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Owner and general manager of Hunter Steel, is struggling to decide what to do about Ontario’s labour shortage as a result of COVID-19. The steel company is categorized as Tier 2, and requires general labourers and saw mechanics within each warehouse in order to efficiently run operations. Currently, each of his 5 warehouses are short 2 general labourers. This is unsustainable and poses a threat to meeting demand, Hunter must decide a course of action. He can either invest into partial automation eliminating the need for as much labour to be employed, pursue a labour government assistance program, continue status quo and hope, or pursue a marketing campaign that markets to consumers and potential hires.

In 2020, Cathy Siskind-Kelly and Rob Kelly, co-founders and co-owners of Black Fly Beverage Company were deciding whether they should undertake a major expansion of their company’s production facility. Black Fly was started in London, Ontario in 2005 and had grown to be one of the largest ready-to-drink brands in the alcoholic beverage industry. Part of Black Fly’s business relied on a co-packer for their canned products, and increasing challenges including supply-chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic made their reliance on the co-packer increasingly risky. The move would not only allow them to massively increase their capacity, but bring their can production in-house, as well as become a co-packer for other beverage companies

In 2021, amidst a world pandemic and escalated racial tensions, Allens Lane Art Center, a non-profit art centre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was losing its leadership and failing to live up to its history-making initiative to promote integration among community members through the arts. The Center's executive director was stepping down and there was no replacement in line. Also, like many small businesses in the West Mount Airy neighbourhood of Philadelphia during this period, the Center suffered low revenue, among other issues. <br><br>The president of the Center's board of directors had to determine how to bring the small non-profit back to life and generate a reawakened commitment from the board. They had to be prepared to make difficult decisions, including determining how the Center could change its business model while holding to its mission of bringing diverse communities together through the arts.

In December 2022, Steve Noakes, Board Chair of Binna Burra Lodge Ltd, Queensland, Australia learned that they had received government funding of AU$18 million to reconstruct the Lodge and cabins lost in the 2019 bushfires. The timeframe was tight for this major re-build which would need to adhere to a safer, more sustainable, and fire-resistant materials. They were also committed to re-building with a stronger Binna Burra spirit that would include the meaningful involvement of the local community, including the local Indigenous population, the Yugambeh languages people, but it also had to be financially viable.

以手機為主的直播平台，掀起自媒體的熱潮，從2016年開始在台灣興起一陣熱潮。由於A直播平台以打賞為主的商業模式獲得快速的成功，引起其他以類似YouTube廣告模式為主的平台加入競爭，本個案探討主要競爭者B平台對於A平台發動一連串的直播主爭奪戰，B直播平台挾著新募集的豐沛資金，仿效A平台的成功經驗及策略做法，以放大數倍資源的方式，透過模仿與挖角快速成長，直接威脅到A平台的生存與發展。面對競爭對手的直接攻擊，在策略會議上，主張迎頭痛擊或另闢天地的主管各執一詞，A平台應該要如何回應B平台的挑戰？ <span style="font-weight: 700; color:#00f">本個案改寫自2021年6月8日出版之「10-CC-01直播平台之直播主爭奪戰」</span>

Braithwaite & Co. Limited (BCL) was a leading railway-engineering public sector company in India. The company was incorporated in 1930 as the first wagon manufacturing company in India. In 1976, the Government of India (GoI) nationalized the company, registering and incorporating it as a fully owned GoI undertaking to support Indian Railways by supplying railway wagons. However, following nationalization, BCL faced growth challenges and gradually accumulated significant losses during the 1990s; eventually, it was declared legally sick and referred to the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). The reasons identified for its sickness were failure to technologically upgrade and adapt to changing market scenarios, dependence on a single customer (Indian Railways), and operational-level issues within the organization. Yatish Kumar joined BCL in 2018 and took a series of strategic and operational measures to turn the company around. These measures resulted in BCL’s improved financial performance, profitability, and a quick turnaround, and the company was awarded Miniratna Category-I status in 2021. Although BCL had been growing at a good rate, Kumar was concerned about how to sustain the turnaround and maintain that growth rate in the future.

The founders of the app-based credit line MoneyTap shared a vision of creating an inclusionary multi-product banking experience. The company’s gross revenue had surged from its first year, but while the business was doing well, growth was not coming easy because of intense competition. The organization wanted to expand its offerings to include a pay-later feature, credit cards, and digital savings and become India’s first full-stack neobank. The team’s current brand, MoneyTap, was a personal credit-line brand, and to expand it to a full-service neobank required a new brand strategy and a rethinking of the brand architecture. While branding and its concepts were perceived to be more applicable to consumer goods, the founders were convinced that their fintech start-up could only move to the next level by leveraging the inherent power of a strong brand.

Audioteka S.A. was established in 2008 and had a presence in various European markets. It was time for Audioteka to reaffirm its value as a fast-growing mid-sized Polish company. By 2022 the company offered 80,000 audiobooks in 11 languages. Newly appointed chief executive officer Arkadiusz Seidler was exploring possibilities to enter new markets that could help the company grow. An unusual direction had been identified, India. Preliminary data indicated that the idea was promising. But was it worth considering a project that could be perceived as an expression of overconfidence and eccentricity on the part of Audioteka's current management? To date, no Polish company had achieved success in India.

In 2022, the manager of Hyundai Nishat Motor (Private) Limited was ambitious to expand the company in Pakistan and continue its hard-earned growth. His first step was determining whether the expansion plan was worth it. But how could he estimate the cost of equity of a privately held firm? Although the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and dividend discount model (DDM) were most commonly used to calculate the cost of equity, neither of those models could be used with an unlisted company, which had no stock price and hence no stock returns and beta. Financial consultants thus advised the manager to research the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) and the cost of equity of Hyundai’s competitors in a comparable company analysis.

Bhima Jewels (“Bhima”) was a household name in southern India, where the company had built up a loyal clientele spanning three generations over its 97 years in business as a retailer in the jewellery sector. In 2015, Abhishek Bindu Madhav, the grandson of the founder, took over the family-run business. He introduced professionalization, infused technology into the company’s practices, and notched up creditable successes in the early years of the transformation, including during the trying times of the pandemic. <br><br>However, now Abhishek must prove that this early success was not a fluke and provide the board with a blueprint outlining how Bhima could realize its ambition of becoming a national brand. Abhishek needs to determine which factors to consider for investment and focus on to successfully script the company’s Transformation 2.0.

On October 31, 2017, Terry Hay, patriarch of the Hay family and leader of the family business, was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and given three weeks to live. This grim prognosis placed the Hay family on an unexpected trajectory and forced them to confront Terry’s health crisis while grappling with the impending transition of their family business, Scandinavian Building Services Ltd. (SBS), based in Edmonton. Although the family had already planned for leadership succession, Terry’s sudden illness forced them to accelerate their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances. How could the family navigate the leadership transition while responding to the urgency of Terry’s illness? What strategic decisions would they need to make to stay competitive and grow market share? Most importantly, how could they preserve Terry’s legacy and solidify the business’s future across generations?

Bigship Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Bigship), an Indian courier aggregator start-up, made its mark in the industry as late entrant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2023, the chief executive officer and co-founder was struggled with emerging issues during internal and external crises: The company’s employee attrition rate had reached 100 per cent, customer loyalty was in question, and rising levels of fraud were putting pressure on profitability. To add to these problems, another co-founder had sacked all of the company’s marketing staff due to disciplinary issues. With a plethora of problems, the CEO and her team now had to determine whether to focus first on tackling internal issues or aggressively follow growth volumes. In which direction should they steer the company’s strategy?

Surana & Surana International Attorneys (S&S) is a multispecialty law firm. Since its inception in 1971, it had declined to serve clients who were in the industries of meat, tobacco, alcohol, and gambling (M-TAG). In early March 2023, a large opportunity arose from a world leader in the alcohol business. Sanjay Mehta, Head of Business Development, met Vinod Surana, CEO and Partner at S&S, to convince him about bringing change to its deep-rooted tradition of sticking to no M-TAG. Kartik and Keerti,CEO's two sons would join S&S soon after finishing their legal education. Surana had a dilemma whether to stick to the existing business philosophy of "no M-TAG" clients or be flexible, considering growing competition and the business requirements.

This case study explores the various digital interventions (DIs) used by the Asude Foundation (Asude) in delivering education to students from low socio-economic sections in Aurangabad, India, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on students’ learning outcomes. Asude used an approach of recombining resources and leveraging the available digital and human capabilities, thus it provided a holistic and practical solution to the challenges created by the pandemic coupled with various institutional voids. The case study considers how Asude should plan in 2022 for growth and sustainability.

Contrary to the typical practice of cutting operating expenses by compromising on employees’ benefits, the chairman of Zentaku Kogyo Company Ltd. (Zentaku), David Wu Chongrang, aimed to improve the standard of living of his staff by steadily raising their salaries and benefits. In fact, the key performance indicator David had set for himself was to raise his employees’ salaries regularly to a preset target benchmark. Contrary to conventional approaches, over the past sixteen years (2006–2022) David had reduced Zentaku’s revenue by 28 per cent and the number of employees by two-thirds, while raising the annual gross profit per employee to 239 per cent. Zentaku had achieved more with less by transforming itself through the rigorous implementation of lean production, inspired by the famed Toyota Production System, but Zentaku’s future leadership now faced challenges in sustaining the success Zentaku had achieved. Were the management methods adopted in the past applicable to the younger generation of workers? How could the current management pass the enterprise to the younger generation while ensuring employees remained fulfilled in the workplace?

In February 2022, Sudhir Kumar Singh, head of human resources (HR) at Tata Steel Limited (Tata Steel)—one of India’s oldest and largest steel producers—was meeting with the vice president of HR to discuss how a unique pilot project to employ transgender people at the mine could be rolled out across the entire company. The long-term objective of the initiative was to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and contribute toward achieving a 25 percent diverse workforce by 2025. Although the pilot project had been successful, how could the HR team now scale up the transgender initiative across Tata Steel? Singh understood that to overcome these challenges he needed to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach, plan holistically, and integrate all the learnings from the pilot project to create a clear, consistent, and comprehensive plan that could be discussed with the vice president of HR.

Aditya Goel, co-founder of Love In Store Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (Love In Store), had had a great run despite the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in 2019. Goel and his technology partner had created Love In Store as an entrepreneurial venture that offered a one-stop solution to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies in India, the majority of which handled the bulk of their supplies through distributors and wholesalers. Love In Store provided both people and technology (tech) to supervise distribution activities for FMCG companies. After the initial success with FMCG companies, Goel also added a tech solution related to payments made to distributors, which would be based on actual proof of promotions. Love In Store’s application (app)-based technology solution streamlined the previously complex and tedious process of supervising distribution and managing sales territories—which had required distributors’ salespeople to write orders, check inventory of stock-keeping units in various categories, and benchmark competitive campaigns, as well as manage sales promotions and merchandising displays and inform retailers about company schemes and policies. Love In Store’s app enabled its appointed people to take care of this supervision, generate reports, pass on orders to the distributors, and support the distributors. After the company’s initial success, and once its turnover reached ₹10 million, Goel and his co-founder decided to expand their operations. The aftermath of the pandemic dominated Goel’s thinking, and he wondered whether it was a good strategy to keep the business restricted to one domain only. While he needed to manage running the business, he was also contemplating the challenge of expanding into other business areas.

MedoPlus is a startup working in the space of rural health care in India. Its pilot is currently running in five districts near Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh. The MedoPlus model connects villagers to the nearest health-care facility through an app mediated by a local villager, the MedoMITR. In only 18 months, the company has managed to reach 200,000 registered customers with 50,000 patients accessing health-care facilities. The management team at MedoPlus are planning for the next growth phase and considering the challenges ahead to obtain Series A funding for the company’s expansion.

The executive director of Meals on Wheels London (MOWL) was struggling with a lack of volunteers to deliver meals to the not-for-profit organization’s customers. MOWL provided nutritional support for adults with disabilities and older people who required short-term or long-term assistance. Several options were under consideration to mitigate the volunteer issue. These included using new, state-of-the-art computer software to allocate volunteers more efficiently; running a volunteer recruitment campaign; and hiring paid delivery drivers to supplement MOWL’s volunteers. The executive director needed to make a quick decision to present at a fast-approaching board meeting where any necessary funding would need to be approved.

This case describes the origins, design, and operations of a social enterprise that was working on the challenge of making high-skill employment opportunities available to non-speaking people with autism. Key to the organization’s efforts was a unique community model that provided the supports needed to activate the talents of a group of people who had historically been excluded from the labour market. These activities were an important part of the overall evolution of work that was happening in the early twenty-first century due to shifting social, technological, and competitive factors.