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Huanglongxi, a historic town in Sichuan Province, topped the list of "China's Iconic Cultural Tourism Towns 2020." In October 2017, Zhang Dafan, the executive director of the Huanglongxi Overseas Chinese Town Group (OCT), had led his team in initiating a smart cultural tourism project in Huanglongxi against the backdrop red-hot rivalry between China's ancient towns. In just three years, the project had led to the remarkable transformation of Huanglongxi into a smart, award-winning ancient town. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic had left the tourism industry in limbo. To emerge from these difficult times caused by the pandemic, Huanglongxi the OCT had to assess how to strengthen the depth and breadth of its Huanglongxi's smart cultural tourism construction offer in order to bring draw travellers back. How had Huanglongxi overcome the homogeneous competition it faced to develop into a unique, smart ancient town in 2017? Given the new challenges it faced, how could it do so once again?

In May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests that followed the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody, leadership at the National Association for Stock Car Automobile Racing (NASCAR), the American auto-racing company best known for stock-car racing, had to decide whether to ban the Confederate flag at its events. To many, the flag was emblematic of racism and a celebration of the Confederacy and its attempts, in the American Civil War, to retain the institution of slavery. Race attendees often carried the flag with them, it was emblazoned on clothes, souvenirs, and mugs, and some even tattooed it on themselves. The Confederate flag had been controversial for years, and NASCAR had tried to eliminate it and other racist symbols from its events, but to no avail. But this time was different: awareness of injustice and inequity had permeated the country's social consciousness and people throughout America had taken to the streets to protest. Nonetheless, many NASCAR fans claimed the Confederacy flag was representative of "heritage, not hate" and threatened to boycott the sport if it were banned. Despite NASCAR's attempts to diversify both the organization and the audience, NASCAR's fan base remained decidedly conservative and, for the most part, tolerant of the flag's presence. NASCAR did not want to alienate its fan base, but leadership did want to change with the times and instill diversity in every aspect of the organization. It also did not want to put up roadblocks to attendee comfort-and for many current and potential fans, the Confederate flag's presence was a roadblock.

In May 2021, SHEIN overtook Amazon as the most downloaded shopping app on the US iOS and Android app stores. During the pandemic in 2020, SHEIN achieved substantial sales growth and is now catching up with the fast-fashion giant Zara. This case first briefly discusses the apparel and fast-fashion industry and the creation of the fast-fashion model by Zara. Then it covers SHEIN's historical development and its "fast-fashion 2.0" business model-using big data and algorithms to identify customers and their preferences. The case also discusses various perspectives of SHEIN's business operations: products and pricing, marketing and branding, and supply chain management. The case further discusses several challenges that SHEIN faces: product quality, transparency of company disclosure, environmental impact, and geopolitical risk. In the last section, the case presents several options that SHEIN may be able to pursue in the future. The case is suitable for MBA, EMBA, and undergraduate students who are interested in competitive strategy, technology or digital strategy, innovation, blue ocean strategy, China strategy, global strategy (cross-border e-commerce), and the fashion industry. The case can be used in core strategy courses at different levels, as it covers various topics.

This case study is organised into four parts (A through D), meant to be read and discussed progressively. Jane Blanston, a newly hired Enterprise Architect at LGB Bank, had developed over her career a specialisation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Prior to joining LGB, she had recent successes in a smaller regional bank where she had replaced its outdated batch-mode file transfer style of integration with a real-time SOA style of integration. This provided the bank with a more flexible architecture and an abstraction layer which enabled the bank to make large scale changes in the backend (e.g., a core banking system replacement) with minimal impact to the bank's front-end banking channels (e.g., internet banking). Furthermore, with an SOA in place, the bank had the ability to rapidly assemble new solutions by reusing existing services. Blanston was headhunted by LGB and offered a job based on her expertise in SOA and reputation as a problem solver. LGB specifically wanted her to review its current microservices-based architecture (a subset of SOA) and to propose an improved architecture which emphasised service reuse, like what she had implemented in the past. Even though LGB was a larger bank with larger integration problems, She decided to take up the challenge. She accepted the job offer to join LGB's technology department based in Singapore.

Chinese electric vehicle (EV) company NIO had launched Battery as a Service (BaaS), in a competitive bid to reduce vehicle price and make its products more attractive to its consumers. By 2021, almost 40% of its consumer base had switched to using BaaS, and NIO had plans to expand its BaaS services further. BaaS offered four key benefits. Firstly, it reduced the price of the EV by about US$ 10,800. Secondly, it allowed consumers to do multiple battery swaps for a nominal US$ 152 monthly subscription fee. Thirdly, it allowed consumers to swap their batteries in a short time of 3 to 5 minutes, as opposed to 45 minutes recharge at a charging station. To support its BaaS program, NIO had installed 301 battery-swapping stations across China by July 2021, and had plans to complete 3000 swapping stations globally by 2025. Fourthly, BaaS supported a circular economy, as it potentially helped recycle batteries in a more controlled fashion, which could then be reused in other industries (like for solar panels in homes). However, NIO's BaaS entailed a few shortcomings despite its promise. Its implementation involved the construction of swapping stations, deployment of automated technology, and maintenance of battery stocks at stations, which was an expensive affair. Besides, technology for batteries had started to advance, and batteries could last longer in terms of miles travelled based on a single charge, reducing the need for frequent recharge at swapping stations. Given the scenario, was NIO's BaaS venture a sustainable business model? Could it provide NIO with a strong competitive advantage?

The Alcagüete case is an example of a market-focused social initiative (B Corporation) that encountered serious doubts regarding its mission while it was considering an expansion proposal that would allow it to grow exponentially in record time. Alcagüete produced and sold healthy snacks. A fundamental pillar of the business was its social value proposition of combating childhood malnutrition. This was reflected in the brand and its 1x1 cause-related marketing strategy under which for each product sold, a contribution was made to a social organization addressing childhood malnutrition in Colombia, becoming a mainstay of its positioning and differentiation strategy. A progressive growth strategy had been working, but a more significant scale-up was needed the following year. One of the company's strategic partners had offered to sell products at hard-discount stores, but at what cost? And if they didn't, what other growth options were available?

Alexandra Camacho, Vice President of Credit Risk at the Multilateral Development Agency (MDA), faces the challenge of preparing in a short time a report that links the results of CSR management to the financial performance of Banco W. Demonstrating the link between finance and CSR has been established as an essential requirement given the critical position of Ernesto Rivera, Vice President of Sustainable Development, as a prerequisite to the approval of a guarantee being requested by Banco W. The approval of this guarantee will allow Alexandra to complete the goals required of her unit, to attend to the special request of the President of MDA to give a prompt response to the bank and to open a new niche of clients. In the role of Alexandra Camacho, the students will take on the challenge of developing the Value Footprint or Fourth Financial Statement. It will enable them to relate the results of the financial management and the CSR of Banco W and thus be able to support the recommendation of the endorsement requested by Banco W. This case uses public information of Banco W for didactic purposes, and all characters and situations presented are the product of fiction.

In 2019, Bruno Masson, the vice chairman of Veolia's Ethics Committee, was preparing for a meeting on a rollout plan for a new whistleblowing system to more countries. Veolia, a global supplier of water, waste, and energy services, had recently gone through several incidents of corporate misconduct. In response, Veolia believed that strengthening corporate whistleblowing was an essential next step to prevent future incidents of misconduct. Given the positive experiences with its existing platform in the U.S., Veolia had originally tested this platform in Germany, where both corporate and legal protections for whistleblowers were weaker compared to the U.S.. However, this rollout turned out to be unsuccessful. This initial setback prompted Masson to try a different approach to encourage more whistleblowing. They hired an outside vendor to provide Veolia with new whistleblowing capabilities. Would the new system be more successful in encouraging employees to report their concerns? How would the whistleblowing laws in Germany influence the effectiveness of this platform? Could this technology have negative implications for employee trust and productivity in the long run?

Bunge, one of the world's leading agribusiness traders and processors, strives to comply with its commitment to having a deforestation-free value chain by 2025 while it considers potential new business growth areas. After a complex turnaround, which involved one of the biggest corporate reorganizations in Bunge's 203-year history, the company finally has surplus cash to invest. CEO Greg Heckman and Chief Sustainability Officer Robert Coviello must figure out if they can turn sustainability into a profit maker for the company or if it will remain as another cost of doing business.

Rahul, a first year Master of Business Administration Student in a premier business school in India, encountered a misunderstanding while interacting with his study group, which met online due to COVID-19 restrictions in August 2020. He tried to resolve the misunderstanding, but instead, his attempt resulted in an escalation of the situation. Distressed over the misunderstanding and what he perceived as a breach of trust, he had lost his motivation to work with the group. Now, he is trying to reassess the situation and understand what went wrong, in an attempt to form a plan of action to mitigate the situation.

In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the vice-president of sales and marketing at Priority Management, a hotel and resort management company, was overseeing the operations of two hotels. New England Hotel was a large corporate hotel that had successfully cultivated much of its business from corporations in the nearby corporate business park. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, hotel occupancy plummeted, and the hotel's general manager was resisting changing strategy to address heightened fears amid uncertainty from the hotel's staff. A "business as usual" strategy would inevitably result in the hotel closing and all staff members being laid off. Midwest Hotel was a major branded full-service hotel located outside the downtown area. The hotel had undergone several changes in leadership and rebranding, which the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated. The hotel manager was forced to drastically reduce the hotel's staff and implement a new strategy before the hotel became unsavable.

CUBO Modular Inc. (CUBO) was a start-up social enterprise in the Philippines that emerged shortly after its chief executive officer, Earl Forlales, received a substantial cash award for besting 1,200 entries in a competition. The concept behind Forlales's competition entry was the use of engineered bamboo to produce modular houses. The materials, design, and fabrication resulted in cheaper houses that could be used for mass housing projects. The public gained awareness of CUBO from the various articles posted online about the competition, which were also posted on CUBO's Facebook page. By 2021, interest in the well-designed CUBO houses had swelled, and the quantity of queries overwhelmed the CUBO team, resulting in its failure to respond to hundreds of queries posed by potential customers. What should Forlales do to keep interest in CUBO products at a high level while managing its production capacity to meet consumer demand?

Cognizant Technology Solutions (Cognizant) was a multinational corporation that operated in the information technology (IT) services sector and provided consulting and business process outsourcing services to its clients. As the world fell into the clutches of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company faced a series of challenges, through 2020 and into the start of 2021, that rocketed its employee attrition rates to an all-time high while also affecting revenue. During early 2021, the company was faced with the herculean task of retaining employees in the face of uncertainty and an extremely competitive market, even if this meant putting a dent in the company's cash reserves. Cognizant had to determine how to build a better employee value proposition and develop initiatives to both retain and regain employees. Were the measures it had taken sufficient? Amid the scare of the pandemic and the war raging in India for talent, would Cognizant need a more robust human resources (HR) plan? Would it need to improve its measures for promoting the well-being of employees? Was the company too focused on performance and the bottom line?

In 2016, a Black woman entrepreneur in Ajax, Ontario, Canada, in the greater Toronto area founded a small but successful venture named Kids Swag in response to a gap she identified in the children's products market, which was failing to represent the Black community. The founder started her business while working as a full-time marketing professional. Kids Swag sold globally sourced products that featured positive Black personas and imagery in pop-up stores, local community events, and online through her social media account. Within four years, she exceeded her initial goals and found herself struggling to keep pace with the growing demand for her products. Her clientele grew from the local community and Facebook groups to international customers, large companies, and institutional clients such as retail outlets and school boards. By the end of 2020, the founder was wondering if she should open a physical store to complement her online presence and if she should leave her full-time career to devote herself fully to running her business. With warehouse space becoming increasingly limited and demand for her products continuing to grow, could she invest the necessary time and resources to take Kids Swag to the next level?

This case describes how SAP Labs India, a research and development center of SAP SE introduced and pursued a wide range of diversity and inclusion (D&I) programs across the organization. Set in September 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it narrates the story of Sap Labs' D&I journey of over a decade. Told from the perspective of Shraddhanjali Rao, VP, Human Resources, and other company executives, the case outlines and examines different diversity programs that were instituted around four pillars of D&I, namely, (i) gender, (ii) culture and identity (LGBTQ employees), (iii) cross-generational employees and (iv) differently abled people. The case discusses the company's efforts to promote awareness and adoption of its diversity goals across these four pillars and the challenges it faced along the way through the perspectives of a cross-section of program leaders. The case raises the following questions: Did the programmatic efforts to implement diversity initiatives lead to inclusion at SAP Labs? What were the challenges in promoting these initiatives? Did they degenerate to tokenism? What could SAP Labs have done better to institutionalize its commitment to diversity in the workplace? Beyond diversity, what more could SAP Labs do in the future to embrace an inclusive culture?

This case focuses on a key business decision taken by The Boeing Company to counter competition from its rival Airbus - in a duopoly market. The pressure to stay relevant, be competitive and bag a large market pie in the burgeoning aviation sector, led Boeing to make a series of untimely decisions that resulted in two plane crashes, followed by an exposé of several safety and regulatory practices and processes. The case presents Boeing's flagship 737 MAX 8 aircraft; throws light on the popularity of the model; provides an overview of the aviation market; and the context surrounding the two crashes that occurred when the 737 MAX aircraft were released; and the ensuing communication debacle that followed.

The case traces the digital journey of the Vikatan Group, a Tamil media conglomerate in India. The case can be used to build a process-based framework for ensuring organizational longevity, especially when the environment is dynamic. Vikatan faced a continuous onslaught of technological changes which at first sight are peripheral to the magazine publishing industry. However, these digital disruptions later became the defining media for news and entertainment. Vikatan made some decisions early on to follow where its customers went. It encouraged low stakes experiments with new technology. It ensured that the top management was open to inputs from the successes/failures of the experiments. Finally, it built flexibility into its organizational core to ensure that it successfully overcame the digital disruptions. The case provides the facts of this digital journey and helps the student identify how organizational longevity can be built into the firm through conscious strategic decision making.

Meesho is a three-part case that highlights the ups and downs, and the twists and turns, of a typical entrepreneurial journey. It follows the experiences and decisions of Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, two IIT Delhi graduates, as they build their venture - Meesho. The idea that they begin with, morphs substantially as they go through the process of finding a product-market fit. Each time they face a hurdle, they dig deeper into the needs and challenges of their customers, until they arrive at what could potentially be product-market fit. Even then, they struggle to monetize and decide to pivot yet again, in order to unlock the value created by their venture. The case provides rich material to discuss the iterative, non-linear nature of venture building. It reinforces the importance of continuously measuring and responding to metrics.

Godrej Appliances Division (GAD) of Godrej & Boyce manufacturing company limited - which had been around for more than 60 years and was the first company to manufacture refrigerators in India - began to face intense competition in the early to late 2000s due to the entry of multinational companies (MNCs), such as LG and Samsung, after liberalization of the Indian economy. GAD had been among the top-3 players in the industry until the entry of the MNCs, and subsequently, their market share fell by half to 13% in the late 1990s and further decreased to 6% by 2010. To improve their competitiveness, to benchmark with industry best practices, and to get feedback from the assessment process, GAD chose to participate in the Confederation of Indian Industry's (CII) Business Excellence (BE) award, modeled after EFQM, from 2011 onward. The objective was to use this feedback to identify their internal gaps vis-à-vis the competition and improve the respective processes in order to regain their market share. The case describes how GAD made use of the EFQM philosophy and the award criteria to completely revamp their processes and bridge gaps with the competition. They focused on the five enablers: (1) Leadership (2) Strategy (3) People (4) Partnerships & Resources and (5) Processes, Products & Services, to improve their business and organizational processes. These efforts paid off, and GAD progressively improved their products and processes during the next several years, finally achieving the CII-BE award in 2019. The case A ends with a list of operational capabilities that GAD acquired in the process and how they can exploit them, just when COVID-19 pandemic hit India. Case B then goes on to describe how GAD made use of these capabilities to quickly develop and introduce new products that were urgently needed in the country, to address the challenges posed by the pandemic.

L'Oréal, the world leader in beauty products, began to rethink its vision for the industry. The world was on the cusp of a digital future full of possibilities. For a company known for its consumer-pleasing beauty products and owner of some the world's most iconic brands, this meant thinking about innovation in a different way. It would no longer mean only providing the best products but also continuously adapting the industry to market needs. Through a combination of goal setting, training and communication, the digital transformation began, first with efforts in marketing, sales and consumer outreach, but supply chain quickly moved to a prominent role in helping address questions about how digitalization would affect the company's products and consumer expectations. Starting with a vision of the CEO, Jean-Paul Agon, the company found itself on a journey to challenge its culture, its approach and even what its value proposition was. Along the way, the supply chain became a force for bringing together the different functions of a large, complex organization to identify and implement new business models in the digital age that cut to the heart of the company's operations.