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A cup of Starbucks was a middle-class symbol in China. Since the opening of its first store in China in 1999, Starbucks had conquered the Chinese coffee market with its experience driven philosophy. Nonetheless, a few ambitious and well-funded Chinese tech entrepreneurs had decided to challenge Starbucks. Founded in October 2017, Luckin Coffee expressed a desire "to be part of everyone's life, starting with coffee." Leveraging its core competence in technology and a business model focused on delivery and heavy discounts, Luckin scaled up rapidly. By 2020 it operated more stores in China than Starbucks. But Starbucks was responding to the new threat, forging an alliance with Alibaba backed Ele.me. In this situation, what should both firms do to do to win the war for China's coffee consumer?

In March 2020, in response to the global pandemic, the cruise industry ceased operations. Carnival was the largest cruise line operator in the world, and CEO Arnold Donald and his management team worked to position the company to survive. They slashed operating expenses and capital expenditures, raised more than $10 billion in new debt and equity financing, and negotiated with creditors. Planned ship deliveries were cancelled, and less efficient ships were retired or sold. Had the company done enough?

In August 2019, the leadership of Hester Pharmaceuticals (Hester) had a problem. Italy promised to be a key market for their new breakthrough oncology drug Akrozumab, but for almost two years, its single-payer healthcare system had been unable to agree with Hester on a price. With only a few years before a competing drug to Akrozumab was due to hit the market, company leaders felt mounting pressure to compromise with Italian negotiators. At the same time, they realized that compromising on a low price might jeopardize the higher prices Hester had already negotiated with other European nations, if these countries bought up extra supply from Italy or referenced Italy's low price when they renegotiated their own prices the following year. Should Hester settle for a low price, stall for more time, or walk away? This case introduces students to the process of bringing new prescription drugs to market and the factors that go into pricing drugs in both single-payer and multi-payer healthcare systems. Students will wrestle with the complex strategy behind pricing their drugs internationally.

THE YES, a multi-brand shopping app launched in May 2020 offered a new type of buying experience for women's fashion, driven by a sophisticated algorithm that used data science and machine learning to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on her style preferences, size, and budget. When a woman downloaded THE YES app, she embarked upon an interactive shopping journey that leveraged a fun, easy, gamified user experience (UX) reminiscent of dating apps to collect a stream of data from her that could be used to dynamically curate an ever-changing product assortment just for her. The founders had to decide whether to continue developing the UX and the algorithm to deliver on the company's customer value proposition, or to focus on new customer acquisition via paid media, with the idea that more users on the app improve the algorithm's performance. Several ideas for further monetizing the platform were on the table, including the development of social shopping features to make the shopping experience more viral, the design of an influencer program to bring fashion influencer voices onto the platform, and the construction of a customer loyalty program. Should THE YES invest in improving the algorithm, enhancing the UX with new functionality, or on customer acquisition?

In 2010, Ken Talbot, a self-made Australian billionaire, was traveling throughout Africa to bring his innovative coal technology to the continent when he perished in a plane crash. His will was originally created years prior when his estate worth was estimated to be AU $130 million. At the time of his passing, however, his estate had grown over ten times to AU $1.3 billion and he hadn't yet finalized an updated will. His beneficiaries were unaware of both the existence of his will and his intentions, which led to significant legal battles and the devaluation of a number of his assets. What could have been done differently to prevent the legal nightmare and emotional distress that plagued his family and ensure his loved ones carried out his intentions?

The Risk organization at SEB, a leading Nordic financial services group founded in 1856, undertook a culture change program focused on psychological safety, empathic listening, and strategic framing. The program enabled risk organization teams to make progress on strategic challenges and improved decision making processes. Chief Risk Officer Magnus Agustsson believed that the rest of SEB should go through a similar program. But it was not clear how to convince other departments to invest considerable time in developing the soft skills of culture change.

With "An ESG Puzzle", students get to use sustainability information paired with financial information for the first time. For the past twenty years, more and more companies around the world have started to supplement their GAAP reports with non-financial reports. This new reporting trend has become increasingly standardized but remains unregulated. While there is no one global agency to enforce non-financial reporting, international bodies like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) or the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) propose measures and methodologies of reporting sustainability information. By solving this case, students will learn about Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), how to use the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which measure these sustainability factors and lastly, how to use this information in conjunction with common financial ratios which they have previously learned about and used in other finance and accounting courses.

This case examines the leadership of Corie Barry, the new CEO of Best Buy, with a focus on actions the company took in 2020 to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. The case includes a history of Best Buy's strategy and leadership, including the transitions between the company's founder and the subsequent four CEOs. In particular, the career trajectory of CEO Corie Barry is described in detail. Regarding Best Buy's response to COVID-19, the case details the company's scenario planning and operational adjustments, including the temporary closure of all stores followed by the rapid establishment of curbside-pickup customer-order-fulfillment operations at roughly 1,000 store locations in the U.S. The case also attends to leadership's decisions to furlough more than 51,000 frontline employees, suspend in-home services, and subsequently resume in-store services under modified operating procedures.

Five years after the company's founding, Andela, a company that built and trained remote engineering teams, became arguably Africa's greatest technology unicorn. By January 2019, Andela raised $100 million in Series D funding. As Andela looked to scale in an increasingly competitive landscape, its goal was to democratize trust and become an "Amazon Web Services" (AWS) for software engineering talent. With their windfall investment and the advent of COVID, Andela had to figure out their "2.0 model" to permit scaling. How would Andela stack up in a growing landscape of global remote talent companies? Could Andela become not just Africa's, but the world's AWS for trusted software engineering talent?

Birla Cellulose, a part of India's large conglomerate Aditya Birla Group, manufactured viscose fibre, which came from wood and was naturally sustainable. In 2017, the Changing Markets Foundation (CMF) brought out a report titled Dirty Fashion, which described the environmental damage caused by manufacturing practices used in viscose fibre production. The report detailed impacts on the environment, bodies of water, and communities around viscose manufacturing plants. Birla Cellulose responded to the report by collaborating with CMF and making significant changes to its manufacturing processes to comply with the highest standards around the globe. It ensured that its raw materials were responsibly sourced and that its products were responsibly manufactured and then properly handled at the end of their lives. The company was proud of its achievements. At the same time, it recognized that it needed to do more. In late 2019, the company's business director wondered how to make the company even more sustainable. What level of investment would be required? How could it adapt to changing consumer preferences and still retain the benefits it had recently gained?

The Concorde, a British-French supersonic jet, captured the hearts and minds of aviators, business professionals, and celebrities around the world through its iconic design, superior features, and unique inflight experience. Despite its transcendent appeal, the jet became surrounded by controversy, catastrophe, an environmental movement, and changing consumer trends, all of which led to its grounding in 2003. In almost two decades, no aerospace program had been successful in recreating commercial supersonic air travel. The Concorde's story showed that these non-technical aspects of technology adoption and diffusion were strong enough to force the retirement of a superior, breakthrough technology and replace it with an inferior one. In 2021, did it make sense to aim to commercialize supersonic travel by imitating the good in the Concorde and tweaking the downsides, or was there a hidden reason why the Concorde had failed and supersonic transport had not been recreated?

This is a fictional roleplay based on the experiences of Daryn Dodson, the managing director of Illumen Capital, an investment firm that aims to leverage its power as an investor to deliver capital combined with evidence-based bias-reduction training and coaching for its portfolio of fund managers. Through Illumen Capital, Dodson worked to train portfolio fund managers to discern and eliminate implicit and explicit biases, thereby helping them to increase their returns by optimizing investment opportunities, hiring, and board selection. His approach included the "Illumen Impact Experience" in which Dodson linked slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration to the asset management industry to help people understand how assets became so imbalanced and created the huge disparities that contribute to suboptimal returns in investment portfolios. Dodson supported these historic linkages with current research, including a study conducted with Stanford SPARQ's Jennifer Eberhardt that revealed, counterintuitively, that the better Black, male fund managers performed, the greater the levels of bias they faced. Dodson is just wrapping up a pitch to the endowment of a university that was long ago saved from financial collapse by the sale of 272 slaves. The university had attempted several things to make amends for this, but Dodson thought they could do a lot more - and one was through management of the endowment. Should he, as a Black asset manager, bring up this history? If he brings it up, what tone should he use? What outcome would he be hoping for? How would bringing it up help, or hinder, his achieving the outcome? This is the elephant in the room. One student plays Dodson and the other plays the university investment officer in this roleplay that broaches on numerous issues related to race, justice, and the possibility of reparation.

Care Group is a coalition of Boston hospitals. In FY1998, it incurred an operating loss of over $34 million, and a decline in its equity of more than $104 million. This contrasts with very positive performance in the previous two years. The goal is to determine why this happened.

The chair of the anesthesiology is attempting to develop a compensation plan that will reward the physicians in his department for their performance in clinical, teaching, and research activities. His efforts are impeded by a variety of conflicting incentives.

In August 2019, Oliver Jones, senior manager at the New South Wales Institute of Qualified Accountants, was following the case of the insolvency of Dick Smith Group. The company began when the founder started servicing radios and expanded to carry a wide range of electronics products. Over the years, the competitive consumer electronics industry saw Dick Smith undergo several strategic changes. The founder had sold the company to Woolworths before the supermarket retailer decided to exit the consumer electronics business. After private equity firm Anchorage turned the company around and sold it for a profit in 2014, Dick Smith again experienced financial troubles. Management had bought too much inventory, chose the wrong products to buy and ultimately assumed too much debt during its expansion phase. In 2016, Dick Smith went bankrupt. Subsequently, creditors began litigation against top Dick Smith executives for pursuing a "rebate maximising" strategy that prioritised rebates over customer demand. The auditor was also implicated. While Jones was unsure if the auditor was legally responsible for investor losses, he wondered how they had not found any risks worth flagging.

Analysts have often compared keeping up with Cybersecurity threats to running on a treadmill that keeps speeding up; the runner cannot move forward and often begins to slide backwards and fall behind. Set in July 2020, this case explores how one of the world's most renowned such cybersecurity "runners", FireEye, implemented AI-based solutions within the organisation to provide improved cybersecurity services to its clients. The case delves into the various strategies implemented by the firm for AI adoption using a specific example tool. FireEye used its conceptual AI framework called the 'Automatibility Spectrum' to determine the appropriate degree of automation for developing different solutions. Additionally, the firm implemented agile practices to build inter-team collaborations, cross-team workflow processes and changes in its organisational structure and culture to promote a mind-set shift towards automation. Tasks that involved decision making would typically incorporate human verification with repetitive tasks being performed by automated algorithms. This Human+AI approach had enabled FireEye to expand and scale its support services. However, cyber attackers were constantly 'upping their game', and rapid technology innovations were creating new threat exposures. The nature of cybersecurity threats and the supporting technical methods were changing rapidly and continuously, and some of the rules and approaches for threat protection and investigation applicable earlier were becoming irrelevant as cyber threats evolved and became more sophisticated over time. Was FireEye's existing approach of Human+AI capable enough to tackle the ever-changing challenges in cybersecurity?

mPharma pioneered electronic prescriptions in Ghana, and aimed to increase drug affordability and accessibility in Africa, but the company remained unprofitable. Following investor concerns about mPharma's business, CEO Gregory Rockson considered alternative business models and services that could increase mPharma's profitability and impact.

In 2020, TikTok became the most valuable start-up ever. The short-form, video-sharing social media platform emerged as the crown jewel of the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, realizing 850 million monthly users and an estimated worth of $180 billion. However, a crusade against Chinese technology companies launched by the United States' Trump administration threatened to jeopardize ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming's creation. How could Zhang assuage foreign government's concerns about TikTok's data security practices without also running afoul of the Chinese government's desire to keep China's most successful technologies under wraps? This case follows Zhang's entrepreneurial journey, from creative ambition to being caught up in the U.S.-China tech war.