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In 2019, Bill Cummings, founder of Cummings Properties and Cummings Foundation and billionaire signer of the Giving Pledge, is winding down his roles at his company and foundation. How should the management move the company forward?

Many companies are protecting themselves against "climate risk"--the damage they might suffer from heat waves, flooding, and other effects of global climate change. But the smartest companies are also paying attention to "carbon risk"--the costs they will have to bear as governmental policies extract a growing price for CO2 emissions. These firms are setting "internal carbon prices" (ICPs), putting a monetary value on their own emissions to better prepare for success in a lower-carbon world. This article explains the process firms go through: measuring their direct and indirect emissions, ascertaining current external carbon prices (both explicit and implicit), predicting future ones, deciding what time horizons their ICPs should cover, and considering emissions-reduction goals. The authors then discuss how internal carbon pricing is helping companies make decisions about new investments, manage financial and regulatory risks, and develop long-term strategy.

As bank executives for over 30 years, Kevin Clark and Troy Wright witnessed countless opportunities to support small businesses being missed. That is what attracted them to the fintech revolution now transforming banking and financial services around the world. In this Ivey Business Journal interview, Ivey Professor Michael King sat down with Clark to discuss his transformation from old-school banker to fintech entrepreneur, not to mention his company’s evolution from industry disruptor to industry partner. Clark considers his firm, Lendified, to be a lending technology company that is taking the pain points out of borrowing for small businesses. Lendified provides a frictionless customer experience through the online application process, the speed of making decisions, and rapid access to capital. Lendified, he says, has effectively built two operating companies, but it did not start that way. Clark and Wright thought they were creating a highly effective lending business, but the credit technology turned out to be a successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) business unto itself. Furthermore, they thought their product would be sold on the basis of its efficiency, and yet what has sold the software is the customer experience.

Canada’s SNC-Lavalin affair has been compared to the U.S. Nixon Administration’s Watergate scandal, but the comparison is misguided. This article seeks to separate fact from misinformation in order to enable more constructive public discourse about the scandal. The second goal is to make the case for embracing negotiated settlements as a legitimate corruption-fighting tool based on the author’s experience as a financial-sector whistleblower during the dotcom era (which led to a long career as an investigative journalist covering white-collar crime). Finally, this article identifies key takeaways for managers and directors who are expected to drive growth and profit without breaking the law. In the SNC-Lavalin affair, an opportunity to improve how Canada fights corporate corruption appears to have been lost in the commotion. When fighting corruption, it is important to remember that organizations like SNC-Lavalin can also be victims, and that corporations do not decide to be corrupt—people do. Many corporate boards still rely heavily on senior management to report cultural issues, which is ridiculous, and not just because unethical executives rarely rat themselves out. It is time for more boards to proactively investigate the health of the corporate cultures they govern and doing this requires direct contact with lower-level employees, especially ones in specialist functions such as internal audit, compliance, and risk management.

AWARD-WINNING CASE - Continuous Improvement: the Journey to Excellence Category, 2019 European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) Case Writing Competition. In 2016, the supply chain manager at Northwestern Memorial Hospital recognized that many problems occurring throughout the hospital originated at the hospital receiving area. Some problems had reached epic proportions: overstocking at par locations, stocking at temporary locations, misplaced items, expired items, and inaccurate inventory records. Most of the problems could be traced to the receiving area’s procedures and average three-day dock-to-stock lead time. A value-stream mapping kaizen event revealed that a big contributor to the long lead time was the receiving area’s reliance on batch-oriented processing. The supply chain manager recognized the severity of the situation and urgent need to do something to improve operations in the receiving area and shorten the lead time from package arrival to final delivery. He felt that reducing the lead time from three days to one day would reduce or eliminate many of the problems, and it seemed a reachable goal. The supply chain manager intended to approach this challenge using the lean production practices he had successfully employed elsewhere.

In 2016, the supply chain manager at Northwestern Memorial Hospital recognized that many problems occurring throughout the hospital originated at the hospital receiving area. Some problems had reached epic proportions: overstocking at par locations, stocking at temporary locations, misplaced items, expired items, and inaccurate inventory records. Most of the problems could be traced to the receiving area's procedures and average three-day dock-to-stock lead time. A value-stream mapping kaizen event revealed that a big contributor to the long lead time was the receiving area's reliance on batch-oriented processing. The supply chain manager recognized the severity of the situation and urgent need to do something to improve operations in the receiving area and shorten the lead time from package arrival to final delivery. He felt that reducing the lead time from three days to one day would reduce or eliminate many of the problems, and it seemed a reachable goal. The supply chain manager intended to approach this challenge using the lean production practices he had successfully employed elsewhere.

Service systems are inherently subject to variability, whether through customers, service providers, suppliers, or unexpected events. Yet customers demand excellence and consistency regardless of this variability. In general, there are two ways to handle this variability-through people or through processes. We use the concept of robustness to describe these two approaches. This case uses an inventory mishap at a pet store to explore the need for robust people in a service system subject to variability. The case gives students the opportunity to explore the implications of lack of robustness when people face unexpected variability. A day-shift manager at a pet store, Martin Fesmire, thinks nothing of selling two rabbits to his best customer. But when the rabbits have a litter of bunnies overnight, Fesmire's professional world is thrown into turmoil that will grow to involve his boss, the corporate legal department, the CEO, the highest court in America, and an ever-increasing number of disputed rabbits. This tongue-in-cheek story allows for a discussion of the strategic tradeoffs between investing in robust people versus investing in robust processes.

The president and chief executive officer of Romet Limited, was preparing for a project team meeting that would start at 1:00 p.m. that afternoon. It was Friday April 27, 2018, and he had just finalized the architectural design and layout for the company's new plant. The lease for the current plant would expire at the end of that year, and he was reviewing the activities required to complete the facility relocation project. The plant relocation was named "Project Destiny." Recognizing that extending the completion beyond the end of the lease was impossible, he was concerned about being able to complete the project on schedule without increasing costs.

In September 2018, the executive team at Ariadne Labs (Ariadne), a Boston-based organization dedicated to improving health systems through the discovery and implementation of simple tools, faced a number of strategic decisions. Chief among them, the seven-year-old organization needed to determine how it might establish and shepherd successful partnerships with a wide range of diverse entities-ranging from major international public health organizations like the World Bank to small non-profit implementing organizations.

In 2018, Nick Molnar, the founder of the Australia-based online payment service Afterpay began its expansion to the U.S. market. The service had gained a loyal following in Australia by enabling customers to pay for online purchases through four interest-free installments. Customer advocacy and the brand's ability to improve customer acquisition for its retail partners had contributed to strong network effects, leading to rapid growth. In the United States, however, competitors were abundant, the regulatory environment was unfamiliar, brand awareness was lacking and retailers were seeking to partner with service providers capable of supporting an omnichannel experience. This new set of challenges required Afterpay to reevaluate its strategy: should the company fast-track the rollout of its offline offering in the United States or was it prudent to wait to acquire a larger customer base to justify the capital expenditure and operational changes this would require?

In May 2017, an associate professor at Balsam State University (Balsam State), was reviewing the most recent evaluations for her fourth-year elective course, Field Forensics. While she knew that the term had not gone particularly well, she was still surprised by the poor ratings her course had received. This associate professor had been teaching at Balsam State for nearly seven years, and her elective course had previously scored well during evaluations. With only a few months to make changes to the course before the fall semester, she needed to glean what insights she could from the course evaluations and determine what changes, if any, she should make to her course.

This case details The Boeing Company's raw material supply chain risks and explores appropriate strategies to mitigate them. Aluminum and titanium accounted for about 75% of the weight of a typical large commercial aircraft, so Boeing and its suppliers bought hundreds of millions of pounds of these metals every year in order to manufacture structural parts. But Boeing's forecasting methodologies for aluminum and titanium consistently underestimated true demand, which cost the company significant time and money. The case describes an ineffective scrap recovery process which failed to recover millions of dollars of precious scrap material, as well as a disproportionately low allocation of risk mitigation resources to raw material mills. Students will analyze purchasing policies pertaining to supplier evaluation and develop new strategies to minimize raw material costs.

The case is based on a dynamic real-life story. In this case we have examined how Faurecia decorative division has used digital tools and technology, both hardware and software, to first modernize its interior division in Abrera (Spain) plant in 2015 which eventually transformed the plant into a profitable unit while before it was losing 3 M€ every year from 2003.

The case describes the various industry 4.0 options which were available to Faurecia for digital transformation and finally illustrate the process of successful implementation of the digital transformation strategy in Abrera' plant by overcoming various challenges, the value proposition, the execution of the plan, and the costly pitfalls along the way.

The case covers real time experiences of the people involved in digital transformation, capture the lessons learned and explain how Faurecia was able to transform its plant into a culture of innovation for the manufacturing processes.

In June 2018, subsequent to the widespread reporting around a privacy breach, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 33-year-old founder, Chairman and CEO, was under pressure from the lawmakers to act on protecting the privacy rights of individuals. Facebook's lax policies allegedly allowed an app developer to sell Facebook users' data to Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm. Cambridge Analytica was accused of using Facebook users' data to profile and influence the voting intentions of British and American people. The disclosure of this news left Facebook tremendously vulnerable to criticism from the general public, media, and lawmakers. This resulted in an 18% drop in the company's stock prices. After two rounds of intense testimonies before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, lawmakers were still baffled by how Facebook was planning to address privacy issue given their business model that sacrificed user data for making the profit. Zuckerberg faced the difficult task of deciding how best to protect the privacy of users to prevent similar adverse events in the future, while maintaining profit. His options included (1) making some fundamental, and perhaps philosophical, changes in firm's value proposition (2) imposing stronger privacy protection measures, and (3) improving ethical decision-making in privacy protection through the governance adjustments.

This case comes in two parts, the first part is the written case and it paints a picture of a current business situation (December 2015) in the emerging industry of recycling - ripe with quality issues, some defined, many not. It challenges the student to come up with a quality-based plan of attack specifically for the purpose establishing a sustainable position in the community for the WM MRF. The detail in the case describes residential single-stream recycling supply chain from its mixed-material collection through sorted and bailed-delivery to recycling customers. The second part of the case is a data set to compliment the detail of the written case. It includes a spreadsheet of over 390 sampled receipts over a two-year period and includes over 5000 lines of detail. The student is challenged to explore this data and characterize and consider it managerially using statistically sound methods. How might insights from that analysis support the MRF's plans for improvements?

Spreadsheet supplement for case NA0579.

This is a case for teaching Project Management, Uncertainty Complexity and Risk in Projects and Technology Management. It discusses the issues related to installation, commissioning of new technology that is an alternative to blast furnace technology. The case deals with location, technology selection, a problems encountered by a major integrated steel makers in Indian Context. We discuss and unforeseen uncertainties associated with this project.

COREX, a new technology brought by Mr. Jindal, froze before going into live operations resulting in 10 month delay. This case discusses the project management monitoring methods used by them. Their use of Microsoft Project in place of Primavera is interesting. Before this, India did not have expertise in COREX. The case also discussed how to build project team when the local expertise is not available. The case also shows how much of monitoring methods discussed in books are practicable.