Landsbankinn hf. was the market leading financial institution in Iceland. The chief executive officer took on his role in mid-2010. At a time when employee morale and customer satisfaction was essentially non-existent, and bankers were widely seen as nation-destroying criminals, he was hired to build a sustainable operation with a reputable brand and restore trust among employees, politicians, regulators, industry peers and customers. Building a positive relationship with Icelanders would be particularly difficult for Landsbankinn because it was moving forward using the decimated brand of its failed predecessor. The Icelandic people would want to know and see what exactly had changed that made the bank a trustworthy institution.
Two people with opposing skills – business management and marketing on the one hand and technological know-how on the other – are joint chief executive officers of a market-leading smartphone manufacturer. Their leadership styles, decision-making and relationship with each other are paramount from the company’s inception, through its rise, its response to mounting competition and the period of declining performance that followed. Conflicting points of view provide the basis for debate about what led to the company’s decline and to what extent top management leadership (versus insurmountable market forces) was responsible for its loss of market share and brand loyalty.
In 2010, approximately 20,000 barrels of oil being shipped south by Enbridge spilled into Michigan’s Talmadge Creek, contaminating wetlands around Battle Creek and the nearby county seat of Marshall, including a stretch of the Kalamazoo River. The timing of the incident could not have been worse. The pipeline had been carrying controversial tar sands oil at a time when Enbridge and its competitors were seeking to greatly expand their pipeline networks across North America. Moreover, the pipeline failure came on the heels of BP's much larger oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, amid a period of heightened public intolerance toward oil spills. As a result, Enbridge faced massive public relations (PR) and regulatory challenges. Enbridge's reputation was clearly at risk since the company had promoted itself as a true believer in corporate social responsibility, which had raised the stakes when dealing with the industrial accident. The CEO of Enbridge faced an almost impossible challenge. He needed to prove to American citizens — and to industry regulators, market watchers, company shareholders and Enbridge employees — that his company deserved to be judged on its own merits, not as a Canadian version of BP. To meet this challenge, he needed to demonstrate that Enbridge was run by people who not only wanted to make amends but could be trusted to do so.
The Apple A and B cases provide two different perspectives on the evolution of the computer and electronics firm Apple and are designed to evoke debate about models of strategy, organization, and leadership. The A case presents the story of Apple from a hindsight rational analytic perspective in which students are able to apply a variety of models about strategy, organization, leadership, and innovation. The B case presents a more nuanced, critical account of Apple’s development, attributing some of its success to happenstance and good fortune, and also raises questions about Jobs’s leadership.
Noel Biderman was the president of Avid Life Media, a profitable Canadian growth company whose main businesses were various online social networks for groups seeking sexual partners and romance. Biderman was seeking to raise $60 million via a private placement offering to acquire a privately held online advertising sales company, merge the companies, and take the new and improved entity to the TSX Venture Exchange or the Toronto Stock Exchange. The Avid Life offering represented a legal and potentially lucrative investment. Nevertheless, only one investment bank (GMP Capital) was willing to help Biderman raise capital — because among the various social networks Avid Life owned the notorious Ashley Madison online community for married people seeking to commit adultery. GMP’s relationship was short-lived; after media coverage of the Avid Life offering started to focus on the bank’s willingness to service Biderman’s company, GMP withdrew its support. Possibly it was the bank’s desire to avoid being linked to someone known, rightly or wrongly, as the king of infidelity, that led to GMP’s withdrawn support, leaving Biderman unable to take a potentially lucrative investment opportunity to market.