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The case is set immediately following a catastrophic fire that destroyed the Triumph Motorcycle Company's manufacturing facility in England. After having gone out of business in the 1980s, the company was resurrected by a British entrepreneur, John Bloor and, at the time of the fire, was in its tenth year of renewed operations. The decision facing Bloor and his team after the fire was whether to rebuild and resume their strategy as before or if another course of action might be worthwhile. Students are challenged to identify and articulate Triumph's strategy during its renaissance and evaluate whether other alternatives might be more appropriate. This mirrors the assignment given to McKinsey and Company when they were engaged to help Triumph during their recovery. The case provides information about Triumph's history as well as a current picture of the motorcycle industry.

The case documents Unilever's journey to revitalize Lipton brand through sourcing all its tea from Rainforest Alliance Certified (TM) farms. It provides a framework for discussions around the challenges of aligning supply chains behind the re-positioning of a high-value brand as sustainable. It also explores the business case for sustainable sourcing of agricultural raw materials and raises questions on the potential to improve the economic health of the entire supply chain. Learning objectives: Understand the business case for major brands to convert to sustainable sourcing. Understand the challenges of aligning suppliers behind a major market transformation effort. Illustrate the dilemmas of adapting to a changing business context while staying on course with long-term objectives. Change the traditional perception of business responsibility in pushing forward the agenda for action on sustainable agriculture and other "mega-issues."

In 2006, Mudra Communications, the third-largest advertising agency in India, is in the middle of an organizational transformation in which information technology (IT) is seen by the top management as pivotal. The IT setup is undergoing a transition at Mudra from manual systems to an Enterprise System (ES) which has been developed internally by the eight-member IT team led by executive vice president for technology Sebastian Joseph. As he gets ready to implement the first module of ES, known as Mudra Business Operations Support System (mBoss), covering 70 per cent of the activities of the agency, Joseph is facing some managerial dilemmas related to planning the roll-out, training the end users, and managing the change that the new system will bring to the agency. He is also facing choices between outsourcing the ES architecture or owning it, and between outsourcing the development of the remaining seven modules or developing them internally, as before.

The world famous toymaker, The LEGO Group, assembled an internal management team to create a strategic report on LEGO’s different product lines and business operations. In recent years, numerous threats to LEGO had emerged in the toy industry. The acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by The Walt Disney Company created major implications for valuable toy license agreements. LEGO had also recently lost a long legal battle with major competitor MEGA Brands, makers of MEGA Bloks, with a European Union court decision that removed the LEGO brick trademark. Furthermore, the second-largest toymaker in the world, Hasbro, was preparing to launch a new rival product line called Kre-O. It was critical for the management team to identify where to expand LEGO’s product lines and business operations, in order to develop a competitive strategy to continue the organization’s recent years of financial success and dominance in the building toy market.

The world famous toymaker, The LEGO Group (LEGO), assembles an internal management team to create a strategic report on LEGO's different product lines and business operations. In recent years, numerous threats had emerged against LEGO in toy industry. The acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by The Walt Disney Company created major implications for valuable toy license agreements. LEGO also recently lost a long legal battle with major competitor MEGA Brands, makers of MEGA Bloks, with a European Union court decision that removed the LEGO brick trademark. Furthermore, new competition is preparing to enter the marketplace from Hasbro, the second-largest toymaker in the world, with the company launching a new rival product line called Kre-O. It is critical for the management team to identify where to expand Lego's product lines and business operations, in order to develop a competitive strategy to continue the organization's recent years of financial success and dominance in the building toy market.

Vision 2020 aimed to achieve annual revenues in excess of $200 billion by offering innovative integrated solutions to major global challenges such as the availability of water, energy and infrastructure. To "dream the client's dreams," the plan required over 200,000 new employees worldwide, united by a common entrepreneurial bond. Such projections would have sounded extravagant for any other firm; for Odebrecht, these were simple linear extrapolations of the company's performance over the last 10 years, during which the firm grew its revenues at an annualized rate of over 21%... Odebrecht also aspired to become a model of sustainable development and socio-environmental responsibility. For this, it could already rely on its massive investments in "green" plastics and ethanol production facilities. It also rallied behind a colossal hydroelectric project, pioneering CSR practices and novel turbine and dam technology to reduce the impact of such facilities on sensitive Amazon ecosystems. These investments set the tune for the firm in the second decade of the century. For Marcelo, the issue was how to translate the vision into "a dream with a deadline." Could he depend on the old recipes for growth? Were historical clients the right ones going forward? Would the forces and culture that had created the opportunities in the past support the future? Was Odebrecht ready to handle another massive bout of growth? As Marcelo assumed sole executive leadership for the $23 billion family business at the age of 42, he was aware of his responsibility and challenges. He knew he was expected to build on his forefathers' successes, and they had set a very high bar for him, but he also knew he could rely on the entrepreneur-partners he inherited. Learning objectives: Managing growth, family business governance, succession, CSR, sustainable development, renewable energy, managing the value chain.

The president and CEO of a provincial auto club is assessing opportunities to grow his organization at the same time as industry consolidation and changes in the allocation of national operating costs. The auto club has diversified from automobile towing and travel services into insurance, package travel, automobile sales, and service. However, the president's vision for the upcoming board of directors' meeting calls for a 300 per cent increase in operating revenues over the next 10 years. Without more members, the auto club cannot support its allocated costs of branded national and international products. The CEO's challenge is to find growth opportunities.

The vice president of communications of Domino’s Pizza International faced a significant threat to his company’s reputation due to negative social media exposure. A video had been posted on YouTube two days earlier by a Domino’s employee that showed two Domino’s employees at a North Carolina franchise tampering with customers’ pizza and sandwich orders. The employee stuck cheese up his nose, sneezed on the food prior to boxing it up, and could be overheard in the video admitting that the orders would soon be delivered to unsuspecting customers. The video went viral; it had been reposted to Twitter and Facebook, and received almost a million views and many comments on YouTube. It was also receiving attention from both local and national media channels. The senior executive team of Domino’s was meeting with the vice president in a matter of hours, and Domino’s social media team would need to devise a plan to respond to the video to protect Domino’s strong brand image before it was too late.<p>You might also like: Abercrombie & #Fitchthehomeless, Abercrombie and Fitch, Mountain Dew: The Most Racist Soft-drink Commercial in History?

In January 2011, the group medical director of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd (AHEL), India’s largest integrated health care provider in the private sector, is weighing his options in promoting clinical excellence among group hospitals. AHEL has been using a clinical scorecard, called ACE@25, as a tool to measure and monitor clinical excellence, which is becoming a source of differentiation in the Indian health care industry. ACE@25 measures 25 clinical parameters, benchmarked against the best hospitals globally, every month. The group medical director is wondering whether his role should be limited to monitoring clinical outcomes or whether, in order to drive clinical excellence, he should also prescribe the steps that the medical superintendents of individual hospitals should take in improving outcomes on their watch.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is an American mixed martial arts (MMA) company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. The UFC is controlled by its parent company, Zuffa LLC, which is owned by Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta and Dana White. The UFC has seen a great deal of success since its purchase from its founders in 2001 for $2 million. The owners have made MMA a highly marketable product in terms of live event ticket sales, at-home pay-per-view purchases, and general popularity among their key demographic: men aged 18 to 34. However, this success has mainly occurred within the United States and Lorenzo, current UFC chief executive officer, wants to expand the organization’s reach across the globe. The UFC has held several successful international events in countries that are fairly culturally comparable to the United States (the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada), and Lorenzo must decide if the organization can be culturally viable in several new international markets — specifically, China, India, and South Korea.

This case showcases key decisions in promoting the re-launch of Brisk, a ready-to-drink iced tea by Pepsi-Lipton. The decisions are: creative, media and metrics selection. It also deals with budget allocation to traditional (Super Bowl, television) and new (viral ads and social) media.

The note explains how bundled health care payment differs from fee-for-service payment; provides examples of the difference between the two; describes early innovators in bundling and their results; provides guidance on how to make it happen; and elucidates the legal issues bundling raises. Bundled payment will replace virtually all other health care payment formats. This note explains how and why.

This case is excellent for teaching both MBAs and executives how to create a blue ocean strategy that is hard to imitate and sustainable. It focuses on Wikipedia versus Britannica.com in the online encyclopedia industry. The case teaches participants the importance of aligning the three strategy propositions of value, profit, and people around both differentiation and low cost to break the value-cost trade-off and create a blue ocean that is hard to imitate. Compelling firsthand video interviews with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia - along with other key executives, staff and volunteers, otherwise known as Wikipedians - bring this case to life in the classroom. It can be downloaded from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/wikipedia/ The case is also available in Chinese.

A campaign to make management more of a profession-one that adheres to higher aims that self-interest or economic benefit-is under way. But professions actually have another defining feature: a specialized body of knowledge that practitioners must apply in their daily work. In law, people must pass an exam to gain admission to the bar. In medicine, doctors are required to complete continuing education. The idea of setting knowledge standards for managers is starting to gain traction, but if it is to take hold, business schools, management publications, and public and private organizations will need to take action.

This case examines medication administration processes and technologies on a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Taking the point of view of a hospital's VP of Administration, the case also gives students an opportunity to consider the perspectives of the CIO and Medical Director. It describes tragedies in which infants died after being inadvertently overdosed with blood thinners (poor information quality and poor process quality were implicated in these tragedies), and briefly introduces students to several U.S. national initiatives that aim to improve clinical processes and outcomes.

Lucy Normen, Chief Operating Officer of Sweetbriar Hospital, had just gotten off the phone with her Emergency Department Director, Dr. Max Warner. He was very upset with the present situation in the ED: people currently boarding in the ED hallways because there were no open inpatient beds; some patients waiting over 24 hours to be admitted; stressed out medical staff." Dr. Warner worried about possible mistakes-and likely drops in patient satisfaction scores. Lucy was puzzled. They had just spent millions of dollars on expanding the hospital's emergency department, yet in the three months since it re-opened things had gotten worse rather than better. She had a strong feeling that her problems were all related to inefficient patient flow throughout the hospital, but didn't quite know how to address them.

Lucy Normen, Chief Operating Officer of Sweetbriar Hospital, had just gotten off the phone with her Emergency Department Director, Dr. Max Warner. He was very upset with the present situation in the ED: people currently boarding in the ED hallways because there were no open inpatient beds; some patients waiting over 24 hours to be admitted; stressed out medical staff." Dr. Warner worried about possible mistakes-and likely drops in patient satisfaction scores. Lucy was puzzled. They had just spent millions of dollars on expanding the hospital's emergency department, yet in the three months since it re-opened things had gotten worse rather than better. She had a strong feeling that her problems were all related to inefficient patient flow throughout the hospital, but didn't quite know how to address them.

Lucy Normen, Chief Operating Officer of Sweetbriar Hospital, had just gotten off the phone with her Emergency Department Director, Dr. Max Warner. He was very upset with the present situation in the ED: people currently boarding in the ED hallways because there were no open inpatient beds; some patients waiting over 24 hours to be admitted; stressed out medical staff." Dr. Warner worried about possible mistakes-and likely drops in patient satisfaction scores. Lucy was puzzled. They had just spent millions of dollars on expanding the hospital's emergency department, yet in the three months since it re-opened things had gotten worse rather than better. She had a strong feeling that her problems were all related to inefficient patient flow throughout the hospital, but didn't quite know how to address them.

When eBay's IPO in September 1998 made Omidyar wealthier than he'd ever imagined, he and his fiancee, Pam (now his wife), decided to create a nonprofit family foundation. For a few years they made grants randomly, according to whatever needs resonated with them. But that was just charity, by Omidyar's definition: an important but never-ending effort to alleviate suffering. He wanted to be involved in philanthropy: improving the state of humanity and the world by addressing the root causes of suffering. He began looking for ways to harness the incredible power of business to make the world better. After running up against the complexities of the tax code regarding nonprofits, he ended up creating a limited liability corporation called Omidyar Network, whose staff would be able to handle both nonprofit grants and for-profit investments. This hybrid philanthropic model faced cultural challenges, in part because a program officer's due diligence for a foundation is vastly different from an investment analyst's due diligence for a venture capital firm, and in part because it was difficult to incentivize the for-profit employees without disincentivizing the nonprofit ones. Eventually the organization was restructured to be more like a venture capital firm, though more than half of its $442 million in commitments has gone to nonprofits, with a focus on microfinance. Omidyar believes that a true philanthropist will use every tool he can to create impact, and business is a key part of the equation.

In 2009, as financial institutions faced plummeting profits and public scorn, the star of Standard Chartered Bank was on the rise. The bank posted its seventh straight year of income growth (with no help from government funding) and increased its lending by 13%. Why was it thriving in such a difficult time? Because a different approach to leadership had taken hold there, say the authors, a team from the TruePoint consultancy. Mervyn Davies, who took Standard Chartered's reins in 2001, and his successor, Peter Sands, represent a new breed of CEO. Not content with achieving only strong economic returns, these CEOs drive their companies toward high performance on three fronts at once: creating long-term value, producing benefits for the wider community, and building strong social capital within the organization. Many CEOs do well in one of these areas, but what sets these "higher-ambition leaders" apart is their ability to excel in all three. In pursuing their aggressive agendas, higher-ambition leaders do three things: They draw on a much broader view of their companies' organizational and cultural assets to forge more-powerful strategic visions. They build widespread commitment to achieve those visions by turning their companies into communities of shared purpose. And they demonstrate the grit to commit to their visions over the long term. As each of these activities reinforces the others, the full human and business potential of the organization is unlocked, allowing these CEOs to lead their companies to remarkable success, even in the face of daunting challenges.