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As 2019 ended, the founder and chief executive officer of Nudestix Inc. (Nudestix) had overseen phenomenal growth during the firm’s five years of operation. However, the company was about to encounter a series of issues as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and closures of non-essential businesses around the world. Nudestix, like many companies, suffered a severe decline in revenue. How could the company respond to this crisis in a way that would minimize its losses?

Presentation to accompany product 8B21M026.

On July 29, 2020, Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. (Amazon), testified before a United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law that was investigating the company for engaging in anti-competitive practices. Although the company offered low prices and did not distort consumer welfare principles despite its large market size, the Committee questioned whether it had exploited its sellers on both Amazon Marketplace and the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. The company was accused of not only exploiting sellers but also using their sales data for developing its private-label brands. As committee members were looking to redefine monopolistic practices, it was also recommended that Amazon should be split to avoid anti-competitive practices. Was it time for Bezos to proactively split Amazon and avoid antitrust actions against his company owing to its market dominance? What could he do to manage antitrust issues against his company?

In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world's resources-bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the "stuff of science-fiction," teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an "avatar service platform"-a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin's eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA's support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporates, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services-for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the "ANA AVATAR" program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, "avatarin." Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations?

In 2016, Akira Fukabori and Kevin Kajitani, aeronautical engineers at All Nippon Airways Co., Ltd., began to wonder why, in a world of accelerating globalization and digital connectivity, those who lived in far-remote villages or impoverished urban areas could not access high quality education or healthcare. They believed that with a faster, cheaper mode of transportation, they could democratize the world's resources-bring the right people or resources together to the right places at the right time. Although teleportation was still the "stuff of science-fiction," teleporting human consciousness and skills to remote locations through robots was not. Their vision was to build an "avatar service platform"-a global infrastructure of general-purpose avatar robots that humans could rent, like Uber or AirBnB, to perform surgery, defuse a bomb, visit elderly grandparents, attend school, or vacation in distant physical environments. In Akira and Kevin's eyes, ANA was in the mobility business, not just the airline business. They influenced senior management to invest $22 million to fund the ANA AVATAR XPRIZE and, with ANA's support, built a global avatar ecosystem of technologists, start-ups, corporates, non-profits, and government, including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. As they worked to advance the technology and regulatory landscape, they also generated demand for avatar services-for that, they needed to change the mindset of the general public. By 2020, the "ANA AVATAR" program, as they called it, had made significant progress, and Akira and Kevin initiated the process to spin out of ANA, and launch a start-up, "avatarin." Then, COVID-19 upended reality. The years they thought it would take to create widespread demand for avatar-enabled telepresence had evaporated. Now, the question was, how should they deploy their start-up team to meet the humanitarian need, investor, and partner expectations?

In March 2020, the director of Shikshaa Public School (SPS), a privately owned school with 785 students, located in Chennai, India, and his wife and co-founder were reviewing the school’s performance and deciding its strategy going forward. The Indian education sector was highly regulated and competitive. Government schools, government-aided schools, and private schools all competed for new student enrolments to obtain a portion of the US$101.1 billion (in fiscal year 2019) Indian education sector. Having recently taken out a bank loan to construct a school building that increased SPS’s capacity to 3,000 students, the cofounders were considering ways to increase SPS’s revenue and profitability. The options considered were (1) more effective marketing to attract an increased enrolment of new students; (2) relocation of SPS to an upmarket location, where families had the potential to pay higher fees; and (3) acquisition of another school to expand rapidly and leverage the SPS brand.

In October 2020, Melissa Wood-Tepperberg, founder of the digital subscription wellness platform Melissa Wood Health (MWH) and creator of 'The MWH Method,' was evaluating the strategic directions of her company. What had started as a way to share workouts and wellness tips via Instagram only five years ago, today was a growing business enterprise. The MWH membership was reaching 92,000 paying subscribers who accessed the content in her platform. Wood's base of Instagram followers was also growing, now totaling more than 650,000, along with the number of brands who sought her attention and endorsement to promote their brands via her Instagram account. As the business grew, new opportunities arose. Today Wood was meeting with executives of a large fashion retailer who had proposed a partnership to create, launch, and sell Wood's own collection of apparel-an important step for MWH towards becoming a lifestyle brand. How should Wood approach the negotiations about the deal terms? What would this partnership mean to her members and followers? And how could she ensure this new partnership would help propel the other parts of her business?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPMC), one of the world’s largest banks, was confronting the advent of open banking in its retail banking business. In late 2020, policy makers and regulators were advocating movement toward open banking with growing enthusiasm as a way to stimulate competition in the financial services sector and thus, encourage greater value creation for consumers. JPMC, however, seemed to embrace open banking while also resisting it, aggressively building out the technical infrastructure required for open banking while also blocking some third-party financial services companies from accessing customers’ Chase bank accounts, citing data security and privacy concerns. Open banking seemed fraught with risk, but might it represent new and significant opportunities for banks? In either case, what should the approach to open banking be for an established bank like JPMC?

As the covid pandemic spread in early 2020, global travel ground to a halt. For Airbnb, the San Francisco-based platform for renting accommodations, the impact was both swift and severe as revenues plummeted more than 70% over the prior year. Responding to the sudden downturn was a challenge for CEO Brian Chesky and his leadership team because the firm had a adopted a stakeholder model with five key constituents: guests (renters), hosts (landlords), employees, communities and shareholders. While all five groups could benefit in the long-term if the firm succeeded, it was less clear how they should balance the potentially conflicting demands in the short-term particularly given the mounting losses. For example, in the face of travel restrictions, Airbnb could support guests by requiring hosts to refund deposits or could support hosts by allowing them to keep deposits. Similarly, should Airbnb use existing cash to maintain employment levels or downsize to protect capital providers? In the highly uncertain environment that existed in April 2020, Chesky and his team had to make many critical decisions with little precedent and limited information to guide them. As one of the first Silicon Valley "unicorns" to adopt a stakeholder business model, the world would be watching to see what they did, how they did it, and why.

GoSports Foundation was a non-profit venture that developed India's emerging athletic talent through athletic scholarships and other supports that helped the athletes achieve sports excellence. The foundation had limited funding and numerous applicants, requiring that it carefully choose the athletes it would support. Nandan Kamath, a co-founder of the organization, has to choose one athlete from several applicants for support. He also has to decide whether the foundation should start supporting the development of coaches and trainers and how it should balance its support with a desire to advance the profile of athletes competing in the Paralympics.

GoSports Foundation was a non-profit venture that developed India’s emerging athletic talent through athletic scholarships and other supports that helped the athletes achieve sports excellence. The foundation had limited funding and numerous applicants, requiring that it carefully choose the athletes it would support. Nandan Kamath, a co-founder of the organization, has to choose one athlete from several applicants for support. He also has to decide whether the foundation should start supporting the development of coaches and trainers and how it should balance its support with a desire to advance the profile of athletes competing in the Paralympics.

In late January 2021, Robinhood Markets Inc. (Robinhood), the California-based start-up that had upended the securities brokerage industry with its zero-commission trades, faced legal and market challenges. The US Securities and Exchange Commission had imposed a hefty fine on the company for its inadequate disclosure of payments to market brokers. In addition, a state regulator had filed an administrative complaint about the start-up's "gamification" of investing that had arguably led unwitting customers to lose money. A huge run-up in the stock of GameStop Corp. had put the spotlight on Robinhood and its business practices. On the competitive front, both traditional brokers such as Charles Schwab Corporation and Webull Financial LLC, a China-based start-up, were challenging Robinhood for the millennial investor customer base. Robinhood’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Vladimir Tenev, and his team needed to respond to these challenges so the company could file papers in March 2021 for a mid-2021 initial public offering.

The case describes how Odebrecht's board of directors handled the issues raised in the (A) case and continues the story of the Group's efforts to restore its reputation and return to growth after admitting its role in Latin America's largest-ever corruption scandal. The case covers the Group's filing for, and emergence from, a court-supervised reorganization while coping with an ongoing feud within its founding family, as well as changes in the Group's leadership and governance as it attempts to regain financial stability and complete another round of changes to its compliance and internal control systems. The case concludes with the outgoing CEO's announcement of the Group's new name-Novonor-and its newly defined purpose and vision for its future.

As a result of recent success and rapid growth, the Skyrose Marketing Agency team was becoming overwhelmed with significant variation in workload levels. The vice-president, who was responsible for managing the company's clients from the beverage industry, wanted to smooth the team's workload level to improve morale. She also wanted to remain attentive to her clients' needs, which could increase as peak holiday seasons approached. The vice-president was considering using Google Trends to predict how popular certain beverage products would be in the future so that her beverage company clients could predict future sales volumes. She hoped that by forecasting proxy sales for three specific clients she could gain key insight to help her smooth the volume levels of her team's workload, without having a negative impact on her client relationships.

Student spreadsheet to exercise W21220