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In many firms, strategic initiatives lead to frustration rather than performance improvements and strategic renewal. One frequently overlooked key to driving value through strategic initiatives lies in shifting the focus from launching disconnected individual strategic initiatives to managing an integrated portfolio of initiatives. This article identifies five key management practices that allow firms to address obstacles to effective initiative management and to enhance value creation through the deliberate management of initiative portfolios.

In July 2017, the government of India implemented goods and services tax (GST), which brought uniformity in the tax rates on all types of biscuits. Compared to the pre-GST regime, the uniform tax rate resulted in a higher tax rate on mass-market biscuits and a lower tax rate on premium biscuits. Parle-G, the most popular brand of Parle Products Private Limited (Parle), fell into the mass-market biscuit category. The Parle-G brand had 75 to 80 per cent market share in the mass-market biscuit category, and it contributed nearly 33 per cent of Parle's total revenue. The brand was sold at a very low price point and was highly price sensitive. To mitigate the tax rate increase, one option was to raise Parle-G prices; however, any price increase or change in package size for a product in the highly price-sensitive category could reduce company revenue. Therefore, new business strategies were needed under the new tax regime and amid the country's overall changing business and economic scenario so that Parle's margins and leading position were retained.

In March 2016, the chief executive officer (CEO) of ICICI Bank Ltd. (ICICI), one of the largest private sector banks in India, was accused of non-disclosure and exploitation of conflict of interest by an investor. The CEO, who had successfully led the bank since 2009, had been featured in two Forbes lists of the most powerful women in 2017. Initially, the ICICI board of directors supported the CEO for two years, until March 2018, when Indian regulatory agencies including the Central Bureau of Investigation opened investigations. In January 2019, following the findings of an internal investigation report by ICICI, the newly appointed chairman of the ICICI board terminated the CEO over non-disclosure of conflict of interest. The board chairman also demanded the return of all bonuses and stock options received by the CEO since her appointment in 2009. Was the ICICI board chairman right to take strict action against the CEO for non-disclosure of conflict of interest? What could he do to improve governance practices at ICICI?

Yuser Inc. (Yuser) was a new social networking start-up based in London, Ontario. Well-established social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube had begun to restrict social media influencers' monetization of their user base, and this had opened an opportunity for a new social media network to make three-way interactions among users, social media influencers (SMIs), and corporate sponsors completely stable and transparent. Yuser granted SMIs freedom in terms of the content they posted, allowing companies to identify influencers who helped their marketing efforts and to financially reward them using Yuser's cryptocurrency. Rather than facilitating two-way relationships, as most platforms did, Yuser would help build triangular relationships among companies, target markets, and SMIs. However, Yuser's business concept was complex, making it difficult for the company's chief operations officer to pitch Yuser's value proposition to external investors. In June 2018, she needed to find a delicate balance that would allow her to inform investors of the venture's potential without overwhelming them in a sea of confusing details.

This case presents the situation facing Tony Fernandes, the former Vice President of Warner Brothers, ASEAN region, in 2001, who had to decide whether to venture into the aviation business by acquiring an existing airline or drop the idea altogether. Fernandes was interested in starting a budget airline in Malaysia similar to low-cost airlines in the USA and Europe. He and his two close associates presented a proposal to Mahathir bin Mohammad, Malaysia's Prime Minister (PM), to start a low-cost airline. Mohammad rejected the proposal and suggested Fernandes to consider buying an existing airline. Conceptually it helps the participant to build the concept of entry through acquisition mode as opposed to entry through own creation. In the larger context, it involves the participants in evaluating a strategic opportunity for a new entrant.

Zimmerli of Switzerland is a small Swiss brand that offers the highest quality underwear for men and women in the luxury segment. It has a loyal customer base including celebrities from all over the world. The case describes the dilemmas Zimmerli's CEO Marcel Hossli faced in January 2018, when deciding on Zimmerli's future strategy and how the company should continue to innovate to sustain brand desirability in a disrupted environment. In 2012, Zimmerli had decided to rely less on B2B distribution through wholesalers and to follow a multichannel strategy with direct sales channels (B2C). Since then, it has opened 15 mono-brand boutiques in Europe and Asia, as well as an e-commerce platform. As a result, Zimmerli grew 8% between 2011 and 2017. However, physical stores were expensive and impacted Zimmerli's net margin (0%-5%). Zimmerli faced the challenge of rejuvenating its customer base, without losing its traditional, older customers. In the past, Zimmerli had not invested much in advertising. Although it had a presence in various social media channels, it had few followers and not much user-generated content. Could Zimmerli attract new customers and gather data about their preferences on underwear through digital channels? So far, it had focused on product innovation by offering the highest quality products "Made in Switzerland." This USP came at a high cost and restricted further growth, due to production capacity constraints and a decline in suitable suppliers. Another challenge was Zimmerli's strategy of making investments out of cash flow only. The case stimulates discussion on how luxury brands can innovate along the customer journey using digital technologies. Zimmerli's strengths, its gaps, and its strategic options going forward can be explored using frameworks such as STEEP, Unique Competing Space (UCS) and the New Customer Journey.

In January 2018, the three founders of Lighting Enhancement Corporation (Lightenco), a Canadian turnkey lighting solutions enterprise, were at a crossroads. After building a successful business enterprise over seven years by relying entirely on internal financial sources, the founders of Lightenco now faced a difficult decision. Energy subsidies from the provincial governments of Quebec and Ontario had underpinned part of Lightenco's value proposition to customers, but these subsidy schemes were facing imminent termination in both provinces. Moreover, the financing option that Lightenco's three founders had deployed-relying on internally generated funds and not taking external capital-no longer seemed tenable, and moving to the next level of growth seemed to necessitate new and innovative financing options. Should the founders persist with the bootstrapping that had now become part of their entrepreneurial mindset? Or should they scale the business by either giving up equity or subsuming their operations in a merger with a larger firm? The founders were at a tipping point and had to decide which option to take.

DuckDuckGo, a late entrant in the search engine industry, was founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg with the main purpose of protecting users' online privacy and raising the standard of trust online. DuckDuckGo earned a reputation for being "the search engine that doesn't track you," and despite initial hurdles, by 2017, it had emerged as one of the top 10 search engines in the world. DuckDuckGo had managed to successfully leverage increasing privacy concerns amid accusations of tracking made against other search engines. Weinberg was now contemplating how to compete against organizations with massive resources and reach the maximum number of people who were concerned about privacy yet unaware of the existence of his search engine.

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company's value proposition was quite simple: partner with employers to offer employees affordable loans that were repaid through automatic payroll deductions. Taking repayments directly from salary, and collecting those repayments in one transaction from the employer, dramatically reduced costs, saving employees large amounts of interest when compared to market alternatives like credit cards or payday lenders. For improving access to affordable credit, Salary Finance garnered considerable praise in the media, being named one of the UK's most socially responsible and innovative FinTech companies. Since the beginning of 2018, Salary Finance had introduced a savings product and an earned income advance product that were linked to employee salary. In September 2018, they expanded to the United States, in partnership with the United Way, opening an office in Boston, Massachusetts. Sarkar was excited by the progress but was still pondering how best to accelerate further growth and improve the business. First there was the question of geographic expansion. Did it make sense to pursue other markets like India? Or, should he focus on building Salary Finance's position in the UK and US? In these markets, should he prioritize attracting new employers to the platform or adding new products such as mortgages or investments? Should he register as a bank, tapping into low cost deposits and reducing the dependence on commercial borrowing to fund loans? Finally, he was concerned about how to best maintain Salary Finance's culture - "For People Not Numbers" - during rapid growth. These questions and more weighed heavily on Sarkar's mind as he considered the company's future.

Managers struggle to understand what digital transformation actually means for them in terms of which opportunities to pursue and which initiatives to prioritize. It's not surprising that many of them expect it to involve a radical disruption of the business, huge new investments in technology, a complete switch from physical to virtual channels, and the acquisition of tech start-ups. To be sure, in some cases such a paradigm shift is involved. But the authors' research and work suggest that wholesale disruption is often quite unnecessary. Some companies have successfully responded to the digital challenge by making major changes to their manufacturing processes, distribution channels, or business models, but many others have fared equally well using a more incremental approach that leaves the core value proposition and supply chain essentially unchanged.

Baldor Specialty Foods, a family owned, New York City-based food intermediary, served business customers in the country's north east corridor. A key activity that Baldor performed, called the "Fresh Cuts" program, was sourcing and preparing various vegetables for use by its customers. An outgrowth of Fresh Cuts was the approximately 150,000 pounds per week of produce scraps generated that was unfit for sale. Thomas McQuillan, Baldor's Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Culture, and Sustainability was charged with the disposal of these scraps in an environmentally friendly way that would also help the company's bottom line. After McQuillan designated Baldor's food scraps as "SparCs," ("scraps" spelled backwards) he and the company had early success in selling "SparCs" primarily for animal consumption and partly for human use. However, in 2018, waste disposal continued to be a significant cost for the company. At an upcoming offsite company retreat, McQuillan had to present a plan to address Baldor's food waste disposal that would help the company both financially and, in its sustainability standing.

This case presents an overview of China's FMCG industry in the early 2010s from the perspective of WinChannel, an information service provider to major FMCG companies in China. It describes the three major distribution channels (i.e., Routes-to-Market) and focuses on the challenges facing the traditional trade channel through which FMCG companies provide their products to millions of "mom-and-pop" stores (i.e., small, independently owned and operated convenience stores), especially in rural parts of China. In early 2015, Zhen (Andrew) Cui, Founder and CEO of WinChannel, is exploring how he can help improve the reach and efficiency of the traditional trade channel and wonders if the emerging online/mobile B2B FMCG platforms offer the best solution for the increasingly digitized FMCG retail industry in China.

This case aims to help students understand how digitization is enabling and shaping the transformation of the traditional FMCG industry in China. It introduces Andrew Cui's response to the challenges posed in Case (A)-i.e., how WinChannel could improve the reach and efficiency of the traditional trade channel when online/mobile B2B FMCG platforms were emerging in the market. In May 2015, Cui launched Huixiadan, a mobile-based B2B FMCG ordering platform, connecting a select group of leading FMCG companies and their numerous distributors and wholesalers with potentially millions of mom-and-pop stores in China. Huixiadan has used mobile technologies to develop an inclusive and collaborative business model linking most players in the existing traditional trade channel. However, it faces fierce competition from many online competitors seeking to disrupt the FMCG industry, including Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com. Cui is wondering how competitive and sustainable Huixiadan's business model is and what he should do to withstand the competitive threats even as he tries to exploit opportunities in the traditional FMCG industry in China.

Since China's reform and opening up, in merely four decades, the GDP of the city of Shenzhen has grown more than 10,000-fold. The city's development in the past 40 years has been underpinned by industry transformation and innovation, and the Huaqiangbei area in the city epitomizes this development process. Forty years ago, Huaqiangbei was a completely inconspicuous street in Shenzhen, but riding the wave of China's reform and opening up, Huaqiangbei has emerged and gradually grown to be widely known around the world as "China's No. 1 Electronics Street." How should we assess Huaqiangbei's journey of exploration and development? How many rounds of industrial upgrading and market transformation has Huaqiangbei experienced in the course of its development? Also, as the saying goes, nothing lasts forever. After its explosive growth propelled by the knockoff cellphone business, Huaqiangbei soon found itself cornered by the rapid development of e-commerce and mobile Internet technologies. How should it stand up to new challenges and identify new growth opportunities?

On April 2, 2017, the chairman of Kamat Hotels (India) Limited (KHIL) and his son, the company's chief executive officer, were having breakfast and recalling tough times endured in 2014 after a failed corporate debt restructuring. It had been one of the most important decisions ever made by the public sector undertaking bank-leaving their previous joint lenders and deciding to assign the loan to an asset reconstruction company. The incident had proven to be a turning point for the company. The failure of the corporate debt restructuring mechanism had become an unexpected advantage, and the company never looked back. The two leaders were now focused on their commitment to grow the company in a sustained manner, staying true to the local environmental challenges. With the goal of aggressive growth in several Indian states, the chief executive officer was looking for more hotels to own, manage, or lease in the mid to high segments of the market as an expansion plan. His vision was to someday retire as the owner of one of India's largest hotel assets and to take his family name forward to the next benchmark of Indian hospitality. Was this the best path forward for KHIL?

Garmin 2019 is the second in a two-part case. Case A reviews the history of Garmin from 1991 to 2008, when the personal navigation device (PND) industry is disrupted by the entry of smartphones with mapping applications. Garmin 2019 covers the decade until 2019, describing how Garmin and other major players responded to shifting consumer preferences, new developments in digital mapping and satellite networks, and the race to develop self-driving cars. In the face of a massive decline in the PND market in this period, Garmin staged a remarkable recovery, shifting focus to spread over diverse products segments, each with its own threats and opportunities. The core of the case is management's reassessment of corporate strategy across the portfolio of businesses.

Ofo (stylized "ofo"), a Beijing-based bicycle-sharing company, had grown bicycle sharing from nothing into a dockless mobile application (app) service industry with over 120 million monthly active users sharing 30 million bicycles in cities across China and around the world. Founded by five bicycle enthusiasts in 2014, its dockless system used a smartphone application to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging an hourly rate for use. Although only two years old in 2017-and yet to turn a profit-the company was valued at over USD 1 billion in a recent E round of private-equity financing. ofo's new funds would be used to buy bicycles for international expansion and hire more talent, but in a rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, the company needed to assess its current and future position.

Sandu Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (Sandu Pharmaceuticals) was a publicly listed company operating in the pharmaceuticals and health care sector. It manufactured Ayurvedic medicines. Incorporated in 1985, the company traced its history back over more than a century. The third generation was at the helm of the firm in September 2016. The company's director, was thinking about how previous successive generations in the family had handled the challenge of absorbing family members into the business, and in particular about whether he was doing enough to prepare the next generation to take over a business that was bound to grow more rapidly in the future, given the growing concern worldwide about the cost of allopathic health care and demand for less invasive and more holistic treatments.

In June 2017, executives from Amalsad Vibhag Vividh Karyakari Sahakari Khedut Mandali Ltd. (Amalsad Cooperative) met to consider possible changes to the cooperative's interventions in commodity marketing, particularly, whether further interventions would benefit member farmers. Linking a unique reward and penalty scheme to the grade supplied by the farmers and directly supplying produce to the terminal market in Delhi had resulted in a 15 per cent increase in the farmers' income. Streamlining the entire process-from receiving the commodity, grading and sorting the supply, to paying the farmers-had considerably reduced delays. The chairperson of the Amalsad Cooperative, which covered farmers from 17 villages near the town of Amalsad, in India, was pleased that reengineering the commodity marketing process had not only fetched a better price but had also eliminated the inefficiencies associated with marketing through the traditional channel-the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee trading yards, or mandies. However, he wondered whether further refining the grades would enhance the income of the members and asked his executives what other processes could be modified to benefit the members, especially in rendering services.

In 2014, the vice-president of Group Corporate Social Responsibility at Singtel, a Singapore-based provider of telecommunications products and services, was scrutinizing his proposal for the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) transformation. He wanted to reposition Singtel's CSR approach to create greater social impact while demonstrating greater benefit to the company beyond promoting its branding and reputation. In doing so, he was mindful that the proposal would require greater financial investment on the part of the company. The proposal would also need to leverage the company's capabilities and partnerships and address the possibility of dropping its current beneficiaries. His team needed to convince the board of directors and senior management that the potential benefits of the proposed changes would be worth the financial investment and the possibility of reduced brand exposure.