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A Hong Kong start-up, Senior Deli develops a wide variety of soft meal products targeted at mostly elderly patients suffering from dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing and chewing. Its patented technologies help supply softened food that retains the original taste and appearance and appeals to local palates. There is significant market potential for soft meal products amid the aging populations in Hong Kong, mainland China, and other developed countries. Yet the team has found that some patients and care homes have hesitated to adopt the products. In general, soft meal products are still new to many people and suppliers in Hong Kong. The stakeholders seem to hold up in adoption of the products. This market chasm is too costly for Senior Deli or any single start-up to overcome. Therefore, Senior Deli’s major issues are educating target customers, legitimizing soft meals, and promoting its products amid such uncertainty. At the end of 2022, a localized guideline for care foods was announced in Hong Kong, but will it create an opportunity for Senior Deli to overcome the issues it has been facing?

Tire-building machinery producer Safe-Run Group (Safe-Run) was a second-tier supplier in the automotive industry. Responding to “green supply chain” initiatives in the industry, including by Safe-Run’s major clients, the company started working on a new environmentally friendly meridian machine. The results of a pilot test led by Zhijun Li, vice-president and head of research and development at Safe-Run, proved very promising both in terms of energy consumption and productivity, yet senior management remained skeptical. In a meeting with Li, senior executives expressed concerns about the higher production costs and the reaction of Safe-Run’s main customers. Li needed to build a better business case for the new machine.

Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce company, had dedicated itself to corporate responsibility from the time of its launch, focusing on poverty and environmental protection. Alibaba released its Carbon Neutrality Action Report in December 2021, aiming to achieve carbon neutrality in its own operations and slash emissions across its supply chains and transportation networks by 2030. Alibaba was launching several new initiatives, and needed to know whether they would help to achieve its carbon neutrality goals.

In February 2021, the responsible seafood program officer for World Wide Fund for Nature Singapore (WWF-Singapore) was looking to encourage a collective change in the consumption of sustainable seafood. Promoting sustainable seafood in Singapore, however, had not been easy. Due to cultural influences and the nature of seafood trading, driving a change in the sourcing and consumption of seafood among stakeholders required significant effort and creativity. Identified stakeholders were generally either slow in acting or unresponsive. With each party pushing the responsibility to another, the challenge facing the program officer and WWF-Singapore’s market transformation team was how to overcome this deadlock of inertia. WWF-Singapore believed that it was necessary to understand and address each stakeholder separately, as stakeholders required specific communication messages and support to help them make a change. However, with limited resources, WWF-Singapore had to be strategic in deciding who to target and how.

Although Mary Barra, chief executive officer (CEO) of General Motors Company (GM), had faced her fair share of challenges while leading GM, Tesla Inc. (Tesla) posed a tougher competitive challenge than anything that had come before. Despite groundbreaking progress with electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous driving, and sustainable development, GM was now living in the shadow of Tesla, which, to some extent, had leapfrogged industry incumbents to become the most valuable car manufacturer in the United States. Further, major EV developments from old rivals from Detroit, Europe, and Asia, as well as blooming EV start-ups—some backed by technology giants—only compounded Barra’s worries. GM had achieved significant success in adapting to the coming age of EVs, but it also faced a number of questions: Was GM’s current strategy sufficient to sustain the company’s success? What technologies, capabilities, or products would be needed for GM to thrive in the new era of global mobility?

In the fall of 2019, “flight shaming,” a growing environmental movement, was gaining speed. The movement, which was sparked in Sweden and popularized by Greta Thunberg the previous year, sought to express the “unease about flying experienced by environmentally conscious travellers.” As a short-haul airline, EasyJet plc (EasyJet) needed to determine whether this was merely a passing fad that it could ignore or a threat that might damage its reputation and growth ambitions for the future. In the latter case, EasyJet would also need to determine what it should do to mitigate such risks.

The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) was named a top ten plastic polluter by the Break Free from Plastics coalition in 2019. P&G faced backlash over the plastic waste associated with the distribution of consumer goods in single-use sachets. While sachets provided access to everyday household necessities to low-income individuals, they also created negative environmental externalities. The company had to decide how to tackle the problem of waste they were responsible for and, at the same time, deflect accusations of greenwashing. How could this environmental issue be solved without raising prices for low-income individuals? What did P&G’s key stakeholders expect? How could P&G achieve the “triple bottom line” by caring for profits, people, and the planet?

On March 5, 2022, Ronni Kahn sat at her desk in Sydney, Australia, reflecting on what she was going to share at an international conference on leadership. Kahn was the founder and chief executive officer of the food rescue organization OzHarvest, a charity with the goal to nourish Australia through redistributing food and food waste to those in need. Kahn’s work involved a combination of running OzHarvest and being an international ambassador for and keynote speaker on sustainable food practices and living with purpose and meaning. As Kahn reflected on the work that had been done over the last eighteen years, what were the leadership lessons she had learned that she could share with others?

By the end of 2020, Ambuja Cement Foundation, the corporate social responsibility arm of Ambuja Cements Ltd., based in Mumbai, India, had been uplifting its communities through social development goals for the past 25 years. The specific focus of its activities had been water harvesting, agriculture development skills training, health, and education. However, the foundation faced the consistent challenge of measuring the impact of its corporate social responsibility projects with reference to the social development goals selected by the company in terms of performance or improvement at the village level. In December 2020, the vice-president of Ambuja Cement Foundation needed to determine which measurement the foundation should use to measure the performance of its community development programs and its alignment with the social development goals. Should it go along with the existing measurement tools or adopt a new model to measure performance and impact?

In December 2021, Forest Essentials opened its one hundredth store in India and a store in the United Kingdom; the Indian home-grown luxury Ayurveda brand had rapid expansion plans despite the obstacles it faced. Twenty-one years earlier, the company’s founder, liberal arts graduate Mira Kulkarni, converted the six-thousand-year-old science of Ayurveda into bottles and jars of luxurious skin-care and hair-care products, making Forest Essentials an aspirational luxury brand. Forest Essentials had grown to establish a robust presence in five categories—skin care, hair care, wellness, health, and makeup—while acquiring a large and loyal customer base in India. The company was meticulous about the quality of its ingredients and put great effort into sourcing high-quality ingredients from all over India; however, easy access to cheaper Ayurveda-based brands and the entry and availability of international wellness brands into the Indian market threatened Forest Essentials’ customer retention.<br><br>Kulkarni and her son, Samrath Bedi, needed to sustain the growth of Forest Essentials across digital and physical channels in India’s cluttered beauty and wellness market, with a price-sensitive customer base, while also growing the brand’s presence in cross-cultural markets overseas. Could they pursue growth in both marketspaces consistently? Should Kulkarni and Bedi focus on engaging with their existing and potential customers in India, or should they aim to establish their luxury brand in international markets?

In December 2019, the founder and chief executive officer of Nnergix, a struggling Barcelona-based renewable energy analytics provider, came home from work excited. He had just finished a very successful meeting with Holaluz Clidom SA about the potential of a new product idea: Sentinel Solar. Nnergix had been in business for almost seven years but had only recently become profitable. This new business idea could generate increasing recurrent revenues and make the company highly scalable. Nnergix could develop a new product that could deal with geographically dispersed and typically small assets in order to offer specialized services to new types of stakeholders. Was Sentinel Solar the right path for Nnergix to finally scale up, and if so, could the founder and his team convince investors and get the money they needed?

Desi Hangover, an Indian company empowering artisans to manufacture handcrafted leather footwear, was a finalist at Lakmé Fashion Week in 2020 in the category of Circular Changemakers. The chief executive officer had a dream of establishing his company as a leading circular economy fashion brand, and now he had a chance to pitch his vision of the future. But his core team had reservations and worried about the cost and risk of transitioning fully to a circular model. Considering the journey Desi Hangover had taken since its inception, the changing needs of the market, and the unpredictability of the business economy, Desi Hangover had to come up with the right pitch for the event—one that would continue on the path to conscious fashion while ensuring growth in revenues to sustain operations.

In April 2021, the chair and managing director of India’s JSW Steel Limited (JSW Steel) was facing questions about how to encourage sustainability in an expanding company. JSW Steel was the flagship company of the JSW Group, which started with a small steel plant in 1982 and grew into a conglomerate with interests in steel, cement, infrastructure, energy, paints, and sports. Steelmaking had numerous impacts on the environment. To offset the impact on the environment, JSW Steel had decided to use its by-product, slag, to manufacture cement. The managing director was acutely aware of sustainability concerns and was focused on making his sustainability vision a reality. JSW Steel was at the cusp of a large capacity expansion that would come from existing projects as well as inorganic growth through acquisitions, and both modes of expansion posed challenges for sustainability at JSW Steel.

On May 11, 2021, US federal agents raided the premises of a Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) temple in New Jersey and freed dozens of workers who had been operating under modern slavery conditions. Shortly afterward, six workers filed a class-action lawsuit against BAPS at the United States District Court, District of New Jersey. The lawsuit solicited to address the violation of the laws applied to workers, including laws prohibiting forced labour. The lawsuit claimed, among other things, that BAPS isolated workers, coerced workers to live and work in conditions causing psychological deterioration, limited workers’ outside contacts, and caused financial and reputational harm. Although this was only one particular case to come to light, it pointed to a broader problem faced by many companies across the world, either within their own operations or in the supply chains of the organizations they partnered with for corporate social responsibility purposes. How could companies ensure that they abided by fair labour practices and avoided the use of modern slavery?

In January 2021, the Japanese fashion company Uniqlo was accused of using forced labour in its supply chains. Various news reports had been claiming that Uyghur Muslims were being detained and forced to work on cotton farms, production factories, and processing facilities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The United States Customs and Border Protection claimed that Uniqlo was not able to fully demonstrate that its products and inputs were manufactured without use of forced labour or modern slavery in Xinjiang, China and issued a Withhold Release Order to detain Uniqlo’s shipment of cotton garments. Uniqlo’s attempts to dispute the allegations and overturn the WRO were unsuccessful. The company had to find a way to ensure transparency and uphold traceability across all streams of its value chain activity. But how could Uniqlo ensure ethical sourcing for all aspects of its products, given limited oversight over suppliers and subcontractors? Was cotton traceability a viable and feasible option? How could Uniqlo ensure the compliance all key actors in its value chain streams, across tiers of suppliers and layers of subcontractors?

In January 2022, Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Activision) for US$68.7 billion. With a growing franchise of games, and with Microsoft’s apparent ambitions for the games console market, Activision was an attractive acquisition target. Activision owned some of the most popular games in the world and had a $54 billion market value in 2020. The acquisition would also take Microsoft a step closer to expansion into the metaverse, where—along with the cloud gaming and video game software industries—it hoped to gain an edge. However, gaming was a small part of Microsoft’s business. So why had Microsoft pursued the acquisition? What advantages did Microsoft see in it? And what would the move mean for Sony Interactive Entertainment (Sony), the market leader in the video games industry? Finally, how should Microsoft address the allegations of harassment and other employee complaints that had arisen at Activision and set right the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues that had arisen at Activision?

Agricola Himalaya was a family-owned Colombian company, the national leader in the tea industry, and the owner of the only tea plantation in the country, located in the middle of a mist forest. In Colombia, owing to the labour costs involved in tea production, importing tea was less expensive than producing it locally, but if Agricola Himalaya decided to import the tea, what would be the environmental and social impact of closing the plant and plantation? Agricola Himalaya attempted to resolve this dilemma by entering the specialty tea market, launching a new product that was sustainable and organic, with a range of innovative blends and a premium price. However, after eight years, its Bitaco specialty tea line had not reached break even, and in March 2021 the chief executive officer faced a new dilemma: whether or not to continue with the specialty tea initiative.

In July 2012, the French multinational company Michelin Group, one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world, was facing accusations of failing to respect human rights and environmental rights in its operations in Tamil Nadu, India. This complaint came at the surprise of managers at the company who had made efforts to create relationships with local communities. At Michelin Group’s headquarters in France, the senior member of the sustainability team had to decide how to respond to the complaint in a way that would satisfy both external stakeholders (e.g., local communities and civil society organizations) and internal stakeholders (e.g., employees and managers from other departments).

Tire manufacturer Linglong initiated its green supply chain management (GSCM) program in 2018. By extending the ongoing green practices from within the organization to external supply chain partners, Linglong developed a green concept based on the entire product life cycle, which involved materials suppliers, equipment suppliers, distributors, and other stakeholders. After a one-year trial, the company saw an opportunity to mitigate the environmental risks in the supply chain and to enhance both environmental and economic performance at the supply chain level. However, the company also encountered challenges, such as the supply chain partners’ limited understanding of the value of GSCM and a lack of senior leadership support among suppliers. Faced with these challenges, Linglong had to decide whether to extend its GSCM program and how to improve it.

Tom Ewart had been recently promoted to associate vice-president (VP) of Sustainability at The Co-operators Group Limited (Co-operators), a Canadian financial services company focused on insurance. Ewart and his team were in the process of publishing the company’s annual integrated report to inform stakeholders of the firm’s current environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives and commitments. With sustainability trends rapidly growing, Ewart wanted to ensure Co-operators was well positioned to address upcoming changes and to continue to be a catalyst for a sustainable society. Ewart was excited about the growing industry, but he also wanted to find ways to improve Co-operators’ current sustainability strategies and ensure the company was on track towards its ESG commitments. One option Ewart was considering was to hire more individuals to join his Sustainability team, which currently had 3.5 employees. Given the lack of clear career structure in the industry, he was unsure of the types of candidates he should be looking for and what sort of experience they should have. Ewart reflected on his own career journey and the path he had taken to reach his current role as a sustainability executive. He also thought about the experiences and traits of his employees and how they brought value to the team.