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We too often squeeze our worries, fears, and needs through the funnel of aggression. That is usual in business hence our fondness for the language of warfare. But the COVID-19 crisis is not business as usual, and leaders need better ways to show up and care for their people.

Huemen was a new men’s cosmetics start-up founded in mid-2018 by two business students. In 2018, the market for men’s makeup was in its infancy. Stigmas and stereotypes dominated ideas about men investing in their appearance, but the founders believed that cosmetics created for male-type skin could improve the confidence of those who chose to use it. Huemen’s go-to-market strategy and positioning would be pivotal to success. The founders and their team scheduled a meeting with an entrepreneur-in-residence at the business school, a seasoned marketing expert with strong corporate and entrepreneurial experience to consider how to position Huemen in a novel market.

Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the interviewer. Sam leaves the interview hopeful that she will get the offer. The B case details the following day when Sam gets a phone call from the interviewer, Marva Thompson, who asks Sam to come in for a follow-up meeting. Sam is very excited and rushes over, only to find out that Marva really called her in to give her feedback about her interview, not to offer her the job. Marva recognizes that Sam did not have an accurate idea of the expectations of working in a corporate setting, and she wants to provide constructive criticism to help Sam perform better in her next interview.

Supplement to case UV8051 Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the interviewer. This B case details the following day when Sam gets a phone call from the interviewer, Marva Thompson, who asks Sam to come in for a follow-up meeting. Sam is very excited and rushes over, only to find out that Marva really called her in to give her feedback about her interview, not to offer her the job. Marva recognizes that Sam did not have an accurate idea of the expectations of working in a corporate setting, and she wants to provide constructive criticism to help Sam perform better in her next interview.

Handout to case UV8053

In May 2015, Filip Daw, a human capital strategist with a leading consultancy, is hired by the Indian subsidiary of Semicon Inc (SI), an American semiconductor manufacturing company, to uncover the reasons behind the high attrition rate in the company. Established in 2005, SI is a design centre - a skill-intensive core business unit that directly impacts the parent company's competitiveness as a supplier to the end-user industry. India's low-cost and abundant talent was expected to add to the design centre's competitiveness but SI's high attrition rate proved otherwise and had started eroding its competitiveness and revenue. Daw must identify the turnover drivers and analyse how the company's HR policies influenced these drivers. Besides adopting a data-driven approach to diagnose the attrition drivers, Daw needs to examine assumptions held by various stakeholders. The case on Daw's hand requires finding a proxy metric for performance and then connect that performance metric with turnover, developing hypotheses, collecting requisite data and making insightful recommendations. This case documents a real-life analytics project in a semiconductor company that was later bought over by another company. The name Semicon India is used to disguise the identity of the original company. The project was helmed by the author Dr Fermin Diez, who was then its Regional Chief HR Officer.

Supplement to case SMU805 In May 2015, Filip Daw, a human capital strategist with a leading consultancy, is hired by the Indian subsidiary of Semicon Inc (SI), an American semiconductor manufacturing company, to uncover the reasons behind the high attrition rate in the company. Established in 2005, SI is a design centre - a skill-intensive core business unit that directly impacts the parent company's competitiveness as a supplier to the end-user industry. India's low-cost and abundant talent was expected to add to the design centre's competitiveness but SI's high attrition rate proved otherwise and had started eroding its competitiveness and revenue. Daw must identify the turnover drivers and analyse how the company's HR policies influenced these drivers. Besides adopting a data-driven approach to diagnose the attrition drivers, Daw needs to examine assumptions held by various stakeholders. The case on Daw's hand requires finding a proxy metric for performance and then connect that performance metric with turnover, developing hypotheses, collecting requisite data and making insightful recommendations. This case documents a real-life analytics project in a semiconductor company that was later bought over by another company. The name Semicon India is used to disguise the identity of the original company. The project was helmed by the author Dr Fermin Diez, who was then its Regional Chief HR Officer.

Diana Uribe was a successful cultural personality in her native Colombia, best known for her national radio show about world history. Since 2000, the show had aired every Sunday on Caracol Radio, Colombia’s most popular news radio station. On October 9, 2018, Caracol Radio announced to Uribe the unilateral termination of her contract, effective in one week. Uribe felt pressured to act. She knew that her future work opportunities would depend on her ability to remain visible and popular with a diverse audience. The unexpected termination prompted Uribe to think of alternative options to continue to communicate with her audience and ensure continuity for her team. Was the time ripe to move to podcasts?

Supplement to 9B20M174.

Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-Lebanese-French, is by many counts, one of the - if not the - most celebrated automotive executives of the late 20th and early 21st century. This is a two-part case about his career, leadership, and decision-making. Part A starts in 1999, the early days of Ghosn's arrival in Japan, where he went on a mission to rescue Nissan, one of the biggest Japanese car manufacturers with a long tradition that had run into trouble and was in danger of bankruptcy. Ghosn went there after Renault entered into an alliance with Nissan in 1999. The case then goes back in time, following Ghosn from when he was born in Brazil, and then moved to Lebanon and later France, where he studied and began his career at Michelin. The case ends in November 2018, with talk about the potential merger of Renault and Nissan into a single company having stalled, leaving the alliance in status quo. Part A of the case is structured around a key tension: What happens when the cosmopolitan, melting-pot, aggressive Ghosn - who made his name as 'le cost-killer' - meets corporate Japan, with its very homogenous, indirect, and conflict-avoiding culture? Part B starts on November 19, 2018, when Carlos Ghosn is arrested as he arrives at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan. The accusations against him include allegations of misappropriation of company funds for personal use and concealment of a large amount of remuneration. According to the chief prosecutor, Ghosn's wrongdoings were more serious than insider trading. The case presents in some detail the different allegations against Ghosn, and then describes the reactions of Ghosn and Nissan to the accusations. It ends with a recounting of some of the subsequent events, including the granting of bail to Ghosn. Part B of the case is meant to facilitate discussion around a key question: How could someone as successful as Ghosn have come to engage in the kinds of behaviours he was accused of?

PVR Limited (PVR), the largest premium film exhibition company in India, with more than 750 screens, launched its Accessible Cinema Program in December 2018. Supported by its top management, PVR developed a culture of social responsibility that went beyond compliance. The program aimed to make PVR's cinemas accessible to people with disabilities and focused especially on providing content for people with hearing impairment, and visual impairment. PVR rolled out the program to 50 cinemas in the first phase, and the response from patrons was encouraging. However, rolling out the program to the entire chain would involve redesigning existing cinemas to make them accessible and would be operationally and financially challenging. Additionally, the success of the program was dependent upon the willingness of film producers to provide content suitable for visually- and hearing-impaired audiences. Although laws mandated the production of suitable content for people with disabilities, these laws were not consistently enforced. Making movie producers provide suitable content was not going to be easy. In 2019, now that the first phase of the accessibility program was launched, how could the company meet these continuing challenges going forward?

In August 2019, Fair Trade Jewellery Co., a mid-size jewellery retailer based in Toronto, Canada, was wondering how to ensure that its customers received responsibly sourced gold and diamond jewellery. The company had already devoted considerable amounts of time, energy, and expense to develop a responsible supply chain. Its activities toward that goal had included various initiatives beyond jewellery retail, such as providing inventory financing for artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After discovering that a key US partner along the supply chain may have not been following a clear chain-of-custody system in its refinery, the company was unsure how to proceed. Responsibly sourced gold was potentially being contaminated by other gold at the refinery, which led Fair Trade Jewellery Co. to consider opening its own local small-scale refinery. However, that initiative could mean considerable strategic risk and financial burden for the company. It could also have potential effects on its employees, who relied on the company for their livelihood. Did the company’s ethical mission require vertically integrating to such a considerable extent?

By the second quarter of 2018, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the online video technology company Bitmovin Inc. (Bitmovin) had propelled the start-up along an aggressive growth path. After founding the company in Austria, he had relocated Bitmovin’s headquarters to California’s Silicon Valley, raised more than US$40 million in investments in two funding rounds, and was now in the process of building a global sales organization for the company’s innovative online video infrastructure solutions. Within the next few years, the CEO wanted Bitmovin to achieve $100 million in revenues and initiate an initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange in New York. However, Bitmovin’s rapid international growth had resulted in a globally dispersed organization in which effective communication and alignment were difficult to achieve. The sales team was able to close deals with big-name customers in the media industry, but marketing and demand generation had been neglected and there were not enough potential customers in the sales pipeline. The company had recently failed to reach its growth goals for the first time, and the CEO wondered whether the company still had the right sales strategy and the right person as its sales leader.

In 2015, the Department of Health for the province of Gauteng, South Africa, deinstitutionalized patients in need of long term health care in an effort to reduce costs. The residents were moved from an established health care facility experienced with providing the care these patients needed to non-governmental facilities. Many of these facilities were unlicensed and lacking the skills and resources needed to provide the necessary care. The project was poorly planned with inadequate notice and patients were transferred without identification, medication, or medical records. From March to June 2016, 1,712 patients were transferred; many of them were lost in the system and 144 died-most from malnutrition, abuse, or neglect. The health ombudsman investigated and released a report in February 2017, placing the blame for the tragedy on three senior leaders in the health care system. A new member of the executive council was appointed upon the release of the report. In 2018, her challenge was to determine what happened and plan changes to ensure such a tragedy would never be repeated.

In the mid-1990s, Thyrocare disrupted the Indian medical diagnostic industry and steadily gained market share over the next two decades to become one of the top five competitors in India. Thyrocare built and sustained a competitive advantage and entered closely-related businesses. By 2017, the diagnostic industry had become extremely dynamic and competitors were attempting to replicate the unique operating model of Thyrocare. Stand-alone companies were scaling, online and digital aggregators were growing, substitutes such as self-test kits were emerging, and regulations were being tightened, resulting in severe margin pressures. How could Thyrocare preserve its unique model and competitive advantage in such a dynamic industry setting?

In September 2018, Marisol Labrecque, president of Technologies Ecofixe Inc. (Technologies Ecofixe), was heading to Ain Taoujdate, Morocco, in order to supervise the installation of the company’s second ECOFIXE system in Africa. Technologies Ecofixe was a small, socially responsible Québécois company that had developed and commercialized a cost-effective system for the treatment of wastewaters in aerated ponds. With her eye on Africa’s ever-expanding market, Labrecque considered entering the French-speaking countries of Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Burkina Faso. However, given her limited resources, Labrecque knew that she would have to choose. Which country should Technologies Ecofixe enter next?

In 2001, Apple, Inc. (Apple), known mainly as the maker of a niche personal computer and related operating system and software, became a disruptor in the music industry with the launch of the iPod music player; it followed up two years later with the launch of the iTunes Music Store (iTunes). Over the next several years, the company struck deals with major music recording labels to distribute downloadable music legally through iTunes, challenging an industry-wide decline in a climate of widespread digital file-sharing and piracy. In 2007, it brought about increased sales of digital music downloads after launching the iPhone. However, by 2019, consumers were mainly consuming music via streaming services such as Spotify, Google LLC’s YouTube, Amazon.com Inc., and Pandora. What would Apple need to do to continue as a leader in the music industry?

In 2019, Walmart Inc. (Walmart) was the largest retailer in the world, with over $500 billion in revenues and thousands of stores in the United States and international markets. It was in the midst of a transformation to compete in the online shopping and home delivery space, an industry that was dominated by relative newcomer Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon). While Walmart had continued to expand its physical stores and discount centres over several decades, its online presence had needed attention; its investment in online sales between 2013 and 2018 had brought about a significant reduction in the operating income margin in its largest and most profitable segment, Walmart US. However, by February 2019, the company had achieved growth in online sales of 43 per cent. Would the strategic changes that had brought about this growth enable the company to maintain its position in the United States?

Noora Health, an India-based non-profit, through its Care Compassion Program (CCP), which was based on human-centred design principles, aimed to reduce readmission rates and complications after patients were discharged from the hospital. While implementing the program in several hospitals across India, the chief executive officer of Noora Health faced several challenges. These challenges included convincing nurses to train patients' family members in caregiving and increasing the scope and scale of the CCP. By early 2019, Noora Health had successfully implemented the program across 110 hospitals in India. What should the company further undertake to prove the program's effectiveness and enhance its scope and scale?