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The case, set in 2024, describes the transformation of Digital China, a large IT services company in China that had grown proactively and ambitiously into new digital services, including artificial intelligence (AI). The case briefly describes the company's background so we can see how it has evolved over the years alongside the major technology changes in the broader business environment. It then goes into detail on the shift to data services, cloud computing and AI offerings over the last five years. As well as describing what Digital China does and how it works, the case also showcases the vision and 'theories' of its CEO, Mr Guo Wei. Mr Guo has some interesting and provocative ideas about how the digital revolution is changing the nature of competitive advantage, and the case gives the students exposure to these ideas in a way that should stimulate debate.

From its humble beginnings as a paupers' hospital with a mission to care for the sick and poor, Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) has come a long way to become one of the largest and most important multi-disciplinary teaching hospitals in Singapore. Throughout its storied history spanning almost two centuries, it has stayed steadfast in its mission to serve the community, with a strongly ingrained "kampung" spirit in its staff. The past two years have not been easy for TTSH and the National Centre for Infection Diseases (NCID) which is under its administration. In January 2020, the hospital had been at the vanguard of Singapore's fight against COVID-19. The extra workload, coupled with stress caused by the crisis, meant that ensuring Collective Leadership and the well-being of TTSH's staff to stay the fight was essential. Surviving and thriving in a D-VUCA (Disruptive, Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world sometimes requires a leap of faith. Would collective leadership suffice to bring TTSH from good to great?

This research case study illustrates the change process adopted by r. Eugene Fidelis Soh and team from an Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) led the change in hospital management and practices. From the emergence of COVID-19 to the outbreak of the Delta variant, and to the sudden surge of cases in September 2021. TTSH has had to strike a difficult balance between battling against the unyielding and evolving coronavirus (on top of its high - and growing - caseload of patients in a large and ageing district) and preparing TTSH for massive organisational transformation as part of Singapore's National Healthcare Transformation as well as its own Vision for 2040. Anchoring on three key queastions for this transformation were asked: Why did TTSH need to undertake this transformation? What was the purpose, cause or belief underlying this movement? How might the hospital align its existing shared visions to its Vision for 2040? What would TTSH look like in 2040?

The year was 2021. At his Gurugram office in Haryana, India, Anil Chaudhry, Zone President and Managing Director of Schneider Electric India Private Limited (SEIPL), sat working on his keynote address for a conference. He had been invited to present a globally relevant business case on energy-efficient practices for digital transformation and their application in the larger business ecosystem. SEIPL was a subsidiary of Schneider Electric (SE). The French industrial giant SE was a global leader in energy management and industrial automation and delivered solutions spanning hardware, software, and services. SE was also among the Fortune Global 500. Chaudhry was keen on showcasing the company's success in implementing digital transformation. The SE audit team found that SEIPL's Hyderabad factory (in Telangana) pioneered automated tools in 2016 when terms such as "Industry 4.0" and "digitalization" were thin on the ground. The factory successfully converted a brownfield facility into a smart factory in 2019, implementing EcoStruxure, a platform for accelerating digital transformation.Chaudhry had to address multiple questions based on the learnings and takeaways from the implementation at Hyderabad: Why did the need for creating a smart factory arise? How did this lead to digital transformation across the value chain? Were such implementations scalable? Could other industry players replicate this success by converting their non-IIoT -enabled facilities into smart factories? What aspects did organizations need to focus on while planning for such a transformation?

The year was 2021. At his Gurugram office in Haryana, India, Anil Chaudhry, Zone President and Managing Director of Schneider Electric India Private Limited (SEIPL), sat working on his keynote address for a conference. He had been invited to present a globally relevant business case on energy-efficient practices for digital transformation and their application in the larger business ecosystem. SEIPL was a subsidiary of Schneider Electric (SE). The French industrial giant SE was a global leader in energy management and industrial automation and delivered solutions spanning hardware, software, and services. SE was also among the Fortune Global 500. Chaudhry was keen on showcasing the company's success in implementing digital transformation. The SE audit team found that SEIPL's Hyderabad factory (in Telangana) pioneered automated tools in 2016 when terms such as "Industry 4.0" and "digitalization" were thin on the ground. The factory successfully converted a brownfield facility into a smart factory in 2019, implementing EcoStruxure, a platform for accelerating digital transformation.Chaudhry had to address multiple questions based on the learnings and takeaways from the implementation at Hyderabad: Why did the need for creating a smart factory arise? How did this lead to digital transformation across the value chain? Were such implementations scalable? Could other industry players replicate this success by converting their non-IIoT -enabled facilities into smart factories? What aspects did organizations need to focus on while planning for such a transformation?

The case traces the roots of culture at Ganga Hospital, a trauma care center in Coimbatore, an industrial hub in South India. The hospital was founded by an anesthetist with his resourceful wife. Their sons trained overseas with legends in plastic and orthopedic surgery, and returned home. Given the triad of specialties within the family, trauma care emerged as a focus for the hospital. As directors and expert surgeons, the brothers established a core team, and carefully built a sustaining culture at the hospital. Culture emerges in a hospital setting from the attitudes of employees towards each other, their shared values, and governance structures. This culture impacts patient safety and outcomes. The case begins by contrasting the transactional principal-agent model of culture with that of pro-organizational stewardship. The RBV framework helps administrators who wish to make their staff valuable and inimitable. The case provides examples of stewardship by the directors of Ganga Hospital as well as its senior leadership. A few tenets form the threads of shared thinking at Ganga: a spirit of Ubuntu, collective patient ownership, a healthy hierarchy based on mentorship, delegated decision making, and so on. In the natural progression of the hospital, Ganga has gone beyond its focus on clinical excellence to establish academic and research pillars. This has helped the hospital nurture its homegrown talent, as well as train doctors in the streams of anesthesia, plastic, and orthopedic surgery, the triad of disciplines constituting trauma care. The case concludes by highlighting the societal orientation of the hospital with numerous examples.

The case is set in September 2023, and talks about the energy transition of the oil and gas industry in context to ExxonMobil (Exxon), which has seen continued backlash from media and climate activists on its stance on climate change, strategies towards pivoting its core business towards more sustainable practices and moving away from fossil fuel energy that contributes significantly to global warming. While many oil and gas companies have increasingly opted to investing in renewable forms of energy, Exxon has instead focused on investing in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, and other alternate forms of energy like hydrogen and biofuels. Exxon had also introduced Net Zero pledges, but industry analysts continued to question the company's stance and strategies and its persistent focus on oil and gas. Was chasing Net Zero the right strategy for Exxon moving forward? Given its predominant involvement in oil and natural gas, was it strategic to persist in prioritizing oil demand alongside lower emission initiatives and transition investments? Was its existing strategy sufficient to help the conglomerate reinvent itself in a competitive and rapidly changing energy market?

In January 2024, Kara Nortman, Julie Uhrman, and Natalie Portman, the founders of Angel City Football Club (ACFC) were developing the club's first three-year strategic plan. Founded in 2020, ACFC had a star-studded investor group, including Portman and celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Garner, Billie Jean King, and 13 former players from the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team (USWNT). As outsiders to professional sports, the all-female founding team had rewritten the playbook for how to build a sports franchise by applying lessons from the tech and entertainment industries. They had harnessed digital platforms to establish and cultivate a global brand. Unlike typical sports franchises that built their teams and track records over many years before extending their brand beyond a local base, Angel City had inverted the model, generating as much global as local interest in the club within the first three years. ACFC's success was reflected in its estimated private market valuation of $180 million, the highest in the league. But perhaps equally important to ACFC, the club had made a positive impact on its local community and had started to bend the curve toward greater pay equity in women's sports-the club's ultimate goal. The founders knew there was much more to do to capitalize on the club's momentum. There were opportunities to build the brand further globally and to build out fan engagement and membership in the mobile app, but these would require investments in digital content and production, CRM systems, and e-commerce. There were also opportunities to build the "on-field product" (team and facilities) that would demand budget allocation to training facilities, the field, coaching staff, and medical rehabilitation facilities and staff. The founders weighed the most effective ways to build value for the franchise. Was it better to allocate the incremental budget dollar to investments in digital brand building or to investments in the on-field product?

Founded in Hyderabad, India in 2019, Inkpothub is India's first digital media platform to offer researchers, scholars, and academics a forum for sharing success and experience stories. The platform allows users to share their journeys to promote research as a career, help researchers make informed career choices, and avoid common pitfalls. Inkpothub also creates, curates, and shares content, information, and knowledge to promote management scholarship and research. The platform connects users with scholars in major Indian academic institutions through content, mentorship programs, courses, and workshops. Inkpothub facilitates high-quality research output and works closely with institutions across the country to promote their doctoral programs to prospective students.<br><br>Inkpothub's co-founder and current sole owner is Anita Sharma, India's first woman skydiver with a disability, who is also an entrepreneur with a doctorate from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore. Sharma has worked as professor at IIM, Amritsar and has been a keynote speaker, among other roles she has held. In April 2020, Inkpothub's co-founder Nishan Singh left the company for personal reasons, leaving Sharma to lead the company alone and face the impact from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. With a difficult business environment for all businesses across all countries, Sharma was considering three potential options for the future: sell the business to regain her investment in the company, find a new partner to grow the business and share the risks and revenues, or continue to run the business on her own.

In June 2023, the director of corporate communication and digital services for Khalil Fattal et Fils SAL (a subsidiary of Fattal Group) was tasked with presenting a strategy for the company's online activities. The family business was a fourth-generation diversified distributor of a large variety of products and many other items by well-known brands headquartered near Beirut, Lebanon. The director had started to explore online sales platforms after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, which was soon followed by a major political and economic crisis in Lebanon. The director was wondering which of two potential strategies she should present to the board of directors. She could recommend a B2C strategy to strengthen the company's retail business or a B2B strategy to avoid potential conflicts among the company's various independent retailers. The director had to make a decision before the next board meeting.

This case, set in January 2024, discusses the entrepreneurship journey of Serene Lim, the co-founder and CEO of Vibefam, a tech management system for boutique fitness studios. In the Singapore gym and fitness sector, besides the large chain studios, there were many smaller studios that offered niche activities to consumers. These studios often did not have automated booking services, relying instead on pen-and-paper records. Lim felt that she could develop an app to streamline the booking process for these studios and their clients. In 2021, Lim assembled a team comprising members with a common passion for entrepreneurship and possessing the relevant business and technological expertise. After several online interviews with potential customers, the team pivoted away from building a system based on social features. The team then built a prototype booking app to gain actionable feedback from both studio operators and users. Most of the early adopters loved the product and quickly converted to paying customers. While Lim was proud of Vibefam's achievements thus far, she was constantly thinking about how best the startup could expand.

In December 2023, the 60-year-old weight management industry stalwart WeightWatchers announced the launch of WeightWatchers Clinic, which incorporated GLP-1s , a new class of prescription weight-loss medications, into the company's portfolio of products and mobile app experience. The company's embrace of prescription medications for weight loss represented a bold strategic evolution. Since its inception, WeightWatchers had promoted peer-to-peer support coupled with science-based behavior modifications for weight loss, rooted in the idea that weight management was fundamentally about establishing healthy diet and exercise habits. While the company's core business would continue to center on behavior modification, WeightWatcher's new CEO Sima Sistani believed an expanded "toolkit" could be a game-changer for people for whom the company's traditional weight-loss program was inadequate and who required other kinds of support. Sistani, a Silicon Valley veteran, had stepped into the CEO role at a critical moment for the company. Revenue had been declining for years due to slowing member subscriptions, a lackluster digital app, and increasing competition from a host of players. Now, a year and a half into her tenure, revenues continued to trend downward. As she looked ahead, Sistani pondered how to strike the right balance between investing in the "core" business and growing the nascent clinical offering. She recognized that, for the iconic company, there was a delicate balance to be struck between ramping up new products and services and winding down legacy offerings such as weekly in-person meetings, while also fortifying the digital app. She wondered if there were synergies that might offer new avenues for growth in a dynamic market.

Describes a negotiation where lives are truly at stake, where key lessons on persuasion and the role that identity might play in a negotiation are on display through an effort by a frontline negotiator from OneLegacy, the US's largest organ procurement organization. As the CEO outlines the core strategy and philosophy of this non-profit organization of negotiators in the backdrop of an extremely challenging negotiation between the frontline staff and the family of a recently deceased person. Provides insight into various negotiating situations where classical value creation and claiming are less directly applicable, and where team diversity can generate productive benefits.

This case traces the life of Katharine Graham from housewife to publisher of the Washington Post. Born into a family of wealth, Graham described herself as a "doormat wife" after she married Phil Graham and stayed at home to raise their children. His unexpected death thrust her into the role of publisher, a job for which she was ill-prepared. Graham made her mark in history by publishing the Pentagon Papers, which showed the extent to which the government had misled the American people during the Vietnam War, and reporting on the Watergate break-in that eventually forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon. A role model for women and journalists, students will learn how Katharine Graham navigated life's choices to leave a lasting impact on the world.

In early 2023, Maggioncalda, CEO of US EdTech firm Coursera, launched Project Genesis to develop a strategy for incorporating GenAI capabilities into the firm's offerings, asking his teams to focus on value to the firm and cost of implementation. The team identified several projects: powering translations and modifying content format and delivery, personalized coaching, an automatic course-building tool, and the building out of new GenAI-related academic content. By early 2024, the firm had made significant progress in bringing these ideas to market, but there was still much to do. Technology was fast evolving, and Coursera needed to continuously improve its offerings. Maggioncalda wanted better branding to make personalized coaching a distinctive advantage of the firm's platform. For its course builder tool, Coursera and its university partners had to work through difficult intellectual property and branding questions. But more broadly, Maggioncalda remained alert to the risks presented by the advent of GenAI. While the firm had been an early mover, competitors were fast adapting. Was Coursera taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by the technology? What more could it do?

At the end of 2023, the Swedish startup H2 Green Steel was mid-way through construction on an integrated steel plant in Northern Sweden that would use abundant local hydro power to create Europe's first commercial-scale green steel. Their goal was to help European manufacturers to decarbonize their upstream (Scope 3) inputs, and they had successfully negotiated offtake contracts with the big European car companies. Their aspiration did not stop there, however. Maria Persson Gulda, chief technology officer at H2 Green Steel, was already thinking about how to take their green steel technology to other regions, and for use by other kinds of customers. They could play a critical role in addressing a core cause of climate change, but achieving this would require that they scale up their technology as rapidly as possible. How should that be done?

Miami-Dade County led the work to get South Florida designated a national climate resilience tech hub, the only one of 31 focused on climate change, an urgent major issue for the region in light of global warming and sea level rise. Venture capitalists saw the potential but not many investable ventures; some entrepreneurs created scalable ventures but without much regional support; economic development agencies were not yet fully building the ecosystem or just getting started. Most wanted more from government, higher education, and others. The label "climate tech hub" had to be backed by specific proposals to attract available funding. What are the gaps and missing ingredients? What actions might fill the gaps?