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Kombucha Canada Inc. sold kombucha beverages to restaurants and grocery stores in British Columbia, Canada. Restaurant and store closures, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, had affected the company's sales. The business owner wanted to value her inventory at year-end using the first-in, first-out method of valuation and calculate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on her inventory.

Urban Spring is a successful social enterprise. Every day, people in Hong Kong buy around 2.5 million bottles of water. Until Urban Spring marketed its award-winning high tech Well井 water fountains, most plastic containers were sent to landfill, adding hazardous chemicals to the environment. Urban Spring's founder has made it his mission is to reduce the city's plastic waste and to encourage people to take a more sustainable approach to bottled water. By providing consumers with clean chilled water - free of charge, 24/7, Urban Spring has replaced more than 5.28 million plastic bottles, which would otherwise have been sent to landfill. Led by its CEO, Ada Yip, the Urban Spring design team created a fountain that is monitored remotely for hygiene, water quality, and data collection. Units are leased to corporations, hotels, schools and learning institutions. With its second-generation fountains ready for release, the company now needs to make crucial decisions about its future expansion and potential partnerships.

David Swensen and the Investments Office staff must decide whether to continue to allocate the bulk of the university's endowment to illiquid investments-hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, real estate, natural resources-given the impact of the COVID-19 public health crisis on the financial markets. The case explores the risks and benefits of a different asset allocation strategy and considers how to create financial models to prepare for unexpected events. It highlights the issues around allocations across different subclasses, e.g., between venture capital, hedge funds, and real assets.

In 2019 Southwest was the only US airline to remain profitable for nearly 50 years in a row, to never file for bankruptcy, and to never furlough or lay off employees. At the core of its profitability was a commitment, unlike other airline carriers, to keep only Boeing 737s in their fleet, thereby streamlining operational costs and training practices. This keep-it-simple corporate strategy was supported by a strong sense of community and shared values that fostered a cross-functional cohesion among Southwest employees-a culture that other low-cost carriers found difficult to replicate. However, The company's keep-it-simple corporate strategy was tested in March 2019 when Southwest (along with other airlines ) was forced to ground 34 of its newest 737 MAX aircraft, after the Federal Aviation Administration cited safety concerns following the crash of two 737 MAX planes. As a result, Southwest considered parting with its long standing single carrier policy. In this case, students will be asked to consider what ripple effect a move away from a single-source vendor might have on the company's highly efficient operations and organizational culture.

First emerging in China in early January 2020, the lethal COVID-19 virus quickly spread throughout Europe and to the US east coast, with New York City as the epicenter. In March the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Policy makers agreed that a vaccine would be necessary to control the virus, however, interim measures would be necessary until a safe vaccine could be developed, manufactured and distributed. The key initiatives undertaken in "flattening the curve" of the virus's spread included voluntary social distancing, frequent sanitation of hands and surfaces, and, in some instances, mandatory lockdowns. These measures forced many businesses to operate at limited capacity and also reduced the supply of some inputs such as labor. By December 2020 several vaccines had been developed and the world awaited mass distribution, while thousands of people continued to succumb to COVID-19 every day. In this environment, despite regulatory, monetary, and fiscal responses to the crisis, there was both uncertainty about the short-run path to economic recovery as well as the long-term impact of COVID-19 for the global economy. In this case, students will work with a Microsoft Excel-built simulation tool to help understand how disease dynamics work and how it affects the economy.

In 2020, Ndidi Nwuneli, founder and CEO of Sahel Consulting in Nigeria, faced a thorny set of problems. Her firm partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a large project to develop the local dairy industry as a way to facilitate equitable growth and conserve foreign exchange. The Nigerian dairy market was dominated by imported, powdered milk, but the country had a large population of cows owned by pastoralists. Nwuneli had to devise a plan to get local dairy processors, multinational firms, local pastoralists, and the Nigerian government to work together to make local cows more efficient, connect smallholder farmers with processors, and compete with imported milk powder. The stakes were high: the project, if successful, could play a large part in reducing Nigeria's deadly farmer-herder conflict and reducing the country's macroeconomic imbalances. The case explores the variety of interests involved and asks students to debate whether Nwuneli and others should push for protectionist policies as a way to catalyze local production.

Tom Hermans, CEO of EMMA Safety Footwear, is excited about the idea of developing the world's first circular safety shoe - one that adheres to the cradle-to-cradle design principles. This could be a transformational strategy, differentiating EMMA from the crowded safety shoe market in Europe and extending a long tradition of social responsibility since its establishment in 1931. Careful consideration and research are required because this would impact almost every aspect of EMMA's operation - the business model, internal operations, the global supply chain, and the company culture. Questions remain about whether this is the best way to differentiate EMMA. What kind of change management would EMMA and its suppliers need to deploy the circular initiative? How could the business model be reinvented to capture the economic benefits of circular shoes? Can Tom and his team push through this drastic change in a conservative company in a conservative market?

With a fine division of labor across different countries, the global value chains use global sourcing and combines developed countries' know-how with developing countries' low-cost labor to produce lower-priced and higher-quality products, bringing benefits to all parties joining the global value chains. This case, which is based on Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple and other global technology giants, enables students to understand that several forces are challenging and reshaping these global value chains. Foxconn, officially known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, plays an important role as an electronics manufacturer in the global supply chains. The company manufactures different parts in multiple locations to lower costs and offers good quality and competitive prices. Foxconn's main manufacturing plants are all located in China, but Foxconn is under pressure from major US customers such as Apple to move production facilities to other countries. Many factors that are reshaping the global value chains, such as the US-China trade war and COVID-19 pandemic, all have affected Foxconn's operations and forced Foxconn to adjust its strategies. This case sheds light on the risks of global value chains. It provides an opportunity for students to discuss how a company can be affected by global value chain restructuring, especially the US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic, and what strategies a company might adopt to cope with global value chain restructuring.

Angel Torres is a college sophomore placed in their first summer internship. While Angel hoped the Internship might lead to a full-time job after graduation, the work, so far, was basic and did not provide Angel an opportunity to show their full abilities. Angel had an idea of how to improve the user interface of the company's primary app but found it difficult to propose the idea. Angel had other concerns-around pay, specifically-but was concerned about raising them at home. Angel's Mom wanted Angel to help with a family chore but doing so might jeopardize the internship. What could Angel do? In the sequel, Angel reaches out to a number of colleagues and friends to collect additional information to help inform their negotiation choices.

Angel Torres is a college sophomore placed in their first summer internship. While Angel hoped the Internship might lead to a full-time job after graduation, the work, so far, was basic and did not provide Angel an opportunity to show their full abilities. Angel had an idea of how to improve the user interface of the company's primary app but found it difficult to propose the idea. Angel had other concerns-around pay, specifically-but was concerned about raising them at home. Angel's Mom wanted Angel to help with a family chore but doing so might jeopardize the internship. What could Angel do? In the sequel, Angel reaches out to a number of colleagues and friends to collect additional information to help inform their negotiation choices.

Maryam and Sameer, brother and sister, were searching for an apartment in Hitech City, Hyderabad. Recent college graduates who were now starting jobs with high-profile technology firms, they wanted to lease an apartment together. The case details their challenge in negotiating with a potential landlord amid cultural and religious concerns. Maryam must address the landlord's biases and concerns through a careful negotiation involving compromise, building personal relationships and re-setting expectations.

Priya, a graduate student of public policy, was offered internships from two units within the International Development Fund. One offered a good salary, took advantage of her past work experience but was longer than she wanted; the other, offered no pay but would give her the work experience she wanted and was the perfect length. The case details the offers and asks students to consider whether Priya has room to negotiate aspects of either offer.

Shahana had just received a job offer from a trendy global startup in India, but she was getting married in five months and wanted to negotiate for a short leave for the wedding and a transfer to the company's Hong Kong office to be with her new husband. In balancing her career and personal goals, Shahana has to negotiate with both her fiancé and her potential new employer through a careful negotiation involving compromise and re-setting expectations.

This case follows the story of Suelin Chen in her career as the founder of Cake, a digital platform that provided "one-stop access" to a wide range of advance care and end-of-life planning products and services. The case highlights the societal, technological, and cultural trends that led to innovation in end-of-life planning. Chen debates which users to target and whether to utilize a B2B or B2C business model to do so.

Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was a chemical used by tens of thousands of businesses in the United States. It was an affordable tool for many. Yet, TCE had been associated with important health risks, including cancer and autoimmune disease. TCE potentially posed other risks as well: some researchers argued that low doses of TCE caused deformities in fetal hearts, while others argued that there was not enough science to back up this claim. Over twenty years, a vigorous debate encompassing academic, government and industry voices played out around just how toxic TCE was. The American chemical industry and TCE end-users used lobbying to advocate for their positions. A loose coalition of activists, academics and journalists promoted their own, different, perspectives on TCE. Developments in the TCE story were often communicated to the public through investigative reporting, a field of journalism facing economic crisis. The U.S. government and its Environmental Protection Agency were responsible for assessing TCE's toxicity, leading to secondary policy decisions around how the chemical should be regulated. Yet, by the end of 2020, controversy remained around whether successive governments had been untowardly influenced by special interests in their TCE decision-making. Which stance should the Biden administration take in regards to TCE? More broadly, which broader lessons could be drawn from the TCE case? In particular, should the influence of lobbying on regulations and policies be constrained in any way?

Florian Hillen, co-founder and CEO of VideaHealth, a startup that used artificial intelligence (AI) to detect dental conditions on x-rays, spent the early years of his company laying the groundwork for an AI factory. A process for quickly building and iterating on new AI products, Hillen believed that the AI factory would prove a competitive advantage when he took his company to market. The AI factory consisted of four stages: the data pipeline, which required labeling dental pathologies on x-rays; algorithm development, which required writing computer programs that learned to recognize the presence of dental conditions and identify them in un-labeled x-rays; an experimentation platform, which tested the accuracy of Videa's diagnoses and determined the appropriate sensitivity of the AI models; and software infrastructure, which deployed the company's AI programs and managed the process for cleaning, storing, and transmitting data. Hillen knew that his company's technology would appeal to individual dentists or dental service organizations (DSOs), who could use AI to make diagnoses more accurate and improve patient trust. Yet Videa would also benefit insurance companies, who could use the technology during the claims review process. Poised to take the company to market, Hillen must decide which customer segment to pursue.

This case describes the life choices of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. A young man with tremendous potential, Wilson hit rock bottom as a drunk. An epiphany, coupled with his personal drive, led him to build a worldwide organization that has helped millions of people recover from alcohol addiction. Students will learn how he navigated life's choices to leave a lasting impact on the world.

This case uses the impact of the global pandemic on the concentrated meatpacking industry to explore management of supply chain disruptions. COVID-19 had created massive problems at Tyson Foods, with high infection rates among workers, plants closing, and farmers unable to deliver livestock to processing plants. This translated into shortages at grocery stores. Then the president of the United States issued an executive order that meat-processing plants were to stay open to ensure the food supply. At the time, Tyson Foods had decided to close the majority of its facilities, but with the order, the meat-processing giant could remain open and workers could not hold the company liable if they got sick on the job. Tyson Foods struggled with workers getting sick, with creating protocols for clean line work, and with getting products to supermarkets. The material in this case brings the opportunity to explore a vitally important supply chain, the resiliency of that supply chain, and important decisions around fragility, security, fairness, and employees' welfare. In addition, the case allows exploration around how Lean operations leads to efficiencies, but supply chains may not be resilient to disruption. Furthermore, examining John Tyson's public letter in select newspapers provides the opportunity to explore crisis communication and crisis leadership.

In November 2020, the owner of Tranquility by Jen Candle Company located in Canmore, Alberta, Canada, was reviewing her company's financial performance for its third fiscal year. The company was a candle manufacturer located in Canmore, Alberta, Canada. The owner had gathered the company's statement of financial position for fiscal year 2018-19, the list of cash receipts and disbursements for 2019-20, and various related miscellaneous information. Her task was to record all necessary accounting transactions for the current fiscal year, ending October 31, 2020.

Mathilde Johnsen was a highly motivated environmental systems engineer in the real property branch of Public Services and Procurement Canada. Johnsen advanced a job grade about every 18 months, and in 2016, she successfully applied to the management stream. In 2019, after completing an MBA, Johnsen pursued an opportunity in the executive stream of the civil service. Her past behaviour raised concerns for the selection committee, who decided that, rather than promote Johnsen, they would give her a one-year secondment in the executive position so they could assess her growth. Unfortunately, her inability to deal effectively with subordinates, peers, and superiors resulted in Johnsen's effective demotion and transfer out of the department. Could this unfortunate career derailment have been avoided?