exception) loss-making. The leadership team needed to urgently develop a turnaround plan.
Case (B) is set in January 2020 when CEO John Davison decided to step down as CEO by end of June 2020. It describes the specific actions of Zuellig Pharma's transformation and how they resulted in more than doubling the company's net profit between 2015 and 2019 These actions included: (1) driving operational excellence by successfully completing the ERP implementation and taking other steps to fix operational problems; (2) fostering the leadership team through selective changes and aligning it around an integrated regional strategy; (3) increasing head office control while ensuring that country operations had the autonomy needed to operate effectively; (4) resetting the relationship between the management and the board to create more alignment and trust; (5) strengthening relationships with key distribution clients; and (6) growing the solutions businesses which accounted by 2019 for over 20% of GOR and net profit. The case also describes the situation facing Zuellig Pharma as the Covid-19 pandemic began to unfold, and John Davison's initial thoughts on related key issues facing the company.
Case (C) is set in July 2020 when John Graham took over as Zuellig Pharma's new CEO and he needed to decide how to take the company forward. Prior to that, John Graham had effectively led the company's Commercial Solutions business. However, as the new CEO he needed to manage the entire portfolio of new solutions businesses and investments in digital startups. Zuellig Pharma had successfully navigated the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It had benefited from its earlier efforts to increase the robustness of its supply chain as well as the resilience and dedication of its employees. The COVID-19 crisis had accelerated the roll-out of its new e-commerce platform, which allowed for online ordering and cash collection. At the same time, the company had suffered financially because some costs had significantly increased. Zuellig Pharma faced an even more difficult environment with new stakeholders (like patient groups and Ministries of Health) playing a more important role. Given these challenges, its leadership needed to decide how to take the company forward and ensure that it continues to thrive in the future.
Case B focuses on the year of transformation. In January 2018 Anna disrupted ths narrative of success and told RDB it needed to transform. The case outlines the critical decisions and actions Anna initiated to steer the transformation, engage customers and staff and address concerns in the leadership team. Focusing on cultural transformation was a pre-requisite to prepare the company for digital transformation. The case provides the opportunity for participants to assess whether Anna succeeded in introducing transformation to an already successful business.
The Roche Diagnostics Belgium (RDB) case study consists of two parts: Part (A): "Changing a Winning Formula?" and Part (B): Cultural and Digital transformation. The cases focus on the transformation which Anna-Maria Heuchel-Reinig initiated to turn the company into a more successful business. RDB had a strong track-record within Roche for high-performance and good market share. Anna had an equally solid reputation, having managed different businesses and country organizations within Roche over a 20-year career. The two-part case study covers the period from April 2017 until October 2019 and recounts how Anna made sense of the situation she inherited when she became the General Manager of the Belgian organisation and the actions she took to initiate a journey focused on customer centricity, cultural change and digital business transformation. Case A covers Anna's first 100 days as General Manager from April 2017 - August 2017. She was told that RDB was a high performing, customer-focused organization, yet she encountered a company living on past successes with weakening customer focus. The case outlines the company context, Anna's early encounters with the Belgian organization, her developing concerns and the gap between RDB's narrative of success and her own assessment of the company.
The case presents the impact of the digital disruption coming from the sharing economy from the perspective of the largest American auto manufacturer, General Motors (GM). ?The car-sharing business led by Uber has been forcing a change to the traditional model by introducing the for-hire transport business especially in densely populated urban settings. At the same time, technology innovation has allowed non-traditional competitors making serious advancements. For GM, despite its history of innovations, these forces represent uncertainty and perhaps even an existential challenge. At the beginning of 2016, GM failed to acquire Lyft, the most promising competitor of Uber and ended up in an investment of $500 million corresponding to only 9% of the company. This investment, together with other two (Maven and Cruise Automation) are the proof that GM and its CEO Mary Barra, realized how difficult would be - for a company of the size and structure like GM - to compete with agile and innovative start-up companies leveraging on data and digital technologies. Despite being the pioneer of the technology of the connected cars with its OnStar® technology, GM finds itself desperately looking for insights and customer data that would allow better understanding the changing preference of the urban customers shifting their consumption behaviour from car-ownership to shared mobility services. With declining market share in the traditional automotive space, Mary Barra is called to make a tough strategic call that should attempt to steer this giant and iconic American company into a new ecosystem where value creation is much more delocalized and where GM should attempt to take a large part in order to avoid the risk of irrelevance that the new competitors and the digitally enabled service-based economy are posing. What should Mary Barra do with Lyft and how should Lyft be integrated in the future offering of General Motors?
Kaan Terzioglu, Turkcell's CEO, was in a pensive mood on his fifth day on the job. He had just received his first WhatsApp call, which highlighted the challenge his company - Turkey's largest mobile telecommunications provider - was facing from over-the-top (OTT) service providers. Of Turkcell's 35 million mobile subscribers, 10 million were WhatsApp users. The 4.5G spectrum auctions, where the company would be competing against Vodafone and Turk Telekom, were approaching in August 2015. Turkcell needed to decide whether to bid aggressively to maintain its market leading position or to bid less aggressively to acknowledge a more competitive and less profitable future. Turkcell had remained solidly profitable and its revenues in Turkey had increased by 10% from the first quarter of 2014 to early 2015. Voice revenues in Turkey had dropped by 4%, though an increase in data revenues of 46% had more than counterbalanced this. Intense competition with Vodafone and Turk Telekom made it difficult to increase prices. Turkcell faced significant internal challenges. Mobile and fixed-line communications were run by separate subsidiaries, which made it difficult for Turkcell to present one face to the consumer and react effectively to the converging telecom market. The organization was top-heavy with too many managers at all levels. Despite all this, the feeling within the company was that there was no compelling need for change because it was number one among mobile telecom operators and profitable. Turkcell's international operations had been hit by currency devaluations in Ukraine and Belarus. They were a mixed bag including both subsidiaries and minority stakes. As the new CEO, Kaan Terzioglu knew that he had a window of opportunity to make significant changes. He wondered where he should start.
Supplement to case IMD972 Kaan Terzioglu, Turkcell's CEO, and his top team had spent Capital Markets Day with global investment analysts celebrating the firm's achievements. Over the last three years, the company had transformed itself from a network operator selling undifferentiated data and voice services in Turkey into an experience provider that offered messaging, music, TV, search and other services to its customers. This had culminated in the launch of its Lifecell digital brand in Turkey in September 2017. This had turbocharged its revenue growth, which reached 23% in 2017. While there was room for Turkcell to grow its core consumer business in Turkey, it would also rely on opportunities in digital services, the corporate market and in new business areas including energy, finance, healthcare and automotive to sustain future growth. Turkcell had rationalized its international portfolio, taken steps to make its subsidiaries in Ukraine, Belarus and Northern Cyprus financially stable and was moving forward with the same digital operator strategy as in Turkey. The company planned to grow internationally by franchising the digital operator model it had pioneered in Turkey to telecom operators worldwide. Kaan Terzioglu felt this would increase the company's valuation given the valuation of global over-the-top (OTT) companies. Turkcell's growth plan raised questions. Did the firm have the management bandwidth to move into so many new business areas in Turkey? Would it be able to grow internationally using the franchise model? The answers were not clear.
The hotel industry is being disrupted by new digital players who have entered the market and challenge the conventional hospitality approach. The sharing economy in particular, with the Airbnb start-up in the lead, has created a major challenge, if not a threat, to established hotel chains. As a response, AccorHotels, Europe's leading hotel group, is going through a major digital transformation that impacts its corporate culture, organizational structure, value proposition, and overall business model. The goal is to turn the traditional asset-heavy company into an active player in the new hospitality economy, able to compete head-on with the industry's digital disruptors. Learning objective: The case discusses the strategic response of industry incumbents to the challenges coming from digital disruptors. Participants will be asked to compare the two business models from different angles: how do the different approaches deliver on the consumer proposition, and which are the strengths and weaknesses of each business model. Participants will further be asked to assess the strategic options of an asset-heavy incumbent to react to asset-light competitors in a context of digital disruption. The case serves as a basis to discuss the opportunities and challenges of industry incumbents to transform themselves and better compete in an increasingly digital business environment.
This case study investigates the phenomenal development of M-PESA in Kenya, the world's most successful mobile phone-based financial service, and the way it transformed its parent company, Safaricom from being an incumbent telecommunications operator to also becoming a digital platform working across different industries and sectors through an extensive business ecosystem. Safaricom, Kenya's incumbent telecom operator, developed M-PESA in partnership with Vodafone. The service was launched in March 2007 and has since been used by more than 23 million people in Kenya! It started off as a mere person-to-person remittance service and now provides a wide array of financial services for retail customers, businesses and government. Nearly a decade after its launch, M-PESA has drastically transformed the daily life of its users as well as Kenya's economic landscape, where it impacted the banking and telecom landscape, boosted the development of e-commerce and facilitated operations for thousands of small businesses, online and offline. Internationally, M-PESA has become a role model for mobile financial services and payment platforms as well as inclusive business practices. Learning objective: The case provides insights about the digital business transformation (DBT) of an incumbent telecom operator through the offering of mobile financial services. It helps to: Comprehend the why, what, and how of DBT; Assess the different dimensions of DBT; Appreciate the crucial role in DBT of leadership, lean management, talent development and organizational alignment; Understand the business opportunities enabled by leveraging breakthrough innovation, digital platforms, and big data.
Tunisia has been the only country to emerge from the Arab Spring with a successful transition to democracy. This case focuses on a critical period in this transition process, when the country appointed an interim government. The case zooms in on the leadership and governance challenges of this "caretaker" administration during its one-year mandate in 2014-2015. In order to convey the highly turbulent environment this government faced, the story centers on one of the cabinet ministers and his struggle to deal with students' protests, labor strikes and threats to national security. It also outlines the challenge of making ethical decisions and pursuing much-needed reforms in this context. The protagonist of the case - the Minister of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Information & Communication Technologies, Mr Tawfik Jelassi - is unusual in that he was a business school professor and dean with no political experience, who was plunged into a new environment and expected to "sink or swim." He had to learn to map out the constellation of stakeholders who were important to his decision-making and to understand the dynamics of political conflicts. He was a member of a diverse team: non-partisan "technocrats" coming from different sectors and countries. An esprit-de-corps and high-level coordination enabled the government team to achieve the objectives set by the country's National Dialogue Quartet at the outset of their mandate. In 2015, Tunisia was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having built a pluralistic democracy. The Norwegian Nobel Committee stated that: "The ultimate validation of the Quartet's historical effort came in the autumn of 2014, when the parliamentary and presidential elections were carried out. Both the technocratic government and the interim president resigned and were replaced by lawfully elected successors."
The Dallara Automobili case describes the success of a family run company that designed and built chassis for racing and sports cars. Established in 1972 by the legendary Gian Paolo Dallara, the company provided winning chassis for almost all major racing formulas. Initially the company's success was based on two core capabilities: aerodynamics and carbon fiber manufacturing, a combination that allowed the company to produce fast, light and safe chassis. In 2007, when the founder turned 70, he brought on board a new CEO, Andrea Pontremoli (former CEO of IBM Italy), to support and develop the company's long-term vision. Pontremoli led the company through an innovation journey that transformed Dallara from a pure high-end craftsmanship company into a modern engineering firm. Dallara pursued its original vocation and capabilities but it also developed new revenue streams, entering new customer segments beyond motorsports. The case describes the steps of this journey, focusing on how innovation impacted the traditional workflow within Dallara, opening up new business opportunities while maintaining the lead in its core business.
The case charts the past decade of online grocery retailing at Tesco.com and the development and launch of the non-food operation "Tesco Direct". Tesco implemented a unique fulfillment model by using its vast network of bricks-and-mortar supermarkets across the UK to pick the items ordered by online customers.
This case focuses on Nordea's move from e-banking to e-business and the way the bank established an e-habit and e-trust among its customers. It examines the main e-business services that Nordea currently offers to its private and corporate customers. These include e-identification, e-signature, e-billing, e-salary and e-payment. The case also discusses multi-channel management and pricing issues as well as future growth opportunities.
Paybox.net, founded in 1999, is a frontrunner in providing mobile payment services in Germany and other European countries. The case discusses the development and roll- out of the m-payment services, the business model and marketing approach used, the technological and organizational challenges that the company faced as well as the sustainability of the paybox competitive position.
The case focuses on opportunities and challenges for a traditional, bricks-and-mortar retailer to use the Internet as an added channel. A major implementation issue, which raised a heated debate among retailers, concerns Tesco.com's order fulfilment approach, based on in-store picked (rather than dedicated warehouses). It also insists on how can one make Internet retailing a profit-making story.
This case analyses the first years of operation of 12Snap, a German start-up launched in 1999 and considered today the largest mobile marketing channel in Europe. It focuses on the changing market positioning and business model of the company, which evolved from B2C mobile retailing to B2B mobile marketing.
This case describes the development and use of a neutral B-to-B marketplace (mondus.com), set up for small- and medium-sized enterprises. It analyses how mondus matches buyers and sellers through the request-for-proposals model. The case also describes the international expansion of mondus and the entrepreneurial leadership of its founders, and highlights the benefits and drawbacks for the e-marketplace players.