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When he was the CEO of SRI International, Curtis Carlson presided over the conception and development of Siri, HDTV, and other groundbreaking innovations. Since then he has shared his approach with more than 500 corporate, university, and government groups. His methodology is based on the principles of active learning, which emphasize concise mental models, the continual iteration of ideas, real-time feedback, teamwork, and frequent comparison of alternatives. Those elements are woven into a process that focuses on customers' needs, a compelling approach, valuable benefits relative to costs, and superiority to the competition.

The Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements have forced people in positions of power--namely, the white men who dominate institutional leadership roles--to realize they must personally step up to make organizations more fair and inclusive. That means playing a truly active role in helping marginalized colleagues advance (instead of just delegating diversity efforts to human resources). How can white men be effective allies to those employees? First, by taking responsibility for their own behaviors, educating themselves about racism and privilege, and getting and accepting feedback from people in underrepresented groups. They can also become confidants to and sponsors of women and people of color and insist on diverse hiring pools and practices. They can vigilantly watch out for bias at work, intervening decisively if they discover it. Last, they can work to build a community of other allies against racism and sexism.

The inventor of the Rubik's Cube on creativity and innovation.

In March 2019, Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft was grounded across the globe following its second crash in five months. Investigations concluded that the sensor in the planes' Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) had failed, leading both aircraft to nosedive downward, crashing and killing all aboard. The public was confused as to how this engineering error occurred, given Boeing's strong history of aerospace achievements. The case traces the main developments in the aircraft manufacturing industry and Boeing's organizational changes over time. How could these changes have affected events leading up to the two 737 MAX crashes?

Southern Implants, a South African dental implants manufacturer, was considering how to diversify its risk. Over the last 30 years, the company had grown from a local manufacturing company and now served customers around the world through distributors and subsidiaries. The founder and managing director was particularly concerned about the final stages of production which involved cleaning, sterilizing, and packing. While Southern Implants had four machine shops across South Africa, the final stages of production involved all items coming back to Southern Implants for these final packaging steps. The managing director wanted to set up another processing cleaning plant abroad, but he wondered what location for this plant would be best. The United States was the largest market for Southern Implants but labour costs were high. Portugal was another option and had an investor-friendly economic environment with no discrimination between domestic and foreign investors. What were the organizational and managerial risks to consider before making this decision?

Southern Implants, a South African dental implants manufacturer, was considering how to diversify its risk. Over the last 30 years, the company had grown from a local manufacturing company and now served customers around the world through distributors and subsidiaries. The founder and managing director was particularly concerned about the final stages of production which involved cleaning, sterilizing, and packing. While Southern Implants had four machine shops across South Africa, the final stages of production involved all items coming back to Southern Implants for these final packaging steps. The managing director wanted to set up another processing cleaning plant abroad, but he wondered what location for this plant would be best. The United States was the largest market for Southern Implants but labour costs were high. Portugal was another option and had an investor-friendly economic environment with no discrimination between domestic and foreign investors. What were the organizational and managerial risks to consider before making this decision?

Second-generation hawker Melvin Chew decided to set up the Hawkers United - Dabao 2020 Facebook group after the Singapore government announced that dining in at hawker centres, and all other food and beverage (F&B) establishments would be banned, following the imposition of the circuit breaker (partial lockdown) on April 7, 2020, in view of the worsening Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore. The group would allow hawkers to post their offerings, promotions, and takeaway or delivery options. Customers could also join it to pre-order food from these hawkers. The key reasons for Chew's decision to start the Facebook group included his desire to help his fellow hawkers, the need to devise alternatives to food delivery platforms that charged prohibitive commissions, and the necessity to save the hawker trade. There were however several barriers preventing hawkers from going digital, such as practical difficulties encountered when trying to adopt digital tools, as well as digital and verbal illiteracy among the more elderly hawkers. Nonetheless, various players in the ecosystem like the government, delivery platforms and software developers have stepped in to help coax hawkers to embrace digitalisation through various initiatives.

In early 2020, the founder and operator of Ramon Film Productions-known familiarly as Wakaliwood-needed to manage the tensions of operating as an informal movie production company in a slum in Uganda's capital of Kampala. Although Ramon Film Productions had received much international acclaim for its ultra-low-budget action movies, the company was under increasing pressure from the local authorities to formalize, by obtaining new operating licences and complying with stricter regulations. The founder needed to weigh the costs and benefits of continuing to operate informally, compared with formalizing his business.

In April 2018, the two co-founders of SafeMotos, a motorcycle taxi service in Rwanda, in Central Africa, were examining their expansion plan. Their start-up had not yet become profitable, but they were already making plans to expand into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were also driven by the larger goals of replicating their tried and tested growth model in other cities on the African continent and moving quickly into the underserved city transportation markets of Asia and the Far East. As they reviewed their four-year experience of working in Africa, they were facing a singular question: What should be the roadmap for scaling up their ride hailing service?

In early 2020, the founder and operator of Ramon Film Productions—known familiarly as Wakaliwood—needed to manage the tensions of operating as an informal movie production company in a slum in Uganda's capital of Kampala. Although Ramon Film Productions had received much international acclaim for its ultra-low-budget action movies, the company was under increasing pressure from the local authorities to formalize, by obtaining new operating licences and complying with stricter regulations. The founder needed to weigh the costs and benefits of continuing to operate informally, compared with formalizing his business.

In April 2018, following an in-store incident in Philadelphia that resulted in the unwarranted arrests of two Black men, Starbucks Corporation (Starbucks) faced a severe public relations crisis. A video of the incident, posted on Twitter, quickly generated widespread attention, online criticism, and in-person protests from people who accused the coffee giant of having exhibited racial bias. Within a few days, Starbucks shared press releases that featured its chief executive officer personally apologizing and taking responsibility for the incident. The chief executive officer also announced that US Starbucks stores would close for an afternoon for racial bias training and education. Although many public relations experts and customers commended Starbucks for its response, others continued to criticize Starbucks, claiming that its response wasn't genuine, but merely an attempt to protect reputation and avoid losing business. Further, while the training may have yielded positive education for employees, was it enough to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future? What could Starbucks do to demonstrate its intentions were genuine? How could it correct its mistake, address the root cause of the incident, keep customers' trust, and thrive as the world's largest coffee retailer?

In February 2017, the chief executive officer of Conexus Credit Union, a local credit union headquartered in Regina, Saskatchewan, was preparing to meet with the board of directors. He would be pitching his plan to build, staff, and operate a start-up venture program to be called the Cultivator. The Cultivator would create a stream of new regional high-technology businesses that would be well-placed, both for Conexus to serve and its members and the wider community to benefit from. The real question was how to operationalize this model: Should Conexus use the template of existing for-profit start-up accelerator programs to launch companies quickly and optimally to fail or scale? Or considering its community mandate, should Conexus take a different route?

<p style="color: white; background-color: rgb(3, 70, 56); font-size: 16px; display: inline-block; border: 0px solid rgb(197, 183, 131); padding: 4px 4px;"><a href="https://www.iveypublishing.ca/s/product/01tOF000002kr3NYAQ" style="color: inherit; text-decoration: inherit;"> AVAILABLE AS A DIGITAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE </a></p><br><br>In April 2018, following an in-store incident in Philadelphia that resulted in the unwarranted arrests of two Black men, Starbucks Corporation (Starbucks) faced a severe public relations crisis. A video of the incident, posted on Twitter, quickly generated widespread attention, online criticism, and in-person protests from people who accused the coffee giant of having exhibited racial bias. Within a few days, Starbucks shared press releases that featured its chief executive officer personally apologizing and taking responsibility for the incident. The chief executive officer also announced that US Starbucks stores would close for an afternoon for racial bias training and education. Although many public relations experts and customers commended Starbucks for its response, others continued to criticize Starbucks, claiming that its response wasn't genuine, but merely an attempt to protect reputation and avoid losing business. Further, while the training may have yielded positive education for employees, was it enough to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future? What could Starbucks do to demonstrate its intentions were genuine? How could it correct its mistake, address the root cause of the incident, keep customers' trust, and thrive as the world's largest coffee retailer?

In the first quarter of 2019, A.T. Kearney Inc.’s managing partner had to find a strategy that would help the company move into the top tier of the world’s management consultancy firms. The new leader was only the ninth managing partner in the firm’s history, having succeeded the previous leader one year earlier. He was a member of the firm’s board of directors and had previously led the company’s global Communications, Media & Technology practice. He had also been named one of The Top 25 Consultants by Consulting magazine. After his appointment as managing director, he announced that A.T. Kearney Inc. would continue to be committed to helping its clients with their biggest and most important challenges. However, the firm faced a major challenge of its own: how to become a US$2 billion management consultancy titan as quickly as possible and compete against the industry’s giants. A.T. Kearney Inc. had to determine what would be the best option for the future of the company.

AfreecaTV Co. Ltd. (AfreecaTV) was a pioneer in the business of live video streaming, as well as in using voluntary donations as a monetization strategy. In August 2020, AfreecaTV’s co-chief executive officer (CEO) and its largest shareholder, was facing a strategic crossroads. After battling global live-streaming giant and Amazon subsidiary Twitch to a standstill in AfreecaTV’s domestic Korean market, the co-CEO had to decide whether to pursue several risky strategic initiatives, including moving into foreign markets like the United States, further developing the company’s video-on-demand service, expanding advertising on the platform, and generating new, proprietary content (e.g., the company’s own K-pop group). He wondered which would be the best direction to take AfreecaTV in the coming years.

Suning Logistics, a retail logistics enterprise, was located in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. As a subsidiary of Suning Holding Group (Suning), Suning Logistics represented the core competitiveness of Suning in occupying the leading position in China's retail landscape. Suning Logistics was registered as a company in 2012 but was a subsidiary of Suning before growing into Suning Logistics Group (Suning Logistics) in 2015. During the 30-year development process, Suning Logistics had repeatedly iterated and upgraded its logistics model to support the transformation from a physical retailer to online retailer. With the China's new retail wave, experiential shopping and digital consumption brought challenges to the logistics upgrade. To win competitive advantage, the general manager of Suning Logistics had to make a choice between two transformational directions: Should the company improve the logistics efficiency of multi-scenario retail? Or, should it explore the reverse supply chain with emerging technology?

Amazon.com Inc.’s (Amazon’s) global expansion from 1998 to 2020, started with investment in the United Kingdom and Germany and ended with investment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In 2019, as one of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, Amazon had a 15.1 per cent share of the worldwide e-commerce market with operations in 16 countries, including both developed and emerging markets. However, the company was showing unbalanced performance across countries. For example, in 2019, Amazon was the market leader in the United Kingdom (23.3 per cent market share) and Germany (48.3 per cent market share), while it only held 0.2 per cent of the Chinese online retailing market, far behind the market leader who had a 42.7 per cent market share, and it held only 1 per cent market share in Brazil with the market leader having 23.2 per cent. Amazon faced critical challenges in developing its future international strategies. Should it continue its global expansion into new markets? What should the company do with less successful markets such as China and Brazil? Also, how should Amazon deal with the ramifications of an unexpected global pandemic event in its international strategy?<br><br>This case is an updated version of Amazon Goes Global, former Ivey product 9B14M122.

The Maple Leaf Foods (MLF): Changing the System case explores how a major food processor pivoted its vision and operations in an attempt to become the world’s most sustainable protein company. Instead of focusing solely on financial goals, the organization's new purpose clearly recognized MLF’s potential impact on both society and the natural environment. In the anchor case, senior leaders considered the background and progress of this initiative. The supplemental cases (A to E) offer the perspectives of five stakeholders, each of whom is critical to the MLF initiative. Since an organization is part of an open system, these views allow a consideration of how the different parts of the system may experience, and impact, any change attempt.