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Are you ready to build a culture that drives innovation, where people can thrive and create? By embracing three principles (bold leadership, an empowering environment and comprehensive action), the authors show how an organization can prime itself to be more innovative than ever before. Their research at Accenture has found that a culture of equality-the same kind of workplace environment that helps everyone advance to higher positions-is a powerful multiplier of innovation and growth. They show that building a culture of equality is not just an ethical imperative, it is also a business priority. Put simply, if organizations want to innovate and thrive, they have to 'get to equal'.

This case describes Amandla Capital, a fledgling company in Cote d'Ivoire, facing three opportunities in the real estate and hospitality industries in Africa. It introduces students to several concepts: decision making and cost-benefit analysis in real estate, corporate strategy selection, management of stakeholders with varied needs and levels of sophistication, dealing with conflicts of interest, basics of hospitality and hotel management industries.

Profico Trading and Contracting Company WLL, an aluminum and glazing contracting company in Lebanon, assembled and installed aluminum and glazing doors and windows and aluminum composite panels for local construction projects. The company's revenues had increased over the years, but over the previous four years, revenues had declined, largely as a result of regional political turmoil that affected the construction industry. The management team was contemplating an opportunity to invest in a production line that would expand the company's scope through backward integration, conceivably increasing the company's revenues by 40–50 per cent. Was the investment worthwhile in the context, and if so, how might the company finance it?

In 2018, the acknowledged saviour of Nissan and the creator of the 19-year-old cross-shareholding Renault-Nissan alliance was accused by the Tokyo Prosecutors Office of understating his compensation and of using company resources for personal gain. The arrest of the former chairperson of Groupe Renault, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., and Mitsubishi Motors brought to light weak governance practices at Nissan and challenged the state of the tripartite alliance. How could Nissan restore investor trust and prevent the recurrence of another scandal? What would happen to the alliance? Convicted or not, could the saviour himself ever recover from this scandal? Was he indeed a hero or a villain?

On June 22, 2018, Stephanie Wilkinson, co-founder of the Red Hen, a small farm-to-table restaurant in rural Virginia, was caught off guard when a frantic call from her chef told her that the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had just sat down to eat at Wilkinson's restaurant. Staff at the Red Hen were tense because they fundamentally disagreed with Sanders's support of the Trump administration on issues such as immigration and transgender rights. Wilkinson was equally concerned because she had kept politics off the menu at the Red Hen for over 10 years in a politically charged city. Now, Wilkinson had to decide whether to side with her employees and her own moral values and ask Sanders to leave, or permit Sanders to stay at the restaurant. Either way, Wilkinson knew that there would be consequences and that the media would be knocking at her door.

90% of the GDP in the world is created through family-owned businesses. Family businesses are frequently thought to be exclusively mom-and-pop, small businesses. Most fail to realize that Walmart, Fidelity, Cargill, Koch Industries, and Ford, to name a few, are all family-owned or controlled businesses. Family businesses can be private or public, sometimes with a dual-class stock structure. They can also be 100% family-owned or have outside investors. Family businesses come in all shapes and sizes, and they are here to stay globally, gaining power and influence by the day. In this module note, we provide an overview of the Demystifying the Family Enterprise Course course, which explores each of the three Family organizations, (1) Family, (2) Operating Company, (3) Family Office, as well as what it takes to create an enduring Family legacy.

Module 1 of Demystifying Families in Business focuses on the Family. The Family unit forms the bedrock of the organizations that comprise the collective Family organization, specifically, the virtues that define the Family members' rules of engagement, and the Family governance structure necessary to support it. In this module note, we provide a framework for Legacy Governance, and introduce the Three Virtues of Family Business, (1) Clarity, (2) Fairness, and (3) Motivation, as requisite shared values for all Families in Business.

Ace Company (Ace) was a Chinese start-up developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT). The company was founded in February 2015 by three colleagues for the initial purpose of providing an unprecedented universal IoT operating system, the absence of which was severely crippling developing development in IoT. By mid-2017, having proven the technical viability and market acceptability of its offering, the company was ready to scale up. However, the co-founders disagreed on the choice of growth strategy. One founder advocated extending Ace’s business to as many industrial scenarios and companies as possible, while the other founder was in favour of Ace focusing on and penetrating deeply into a few industries. The third founder was stuck in the middle and wanted to know which path they should choose.

Between 2010 and 2015, Opera Philadelphia experienced a steep decline in household subscribers and single-ticket buyers, coupled with severe revenue fluctuations. At that time, market behaviours had changed along with growth in more sophisticated use of digital media for entertainment and social interaction.<br><br>The general director’s critical objective for the Opera was to develop a fresh strategy that specifically targeted evolving tastes for opera performance in Philadelphia and the surrounding area. The Opera had to determine whether it needed to revise its segmentation and positioning strategy, as well as make adjustments to its product. This new strategy also had to provide protection for and prevent further loss of the Opera’s existing subscription audience, many of whom were loyal donors.

In 2013, Bikes & Co. Ltd., a business unit belonging to a multi-divisional organization in Nagpur, India, was rooted in the past and out of touch with the contemporary environment. A new chief executive officer had been charged with implementing strategic changes that would turn the unit around across the organization, in every function and department. These changes aimed to align the company with consumer expectations and behaviour, which was reflected in retail outlets or points of purchase. The organization had to avoid concentrating only on the consumer’s end decision point and focus instead on the entire consumer decision journey. The new chief executive officer had been given 12 months to accomplish a business transformation that would address issues related to human resources, the supply chain, marketing and branding, vendor management, sourcing, sales, customer service, enterprise resource management, product design, engineering, and retail outlets.

In early 2019, arc Thrift Stores was supporting 14 Colorado chapters of the Arc, an organization that advocated for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) in schools, helped individuals with I/DD live more independently, and supported legislation regarding their rights all across the state. The chief executive officer and marketing director of arc Thrift Stores were reviewing a survey they hoped would help them understand arc Thrift Stores’ customers and broaden the interest in arc Thrift Stores among younger generations. By all measures, arc Thrift Stores was very profitable, but its core audience was aging, and the team wanted to ensure that it continued the successes of its past 50 years into the next 50 years. The company wanted people to understand the value of shopping their stores and the quality of items they could expect to find there. How could the company make inroads with a younger demographic? Should it focus more on sustainability? Should it consider moving into the e-commerce space?

This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in the later part of the year. This pattern drives the CFO to reflect on the process by which she sets annual targets for shop managers and how those targets relate to various aspects of their compensation contract. Challenging targets, however, appear to be motivating for a sizeable amount of shop managers. In fact, many shop managers that repeatedly fail to meet the target appear not to be giving up and keep trying to achieve their challenging targets. Therefore, the CFO needs to strike the right balance between providing motivating targets and curbing the undesired behaviors that she just discovered. The case lends itself to a rich discussion of common performance management issues, such as target setting, performance metrics selection, and performance-based compensation design. In particular, the case exposes the students to the issue of target ratcheting. As the case includes a data base it provides ample opportunities for students to practice their analytical skills (producing and discussing descriptive statistics, regressions and interactions).

In 2008, Roshan, Afghanistan’s leading telecommunications provider, launched M-Paisa, its mobile money transfer service, which allowed Afghans to use their mobile phones to transfer funds, receive and repay microfinance loans, make purchases, and disburse and receive salaries. The company was committed to building a financial ecosystem for transparent, safe, convenient, and secure services, which would also contribute to the long-term development of Afghanistan’s society. Utilizing technology from Vodafone Group Plc, which had been successful in Kenya, Roshan enjoyed several successful pilots, but it still faced a myriad of issues as it sought to scale the service amid a challenging operational environment. In 2011, three years after its launch, the M-Paisa service had yet to make a profit. Roshan’s chief executive officer and chief operating officer wondered what more they could do to turn M-Paisa around and, ideally, make an even more significant social impact.

This case focuses on a large Saudi Arabian industrial conglomerate and family business Zamil Group's corporate and the family's governance journey. The 12 sons of the founder led and grew the group successfully after taking over from their father in 1961. The secret to their success was to arrive at all decisions with a consensus, although each had their own approach to dealing with issues. In the mid-1990s, they hired world-class consultants and created manuals and guidelines for governing the business and continuing the growth of the Group's assets. They were the model for running a family business in Saudi Arabia. However, the increasing number of family members in the group-84 third-generation and 162 fourth-generation members and the upcoming fifth generation-created challenges going forward. They wanted to ensure that the governance principles they had created would evolve and develop in line with the changing dynamics. The upcoming generations did not have jobs waiting for them in the family business simply because they were members of the Zamil family, and not all of them were motivated to remain invested in the businesses. The second-generation and senior members of the third-generation wanted to make sure that they balanced the needs of the business and those of individual family members. They sought to put mechanisms in place that would keep the shares of the business in the family so as to avoid diluting the family's ownership as they diversified the asset portfolio, addressed diverse risks, and catered to the consumption goals of the next generation. This might mean that the Group would eventually move from being operators to becoming financial investors.

This case provides an inside glimpse of an inter-organizational crisis as it unfolds. On January 25, 1990 at approximately 9:35 p.m. eastern standard time, Avianca flight 052 crashed into a hillside in a wooded residential area of Cove Neck, New York. Seventy-three of the 158 people on board died, including all of the flight crew, as well as five flight attendants. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the primary cause of the accident was fuel exhaustion. No one will ever understand the full range of causes that led to this accident. Like many crises, the fate of Avianca Airlines flight 052 was stirred by a deadly layering of intricate problems. Perhaps the most tragic among them relate directly to cross-cultural differences, as cues of the crisis were missed, mishandled and lost in translation. Urgencies that were slighted caused known and practiced signal detection and crisis responses to go awry. An exceptional feature of this case is that the evidence on which it rests puts the reader on the scene as the crisis unfolds.Verbatim cockpit dialogue, captured in black box recordings during the last hour before the accident, exposes the lethal impact of unreconciled diversities among languages, jargon, beliefs, values and habits. Relatively common flight problems flare to crisis proportion when individuals who could have averted or fixed them miss signals of impending doom. Accomplished leaders and operators are blindsided by their parochial interpretations of vocabulary and intent, which add fatal obstacles to crisis management efforts.

The Hilti Corporation was founded by Martin Hilti in 1941 in Liechtenstein, Germany. From its inception, Hilti set the highest standards of peoples' practices, innovation, quality and governance. The values of the company; Team, Commitment, Integrity and Courage, defined by Martin, remained unchanged over the years, even though the company leadership transitioned from Martin to his son Michael to the non-family Chairman Baschera and later Fisher. Continuity was given a lot of importance at Hilti. In 2017, the family trust and the board of directors of the Hilti corporation, both had non-family leaders. Michael Hilti, the Lifetime Honorary Chairman of the Board of Directors, was happy that the transition of leadership had happened smoothly and as planned. He was keen to identify and correct possible areas of weaknesses existing or that might emerge in future. He knew that he didn't have a long time to further institutionalize the family and business.

US-based Chinese Children Adoption International (CCAI), founded in 1992, was the world's largest agency dedicated to providing adoption services to abandoned children living in Chinese social welfare institutions. By 2017, CCAI had found permanent homes in the United States for more than 12,000 orphaned children and children with disabilities. However, the economic, social, legal, and political environments in China were changing. The number of abandoned children in the Chinese mainland was gradually decreasing, while the number of children with disabilities seeking a foreign adoption was constantly increasing. The founders were determined to apply their experiences, resources, and influence to charitable work, while continuing to pursue the cause of international adoptions. What should they do to help maintain CCAI’s sustainable development?

In 2018, President of the United States, Donald Trump, criticized the company Pfizer Inc. (Pfizer) for increasing drug prices—which had been a strategic move by Pfizer in response to industry-wide challenges. This announcement highlighted the complex dynamics of the pharmaceutical industry and the big challenges that innovative research and development (R&D)–intensive pharmaceutical companies faced. The entire pharmaceutical industry was being challenged by issues such as decreasing global average returns on investment and increased R&D costs. In addition, the company faced increased competition from companies from other industries and from emerging-market companies. Pfizer’s chief executive officer needed to determine whether or not these changes marked a turning point for the whole industry.

Case B complements Case A, describing pharmaceutical companies’ strategic responses—such as mega-mergers and acquisitions and specialization—to industry-wide global challenges and highlights strategic decisions by Pfizer’s chief executive officers between 2007 and 2018.