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SF Express Group Co. Ltd. (SF Express) was a leading express delivery and logistics solutions provider in China. In May 2017, SF Express became involved in a dispute with the logistics-tracking platform Cainiao Network Technology (Cainiao), which was controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. SF Express and Cainiao were the two largest players in China’s express delivery market. The dispute, which involved an SF Express–affiliated smart package locker company that declined a data-sharing request from Cainiao, caused SF Express and Cainiao to sever their ties over proprietary data and cybersecurity. This severance caused significant disruption to China’s e-commerce sector. After regulatory intervention, both parties agreed to resume sharing data for the time being and had to negotiate a resolution to their data dispute within 30 days. The chief information officer of SF Express needed to come up with an immediate solution to the dispute as well as a long-term data strategy for SF Express.

In 2015, the general manager of the Gold Crest Hotel (Gold Crest) in Mwanza, Tanzania, had only three days to present a compelling marketing strategy for the hotel at the executive board meeting. Though the hotel had recently experienced revenue growth from its conference room bookings, management wanted to increase average yearly hotel occupancy. A new marketing strategy had to include a target consumer segment, a marketing plan, and options that would attract customers to book guest rooms at the Gold Crest. Also, the manager had to decide whether to renovate the ninth floor of the hotel and, if so, whether to add additional conference rooms or additional guest rooms, depending on the targeted market segment.

Burro was a growing start-up in Ghana with a mission to provide “tools for a better life” to Ghanaians by distributing products that addressed local needs. In February 2015, after seven years of operation, the company had finally become profitable. Demand for Burro’s sustainable products was growing quickly in the booming Ghanaian market. The country manager wanted to determine a strategy for growth to maximize the success of Burro's future.

In late May 2014, the founder of Liyu Ethiopia Tours was considering his options to grow the company. The small but reputable tour company had become successfull in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in only seven months. The founder, who faced the challenge of continuing to grow the business on a limited budget, was considering several strategic decisions: should he increase the company’s online presence by using the services of Google AdWords or TripAdvisor; expand local and national partnerships with hotels or with tour companies in neighbouring countries; or participate in a major trade show, with the hope of developing international partnerships. The founder wondered how to align his company’s goals with its capabilities.

In mid-2015, India-based Titan Company, a joint venture between Tata Group and Tamil Nadu Development Corporation, was active in several retail businesses: watches; jewellery; eyewear; and youth accessories (e.g. backpacks and helmets). As of July 2015, Titan Company operated 1,300 of its own stores in 240 Indian cities and towns, and its products were being sold abroad through 2,300 third-party retail outlets in 32 countries. Titan Company's board of directors had developed an ambitious target—revenues of INR300 billion by 2020. The chief executive officer and his team needed to outline a strategy to achieve this goal. In particular, they needed to decide whether Titan Company should continue to launch new businesses or instead focus on consolidating its existing businesses.

Malaysian palm oil company IOI Corporation Berhad (IOI) developed from a plantation company in Malaysia to become a vertically integrated manufacturing company with a range of higher value manufacturing businesses across Asia, Europe, and the United States. The rapid expansion into what the chief executive officer (CEO) called a “mini-multinational” placed greater demands on IOI and its leadership. The CEO had struggled to simultaneously achieve growth, innovation, control, and coordination, and the company had experienced a sustainability crisis in 2016. In early 2017, the CEO needed to decide whether to approve an ambitious growth strategy—proposed by IOI’s specialty oils and fats team, which led most overseas operations and handled IOI’s most innovative products—to be achieved by 2025. While he was eager to expand IOI and strengthen its position as a widely admired Asian family multinational, he also needed to weigh the constraints. He could not risk growing the company faster than the leadership’s ability to control it.

In 2017, bike sharing was one of the hottest technology trends in China. Since its inception two years earlier, Mobike had quickly become one of China’s leading bike on-demand companies because of its bicycles’ superior quality, and the company’s intelligence capability, open innovation, alliance strategies, and big data applications. Mobike expanded aggressively to take advantage of opportunities in this emerging market and the need for efficient, green, and sustainable solutions to short-distance urban transportation. However, Mobike's aggressive expansion faced tough challenges, including shared bicycle operations and management, competition from rivals, and government regulations. By late 2017, several bike-sharing services had gone bankrupt. How could Mobike avoid the same fate, generate profit, and continue to prosper?

In March 2017, a pharmacy in Berlin encountered a personnel scheduling problem. The pharmacy’s key activity was serving customers in-store with ready-made medication. These services had to be offered during regular opening hours, on occasional Sundays, and during pre-assigned emergency-service shifts. In addition, customer-specific formulations had to be prepared, and certain office duties had to be performed. A particular aspect of the problem was that, in addition to differences in the employment contracts, the employees’ preferred attendance times had to be considered. Although the issue was presented as an operational problem, long-term considerations of determining the cornerstones of the employment contracts could be addressed.

On January 1, 2017, the head of sustainability initiatives at Lemon Tree Hotels (Lemon Tree) in India reflected on the future of the company’s inclusion and diversity initiative. Since the inception of the initiative in 2007, Lemon Tree had become the largest employer of persons with disabilities in the Indian hospitality industry. In 2014, Lemon Tree had set itself an ambitious target of increasing the share of opportunity-deprived individuals, which included mainly persons with disabilities, to 45 per cent of its workforce by the end of financial year 2025.<br><br>To remain on course to achieve this goal, the head of sustainability initiatives needed to address key areas of concern in expanding the initiative beyond its current level. For example, where would the company source and recruit persons with disabilities, what costs would be involved, and what specific types of disability would the initiative need to open itself to? While expanding the initiative, how would Lemon Tree preserve its sustainability framework, which was based on the three pillars of the triple bottom line: profit, planet, and people? Should the company instead pursue deeper integration and more gradual growth, which would allow it to consolidate its learning thus far, but would require deeper analysis of training needs and delivery? The head of sustainability initiatives felt the need to discuss these options with the senior leadership team and plan the company’s approach to best operationally and culturally integrate persons with disabilities and other opportunity-deprived individuals into its workforce.

Danone SA (Danone), a multinational food company based in Paris, had a history of social and environmental consciousness and a corporate strategy that focused on economic and social objectives. In 2013, the company was trying to ensure that this social and environmental focus was part of its decision-making process, and wanted to communicate its industry-leading efforts to internal and external stakeholders alike. The company had learned that it was not enough just to have internal systems and data prove its environmental consciousness. The company’s carbon accounting initiative, for example, demonstrated the firm’s progress in reducing its carbon footprint; however, because it did not make use of widely accepted carbon accounting standards, Danone’s sustainability efforts were largely discounted or ignored. Now the company had to decide how to report to its various stakeholders going forward.<br><br>The A case focuses on Danone’s reporting activity in 2013, when it worked with the International Integrated Reporting Council to pilot that organization’s integrated reporting standard. The B case brings the situation forward to 2018 and discusses Danone’s work to launch its own integrated report, its efforts to become certified as a B Corporation, and its support of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

As a pioneer and leading competitor among China’s online travel-service providers, Ctrip.com International, Ltd. (Ctrip) had successfully integrated technology into China’s rapidly growing travel industry by 2017. The company’s platform provided a comprehensive set of travel services including hotel reservations, flight and train ticketing, vacation packages, business-travel management, and dining reservations. Praised in the industry as the exemplary combination of traditional tourism and e-commerce, Ctrip had experienced significant success. However, the company still had to adapt to an ever-changing and increasingly complex internal and external business environment. How would the company evolve its business model to sustainably compete in the global online travel market?

In 2015, the chief executive officer of Natco Pharma Limited, a commercial manufacturer of pharmaceutical drugs in India, needed to raise funds either through debt or equity to meet the company's capital expenditure and working capital requirements of ₹3.41 billion. The company could finance a loan at an interest rate of 12 per cent or raise funds through public deposits at an interest rate of 13 per cent. The company could also use equity to raise the requisite funds through either a rights offering or a seasoned equity offering. The chief executive officer needed to present his recommendation to the board of directors the following week. Which option should the company adopt?

Datri Blood Stem Cell Donors Registry (DATRI), a not-for-profit social venture established in 2009 with 3,000 donors, was India’s largest stem cell donor registry. Since 2009, it had expanded until its donor base was over 267,000. While DATRI continued to work towards its vision to find a matching donor for every patient in need of life-saving stem cells, its dependence on voluntary donations was causing some pressing issues. Donors who voluntarily enrolled in the registry were backing out of the process when contacted for a transplant, and the organization was also facing fundraising difficulties. DATRI's co-founder and chief executive officer felt that not addressing these issues soon would undermine the organization’s purpose. In May 2017, he was preparing for a meeting with his team to finalize a future plan of action that would solve these problems.

Shanghai Contron Information Technology Co., Ltd. was a small technology company in Shanghai, China, established in 2011. The company's main customer was the government, and sales management was the company's primary department. In a rapidly expanding market, the company moved very quickly from the start-up phase to the growth phase. In 2016, the company’s chief executive officer faced challenges in terms of obtaining, stimulating, and managing sales talent, and improving the leading role of the sales department. What could the chief executive officer do to address these challenges?

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Freshii Inc., a leading Canadian-based, international franchised restaurant chain, had developed a distinctive corporate culture at the restaurant’s head office. In July 2017, Freshii was expanding its healthy food, fast casual restaurants at the rate of about one store per week, and the CEO wanted to ensure a common culture in the chain’s ecosystem. The task fell to the chief people officer to develop a plan that would take into consideration three developments that were relevant: the chain was on the verge of exponential growth; it was transforming from a restaurant brand to a health and wellness brand; and it was entering new lines of business by partnering with retail chains and airline companies. Given the diverse cultures at the store level, how could Freshii ensure a consistent corporate culture across the Freshii ecosystem? And how could Freshii convert its corporate culture to become both a sustainable and scalable competitive advantage?

In November 2016, the two co-founders of the Delhi-based Greenco Enterprises India Pvt. Ltd. were getting ready to launch a range of frozen snacks in the competitive Indian market. Their strategy was to penetrate the already established non-vegetarian frozen snacks market with fast-moving popular products and grow the vegetarian frozen snacks market with differentiated offerings. As the January 2017 launch date approached, they had to get their pricing and distribution strategy in place. For a new brand with a limited budget, securing shelf space was a challenge. The two founders wondered whether the company should focus all of its efforts on building a retail brand in the business-to-consumer segment, or whether it should consider institutional sales in the business-to-business space. How could the initial investment and running costs be balanced with the need to stay competitive in the market?

Two friends started the company Whizz in 2013 with a fleet of seven cars and a team of 12 people in Delhi. Within three years, Whizz had increased its fleet to 2,200 cars, capturing approximately 60–70 per cent of the Indian car rental market. The company had ambitious plans to expand to other cities with the rapid growth in the industry and increasing disposable incomes among millennials—the typical Whizz customer group. When one partner quit for personal reasons, the other was left to manage the company’s marketing and business development divisions, and to secure new funding. Although Whizz was the first mover in the Indian market, it had not seen a profit since its inception, and now, in 2016, pressure was increasing, with Whizz's organized competitors having similar ambitious expansion plans. The remaining partner had to decide how to address these challenges and manage the risks of his business model, while maintaining operations and making a profit.

Globalization increasingly brings businesses and legal providers together. With the help of lawyers, savvy businesspeople can complete complicated international transactions or create multinational networks of related corporations. This isolates risk, facilitates local business transactions, and carefully tailors localized ownership structures. However, these globalization activities can also facilitate activities such as international jurisdiction shopping, tax evasion, money laundering, and even terrorist financing. The resultant challenges undermine the ability of all parties to both compete and pursue ethical behavior across national markets. This article develops a framework for analyzing international business and legal ethics. Specifically, we focus on four key topics: (1) how globalization impacts both business and legal ethics; (2) the special role played by national interests in shaping the applicable ethics and legal standards; (3) a framework to explain how the configuration of international business networks and related legal services can have dramatic ethical implications; and (4) applicable issues identified in the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers.

The Economist recently declared that digital information has overtaken oil as the world's most valuable commodity. Big data technology is inherently global and borderless, yet little international consensus exists over what standards should govern its use. One source of global standards benefitting from considerable international consensus might be used to fill the gap: international human rights law. This article considers the extent to which international human rights law operates as a legal or ethical constraint on global commercial use of big data technologies. By providing clear baseline standards that apply worldwide, human rights can help shape cultural norms-implemented as ethical practices and global policies and procedures-about what businesses should do with their information technologies. In this way, human rights could play a broad and important role in shaping business thinking about the proper handling of this increasingly valuable commodity in the modern global society.

Ethical entrepreneurship has become a global concern. Its promotion presents meaningful implications for entrepreneurs in both developed and underdeveloped countries. This article explores the supportive approach to ethical entrepreneurship in the Third World with a case study of one of the older NGOs in Zimbabwe that implements support programs for enhancing ethics-driven entrepreneurship. We give attention to the influence of context in the understanding of ethical entrepreneurship and provide guidance in its interpretation via the notion of embeddedness, which helps to clarify how the meaning and the measures to promote ethical entrepreneurship are shaped by the culture and values people share in contexts characterized by extreme poverty. Based on narrative interviews, informal conversations, direct observation, and secondary sources, findings show that the general success of support programs depends on the integration of the measures into local people's expectations of what ethical means in the context of entrepreneurship.