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Student spreadsheet for case W19154

Industria de Diseño Textil, SA (Inditex), primarily through its flagship brand Zara, had grown to be the world's number-one fashion manufacturer and retailer with the introduction of what many considered a disruptive fast-fashion business model. However, Inditex's chief executive officer insisted that this term failed to describe the company's business model accurately. Like other successful business model innovators, Inditex in 2019 was faced both with new competitors who had successfully copied and enhanced key components of its approach and with the growing desire of fashion conscious consumers to shop online. Inditex needed to find a way to continue to differentiate Zara in this evolving industry while capturing more than its share of the tremendous market growth anticipated for the future.

Atikameksheng Anishnawbek was a First Nations community near Sudbury, Ontario. The reserve, described in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, encompassed much of the Sudbury mining camp, which produced an estimated CA$1 trillion of mineral resources. At issue was the boundary of the reserve, which was much smaller than agreed upon, and whether Atikameksheng could claim a share of the value. The reserve had not been surveyed until 34 years after the treaty was signed, which resulted in discrepancies, the most significant being that the surveyed reserve boundaries were much smaller than agreed upon and described in the treaty, thus excluding a great deal of the mineralized land. Atikameksheng did not have any agreements in place, nor was the community receiving compensation from the two largest companies mining the land, despite the high value of extracted minerals. In 2018, in the context of the ongoing boundary and compensation disputes, the chief had to decide how best to focus his energies to facilitate community economic development.

In October 2016, Wilf Blackburn, the CEO of Prudential Assurance Company Singapore (PACS) started an organisational transformation journey to reposition PACS as the number one insurance company in Singapore. Earlier that year, PACS' market share had fallen from 22 per cent in the previous year to 17 percent, pushing the company to the number two position. But plummeting market share was not the only reason for concern. There was brimming dissatisfaction amongst employees within the organisation over long work hours, a hierarchical work culture and dwindling bonuses. PACS was a subsidiary of Prudential plc (Prudential), and had a long successful history in Singapore. It had been the performance powerhouse of the Prudential Corporation Asia (PCA), but in 2015, the company lost two key bancassurance partnerships. As a result, PACS annual new business premiums dropped by US$ 82.7 million, and its market share slipped by almost five percentage points. The following year, PACS lost a long-standing high performing agency to its competitor. Once, considered the fortress of Prudential's business in Asia, PACS had many challenges to overcome. The company hardly relied on its regional office (PCA) due to its previous stellar performance, and, there was undoubtedly little trust between the regional office and Singapore office. Internally, there was discord between departments, and each unit preferred to work in silo. Hierarchy was pervasive and performance was sales driven; targets set were not aligned to expectations. Moreover, PACS had seen five CEO appointments over a span of 10 years. Each CEO had his own unique, quite contrasting style of leadership, and this quick succession of changes yielded different business strategies, with many not seen through their full completion. As the incoming CEO of a troubled first world business, what approach could Blackburn take to turn around the organisation?

Aparigraha Yoga was founded in 2012 as a sustainable entrepreneurship venture in Ontario that sought to balance the environmental, social, and financial components of the triple bottom line (3BL) while providing high-quality yoga classes in its community. The founder intended to utilize synergistic solutions, which fully integrated each 3BL component, to address any business problem. In 2018, she identified two issues at her studio that challenged her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and the reality of always finding synergistic solutions. The founder needed to either develop new synergistic approaches to these issues or modify her belief in sustainable entrepreneurship and select which components to favour in which situations.

The chief executive officer and founder of Global Metal Company (GMC), had been in the business of antique reproduction hardware for more than three years, having quit his successful corporate career to start GMC in his hometown of Aligarh in northern India. After seeing the initial response to the business, he was confident that within three years, GMC would realize the annual revenue of US$1 million he had envisioned. In 2018-2019, upon completing three years in business, GMC closed the year with $0.15 million in annual revenues. The CEO wondered what had gone wrong in those years. Had his target of $1 million been over-ambitious? Or had his assessment of the overall market potential been off the mark? During those three years, he had expanded his operations in baby steps from Europe-which was overly price competitive and served by a large number of exporters from Aligarh-to the United States. Now he was wondering whether he should plunge deeply into the US market to grow GMC, or seriously consider quitting this business and moving back into his corporate career.

The case explores the journey taken by GE, at the instigation of Jeff Immelt in 2008, towards transforming itself from a global industrial giant to becoming an Industry 4.0 leader, by harnessing the nascent promise of the Industrial Internet of Things. The case illustrates the different initiatives launched including: 1. Fastworks - lean methodology including design thinking and agile-lite approach to creating new products. 2. Business analytics and sensors for products. 3. Creation of GE Digital in San Ramon, combining analytics with a platform - Predix - and working under full agile methodology. 4. 2015 - introduction of Chief Digital Officers in each industrial vertical reporting to Bill Ruh at GE Digital. 5. Digital Foundries - to help GE customers with their digital transformations. Immelt had invested more than $4 billion into GE's digital transformation. The case uses examples to illustrate the transformation and the challenges GE faced. Challenges included: the initial decision to create a separate division rather than embedding digital into the verticals upfront, culture change, different skill sets and time horizons, different recruitment and remuneration practices, and communication strategies. During the transformation, Immelt retired early due to falling stock value and what the market judged as previous bad decisions. He was replaced by John Flannery, a GE veteran, charged with overhauling GE by focusing on financials and spinning off parts of GE. Flannery announced he was supportive of GE Digital and the changes, but it was clear that the focus was on the industrial verticals. The markets were unhappy with the speed of progress under Flannery and a year later, he was also replaced. This time by Larry Culp, a GE-outsider. The case ends in 2019 with Culp's announcement that GE Digital, the digital 'home' of GE was to become a separate enterprise, although wholly-owned by GE.

Western Governors University (WGU) was a nonprofit institution of higher education whose online learning model served more than 100,000 students in 2019 and was scaling rapidly. President Scott Pulsipher wanted to expand WGU's reach to millions more with a plan called 10x Vision. 10x Vision called for scaling enrollment, creating new ventures to expand access to higher education that complement WGU's business model, and funding these ventures. Pulsipher believed WGU had a potential target market of 40 million people in the United States, as an increasing number of jobs required post-secondary education. How could WGU help these individuals participate in the higher education system and achieve upward mobility?

The case charts the evolution of NVIDIA, the market leading producer of graphics processing units (GPU), from its beginnings to becoming a leader at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) development. Founded in 1993, the company designed processors for gaming, professional visualization, data centers and automotive markets. In 2019, NVIDIA's vision was to be at the forefront of the virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence and deep learning arenas. Though the company had an impressive growth rate, there were increasing competitive threats against NVIDIA's dominance in deep learning. The case ends by asking whether NVIDIA can retain its leading position and what it has to do to sustain it.

In 2012, Mountain Equipment Co-op, a members-only Canadian consumers' co-operative that sold outdoor recreational gear and clothing, underwent a major revamp of its strategic focus, which involved a change of its logo. The shift was away from the co-operative's core, outdoors-focused customer base to a wider target group that included urban and rural customers who were new to outdoor sports. The change was significant and the co-operative realized that many of its core customers-all of whom were shareholders-were upset by the shift in strategy and logo change. Mountain Equipment Co-op needed a communications plan to ease the transition.

Norlha Textiles was a yak wool enterprise located on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Founded in 2007, the company designed and produced yak wool textiles made by Tibetan nomads and sold globally to customers that included such luxury brands as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Yves Saint Laurent. In 2015, the company employed 120 local people, enabling them to adapt to the modern world while preserving their local traditions. Also in 2015, the local government invited the company to expand its model to another nomadic community on the Tibetan Plateau. Although this seemed to be a good opportunity to grow the company's influence, the chief executive officer hesitated, reflecting on the pros and cons. Was such a partnership the right opportunity to grow the company?

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In 2018, the city of Montreal debated a ban on the commercial use of wood-burning ovens used by the city's famous and iconic bagel shops. This consideration came after a domestic ban on wood-burning ovens went into effect, and amid concerns about public health and a citywide effort to substantially reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2020. City officials knew that commercial regulation of wood-fire bagel shop ovens could be perceived as a disruption of an important local tradition. But they also knew that failing to reduce environmental and health risks from wood burning would be seen as irresponsible. This case presents the dynamics of a situation in which environmental policy and regulation goes head-to-head with a city's culturally-important food.

Coesia was a privately owned group of industrial companies based in Bologna, Italy. The group went through a two-phase transformation journey when Isabella Seràgnoli became the full owner of the group. One of her first decisions was to name it Coesia, to symbolize cohesion and shared values among the group companies. Her vision was to build a professionally managed, value-driven, sufficiently diversified global group that would be sustainable in the long term. In 2010, Seràgnoli hired a non-Italian newcomer to the industry, Angelos Papadimitriou, as CEO. Six weeks into his tenure, Papadimitriou presented to the board an aggressive ambition of doubling the business by 2015. Achieving this ambition would require a second phase of transformation in terms of strategy, business model and organization. At that time, only one group company, G.D, was truly global. G.D. accounted for 62% of the group's revenues and 99% of its profits. However, it faced some market challenges and potential risks to its future profitability. Papadimitriou and his leadership team would have to develop an overall strategy to build a more balanced, diversified and global group while strengthening G.D. Coesia operated as a loose federation of independent companies each with its own structure, functions and processes. Aside from reshaping the strategy, the group would have to design a business model and an organizational structure to support its ambition of becoming a larger, more global group.

This case features CRM technology firm Salesforce, and its CEO, Marc Benioff. In 2015, the state of Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was signed into law by then governor Mike Pence. The RFRA was criticized as legalizing blatant discrimination of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning (LGBTQ) community. Because Salesforce had recently expanded to Indianapolis and anticipated future growth there, Benioff decided to ban company travel to the state and threatened to reduce the company's presence in Indiana if RFRA was not repealed. Salesforce was joined by many other large corporations in vocalizing disagreement with RFRA and threatening to reduce or eliminate investment in Indiana. The case explores Benioff's decision to take a public and aggressive stand against the new Indiana law. Some disagreed with Benioff's extreme action that put the company at risk. Others applauded him for taking a stand.

In 2017, the new chairman of A. P. Møller-Maersk confronted one of the worst cyberattacks in history, which crippled the company's vast global shipping network that accounted for nearly 20 per cent of global container shipping. NotPetya was a particularly virulent strain of ransomware that, within seconds, destroyed Maersks's servers and personal computers around the world. Maersk's senior system administrators had warned the company that its network was vulnerable, but the necessary upgrades were never completed. How can the company recover from this devastating event? And how can it protect itself from cyberattacks in the future?

During the period 2011-2016, CEO and Chairman of Greek telecommunications company OTE Michael Tsamaz guided the company through a much needed transformation with a multi-pronged strategy.

In 2019 Walmart was still the world's largest company, with over $500 billion in annual revenue and operations around the world. Although it had mostly vanquished its rival discount retailers in the U.S., it was struggling to find the right growth strategy. Facing a mature U.S. market, it had looked to ecommerce and international sales as an engine of growth. Walmart leadership also faced intense competition from dominant online retailer Amazon. In such a competitive environment, how should Walmart respond to the reality that its traditional strengths no longer guaranteed robust growth?