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In the summer of 2021, an Exxon Mobil Corporation (ExxonMobil) executive was secretly recorded dismissing climate science that his company had publicly supported. ExxonMobil is a vertically integrated business with decades of financial performance to consider. Recent activity at the organization-including activist investor action to change the board of directors' composition-coupled with years of confusion over climate science creates a complex situation with multiple stakeholders. By comparing ExxonMobil's performance to Apple Inc. (Apple) and other technology companies, it provides context for the moment of the crisis and asks readers to consider how to manage the communication complication. Students are challenged to consider nuance in their arguments and balance short-term shareholder returns with longer-term organizational pursuits.

After conducting an impressive turnaround in Walmart's subsidiary in Brazil, Private Equity firm Advent International has to decide how to exit this investment: through an IPO or selling the business to Carrefour.

In March 2013, Alberto Silva, president of the newly appointed Board of Directors of Fabricato, one of Colombia's oldest textile companies, met with representatives of the main shareholder groups in order to gauge their willingness to approve profound changes within the corporation and even inject new money, if necessary. The company was suffering from a major crisis caused by a stock market bubble generated around its share price, which resulted in the suspension of its stock market listing, the disqualification of a major group of shareholders, and the bankruptcy of Interbolsa, the brokerage company that financed the bubble. With great effort, Silva was successful in obtaining, from the representatives of the main groups of shareholders, the commitment that they would vote in the Board of Directors in favor of hiring a new Executive President for the company, only if he were able to identify the path to follow: liquidate the company, restructure it with or without an injection of new money, or split it in two, one to keep the manufacturing assets and the other to develop the real estate business. The student's role is to assume Silva's task and define the course of action to follow, making use of specific financial information about the company, an Excel simulation sheet of its share price and indicators, its history, the challenges of the industry, and the environment in Colombia for March 2013.

Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank's launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank's mobile money app, Illico Cash literally promised "Fast Cash" for its users who also had a Rawbank account. Unlike most mobile money platforms on the African continent, Illico cash was backed by an established bank - not a technology or a telecommunications company. As he contemplated Rawbank's next strategic move, the future of Illico Cash, and the bank's future moves into digital payment systems in the DRC, he saw multiple challenges to Illico Cash's adoption in several regions across the DRC. Seeing lower-than-anticipated usage rates, he wondered if local preferences for cash seemed just too powerful to overcome. Can the bank's digital payments efforts overcome hurdles in local infrastructure, entrenched interests that favored cash, and currency instability? Would crafting a digital ecosystem be a worthwhile investment for Rawbank without a wholesale structural shift in beliefs?

Facing strong pressure from investors to improve financial performance and preserve capital, senior management at Euroland Foods must select which projects to fund across a slate of major investment proposals for 2021. While the board of directors has imposed a limit of EUR120 million for the company budget, various managers have proposed projects totaling EUR316 million. The task for students is to evaluate each proposal's financial attributes and qualitative factors (mainly strategic considerations and internal company politics), then choose the projects to be approved. This case presents two alternative modes of delivery: (1) a standard case discussion; or (2) a role-play exercise with a debriefing. The teaching note includes role-playing character descriptions for distribution to students and describes both modes of delivery. The different viewpoints of the company managers featured in these character descriptions is a unique aspect of this case, which affords students the opportunity to grapple with some aspects of capital budgeting that they don't normally encounter. The multifunctional aspect of this case affords an opportunity for a finance instructor to coteach it with an organizational behavior instructor. Points of linkage are in the areas of group leadership and the assessment and management of group decision-making processes. The case is suitable for intermediate corporate finance courses.

New opportunities, challenges, and decisions arose for a pub owner and his business partners when celebrity Halle Berry raved on social media about the hot wings served at the pub. Berry's post sparked an unprecedented 28-day sellout and a firestorm of news coverage that kept the business going at a time when the restaurant industry was suffering from government-imposed restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pub owner and his partners wonder whether to seize momentum and enter the fiercely competitive packaged goods industry, bottling and selling their signature wing sauces.

In late 2020, the board of the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) was preparing for its strategic planning session. The question on the agenda was, Should the ECF target millennials or baby boomers for its endowment development tools and strategies? Board members were of two minds when it came to millennials. Some members believed the ECF should intensify its efforts among baby boomers, as time was running out on this donor demographic. Others believed the ECF's relationships with baby boomers were strong and that it was now time for the ECF to begin actively courting a new generation of donors. Nneka Otogbolu, the newly appointed director of communications and equity strategy for the ECF, was working on her presentation for the board. Her team had carefully researched the two options, leaving it to her to decide what the recommendation should be. She would need to make her mind up soon, as the board meeting was in two days.

ORTA Anadolu, a denim manufacturer based in Turkey that produces jeans for major global brands, is seeking to embrace the movement for a circular economy by redesigning its products and processes. How easy is the task facing director Sedef Uncu? What are the barriers to and enablers for 'circular' fashion?

The case explores the direct investment strategy of CPP Investments, one of the largest and most influential pension funds and private equity investors globally. Through an analysis of its acquisition and later sale of a controlling stake in GlobalLogic, students follow the Canadian Pension Fund's private equity and venture capital investing strategy.

This field-based case follows the fictionalized Elisa Stallings, the manager of CandyCo's Aviation Dispatch group (Dispatch) which manages the aviation assets for the international company. Students learn about the positive leadership style of Stallings, who believed in empowering employees and having frank, respectful conversations with her staff. Stallings's leadership approach and focus on improving efficiency seem to initially work well as she encounters challenges related to Dispatch's culture and processes. Her successful track record leads to greater opportunities and challenges, however, when Stallings's boss asks her to take control of two other functions in CandyCo: Meeting Planning and Travel Services. Stallings could see the synergies among the three groups she was now managing and believed she could make great changes if she got the teams to work together, but personnel issues kept popping up. One of her employees had a temper problem, another was insubordinate, and a third was a talented worker who seemed unhappy in his role. Stallings had to decide how best to handle these three employees, but she also needed to balance three full groups of people if she wanted to create a cohesive team with a healthy workplace culture. Every puzzle piece had to fit together correctly, and the whole puzzle had to fit the CandyCo organization. This case offers the chance for rich discussions around leadership, managing change, and cross-team collaboration in the context of corporate aviation. It offers role-playing opportunities for students.

Founded in 1984, United Safety & Survivability Corporation (USSC) was an American company headquartered in Exton, Pennsylvania, that began in a garage with just a few products and a dream to develop better and safer transportation solutions. Like most firms, as COVID-19 started to spread in the United States and around the globe, USSC found itself in uncharted waters. The transportation sector, in which USSC operated, was among the most affected by the pandemic as people stopped using public transportation or were confined to their homes. The uncertainty regarding the transportation industry's future was as substantial as the drop in demand caused by the pandemic. USSC's chief executive officer found himself in a difficult situation, as the company would soon run out of money. At the same time, there were no clear answers yet to fundamental questions about the industry's future. USSC's leadership team had to quickly decide on both short-term (tactical) responses to COVID-19 and long-term (strategic) decisions, including decisions about its product portfolio and research and development strategy.

In 2016, just four years after launching their business, the four founders of Campus Sutra (a youth-oriented online fashion brand) had to decide whether to join an online marketplace's brand accelerator program. Joining the program promised rapid growth, but the exclusivity clause was risky. How should the founders evaluate the lucrative proposal? Nurturing high-quality private labels through support programs that accelerated the growth of exclusive brands seemed to help the platforms enhance customer engagement, but was the promise of support from the online marketplace worth the restrictions of platform exclusivity?

There is a pressing need for global reform of inheritance taxation systems. On average, only 0.5% of total tax revenues are sourced from inheritance taxes across the 24 OECD countries that levy them. If designed properly, inheritance taxes could play a greater role in raising revenues for cash-strapped authorities seeking to overcome mounting public deficits. A new equity-based approach to inheritance taxes could also prevent wealth inequality from becoming even more concentrated as the baby-boomers transfer intergenerational wealth. The case explores the challenges facing public policy makers as they seek to balance variables like tax exemption thresholds designed to ensure heirs receive a fair share of wealth tax-free, the operative word being fair. The case also explains the tools used to avoid paying a fair share of inhertance tax, such as trusts and tax havens. Extra teaching materials are available at https://publishing.insead.edu/case/inheritance-tax

London, UK, July 2020. G. Garvin Brown IV, the chairman of Brown-Forman Corporation and 5th generation family shareholder, was preparing to celebrate the firm's 150th anniversary. Despite its current global footprint, a turnover in excess of $3.3 billion and over 4,800 employees worldwide, Brown-Forman had remained in Louisville, Kentucky, close to the Old Forester Distillery, the founding brands' Pre-Prohibition headquarters (1882-1919), on Louisville's historic Main Street, also known as "Whiskey Row". COVID-19, however, had ruined the party, forcing the family to cancel the celebrations. Every family member had received their 150th Anniversary bottles of the limited-edition bourbon, taken from 6 barrels aged for 150 months, as well as a recently published book documenting the amazing history of Brown-Forman through photos, illustrations and artifacts. The pandemic would have a dramatic impact on economies around the world, affecting not only employees' lives but also the livelihoods of partners in the broader hospitality industry. The publicly listed, family-controlled company had weathered worse storms in the past, including Prohibition, which had tested the firm's resilience. Having a long-term-focused, engaged stockholder base and a strong governance system were tremendous advantages in such situations, especially when selling aged products with time-tested brands. Together with the two former CEOs and the board, Brown had painstakingly put together solid company and family governance structures and processes and carefully rebalanced the portfolio in a bid to mitigate the impact of downturns. Still, Garvin could not help wondering how well the delicately crafted system would hold under this real-world "stress test."

John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, co-founders and co-CEOs of LOOP, an insurtech startup based in Austin, Texas, were on a mission to modernize the archaic $250 billion automobile insurance market. They sought to create equitably priced insurance by eliminating pricing factors that disproportionally affected people of color, such as credit score, income, and education. The company used sophisticated AI algorithms to analyze which roads were more prone to accidents and employed proprietary technology to track driving behavior. Moreover, the founders believed in providing a sense of community and in building a mission-driven brand that people loved, thereby altering the antagonist and distant relationship that existed between an insurance company and its customers. By the September 2021 Texas launch, the company had developed a waitlist of over 30,000 people. In March 2022, as the first policy term expired, the co-founders had to figure out which policyholders to renew and at what price to renew them. They also wondered if they could motivate drivers to become safer on the roads by investing in rewards and gamification. Going forward, by the end of 2022 Loop had plans to enter nine additional states with its revolutionary car insurance model, and contemplated removing several other pricing criteria that could be discriminatory, while incorporating metrics that might provide discounts to customers. Longer-term, the company needed to decide which strategic direction to pursue-whether to expand their fledgling company vertically by adding complementary insurance lines, like homeowners insurance, or expand horizontally to other financial services, like auto lending, that were plagued by structural biases against minorities. Given the recent lackluster performance of several high-profile insurtechs, Henry and Nadeau knew that, to achieve their goal of unseating the entrenched incumbents, they had to get these decisions right.

Founder Collective ("FC") launched in 2009 with a clear mission: to be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. In keeping with its mission, FC maintained smaller fund sizes and was not a lifecycle investor. By November of 2021, the seed market had become more competitive, and FC had successfully picked several Unicorn and even Decacorn investments, causing some LPs to wonder about the opportunity costs of FC's "no pro rata" view. Managing Partners David Frankel, Eric Paley, and Micah Rosenbloom wondered if the seed investing sector had changed too much and if they should evolve their strategy. They contemplated three potential paths forward: start investing their pro rata in later rounds, raise an opportunity fund, or continue their current strategy.

The leadership team of Roblox was contemplating a public offering in December 2020. Roblox was an online video game platform that offered developers a platform for building new games and a global social network for publishing and hosting online games. Roblox had filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC, and registered to go public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with the ticker symbol "RBLX." However, at the last minute, a series of market events occurred that made other public listing channels potentially more attractive. Guthrie and the Roblox team must decide whether to delay the IPO, pull the IPO prospectus altogether or list shares through alternative routes such as a direct listing or a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). The Roblox case chronicles the firm's evolution from launch to IPO, highlighting the various funding rounds and market events that impacted the company's public offering in 2020. The case details the process the Roblox team followed to decide between a traditional IPO, a direct listing or a SPAC. Students are encouraged to explore the advantages and disadvantages of different channels for going public, who the stakeholders are in the decision, and the importance of market timing.

Recent years had witnessed the social phenomenon of the rise of Internet brands. Looking at Internet fitness unicorn brand Keep's brand commercialization process, Keep demonstrated the path of creation, product adjustment and upgrade, and brand extension logic of Internet app brands. Keep started as a single-tool app providing exercise content and data records, and gradually developed into a one-stop fitness and exercise platform by actively adjusting its brand goal, surpassing similar products to become the largest social platform for exercise in China. Keep then went through a bottleneck period where it had huge traffic but could not monetize it. Finally, Keep pursued commercialization, transforming into a comprehensive ecological fitness chain. Now, in April 2021, how would Keep respond to the competition and continue its strategic vision of providing a fitness ecosystem? Should its strategic focus continue to shift from online to offline? What should Keep's next steps be?

Malabar Gold & Diamonds (Malabar) was established in 1993 in Kerala, India. By 2019, the company was a leading retail chain in India's jewellery market and one of the top five jewellery businesses in the world, selling their products through 117 Indian outlets and 143 global outlets across nine countries. Most of Malabar's domestic revenue came from the southern region of India, and the company was looking to extend its footprint across the entire Indian market. However, the country's jewellery market was highly competitive, with a strong presence of regional players, and consumers in each Indian state had their own unique preference for jewellery design. Malabar needed to find a strategy to expand its presence into the country's uniquely different geographic areas.