Amazon was one of the first entrants in e-commerce. Under the leadership of founder Jeff Bezos, Amazon had expanded beyond books to manufacturing and selling a wide range of products and services globally. Bezos had built a customer-centric culture that permeated all aspects of the company. As Amazon continued to grow and expand into new business areas, would it be able to maintain its culture and practices? How much of Amazon's success depended on the cult of Bezos? As the company continued to diversify beyond Bezos's immediate oversight, what could Amazon do to ensure that it stayed relentless?

Ray White is an Australian real estate business that has been owned and operated by the White family for four generations. The business has expanded and prospered. However, as the industry faces new challenges and opportunities, how should the White family respond? This case also describes how the company has dealt with the COVID-19 crisis.

This article provides guidance to social entrepreneurs and their funders as they seek to advance the enterprise from startup to scale. It focuses on the evolution of four social entrepreneurs and their decision-making paths as they attempt to scale their respective organizations. It then develops a framework to understand how social entrepreneurs alternate between pursuing activities to increase the scale of their work and delivering social impact in a "zig-zagging" process.

Supplemental to case 517025. This (B) case describes the changes in the organization's strategy from one of Building Playgrounds to Influencing Play. It describes the implementation of the strategy and the challenges it faced internally and externally. It goes on to describe how the organization under its new leader, James Siegal, further adjusted the strategy and its implementation, to navigate through the initial difficulties. The case closes with the question, what else should the organization do to help the new strategy take off?

Accion, an NGO, had been a pioneer in microfinance since its entry into that sector in the early 1970s. Its investments in Banco Compartamos paid off, when the microfinance bank went IPO in 2007, leaving an influx of $138 million for Accion. Under a new CEO, Michael Schlein, who came from Citibank, the organization was constantly wrestling with what its next strategic direction should be. In 2010, Schlein decided to move the organization in the direction of fintech, betting that the new digital technologies would enable a rapid inclusion of the 1.7 billion people who had been traditionally excluded from financial products and services. The case lays out the components of the new strategy and asks students to assess its effectiveness.

Using World Bank data, the note defines the Base of the Pyramid population as the 4.76 billion people living on less than $10/day. It briefly reviews the perspectives of key business articles that address this market, notably C.K Prahalad's work on Bottom of the Pyramid, and Porter and Kramer's article on Creating Shared Value. The note then provides a somewhat more extensive (yet brief) review of the literature from Development Economics literature, before turning to the perspective offered by the HBS, MBA, course on Business at the Base of the Pyramid (BBOP). The note concludes with a brief statistical tour of the key needs that characterize this market segment, namely: Nutrition, Healthcare, Education, Sanitation, Clean Water & Energy, Financial Inclusion, and Affordable Housing.

Using data from U.S. Census and OECD, the note defines poverty as those populations who fall below 50% of that country's median per capita income. It then provides a brief statistical tour of six key challenges facing such populations: Income and Jobs, Healthcare, Education, Affordable Housing, Financial Inclusion, and Incarceration. The note then provides a brief overview of the social safety net programs in the U.S. that are meant to address the identified challenges. It then concludes with a brief statistical tour of the rest of the OECD countries with respect to similar deprivations.

Unlike financial success, there is no clear consensus regarding how best to define and measure social impact. This HBS note written for students of the HBS, MBA, class - Business at the Base of the Pyramid, offers readers pragmatic perspectives on how the framework of the Logic Model (Theory-of-Change) may be used by businesses, nonprofits, and impact investors to assess the social value they create for their customers/beneficiaries and society. The note concludes with a brief tour of a few impact evaluation methodologies and their applications in areas such as hunger, healthcare, education, and microfinance.