Boubyan bank grew from a small Islamic bank in Kuwait to one of the largest and most successful financial organizations in its home country. As the bank is entering its next phase of growth, the leadership must confront how to successfully deal with issues around digitization, regional and global expansion, as well as recruiting talent in a more complex and increasingly hybrid world of digital and physical solutions.

Marcos Galperin, a graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business, founded Mercado Libre in 1999 with a vision to build an e-commerce company focused on serving the nascent but fast- growing Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets in Latin America. In the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up, the company was started in a garage in Buenos Aires. By 2006, Mercado Libre hosted the largest online trading platform in Latin America. Just prior to the company's 2007 IPO, Mercado Libre achieved what eluded most internet start-ups―profit. It had recorded $52 million in revenues and $1.1 million net income for the full year in 2006. The IPO itself raised $289 million. By 2019 Mercado Libre was largest online commerce ecosystem in Latin America based on unique visitors and page views. It operated in 18 countries across Latin America: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and El Salvador. Over the past 20 years, Mercado Libre had developed a diversified business model, one aimed at boosting electronic commerce. With the Mercado Libre Marketplace as the hub and engine, the company developed additional business units to provide payment solutions, logistics, financing, advertising and software services. The Mercado Libre ecosystem was designed to provide users with a complete portfolio of services to facilitate commercial transactions and to provide buyers and sellers with an environment that fostered the development of a large e-commerce community in Latin America, a region with distinctive cultural and geographic challenges. Mercado Libre had penetrated Latin America; however, Mercado Libre faced a formidable competitor - Amazon. Amazon entered Latin America in 2012 and was rapidly expanding.

JTBC, which began operations in 2011, provided press coverage, drama shows, and entertainment programs. Within a relatively brief period, the company had gained the position of Korea's most trusted press outlet, and played a pivotal role in reporting key information related to the controversial case of President Park Geun-hye and her advisor - information that ultimately led to the president's impeachment in March 2017. The case study details the legal and technological transformation of South Korea's media landscape, offers a survey of the top players in provision of news and entertainment programs, and describes the strategies JTBC adopted to move quickly in a rapidly transforming industry.

Innovium has been focusing on disrupting an entrenched space. After getting product market fit the company wrestles with how to scale up, how to build a strong culture and how to raise more funds.

Tubular Labs cofounders Allison Stern and Rob Gabel had jumped into the video analytics space, taking on the challenge of figuring out what data could be tracked, what companies would need, and the best ways to market their consulting services. By 2018, Tubular's technology pulled data from billions of videos on dozens of platforms-including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram-and captured information about creators, audiences, and viewer engagement. Clients could then organize those data and gather insights about their own content or the larger social video landscape. The market for social media analytics was projected to grow to $9.54 billion by 2022-presenting a huge opportunity for a company that could remain nimble, and figure out what companies and advertisers needed to take advantage of the fast-moving online video market. Tubular had more than 200 enterprise customers in 2018-but audience needs and data acquisition were moving as fast as the social video market itself.

Netapp, a fast-growing innovator in the storage and data management market, had become successful both in the U.S. and around the world. By 2017 Netapp faces challenges as the cloud disrupted its core storage unit. The CEO knew the company's strategy and organization structure that had served the company for years needed a change. He brought in a chief transformation officer to make it happen.

In 2017, AmorePacific (AP) was the world's seventh-largest cosmetics, competing head-to-head with leading companies like L'Oréal and Estée Lauder. This case describes AP's unique approach to beauty products, which reflected the corporate credo of "Harmony and Balance" and other philosophies that traced their roots in Eastern philosophy. AP's view of yin and yang, for instance, was integral to the company's approach to R&D. The case also looks at how AP approached the beauty and skin care needs of Korean women initially, developing new make-up and skin care products as well as entirely new beauty routines-based on an Eastern medicine view that the body undergoes substantial changes every seven years. The platform upon which AP formulated and implemented its strategies could be explained as a "cushion-like," flexible, and adaptable organization structure. While many Korean companies continue to be heavily male-oriented, the AP organization was quite unusual. Respect for women, a progressive approach to childcare and flexible schedules, and open communication were hallmarks of how AP operated. AP employees were expected to become "creative craftsmen" who embraced new ways to create new beauty products. The products they created, from the IOPE Air Cushion to the Laneige Beauty Sleeping Pack, reflected this approach.

On the evening of June 10, 2011, the first European tour of Korean idol groups was held in Paris. With European fans demanding tickets and organizing a flashmob rally in front of the Louvre Museum, SM Entertainment, the producers, immediately set up an additional European concert. The success of the Paris concert elevated the status of K-pop and showed that it held potential in the global market. Behind the development of K-pop was the unique production system created by Soo-man Lee of SM Entertainment. When he established SM Entertainment in 1995, Lee introduced a systematic production system that integrated the functions of record distribution, agency, and management and enabled the company to make long-term investments in talented artists. The adoption of a sustainable growth model led SM to emerge as the leader in the Korean entertainment industry. This case explores in depth SM Entertainment's talent development process. It also traces the successes and failures that SM experienced, primarily in China, Japan, and Korea and discusses Lee's vision of building a "virtual nation." Lee believed that "the world's biggest star would come from the largest market," thus explaining his focus on succeeding in the Chinese market and grooming Chinese talent. The case concludes by examining a number of strategies that SM Entertainment used to develop a presence in the global music market.

As 2013 approached, Marcos Galperin and his team of MercadoLibre top executives were meeting to celebrate the breathtaking growth of their company, and contemplate the challenges ahead. Since starting the company with his Stanford Business School classmates in 1999, Marcos had transformed the company from an internet auction site akin to eBay, to Latin America's leading online marketplace unique in its own right, and on par with Amazon. The MercadoLibre team had not just cloned eBay and Amazon in Latin America; it had made a number of key innovations in order to compensate for, and in some cases, take advantage of the lack of commerce infrastructure in its markets. On the technology side, MercadoLibre had started with a then state-of-the-art internet application based on an industrial-grade stack of Oracle technologies. The application handled millions of transactions, provided a good user experience, and facilitated the company's growth and IPO in 2007. In 2008, Galperin had made what he described as a "bet the company" decision to completely replace the company's technology by building and deploying a parallel system; not just another application, but a sophisticated e-commerce platform based on Web 2.0 and the latest mobile web standards. The gamble was paying off. The company's transition was being hailed as another success for Galperin and his team. But there was a larger challenge looming on the horizon.

The case describes the phenomenal growth of Facebook, a social networking site launched in 2004, which had reached approximately 1 billion members by 2012. The case provides an overarching picture of the company's growth over the last eight years, from its founding to present day global expansion, covering the competitive landscape, the challenges it has faced along the way (including controversy over its privacy policy), its growth strategy and product development, marketing, and organizational challenges.