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Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) is a global mining company that has made its first foray into the Canadian far north with its Meadowbank gold mining site. The case describes how AEM has worked with the local government to gain its support, signing an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement (IIBA). This IIBA outlines a number of commitments that AEM must meet in order to ensure equal representation of Inuit people within the mine. The case follows the superintendent of human resources (HR). Facing a turnover rate of 83 per cent and high levels of absenteeism among AEM’s Inuit workforce, AEM is dealing with a talent management crisis of unprecedented proportions. The superintendent of HR must remedy the situation while operating within an environment characterized by resource constraints and a diverse workforce.

In December 2018, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Carrot Rewards (Carrot), a profitable Canadian social enterprise, was facing a turning point. The company, which had been founded three years earlier, was about to implode. Its single largest client had just conveyed its decision to pull out, causing a sudden 65 per cent drop in the company’s annual revenue. Should Carrot continue with the prevailing model—one day at a time? Should it launch a freemium version of its app? Should it pivot toward new geographies and new locations? Should it begin to focus on new verticals and go after new clients? Should it go on the auction block and salvage what is left of the original company? The founder and CEO wondered whether the future held workable options other than those he was considering in dealing with the enterprise he had founded, built, and nurtured.

On March 20, 2020, in an effort to stem the transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic and under the direction of government officials, Canada’s Stratford Festival halted work on its 2020 productions and ultimately postponed the entire season. Additionally, social justice issues had come to the forefront with the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Watching the protests unfold across North America, the Stratford Festival’s executive and management team recognized the pain their black colleagues were experiencing and set their sights on doing something meaningful to champion anti-racism. The executive team offered the Black Caucus and the Indigenous Circle—two informal groups of the Stratford Festival artists and administrators—the opportunity to take over the Festival’s social media channels for a 48-hour period and to conduct a town-hall session on the Stratford Festival’s YouTube channel. The question remained, however, whether turning over the social media channel was a prudent strategy, given the difficulty of predicting the outcomes of activities that start out with good intentions.

In 2020, the flagship location of Jamie's Market, a specialty supermarket retailer in California, struggled to hire enough temporary workers to meet the increased staffing demand resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The new assistant manager, who had been recently transferred to the company's flagship store, was tasked with figuring out what had gone wrong and recommending changes to ensure that the store would have enough qualified workers for the remainder of the pandemic (or until store sales returned to pre-pandemic levels, whichever occurred first). The assistant manager looked into the company’s hiring and socialization processes, spoke with both temporary and permanent workers, and identified at least two reasons for the challenges in hiring temporary workers: insufficient advertising of the job listing for temporary workers, and little or no effort to socialize temporary workers once they were hired. Based on these conclusions, what changes should the assistant manager recommend when hiring the next group of temporary employees?

It was June 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Frances Edmonds, head of sustainable impact at HP Canada Co., the Canadian subsidiary of HP Inc. (HP), was continuing HP’s decades-long pursuit of sustainable impact. HP had worked nearly two decades with strategic partners like Lavergne Groupe to redesign its products and make plastic circular. HP was now committed to using 30 per cent post-consumer recycled plastic across its personal systems and printers by 2025. However, decreasing commodity prices during the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply challenges, and lowered global collection of recycled content could potentially undermine HP’s recycling efforts and goals. Edmonds was considering possible strategic, tactical, and operational actions to cope with the situation and sustain HP’s aspirations. Would HP’s circular supply chain remain viable and competitive?

Zip Co Limited (Zip) was a market follower in the Australian buy now, pay later (BNPL) sector. In September 2020, PayPal Holdings Inc. entered the growing sector, which was expected to disrupt the credit card industry, with better incentives for retailers and consumers. Although investors were concerned, Zip’s chief executive officer remained confident about the company’s future growth. How could he combat competition against large players like PayPal in the United States? What competitive strategies could he opt for—and could Zip disrupt the credit card industry?

In November 2018, a bicycle program specialist who worked in the Planning and Sustainability Division at the Washington, DC, District Department of Transportation, wanted to analyze Capital Bikeshare’s bike rental demand for the past two years. Capital Bikeshare was a station-based bike-sharing operator that provided an expansive, multi-jurisdictional transportation system to Washington and the surrounding area. If the bicycle program specialist could determine some significant factors that affected users’ ridership patterns, he could best design his expansion plan of adding 40 new bike-rental stations to the system. He obtained the hourly bike rental demand for October 2016–September 2018 to evaluate how sensitive the demand was to some external factors.

In January 2019, one of the founding members and current board members of Londvolota, a South African trust formed by General Electric South Africa (GESA) in 2015, faced a challenge. Londvolota needed to improve the establishment and growth of entrepreneurial South African businesses as part of GESA’s development of local suppliers, which aimed to enable the best of these businesses to supply the global GE network. The initiative represented a major contribution to supporting the South African economy; however, the board was considering updating its criteria for selecting the businesses for development. How should the organization adjust its criteria to avoid failures and increase the initiative’s success rate?

In 2017, the general manager of Rajarambapu Patil Co-operative Sugar Factory, a 50-year-old sugar plant in India, needed to recommend a strategy for the factory’s upcoming production cycle. For the aggregate production plan, he was considering three options: a chase strategy, a level strategy, and a subcontracting strategy. The company faced multiple challenges, including a limited pool of skilled labourers, employee poaching by competitors and allied manufacturers, the wide availability of job options in metro cities, and pressure from the labour union. Company management wanted to optimize profits, while reducing risks and incurring no extra costs. How should the general manager decide which strategy would best meet all the criteria?

In late 2015, the chief executive officer of Extraordinary Journeys, an African safari tour operator, faced a rare opportunity to buy a smaller competitor, Safari Specialists Inc. The chief executive officer worried that her firm's strong organic growth would slow, and she was interested in examining alternative growth strategies. The smaller company was offered at a reasonable price and had a remarkably similar organizational culture. On the other hand, it relied heavily on outside contractors, not employees, creating potentially difficult human resources challenges. Further, it was located in rural Georgia, far from the Extraordinary Journeys home office in downtown Manhattan. All things considered, the chief executive officer was wondering if she should buy her competitor.

In 2018, Marsh USA Inc. (Marsh), an insurance company based in New York, launched an innovative pandemic insurance product called PathogenRX. However, until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there was no demand for the product. During the pandemic, some US businesses attempted to claim benefits for business interruption losses from their insurers but were denied because their policies did not cover pandemic losses. Unlike other catastrophic events, pandemics seemed to be uninsurable. In May 2020, industry experts estimated that US small businesses could lose up to US$431 billion due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Marsh’s chief executive officer wrote a letter to the United States Congress and president requesting that a state-backed pandemic insurance plan be developed to help cover extremely high potential claim amounts. The federal government could act as a reinsurer and prevent the US insurance industry from collapsing due to increasing claims from US businesses. However, there were several lingering questions: What challenges could be faced in selling pandemic insurance and how could these be resolved? Was it preferable to partner with a government or a private reinsurance partner? How could pandemic insurance modelling be improved to better forecast potential premiums and claims?

The Sydney Opera House, an iconic architectural landmark and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site, was officially opened in 1973. The project cost AU$102 million and took 14 years to complete—AU$95 million and 10 years more than originally estimated. The challenges with the construction of the opera house included a brilliant and visionary architect who lacked project management experience, team collapse due to misalignment, bureaucratic and political issues that hindered work, and a rush to begin construction without proper planning. What could have been done at crucial crossroads to facilitate the project? What could today’s project managers learn for future construction?

In 2020, the Indonesian bank PT Bank Tabungan Pensiunan Nasional Tbk (BTPN) had to make a decision regarding a digital transformation strategy for its future. BTPN had started as a small bank that focused on pensioners, but became known for its innovation after a private equity partner bought a stake in 2008. Initially innovating successfully in microfinance, BTPN decided to go digital by creating an in-house start-up in 2015 called Jenius, thereby leapfrogging to become one of the forerunners in Indonesian digital consumer banking. The COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated digital financial services, and BTPN had to decide how to scale Jenius to transform the company. Was the in-house start-up model the best choice after all, or would the large incumbent banks digitalize faster?

In late 2019, the Colombian company Agrícola Himalaya SA was undertaking a strategy to double its sales by 2030. The company’s popular Hindú brand of teas, developed over six decades, had expanded to include not only black and green teas but also herbal teas, fruit teas, ready-to-drink products, and an iced tea line. Over the past 10 years, the company had enjoyed steady growth, distributed its products throughout the Americas, and developed a communications strategy focused on health and wellness. Now the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) had to decide whether or not it was time to expand into other product categories, and if so, how. The CEO and marketing team needed to develop a brand strategy to present to the board of directors and create a new product portfolio that would support the company’s growth strategy. Which channels should the company target for growth? Should it continue to grow in the same category, extend the brand to other categories, or expand the demographic mix of its customer base?

Isaac Park was only six weeks into the role of leading all technology operations for Primal Leadership Solutions, a global leadership advisory organization that offered consulting services and executive recruitment. The lifeblood of the business was its database, which contained the critical and comprehensive information for all of the organization’s past and current projects as well as its employees, clients, and recruits. The legacy system had to be replaced by a single, efficient, and reliable database. Although implementing a new database sounded straightforward, about halfway through implementation, pandemonium had broken out. The project’s leader was asked to step aside, and Park was asked to step in as the new leader. Park knew that going back to the old system was not the right answer; it was imperative that the company find a way forward. Both Park’s own credibility and the credibility of the project were on the line.

In 2016, the University of Calgary (U of C) was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a variety of events, such as the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which brought visiting scholars from across the globe. At the same time, Alberta, ON, had been hit with significant forest fires, and many residents that were evacuated from northern communities had moved into U of C residences. The campus was alive with activity when its information technology (IT) systems were encrypted in a ransomware attack. The university’s emergency response team had to act quickly to identify and isolate the root cause of the problem and to decide how to contain it, whether to pay the demanded ransom, and what to tell members of the university and the wider community. The university’s response to this threat and its management through the crisis would ultimately shape the IT team and future investment decisions.

Formed in 1997, Star Alliance was the first global airline network or constellation. Its aim was to shift the airline industry away from a network of loose bilateral agreements between individual airlines to a more comprehensive network of multilateral agreements between members. A wave of deregulation in the industry in the 1970s and 1980s, which opened free travel between countries, led to the creation of three major global constellations: Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam. These networks conferred many benefits on their members, such as cost sharing, loyalty program management, and increased flight load. However, in early 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had devastating effects on the airline industry. The focus of airline alliances thus shifted from greater connectivity between members to survival in the new global landscape. Would this strategy help airlines survive the COVID-19 crisis? Was group-based competition needed to thrive during a pandemic? Their main concern was whether or not the powerful frameworks they created would be able to help member airlines survive this crisis and regain their pre-pandemic financial stability.

In 2019, the global airline industry generated revenues of over US$880 billion. One year later, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, demand had fallen to half of its previous level and airlines faced tough challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic was a new and severe crisis. The responses of airlines and their alliances depended on the fundamental economics and structure of the industry. To devise new strategies for their futures, global airlines had to consider the economics and market structure of their industry. Would the fundamental economics of the airline industry be forever affected? Would the industry return to a “new normal” at some point?

In September 2017, Uber Technologies Inc. hired a new chief executive officer with instructions to prepare the company for an initial public offering and repair its internal culture and reputation. By the end of 2019, however, the company’s past wrongdoings were continuing to haunt the organization. The new leader had to deal with ongoing legal issues related to driver classification and a new ruling in the US state of California that would require drivers to be paid minimum wage and receive sick days and health benefits. The company also faced accusations by a former manager who claimed that employees had engaged in questionable tactics to steal trade secrets. The public learned that the company had paid US$100,000 to hackers to conceal a November 2016 data breach, which exposed the personal information of 57 million riders and drivers. In July 2019, Uber Technologies Inc. came under investigation by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over accusations of gender discrimination. Later that year, its licence to operate in London, UK was revoked. Almost 18 months into the new leader’s tenure, the path to repairing the company’s character reputation and struggling market value was still not clear.

The founder and chief executive officer of impak Finance Inc. had grown his financial technology start-up, based in Montreal, Canada, into a company with two main business lines: an extensive and comprehensive assessment and rating agency that used advanced social impact measurement and scoring software, and an online marketplace platform that used the cryptocurrency impak Coin and connected like-minded consumers, investors, and businesses to support socially sustainable and responsible firms aligned on their economic and financial principles. In case A, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the founder wondered which strategic direction he should take to ensure the long-term sustainability of impak Finance Inc.—invest heavily in developing the rating agency or grow the impak marketplace?