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The case explores a public-private partnership initiative on environment education in India, highlighting the strategic, institutional, and reputational implications for corporate social responsibility in an emerging country context. Launched in 2010 with a target to reach 200,000 schools, "Paryavaran Mitra" (Friends of the Environment) was a multi-layered collaboration with three primary and more than 160 secondary partners. The case is positioned in 2013, when the senior manager of corporate responsibility for the firm that serves as the corporate sponsor of the project must make a decision about the future of the initiative.

Amway Korea Ltd. faces both motivations and challenges as it pursues enhancement of the firm's social responsibility in a multi-level marketing industry. This case asks students to consider whether the firm's social participation can be an effective solution to gain legitimacy and enhance its reputation. Stakeholders and the general public have two different views about the firm's attempts at corporate social responsibility: the window-dressing view (that the firm is making a distrustful attempt to deceive stakeholders) and the value-enhancement view (that the firm is making a genuine investment to improve its responsibility and stakeholder value). Students are also introduced to the concept of creating shared value, which Amway Korea adopts as a strategic initiative in its role as a corporate citizen.

The fictitious Lynn Garcia case examines several managerial challenges faced by first-time CEO Lynn Garcia. After graduating from Stanford's GSB, Garcia founded eChange, a self-service coin-counting company that enabled users to convert coins into other forms of currency. As Garcia grew the company, she encountered a variety of difficult situations. Each of the five vignettes highlighted in the case can be solved through a variety of approaches and decisions, with no clear "right" decision. The first vignette examines the many sources of advice available to Garcia, from classmates to friends to professors to professional associations. With so many potential sources of counsel, Garcia must determine the best strategy for seeking guidance. In the second vignette, Garcia must determine how to navigate a tricky telephone conversation with a notoriously tough advisor named Gene Mathews. After proving eChange's concept through an initial set of machines, Garcia began the process of raising capital to scale eChange across the United States. After accepting an offer from Valley Partners, Garcia was thrilled to turn eChange into a national brand. However, during the due diligence process, it became clear that Valley Partners and Garcia were not on the same page, and Garcia must determine what to do. In the final two vignettes, Garcia must determine how to respond to two challenging phone calls. The first is from Zachary Jones at the Federal Reserve, who wanted to better understand eChange's business and its potential to negatively impact the Federal Reserve. The second was from WSCM News reporter Amy Watson, who planned to run a televised story "exposing" eChange machines' inaccuracies, even though her accusations were off base.

In mid-January 2013, the owner of Lake Superior Lodge and its newly appointed manager were meeting to figure out a marketing plan to turn things around at the motel. The owner, who was born and raised in Duluth, Michigan, bought Lake Superior Lodge primarily because of its location. The property sat on the scenic North Shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and Two Harbors. Ten years later, however, the motel had yet to turn a profit. The manager was hired in late 2012 to operate the motel and to increase its profitability. If he could not make this happen, the owner would have no choice but to sell the property and move on.

Madhymam was a Malayalam-language newspaper headquartered in Kerala, India. Launched by a conservative Islamic trust, much of the newspaper's coverage and content were dictated by the trust's conservative values. Though the high quality of Madhymam's content was widely appreciated, this did not translate into the anticipated sales revenues. At least part of this shortfall was because of Madhymam's public image as a pro-Muslim newspaper - an image that the newspaper's management team had been making efforts to shed. Driven by its vision of becoming the largest newspaper in India, the management of Madhymam had been exploring various options to stimulate readership and sales. The task was made more difficult by the trust's exclusionary policies on advertising, stiff competition from major local players, the entry of national players and the proliferation of regional news channels. In light of such challenges, how should Madhymam move forward?

It was arguably the first financial scandal to play out in the public eye--and even Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe got behind it.

PwC's workforce is strikingly young: Two-thirds of its employees are in their twenties and early thirties. In the past, the assumption has been that most hires will eventually move on to other firms or other careers, while a few will be promoted all the way up to partner--rewarding and justifying years of long hours in service to clients. But a recent study done by the company revealed that the allure of someday becoming partner is no longer enough to generate high levels of engagement. Millennials are less willing than Boomers to make their work lives an exclusive priority, even when offered the prospect of substantial future compensation. They want job flexibility in the here and now, along with opportunities for training and mobility and more frequent feedback and rewards. PwC has instituted several initiatives in response to the results of the study: Employees are asked for their ideas on how to invest in human capital and given choices about what form their bonuses will take. Career paths have become far more flexible. Life skills and leadership training and sabbaticals demonstrate appreciation in nonmonetary ways. Participation in corporate responsibility programs has improved retention and engagement.

The knock on most CEOs is that their focus is too myopic--that they're fixated on achieving short-term goals to increase their pay. If you studied results produced over the long term, which leaders would truly show strong performance? HBR's ranking of the 100 best CEOs provides an answer. To compile our list, we examined how active CEOs of global public companies performed over their entire tenures. We took a scientific, objective approach, basing our evaluation on hard data, rather than on reputation or anecdote. For each executive, we looked at three metrics: the total industry-adjusted shareholder returns produced, the total country-adjusted shareholder returns, and the total increase in market capitalization. The CEOs who made the 2014 list have undeniably been effective. On average, the top 50 have delivered total shareholder returns of 1,350% during their time on the job. That translates into an annual return of 26.2%. Adjusting for industry effects, average total shareholder returns for the top 50 are 1,161%, and for country effects, 1,087%. But the results turned in by the #1 CEO on our list, Jeff Bezos, were especially impressive. Under his leadership, Amazon produced country-adjusted returns of 15,189% and industry-adjusted returns of 14,917% and grew its market capitalization by $140 billion. We also collected biographical and compensation data on the CEOs to see if we could identify what they had in common and whether there was any correlation between performance and pay. While the top 100 have each had unique journeys to success, there do seem to be two preferred pathways: Over a quarter of the CEOs have MBAs, and nearly as many studied engineering. But in some ways, Bezos's place at the top says it all: The best CEO in the long haul turned out to be one who frequently underperformed in the short term--while continuing to make big bets on the future.

In today's organizations, innovators are in demand everywhere--from the factory floor to the salesroom, the IT help desk to the HR department, the employee cafeteria to the C-suite. Innovation isn't a department, the authors say; it's a mindset that should permeate your entire enterprise. And what fuels it is insight--an imaginative understanding of an internal or external opportunity that can be tapped to improve efficiency, generate revenue, or boost engagement. Sawhney and Khosla outline seven "insight channels" that would-be innovators in any function or role can use: (1) Anomalies, or data that deviates from business as usual; (2) Confluence, when economic, demographic, and technological trends come together; (3) Frustrations, which lead to innovative workarounds; (4) Orthodoxies, which can spark a search for alternatives; (5) Extremities, such as fringe members of stakeholder groups who push for solutions; (6) Voyages, whereby innovators leave their offices to visit colleagues or customers; and (7) Analogies, useful ideas or systems in other teams, business units, companies, or industries.

Norman Lear, perhaps most famous for the creation of "All in the Family," has spent his entire career behind the scenes. He talks about negotiating with network bosses, bringing out the best in writers and actors, and more.

This case deals with the revitalization of Tata Chemicals Ltd. (TCL) by way of significant international acquisitions in the first decade of the new millennium. Set in 2011, TCL has a decision to make on the potential acquisition of a stake in a North American early stage potash development company. This acquisition could allow TCL to set up a fertilizer plant, which might give the company a jumpstart just as earlier acquisitions had helped the company to be ranked number two in the world in soda ash production. As backward integration can be a risky strategy, the acquisition needs to be carefully considered in terms of when to integrate and when to rely on market-driven contractual arrangements.

This case deals with the revitalization of Tata Chemicals Ltd. (TCL) by way of significant international acquisitions in the first decade of the new millennium. Set in 2011, TCL has a decision to make on the potential acquisition of a stake in a North American early stage potash development company. This acquisition could allow TCL to set up a fertilizer plant, which might give the company a jumpstart just as earlier acquisitions had helped the company to be ranked number two in the world in soda ash production. As backward integration can be a risky strategy, the acquisition needs to be carefully considered in terms of when to integrate and when to rely on market-driven contractual arrangements.

"With the publication of CK Prahalad's "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" (2005), the poor were suddenly seen as a potential market in the eyes of multinational corporations (MNCs). Although poor, the BOP is a large and growing market. The development community tends to focus on meeting the needs of the poorest of the poor (the 1 billion people who live on less than US$1 a day), but there is a larger segment of the low-income population, comprised of 3.8 billion people with incomes between $2 and $5 a day, that could be the focus of a market-oriented approach. They have no bank accounts, no access to modern financial services, no phones, are dependent on informal or subsistence livelihoods, and lack access to amenities and basic healthcare. Influenced by Prahalad's work, the top management at Novartis decided that it was time to seriously consider the pursuit of commercial opportunities among the world's poor. The case offers a description of the first steps to setting up the Arogya Parivar initiative by Novartis in India and raises strategic questions like how to improve its supply chain reliability, how to deal with the fact that many consumers were women and yet there were few female health educators, how to make the treatment affordable, whether to launch new brands of medicines for this segment, how to convince consumers to seek medical treatment and ensure compliance with the treatment protocol, etc., going forward. Please visit the dedicated case website http://cases.insead.edu/arogya-parivar/ (copy and paste the url into a browser) to access case videos and other support material."

Sheng Siong was the third-largest supermarket chain in Singapore. Its chief executive officer co-founded it with his two brothers in 1985. Sheng Siong's business model was well suited to cater to the price-sensitive and more traditional customer segment in Singapore, with a dominant presence in suburban areas called "heartlands." It also had a unique corporate philosophy, which was influenced by the personal values of its founding family. However, the market became increasingly saturated, competitors were aggressive and costs were rising. The key question was whether Sheng Siong's original competitive advantage was sustainable and how it could grow.

Sheng Siong was the third-largest supermarket chain in Singapore. Its chief executive officer co-founded it with his two brothers in 1985. Sheng Siong’s business model was well suited to cater to the price-sensitive and more traditional customer segment in Singapore, with a dominant presence in suburban areas called “heartlands.” It also had a unique corporate philosophy, which was influenced by the personal values of its founding family. However, the market became increasingly saturated, competitors were aggressive and costs were rising. The key question was whether Sheng Siong’s original competitive advantage was sustainable and how it could grow.

A small Danish design company seeks to collaborate with its largest supplier in Thailand in order to improve health, safety and environmental conditions, as well as labour standards, as a core element of complying with the UN Global Compact principles. The company takes its corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda seriously and has developed a new standard for CSR in its supplier factories that is implemented and audited by a non-governmental organization. New challenges emerge as attention shifts to the certification of production inputs such as wood. Although Western small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face pressures to audit their suppliers in developing countries, these SMEs often lack the financial and political resources to change behaviours in supplier factories. The firm’s quality manager must evaluate its sustainability approach. How much leverage can a small company expect to have with its suppliers? Furthermore, is the cost of auditing suppliers in a country such as Thailand too high?

By 2013, the Indian Metal Company, headquartered in Metconagar in eastern India, had been a leading metallurgical company in India for 100 years. While it had ambitious expansion plans, both at home and abroad, it was bedeviled by an increasing attrition of professionals and difficulty in attracting candidates from premier educational institutions. This shortage of talent could jeopardize the company’s investments. The chief executive officer convened an urgent meeting of senior executives to discuss the problem and explore possible solutions. The meeting ended in a confusing barrage of views and counterviews. A committee was appointed to synthesize the competing views and prepare a master plan for talent management. It began its work by reviewing past data related to attrition and holding discussions with small groups of young professionals. The time had now come to prepare its report and recommendations.

Prince Pipes and Fittings (Prince) - a family managed enterprise in the Indian PVC pipe industry - had not only navigated the 2008 Global financial crisis, a period when more than 1000 Indian pipe companies had shut down within 90 days, it had in fact used the crisis as an opportunity to successfully transition from an small and medium enterprise (SME) to a large enterprise through acquisitions. In 2013, the company faced a bleak macroeconomic environment of declining GDP growth rates, tight monetary conditions, a pessimistic industrial outlook, a depreciating rupee and rising crude prices. It also faced growing domestic competition. Would Prince be able to reach its goals for 2013/14?

Prince Pipes and Fittings (Prince) — a family managed enterprise in the Indian PVC pipe industry — had not only navigated the 2008 Global financial crisis, a period when more than 1000 Indian pipe companies had shut down within 90 days, it had in fact used the crisis as an opportunity to successfully transition from an small and medium enterprise (SME) to a large enterprise through acquisitions. In 2013, the company faced a bleak macroeconomic environment of declining GDP growth rates, tight monetary conditions, a pessimistic industrial outlook, a depreciating rupee and rising crude prices. It also faced growing domestic competition. Would Prince be able to reach its goals for 2013/14?

Driverless cars - once the stuff of science fiction - are fast becoming reality. Indeed, some automotive companies have said they expect to sell autonomous vehicles to the public by 2020. The advent of such self-driving vehicles raises numerous ethical and legal questions that will need to be addressed before such cars can hit the road in significant numbers. This case traces the history and evolution of auto safety in the United States, beginning with the very first automotive-related fatality on September 13, 1899 and ending with a coming era in which, some predict, humans will be banned from driving their own vehicles and machines will be obliged to have ethical systems.