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In February 2022, Café Niloufer, based in Hyderabad, India, was contemplating transforming its product lines of Irani tea, onion samosas, and Osmania biscuits, to grow its customer base over several other competitive brands. Anumula Shashank, Café Niloufer's managing director, wanted to update the brand by strengthening their product portfolio to meet the needs of new-age consumers. Cafes/lounges that provided a variety of beverages were projected to propel the competition in the coming years. Shashank wanted to grow the café business. He had three alternatives: add the products to the existing product line, add a new product line, or open new retail outlets. Shashank also wondered what analysis process and decision criteria he should use to make his decision.

In 2023, the fast-fashion industry found itself under attack on several fronts: a growing poor reputation regarding its significant negative social and environmental impacts; the increasing prevalence of online shopping and the entrance of many new competitors who were not burdened with expensive bricks-and-mortar retail networks; and the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in helping to identify future fashion trends. Industria de Diseño Textil SA (Inditex) and its flagship brand Zara had just come off a record 2022, with industry-leading sales, gross margins, and profits. They were also ahead of the industry with 25.8 per cent of sales through their online channels. However, the challenges the fast-fashion industry faced were significant for Zara and required a long-term strategic response.

In 2016, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJio), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited, disrupted the Indian telecom sector by offering consumers access to the latest cutting-edge fourth-generation (4G) data and voice services at affordable prices. Competitors alleged that RJio had indulged in predatory pricing to acquire customers, but they lost the litigation as the anti-trust regulator held that the company should enjoy the benefits of a start-up and no predatory pricing rules were applicable. Within five years of its launch, RJio had become the top Indian telecom company. In 2023, competitors had caught up by offering better services at equitable rates. Had RJio indulged in predatory behavior to establish itself in a price sensitive market? Could the company continue at the same pace in the future? Had RJio transitioned into a new role as a technology company? What role should retailers play in ensuring customer acquisition to support RJio's future growth strategy?

Ola Electric Mobility Pvt. Ltd. (Ola Electric) was launched in 2017 by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd., better known as Ola Cabs, as a venture for making electric scooters. Bhavish Aggarwal, one of Ola Cabs' founders, acquired a 92.5 per cent stake in Ola Electric and pursued a path of rapid expansion. By 2022, Ola Electric had successfully raised a large amount of capital from investors, developed several subsystems (especially software) of its products in-house, carried out two product launches and generated tens of thousands of bookings from customers, and was building a state-of-the-art plant for making electric scooters. While Ola Electric's scooters had received positive reviews from a few expert reviewers and generated customer bookings, the company found it difficult to deliver defect-free scooters in sufficient numbers. The company was also mired in a number of controversies, such as some of its scooters catching fire, alleged safety issues with its products, publicly sharing a customer's private data, and the departure of several executive from the company. Blunt communication by the founder and majority owner Aggarwal made some of the controversies worse. Aggarwal and his team now had to determine how to address the challenges and decide whether to focus on tackling these or on aggressively pursuing greater volumes. In which direction should they steer the company's strategy?

This case follows the entrepreneurial journey of Tommie Lo, Founder and CEO of education platform Preface, as he pioneered an innovative business model that provides up-to-date education in coding and tech skills, specializing in concepts like blockchain, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and the metaverse in the fast-developing field of Web3, as well as AI-related topics such as machine learning and ChatGPT. While its Business-to-Consumer (B2C) segment targets schoolchildren from well-resourced families or senior executives who are willing to pay a premium for flexible and convenient courses, Preface's clients in the Business-to-Business (B2B) segment include leading brands in financial services, technology, and luxury goods. Headquartered in Hong Kong, Preface differentiates itself in multiple ways. First, in contrast to traditional classrooms or purely online learning, Preface matches students with teachers for training sessions that could be online or offline, anytime and anywhere. Second, Preface's instructors are top engineers from leading tech companies who are passionate about computer science and teach at Preface as a second career, with Preface tapping into a high-quality resource pool. Third, Preface opened physical food & beverage outlets to offer exclusive events and foster a sense of community among its clients, contributing to a cultural shift toward lifelong learning.

Recent sustainability regulations in the EU and some U.S. states hold consumer packaged goods brands responsible for the environmental impact of the materials in their products. For brands with a complex web of suppliers across the globe, gaining visibility into the chemical composition of their products is a major challenge, and most available tools are insufficient for the task. The authors explain how brands can improve supply chain transparency to adapt to this emerging regulatory landscape.

RideAlly, a ride-hailing platform headquartered in Bangalore, India, catered to the business-to-consumer and business-to-business segments. It operated in Bangalore and Hyderabad. Hariprakash Agrawal, the chief executive officer and founder, needed to devise a plan to sustain the business in India's highly competitive ride-hailing market. It was time to think about scaling up the business, which needed significant investment and the right strategy to gain a solid foothold in the industry. Agrawal's team needed to prepare a pitch for investors and present a strategy for penetrating the market and expanding the business.

Acen Haitao Jiang, founder and chief executive officer of Aomi, faced a dilemma. Founded in 2016, Aomi was an online food delivery platform in Macao with a local market share of over 90 per cent. Nevertheless, Macao was a small market with a population of about 680,000 and an area of 32.9 square kilometres, which was becoming a bottleneck for Aomi's growth. Jiang was considering a Y-strategy, composed of three business development strands: food delivery (i.e., maintaining the core business); business diversification (e.g., livestream commerce and online supermarket services); and international expansion to new, larger markets (e.g., Hong Kong). With limited resources and potential risks, however, Jiang was struggling to choose between diversification and market expansion. June 1, 2022, would mark Aomi's sixth anniversary and Jiang had to decide on a growth strategy before then.

Cashify, a start-up incorporated in 2013, is a reverse commerce (re-commerce) company in India with first-mover advantage in the re-commerce of electronic goods. In its contribution to the circular economy (CE), it claims to handle 100,000 used smart phones a month and plans to grow the figure to 200,000 by 2023. The company contributes to the CE by adding value to used electronic devices, particularly smart phones, and extending their lifespans. This ensures that products enter into repeat economic transactions before finding their way to landfills. However, the re-commerce model that gave Cashify a competitive edge became obsolete in 2022 because of emerging competition that leveraged technological advancements to create value in the sector. The company’s founders now find themselves facing difficult questions: Should they include new electronic products in their portfolio? In 2022, after two years of COVID-19-related impacts on the economy, overall circular growth was slipping, as consumers preferred to buy new products instead of recycled, refurbished, and reused goods. Can consumers be incentivized to return to the CE and appreciate the value of remodelled goods? Should the company diversify into new products entirely, including automobiles, home appliances, textiles, apparel, and plastic packaging?

The Human Resources and Social Development Ministry (HRSD) was one of the largest and most important ministries in Saudi Arabia, with 22,000 employees serving more than 30 million customers and beneficiaries. The ministry consisted of four sectors - labor which served and regulated the private and non-profit sectors; civil service which served government entities and employees; social development which served disadvantaged groups; and shared services which served the three customer-facing sectors. The three customer-facing sectors had been separate ministries until they were merged, and still operated mostly in silos. A new minister appointed in 2018 determined that the ministry had to be transformed to allow it to play its part in meeting Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 roles. He brought in Mohammed Al Jasser in 2019 as Assistant Minister for Shared Services to spearhead the transformation. Customer experience (CX) transformation was a key part of this. The case describes the initial phase of the ministry's CX transformation. It included creating a CX deputyship, putting CX strategy and governance in place, and carrying out pilot projects to address immediate problems and build support within the organization. The next phase of the CX transformation would be scaling up and implementing it across the ministry. The case discusses the challenges the ministry will face in this phase, including initiative fatigue, limited interest in improving CX, policy changes not aligned with CX, and fragmented service ownership. The case ends by mentioning two important issues for a successful CX transformation: Ensuring that the outsourcing of customer-facing activities, which was happening in parallel, supported this; and engineering a mindset and cultural shift among ministry officials. Although the first phase of the CX transformation had been successful, scaling up across the ministry would be challenging. How should Al Jasser and his team proceed to achieve this objective?

On July 2022, Signify Health, a health care services company that was disrupting the US health care market with its value-based care provision, announced the opening of a new technology centre outside the United States. This was a significant first step for the company beyond its home country. The company had an ambitious plan to develop an international centre of excellence for innovation that it expected would grow to employ more than 125 people by the end of 2023. The new technology centre was seen as a critical step to develop new solutions and provide technologies that would enable the platform to scale up its business. However, the company had to make some important and urgent decisions, including where to locate the international technology centre and how to integrate the new centre into the wider domestic organization.

The YouTube channel Digital Vidya Kendra (DVK) was launched by J. Singh in 2011 with a mission to develop future managers and researchers. However, the company soon encountered hurdles in its goal to fulfill its mission. DVK maintained a high level of quality in the content of its videos, but increasing the number of subscribers proved difficult. By November 2019, DVK had registered only 500 subscribers-half the minimum number needed to start earning money on YouTube. Its unique videos helped it to gain viewership from scholars, researchers, and academics. However, despite a potential for rapid global growth, DVK's growth rate started dropping in 2020. Something needed to be done to save the company; therefore, Singh tasked his digital marketing team to conduct surveys and research, using 67 of the company's videos, to investigate the issues and problems that had arisen. The DVK research team had to determine what information the numbers were revealing, what factors were affecting DVK's performance, what demographics were affecting business performance, and how cost effective Google Ads were in terms of user traffic, revenue, and hours watched.

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The case describes how Patricia Heidtman, chief innovation and sustainability officer and member of the executive board at Sika, creates a roadmap for sustainability, including a net zero pledge. Sika deliberately put Patricia - also a trained chemist - in charge, unlike many companies that assign the sustainability agenda to the CFO, the head of PR or legal, or even a designated CSO. Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in developing and producing systems and products for bonding, sealing and damping, as well as reinforcement and protection in the construction and automotive industries. The company had over 27,500 employees and sales of CHF 10.49 billion in 2022. In her role, Patricia faces four main challenges. First, the regulatory environment for a global, publicly listed company like Sika changes fast and significantly, as the measurement standards are still developing. Second, scope 1 and 2 emissions count for only about 2% at Sika; 98% are related to scope 3, which the company does not control directly. Third, Sika has over 100 subsidiaries worldwide, and each market and customer segment is very different, requiring a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. Finally, Sika's growth trajectory estimates a 300% revenue increase by 2050. Given this growth rate, reducing emissions by 75% would not decrease any emissions in nominal terms. An important step in implementing this commitment across the organization is a series of regional net zero workshops, with the aim of bringing everyone to the same level of understanding, since net zero affects every part of the business in different ways. At the same time, sharing the learnings and obstacles created valuable input for the regional and global pathway to net zero. This input will serve as a foundation for Sika's 2028 strategy. Through peer discussions instead of top-down mandates, Patricia wanted to create strong alignment between departments and regions on key decarbonization levers.

Managers are struggling, with more and more varied responsibilities than ever before. A recent survey showed that 54% suffer from work-induced fatigue and stress; meanwhile, only one in two employees believes that their manager can help their team succeed. Although any solution will need multiple facets, a new study from the research and advisory firm Gartner points to an essential first step: Organizations need to put the right people into the role to begin with. But promoting on the basis of performance as individual contributors is no longer a viable tack. By letting people nominate themselves for a role, conducting a rigorous and anonymized application process, equipping potential managers for the hardest parts of the job, and letting them opt out without stigma, organizations can build a robust and diverse pipeline of people ready to step into the role whenever needed. Those new managers will be more than twice as likely as others to find the job more manageable and to lead higher-performing teams.

Susan DeLuca, the chief executive officer of Eurostar Pictures (Eurostar), was under pressure from her board to define a new direct-to-consumer strategy for the company's video properties. Complicating this decision was the uncertain state of the streaming video on demand (SVOD) industry in 2023. DeLuca charged her team to consider two questions: (1) What was the future of the video streaming business, including new services (potentially spearheaded by Eurostar) that might disrupt the industry? and (2) How could Eurostar most strategically leverage its video assets to maximize revenue going forward?

When tackling urgent organizational problems, leaders usually work hard to identify underlying causes, tap a wide range of knowledge, and experiment with solutions. But once they've mapped out a plan, there's one more crucial step they must take: crafting a story so compelling that it will harness their organizations' energy and direct it toward change. Drawing on decades of experience helping senior executives lead large-scale transformations, Harvard professor Frei and leadership coach Morriss present an effective way to approach that challenge. They outline four key steps: (1) Understand your story so well that you can describe it in simple terms, (2) honor the past, (3) articulate a persuasive mandate for change, and (4) lay out a rigorous and optimistic path forward. Next you need to get others behind your story. Emotions can bring it to life and help drive employees' commitment to change. You also should promote your narrative aggressively. Share it wherever the opportunity arises-in speeches, interviews, town hall meetings, one-on-ones-and incorporate it into different formats, from videos to images to guidebooks.

The accelerated pace of technological change and, most recently, the advent of AI are reshaping jobs and organizations in ways that call for constant career reinvention. So we all need to learn how to get better at making the most of the frequent transitions that will constitute a long working life. But no matter how often people change careers, they will probably experience the transition as an emotionally fraught process-one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. Big changes can be exhilarating, but they're also terrifying. For more than two decades, Ibarra, of London Business School, has been studying the process of career reinvention: what prompts people to do it, how they go about it, and how it affects them. In this article, drawing on new research, she explains why such transitions are still so hard for so many people, despite their growing frequency and prevalence. She also offers some ideas for managing them more intentionally and successfully.

Three new books tackle how to escape the grip of perfectionism: MoneyZen, by Manisha Thakor; The Perfection Trap, by Thomas Curran; and Never Enough, by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

The Oscar-nominated actress and outspoken human-rights advocate talks about acting as therapy, inspiration from her older sister, and more.