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On December 1, 2014, Medtronic announced that it had completed a $17 billion bond sale to finance the Covidien acquisition, officially completed on January 26, 2015. Medtronic's legal headquarters moved to Ireland, while its operational headquarters remained in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In this case study, Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak reflects back on the integration progress since the deal's completion and offers his perspective as a global leader.

In June 2016, Illinois Tool Works (ITW), a fortune 500 manufacturing company in the United States, was at a critical juncture in its evolution. The company had identified a number of lofty goals in its 2015 annual report to be achieved by the end of 2017. These expectations included reaching over 200 basis points in organic growth above the market, a 23 per cent operating margin, a 20 per cent after-tax return on invested capital, 100 per cent free cash flow as a percentage of net income, and 12 to 14 per cent shareholder returns. Riding on the success of 2015, these targets had seemed achievable based on ITW's performance and operational excellence. However, the U.S. and world economies faced a variety of challenges related to political uncertainty in the United States due to a presidential election and also in Europe because of the United Kingdom's recent decision to exit the European Union. Additional challenges such as continued weaknesses in emerging markets and volatile currencies also affected ITW's outlook. ITW's acquisition strategy had yielded excellent results over the past few years by effectively using diversification and decentralization strategies in its growth, but there was considerable uncertainty about achieving future goals. ITW had to make important choices about resource allocation across product groups based on their past performance and future prospects. The CEO also had to make appropriate decisions for continued superior performance.

This note gives students a systematic and comprehensive framework for analyzing and influencing market attractiveness. It pays explicit attention to value creation, complements, and the dynamics of market attractiveness. It also includes careful sub-frameworks for analyzing each driver, such as bargaining power or competitive intensity.

One of the most profitable products for Tanner Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Tanner), a major U.S. pharmaceutical company, was a vaccine with the brand name Zorstat. Tanner was facing increased public scrutiny over the price of Zorstat. The company was being accused of "being greedy and raising prices in ways that victimized vulnerable people." In two days Jack Stevens, the lead independent board member for Tanner, would attend the annual meeting of independent directors. The Zorstat pricing controversy was on the agenda. Stevens would have to take and defend a position on Tanner's drug pricing strategy. Inevitably, there would be a heated discussion on Zorstat and whether management was effectively driving shareholder value with drug pricing decisions.

In 2016, a personal threat was made against the managing director of Multistrada Agro International, an Indonesian industrial forestry firm. The permits for the firm's new rubber plantation overlapped with an existing palm oil plantation and the activities of local villagers, and also drew concern from outsiders who claimed to have rights over the land or wished to protect the environment. In sum, the venture altered the delicate balance of conflicting local interests. The managing director knew that unless she managed to work with local stakeholders, she would never be able to successfully operate large-scale rubber plantations. How should she handle this latest threat? What tactics could she use to deal with a variety of stakeholders with divergent interests?

On July 2, 2016, Danaher Corporation completed the spinoff of Fortive Corporation. The previous day, Danaher's stock price had reached an all-time high. In 2015, Danaher had decided to split off its test and measurement, fuel and fleet management, and automation businesses, leaving the "new Danaher" focused on life sciences, diagnostics, dental, water quality, and product-identification businesses. It was hardly the first industrial conglomerate to spin off major divisions; Tyco International PLC, ITT Corporation, Illinois Tool Works, Johnson Controls, and Ingersoll-Rand PLC had made similar moves in recent memory. However, its peers had often experienced declining profitability or pressure from activist investors. Danaher, by contrast, had performed strongly in the years leading up to the spinoff. It had spent the previous decade strengthening its portfolio in sectors such as life sciences and dental products with acquisitions including Beckman Coulter in 2011, Nobel Biocare Holding AG in 2014, and Pall Corporation in 2015.

In September 2016, Johnson Controls, Inc., completed the acquisition of Tyco International PLC, a $9.9 billion business with operating profits of $884 million. The purchase consideration was $14.4 billion. Although the deal was billed as a merger, Ireland-based Tyco effectively acquired U.S.-based Johnson Controls in a tax inversion deal that saved $150 million a year in taxes. Operating synergies were estimated at $500 million over three years. Tyco International was all that remained of what 15 years earlier, in 2001, had been a $36.4 billion conglomerate with a market capitalization of $120 billion. It took the charismatic CEO, Dennis Kozlowski, 10 years to grow the business from $3 billion to $36 billion, increasing its value by more than 60 times along the way. But Kozlowski went to prison on fraud charges in 2005, and the portfolio was slowly unwound under his successor. Now in 2016, Tyco was to disappear.

Cembrit Holding A/S (Cembrit), the second-largest producer of fibre cement products in Europe, had experienced a period of restructuring, acquisitions, and consolidation as a result of having acquired fibre cement companies involved in production, sales, and distribution throughout Europe and closing down its own production in Denmark. After years of restructuring and struggling, growth had finally picked up, with turnover reaching an average of 11 per cent per year between 2003 and 2007. As of 2008, however, Cembrit faced numerous challenges: building and strengthening its new corporate identity; repositioning itself in the market; identifying opportunities for organic growth; transitioning to asbestos-free production; and determining its future within its parent company. How it addressed these challenges would affect Cembrit's future well beyond 2008, including whether it would be retained or divested by its parent company.

Leader Healthcare India (LHC) was a medical devices importer firm that dealt primarily in respiratory and anesthetic devices. The company imported medical devices from U.S. manufacturers and, for the most part, performed its own marketing, sales, and service activities. In 2016, the director of LHC was concerned about LHC's multiple failed efforts at market expansion. The company wanted to grow, but its attempts had been unsuccessful. Lack of highly trained personnel, supervisory control, and sufficient financial resources had been the key reasons for the failure. Market expansion was even more critical as LHC wanted to launch a 24/7 service in the respiratory devices business, and success with this service depended on the size of LHC's existing customer base. How could LHC grow?

Co-founders Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler have grown SoulCycle from a business idea in 2006 to a major presence among urban boutique fitness studios in 2015. In March 2015, fitness company Equinox approaches them with an offer to buy them out. Evaluating the offer requires an assessment of market or industry attractiveness and of SoulCycle's (potential) competitive advantage.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, is deciding how to structure the firm presence in Cloud computing. He can pursue the opportunity in multiple ways: doubling down the investments in an internal and nascent cloud offering, partnering with established third parties, or through an acquisition. At the same time, he also needs to continue ensuring the success of VMware virtualization business, and a recent acquisition in mobile. How will the different decisions affect his use of time?

When Joe Jimenez became CEO of Swiss-based Novartis in 2010 replacing longtime CEO Dan Vasella, he assumed control of one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. Vasella, an avowed advocate of diversification, had expanded the scope of the company and structured it into sixteen distinct business units ranging from animal health to oncology while "actively fostering competition between those divisions for resources." Shortly after assuming his position, Jimenez initiated a strategic review that sought to concentrate the portfolio on businesses where Novartis could be at global scale in attractive markets. Rather than following competitors, like Pfizer, in a single mega-acquisition, Jimenez and his M&A team decided to achieve this goal through targeted transactions, or "precision M&A". By 2014 after examining twenty or so possible deals, the company was in the process of negotiating a multi-billion dollar asset swap with Glaxo-Smith Kline (GSK) that was unprecedented in the pharma industry. Although Novartis would improve its position in oncology by acquiring GSK's promising drug portfolio, it had to sell its vaccines and animal health businesses, while giving up control of the over-the-counter (OTC) business. Jimenez and his team knew the offer was "all-or-nothing" and struggled over whether to accept it, or reject it and move in another direction.

In 2010, only 16 percent of Americans were streaming movies and television shows online. By the end of 2011 that number would almost double, and the entertainment industry began barreling towards a digital future. This case follows Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO through the year 2011 as they launched and improved their streaming video capabilities. Though Netflix had historically been the most popular player in the streaming video market, Hulu, Amazon, and HBO had deep pockets and various incentives for entering this market and by the end of the year the competitive advantages of each player had begun to emerge.

In 1997 Reed Hastings founded Netflix on the heels of a $750 million exit of his first venture-a software company. The premise was simple: Hastings believed that he could leverage the high-performance culture and data-drivenness embodied by tech companies to succeed in the DVD-rental-by mail business. Within a decade Netflix was bringing in more than a $1 billion in revenue a year and revered as one of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley. This case covers four distinct eras of Netflix, spanning from 1997 to 2015: A.) the Pre-IPO Era, within which Netflix withstood the dot com bubble and settled on a successful DVD-rental-by-mail business model; B.) The DVD Growth era, within which they held an initial public offering and scaled their business to more than 850,000 subscribers; C.) The Introduction of Streaming era, where Netflix introduced their online video-on-demand service and eventually pivoted to offering streaming only subscriptions; and D.) the Content era, within which Netflix began producing their own exclusive television shows and movies to in response to the ever rising costs of content licensing.

With more than 25,000 stores in 75 countries and $21 billion in annual revenues, Starbucks is the largest roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in the world. Howard Schultz's strategic leadership was critical in turning Starbucks around. He is now hoping that his second retirement from the company he built from the ground up will be his final one. In the meantime, Kevin Johnson, the new CEO, faces several challenges. In particular, the question of maintaining core competencies and how to achieve future growth, both domestically and internationally, are central to the case. The case also focuses on diversification, as Starbucks is branching out in new areas such as menu extensions including offering alcohol as well as rolling out coffee bars with high-end offerings such as a $12 cup of coffee.

This case takes place as Señor Sisig has had three years of increasing success. The case highlights founder Evan Kidera, and the business as a whole, in Señor Sisig's efforts to continue the company's success and in pursuing the best growth options. Señor Sisig has received great acclaim in its early years. Founder Evan Kidera feels great pressure to capitalize on the opportunities presented to Señor Sisig as a result of the hard work in those early years, and at the same time does not want to over-stretch Señor Sisig's reach. Beyond maintaining business as usual, Kidera was considering three growth opportunities for Señor Sisig: (1) Add more food trucks, (2) expand operations to package products for sales to food retailers, and (3) open a bricks-and-mortar restaurant.

When he joined T-Mobile, in September 2012, the author writes, the most important thing he recognized wasn't specific to T-Mobile; it was true for the wireless industry in general: People hated it. He saw that the best way to succeed in this industry was to do things as differently as possible from the existing carriers. T-Mobile got rid of long-term contracts and replaced them with a transparent pricing model, made it easier to upgrade to a new smartphone, and eliminated charges for global roaming. Legere also began criticizing rivals Verizon and AT&T Wireless, which he dubbed "dumb and dumber," at press events and on Twitter. The result: T-Mobile has grown subscribers from 33 million when Legere came on board to nearly 69 million at the end of the third quarter in 2016.

In pursuit of double-digit top-line growth, many retailers relentlessly open new stores, even when doing so destroys the profitability of their businesses. This addiction is fueled by Wall Street and a capitalist culture that's obsessed with growth. It's hard to kick, primarily because companies don't know when or how to turn off the growth machine--or what to replace it with. To explore the problem, the authors studied the financial data of 37 U.S. retailers with recent sales of at least $1 billion whose growth rate had faltered. They found that the less successful retailers had continued to chase growth by opening new stores far past the point of diminishing returns. By contrast, the more successful retailers had drastically curtailed expansion and instead relied on operational improvements at their existing stores to drive additional sales. This allowed them to increase revenues faster than expenses, which had a powerful positive impact on earnings. This article lays out a framework for determining when to switch to a low-growth strategy and how to put it into practice. If retailers execute well, they can stay in the maturity stage of the life cycle for a very long time, forestalling decline.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review Article. For large global companies, forging effective partnerships with high-potential startups is easier said than done. The very traits that make such startups potentially complementary as partners also make it difficult for large companies to engage with them in the first place. Multinational corporations often struggle even to identify promising potential startup partners; startups, for their part, find it difficult to identify and reach the relevant decision makers within the often-confusing hierarchies of gigantic multinational companies. The challenge, for both sides, is all the more vexing in emerging markets. Furthermore, most academic studies of the challenges that large companies and entrepreneurial ventures face in partnering - and the solutions the studies suggest - focus on mature markets, such as the United States and Europe. Far less is known about how multinational corporations should engage with startups in emerging markets such as China and India. To understand how multinational companies have partnered successfully with startups in emerging markets, the authors undertook a study in three major emerging market economies: India, China, and South Africa. Their research uncovered four key factors, and they suggest a strategy for addressing each factor. The first key factor, the authors say, is the immaturity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Specifically, most emerging markets are afflicted by constraints and "voids" in their institutions. The authors recommend that multinational companies address this factor through programs that compensate for the immaturity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and they provide examples such as an IBM Corp. program that provides training, mentoring, and events for startups in China.