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Welspun India Limited (Welspun) was a global leader in home textiles, supplying to top global retailers like Costco Wholesale Corporation, IKEA, Tesco plc, and Bed, Bath and Beyond, Inc. Welspun undertook many sustainability actions like eliminating freshwater usage through a sewage treatment plant in Anjar, improving energy efficiency in manufacturing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, using transportation modes to leave a smaller carbon footprint, and creating products out of waste material. In order to move forward, the chief executive officer needed to decide how to use sustainable fashion to gain a competitive advantage. Was becoming a circular company the answer? If so, what steps needed to be taken for Welspun to become circular?

At the start of 2020, the main strategic challenge for UBits (a start-up focused on online corporate training in Latin America) was how to continue to scale up the operation. Although UBits had gained a foothold in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, the company had no presence in Brazil—Latin America’s largest economy—or in any other major regional economies, including Chile and Argentina. UBits was offering only one type of service—subscription-based courses for corporate clients. The management team was contemplating targeting individual customers directly to leverage the growing UBits library that held more than 300 locally produced courses. However, the ideal strategic direction for the company's expansion was unclear, and its current financial situation did not permit pursuing all options.

In June 2020, UBits faced the uncertainties of a global health crisis—the COVID-19 pandemic. The company had experienced several temporary setbacks, but the chief executive officer and co-founder was encouraged by the shifts in market dynamics that seemed to hold a bright future for online training. However, major competitors had also intensified their efforts to capitalize on the new opportunities in the market. UBits needed to re-evaluate its options for growth, as new opportunities and challenges were arising from the pandemic’s impact on society.

Virtual reality (VR) technology is predicted to become indispensable in the business world, as it fundamentally reimagines the ways in which firms interact with customers. This technology has sparked a VR ecosystem, with multiple types of firms and other stakeholders interacting to create value. Firms need to define their roles in this ecosystem in order to capitalize on the opportunities and address the challenges they face when navigating its complexities. This article develops a VR value chain that illustrates how the use of VR technologies adds value to key stakeholders. It also provides an understanding of the current state of the VR ecosystem and serves as a source for strategic managerial decision making and future VR research.

At the start of 2020, the main strategic challenge for UBits (a start-up focused on online corporate training in Latin America) was how to continue to scale up the operation. Although UBits had gained a foothold in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, the company had no presence in Brazil-Latin America's largest economy-or in any other major regional economies, including Chile and Argentina. UBits was offering only one type of service-subscription-based courses for corporate clients. The management team was contemplating targeting individual customers directly to leverage the growing UBits library that held more than 300 locally produced courses. However, the ideal strategic direction for the company's expansion was unclear, and its current financial situation did not permit pursuing all options.

In June 2020, UBits faced the uncertainties of a global health crisis-the COVID-19 pandemic. The company had experienced several temporary setbacks, but the chief executive officer and co-founder was encouraged by the shifts in market dynamics that seemed to hold a bright future for online training. However, major competitors had also intensified their efforts to capitalize on the new opportunities in the market. UBits needed to re-evaluate its options for growth, as new opportunities and challenges were arising from the pandemic's impact on society.

The case considers the entry of Germany’s leading retailer, Kaufland Warenhandel GmbH & Co KG (Kaufland), known for its hypermarket retail format and low prices, into the Australian market. Before entering Australia in 2016, the retailer had only expanded into Eastern European countries. Australia was its first developed market. In April 2019, a change in chief executive officer (CEO) took place at Kaufland, with the new CEO, Klaus Gehrig, demanding more centralized decision making. In Australia, Kaufland was struggling to get approval for its larger stores. Competitors in Australia, such as Woolworths and Coles, were also gearing up for the competition, with Coles sending a team of executives to study Kaufland’s operations in Germany. In November 2019, after a series of weather-related issues in Australia, the retail price of several grocery items increased. Kaufland was still searching for suppliers and working on opening its stores. Experts felt that Kaufland Australia had the potential to make an impact on the grocery market, as higher prices offered by other retailers would lead consumers to shift to it. Going forward, Gehrig faced a challenging decision: Should he revisit the decision to expand into the Australian market? How might his competitors retaliate?

In March 2020, the founder of an auto mechanic shop in a Toronto suburb was contemplating a five-year growth strategy. Given the disruptions in both the auto mechanic sector and the automotive industry at large, she wondered whether her plan was realistic. Should the founder execute the growth strategy according to plan or change the plan and lead the business in a completely different direction?

On August 24, 2015, Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, and Francois Hollande, president of France, met in Berlin to discuss solutions to what had become known as the European refugee crisis. The vast influx of refugees was the result of thousands from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq leaving their war torn countries to travel across the Mediterranean Sea or overland to seek refuge in European Union (EU) countries. The crisis had been building since the beginning of the year, leaving some countries-particularly those at the EU borders-overwhelmed with refugees. In the meantime the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF), Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, announced it had ratified an order suspending the Dublin convention, a 1990 protocol which forced refugees to apply for asylum in the first EU member country in which they set foot. "Germany will become the member state responsible for processing their claims," a government statement said of the refugees, largely from Syria. As a result, Germany quickly became the first-choice destination for Syrians. Word of Merkel's suspension of the Dublin protocol spread quickly among refugees-Syrian and otherwise-who were heading to the EU or already waiting in camps. Indeed, Hungary's ambassador to Germany, Peter Györkös, later claimed that on August 26, Serbian police found thousands of discarded passports on their side of the border. "From that moment on, every refugee was a Syrian," he told The Guardian.

Traditional manufacturers in the digital era are under pressure to create customer value in an environment of rapidly changing customer buying patterns, and their existing connections with customers no longer give them sustainable competitive advantages. Therefore, the ability to deliver value to customers and get customers engaged in the creation of business value has become a crucial objective in achieving sustainable business growth. As a leading enterprise in liquor production, Wuliangye Group holds an important position in the traditional liquor market. In this case, digital transformation started in the company's marketing function because it is the closest to the market, and can benefit from data asset acquisition as well as value creation and acquisition. Firstly, this case details the Group's practical journey on the path to digital marketing. This path includes organizational changes, profit distribution, customer participation, distribution channels, data resources and much other content. Secondly, the case highlights the Group's acquisition of substantial data assets and its formation of digital capabilities, starting with marketing, along with the actions that have laid a foundation for digital transformation of other business areas. This progressive strategic renewal may mitigate the resistance to digital transformation. In the course of driving deeper digital reform, further discussion and analysis should focus on whether Wuliangye Group can realize effective use of data resources and digital transformation of the enterprise as a whole based on data acquired from marketing.

Demographic realities and the passage of time leave no doubt that in roughly 10 years, the millennial generation will begin its takeover of the C-suite across industries and around the world. This eventuality is troubling to those who accept the popular view of the generation as narcissistic and impatient. In this installment of Organizational Performance, I report on a study involving detailed conversations with members of the baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial generations. From these conversations, I offer two contributions to a healthier understanding of the millennial generation and, in doing so, provide a way to better frame efforts to prepare millennials for their ascent to the C-suite. First, I distinguish between generational characteristics due to time-varying age effects and those associated with immutable period and cohort effects. This distinction makes clear the generational attributes that will pass with time and those that will continue to influence attitudes and behaviors. Then I discuss how period and cohort effects affect leader emergence. These efforts will help those charged with preparing talented millennial executives for the C-suite and ensuring they focus on the right things. After all, understanding today how to address the relevant gaps in millennial leaders' preparation is critical to future organizational performance.

The increasing digitization of the economy means that a new digital resource-a digital twin of an organization-is now feasible. We suggest five principles that assist in the construction of an organizational digital twin and show how they combine into a dynamic evolutionary process that builds and maintains the digital twin incrementally. We also discuss the organizational implications of implementing a digital twin and how digital twins create value in an organization.

Influence vulnerability has recently become a concern across society and in business. Such vulnerabilities increase as social networks are leveraged by different entities, oftentimes through social media, to affect how we think and behave. While many instances of social influence are positive and beneficial, others can be quite negative and lead to harmful outcomes for organizations and individuals such as reputational damage and an inability to control desirable thoughts, narratives, and behaviors, as well as decreasing people's freedom of thought and behavior. This article draws on the concepts of social embeddedness and network commitment to outline people's influence vulnerabilities. We then propose three guidelines to help reduce influence vulnerabilities based on the concepts of trustworthiness, network commitment, and self-management.

As firms struggle with high failure rates when developing new products and services, they seek new approaches to innovation. One method garnering attention is design thinking (DT), a design-based method of problem solving. Businesses as varied as Airbnb and PepsiCo are embracing DT in growing numbers, but some may be joining the bandwagon without understanding its distinctions compared to the main alternative, the Stage-Gate (SG) methodology. SG, a project-review process, is used in many firms today to create innovations. To guide managerial consideration of DT, this article provides an explanation of DT as compared with SG, a framework to assess DT's fit with the firm, and ways DT may be effectively used.

Prior studies that examine business model innovations lack consideration on how value propositions are best developed in specific contexts or how restructuring other components can deliver on value propositions. This article first identifies three types of Chinese consumption behaviors-imitation-based "good-enough" consumption, renqing consumption, and face consumption-and their corresponding value propositions based on value-hierarchy theory. We then look at Chinese companies that illustrate how business model innovations that focus on the targeted value propositions are initiated, formulated, and implemented. In particular, we identify four types of business model innovations: imitation-based "good-enough" business models, renqing business models, face business models, and hybrid business models. We conclude with practical implications for conducting and implementing business model innovations in China.

The chief information officer and head of human resources at Hero MotoCorp Limited, India’s largest two-wheeler company, was responsible for overseeing the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. Under his leadership, the company's CSR team had started an ambitious project to provide livelihood and skills training to girls and women from marginalized socio-economic backgrounds. By March 2019, the program had helped many women become financially independent by providing training and opportunities to earn a living. These women otherwise lacked the resources and family support to gain employment or start their own business. However, the head of CSR wondered whether or not the company had done enough for women to reach their goals and become independent. Although the various CSR programs at Hero MotoCorp Limited had been successful, how could the company scale up its CSR programs for greater impact to help more girls and women?

Hijo Resources Corporation (Hijo) was a conglomerate based in Tagum, Davao del Norte, Philippines. Hijo began as an abaca plantation in the 1940s and ventured into the cultivation and exportation of Cavendish bananas in 1968. Alongside its agribusiness operations, Hijo had diversified into a conglomerate with business interests spanning a broad range of sectors. However, Hijo was no longer able to operate its business as usual due to changing economic, environmental, and societal challenges. The company’s current initiatives were fragmented and existed in silos within each strategic business unit (SBU). In April 2018, Hijo’s president and chief executive officer needed to determine how to holistically integrate sustainability practices into the company’s value chain, cutting across different issues and encouraging collaboration across Hijo’s different SBUs.

In 2014, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), a large, government-owned, global, Fortune 500 petroleum refining and marketing company in India, was facing a variety of issues around its audit process. The internal audit department had been facing delays in completion of audits and compliance of recommendations. The executive director and head of the Internal Audit (IA) department believed that performance problems were due to the organization of the department. Changes were needed to the processes, technology, and structure of the department, and he wanted his team to find solutions to put some fundamental changes in place. What changes should be made to IA's processes, staffing, and structure so the company could complete more audits and comply with the recommendations?