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Thomas Keller, the first and only American-born chef to hold multiple three-star ratings from the prestigious Michelin Guide, and Joe Essa, the immediate past Board Chair of the National Restaurant Association and the CEO of Keller's restaurant group, were class guests in the HBS course "Challenges and Opportunities in the Restaurant Industry" on March 12, 2020. Then, that night, they began to confront a situation they could not have imagined, the declaration of a national emergency and the immediate closure of all of their restaurants. Pondering how they could best save their restaurants, their staff, their communities and the restaurant industry, they examine how to navigate uncharted waters locally within their restaurant communities and nationally in an upcoming meeting with the President of the United States.

In August 2019, Harry Markopolos-the forensic accountant known for uncovering Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme-alleged that General Electric had committed accounting fraud totaling $38 billion, coining the term "GEnron" for perceived similarities with the 2001 accounting fraud at Enron that brought down that company and its auditor. Specifically, Markopolos claimed, GE would need to generate $29 billion in reserves against its insurance obligations, and restate its financials to recognize $9 billion in unreported losses on an oil subsidiary. Though GE management rejected these assertions, repeated writedowns and restatements of GE's performance since 2017 had made investors wary. They now scrambled to assess the merits of Markopolos's claims.

The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company's path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company announced two internal issues in August 2019. The case chronicles the founding and expansion of Jumia and the iterations of its business model and describes its competitive outlook. The case then provides a detailed overview of how Jumia built its three pillars-its marketplace, logistics, and payments arms-and how the co-founders decided on the company's strategic, customer, and product scopes over the seven years in which Jumia spread across 14 countries in Africa since its founding in 2012. The case also provides an overview of Jumia's vertical scope, its technology, marketing, and payments systems, and how the company's localization strategy brings complexities to its business model, as Jumia tries to adopt its approach, website, products, and services to each country to increase profitability. While there is for the most part no single competitor that serves the same geography as Jumia does, Jumia strives to educate the African market about shopping online and overcome various infrastructure problems in the continent to improve its margins and become profitable. While its second quarter 2019 financials show continued GMV and customer growth, the co-founders need to convince investors of the company's path to profitability and answer questions such as: Is Jumia's existing product-service mix and geographical coverage the best use of the company's financial and managerial resources, or does the company need to make some eliminations? Can Jumia's expansive approach be sustainable as the geography becomes more developed and the inevitable specialized players come in?

The COVID-19 pandemic brought enormous disruption to the movie industry, closing theaters indefinitely by mid-March 2020, halting television and film production, and throwing theatrical release schedules into disarray. Shell had assumed the CEO position at NBCUniversal just months before the beginning of the pandemic and now had several important decisions to make. One immediate decision he faced was how to handle the release of Trolls: World Tour, the highly anticipated sequel to a successful animated film, which had been scheduled to premiere in theaters nationwide in early April. Jeff's decision regarding the Trolls distribution strategy would not only impact the sequel's performance but would also likely have a far-reaching impact on the entire film industry, which had seen studios and theaters battle over the length of the theatrical window for decades. With the pandemic weakening the theater industry's bargaining power, had the opportunity finally arrived for film studios to significantly shorten, or even eradicate, the theatrical window?

After hitting an all-time low in 2008, Domino's Pizza underwent a vigorous rebranding, product development, and embraced innovative technologies to become the world's leading international fast-food retailer. Domino's considered itself as much a tech company as it was a purveyor of fast food, with digital orders accounting for a high percentage of sales. Domino's was run more like a Silicon Valley company than a fast food chain and was described by CEO Patrick Doyle as "a technology company that delivers pizza." As it bested rivals like Pizza Hut and Papa John's, Domino's declared itself "The Official Food of Everything." In 2020, as much of the world remained in lockdown Domino's, which offered delivery options from drones to driverless vehicles, saw a jump in sales. How did Domino's become the world's leading restaurant?

Agnico Eagle Mines (AEM) is a global mining company that has made its first foray into the Canadian far north with its Meadowbank gold mining site. The case describes how AEM has worked with the local government to gain its support, signing an Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement (IIBA). This IIBA outlines a number of commitments that AEM must meet in order to ensure equal representation of Inuit people within the mine. The case follows the superintendent of human resources (HR). Facing a turnover rate of 83 per cent and high levels of absenteeism among AEM's Inuit workforce, AEM is dealing with a talent management crisis of unprecedented proportions. The superintendent of HR must remedy the situation while operating within an environment characterized by resource constraints and a diverse workforce.

"We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful." Warren Buffet, 1986 Letter to Shareholders. This investment strategy had proven powerful for Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. It had transformed a bad textile company into a diversified investment company, ranked as the 12th largest company in the world in 2019, right behind Apple. It had made Warren Buffet a billionaire and countless of his shareholders millionaires. At the end of 2019, Berkshire's shareholders included Fidelity Investments and the central bank of Norway. The company's stock was considered the number one retirement stock in America. Amid the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, U.S. financial markets crashed at record speed (-35% between February 12 and March 20, 2020), including the biggest single-day drop ever of -12.9% on March 16, 2020, eclipsing the record of October 28, 1929. Expected to be greedy when others are fearful, Buffet was a net seller of stocks and remained on the sideline during that period. His inaction, combined with an unusually cautionary tone at the annual shareholders' meeting, triggered heavy criticisms. Some of his loyalists sold their stocks. As he was approaching his 90th birthday, many started to wonder whether Warren Buffet had changed his time-tested strategy. Was he disconnected from reality? Was he fearful himself?

The grocery industry was going through a major transformation as a consequence of three major trends - the increasing use of ecommerce and online shopping, the intense rivalry from the hard discounters such as Aldi and Lidl who threatened the already modest margins of the national chains such as Safeway, Kroger, and Wal*Mart, and changing customer demands that emphasized convenience, ubiquity, and variety. It was against that backdrop that Rodney McMullen, CEO of Kroger, initiated the Restock Kroger campaign, a strategic initiative that aimed to digitally transform the entire grocery business. Slated to cost $9b, the initiative was launched in 2017 with four fundamental aims - "redefine the grocery customer experience, expand partnerships to create customer value, develop talent and, living our purpose" . The campaign to transform the company was announced just a few months after Amazon had entered the grocery business with its game-changing acquisition of Whole Foods. The case study follows the execution of the Restock Kroger initiative as it unfolded and highlights the crucial decisions that the company made in its digital transformation journey. In doing so, it offers a snapshot of the partnerships that Kroger has built to gain momentum in the digital realm, how it has tried to leverage modern digital technologies (e.g., AI, big data, predictive analytics) to not only improve the efficiency of its store operations but also to provide superior customer service. As the case closes, the company's business was being challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the rapid transformation strategies that were deployed by its major rivals such as Walmart and Amazon. Thus, the case offers a good platform to explore the process of digital transformation, aligning the strategy of transformation with the customer journey, and balancing the pressures to maintain some of the elements of the legacy retail model while ushering in radically new solutions online.

A manager grapples with the question of flexible work schedules. This fictional case study by Thomas J. DeLong features expert commentary by Elizabeth McKinnon and Rachel Thomas.

A manager grapples with the question of flexible work schedules. This fictional case study by Thomas J. DeLong features expert commentary by Elizabeth McKinnon and Rachel Thomas.

A manager grapples with the question of flexible work schedules. This fictional case study by Thomas J. DeLong features expert commentary by Elizabeth McKinnon and Rachel Thomas.

In 2017, Newsha Ghaeli and Mariana Matus were deciding whether to leave their labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put other job opportunities aside, and dive full-time into founding a wastewater analysis start-up, Biobot. Ghaeli, an architect, and Matus, a computational biologist, had been turning sewage into information about "population health" and now had dreams of turning the data encoded in urine and stool into a viable and impactful business. In plainer terms, they planned to "tap into what you flush down the toilet every day." They'd been told not to. They'd been told their idea was too broad and their skills too narrow. They'd been told they had no defensible intellectual property and limited scalability. They'd been advised to choose other startups instead, and knew, as immigrants on temporary visas, if they failed at this venture, they might even have to leave the country. Despite the many hurdles and objections, Ghaeli and Matus felt mostly at ease about moving ahead. Were they missing something? Or was everyone else?

This case is based on an actual organizational crisis, and the day-to-day operational factors and latent conditions that led to it. Case facts focus on the role of Malcolm Thornton (pseudonym), a newly promoted manager of ride operations at an amusement park. From his first days on the job, Thornton's ignorance and dishonesty nurture a crisis that crescendos with the grotesque death of a 10-year-old boy, who was a passenger on a park ride. Thornton's culpability is obvious, but additional, substantial contributing factors are seeded throughout the case: faulty structure and equipment; lack of safety policies and procedures; absence of external oversight; brazen, hazardous choices made by the designer/co-owner of the deadly ride; and the dereliction of duty by corporate executives.

By all reasonable counts, the 2020 Tour de France 2 (Tour) probably should have been cancelled. The phenomenon could have become an extreme transmitter for the coronavirus (COVID). Had the grand tradition continued normally, it would have drawn millions of spectators, who would have gathered at venues throughout France, packed together for the best views of the field, within arm's reach of cycling celebrities who were accustomed to high-touch access, selfie embraces, and victory hugs. Many decisions and actions made during the Tour secured crisis aversion, and offer prime lessons for organizational crisis preparation and response, as described in this case.

IBM launched Rapid Supplier Connect, a blockchain-based solution to help battle medical supplies supply chain shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the April 31 launch, the company also announced that this solution would be offered at no cost, until August 31, 2020, to qualified buyers and suppliers in the United States and Canada. The solution provided healthcare procurement professionals with secure lists of vetted suppliers. Each supplier's available capacity, quality and regulatory compliance data were stored in the blockchain. An integrated supply chain solution provided details on order fulfillment status.

Semiconductors are the brains of modern electronics. They are used in medical devices, communications, computing, defense, transportation, energy, and technologies of the future such as artificial intelligence, data science, and advanced wireless networks. This case examines the global semiconductor industry and its structure. The case raises several important questions: Is Intel falling behind competitors in the race to make ever more powerful processors? Apple, Amazon, Facebook and other tech firms are designing their own chips - how will this impact the industry? Is the fabless model based on contract manufacturing superior to Intel's model of designing and making its own branded products? Will Chinese companies close the technology gap with firms like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel?

This case depicts the fascinating success story of Promamec, a family-owned business and an unexpected healthcare champion, amid unprecedented business environment changes, in Morocco's business capital, Casablanca. Known as one of the poorest Arab countries in the world, Morocco has become an emerging market that has attracted many foreign investors. Competition has intensified and financial resources have become more limited for Promamec. More specifically, the case draws attention to a crucial leadership transition between generations (2006) and a game-changing strategic decision (2018) to ensure future prosperity. This success story brings together several business disciplines including but not limited to strategy and entrepreneurship. Until 2018, Promamec's leadership created permanent value for more than three decades, growing organically at a double-digit rate in one of the most challenging business environments in the world. However, the son of the founder who remains the major shareholder must then make a very challenging decision: keep the business ("baby" of his father) in the family or sell it to private investors?

The Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project represented a clear opportunity for China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to aid in the economic development of a rapidly rising East African economy. Like most BRI projects across the globe, the project focused on transportation and logistical infrastructure. As a component of the Maritime Silk Road, the SGR could potentially open Eastern and Central Africa to global trade and development, including opportunities for China's business-export expansion. However, with the completion of the railway's first two stages, SGR's operating deficit and heavy debt obligations threatened the project's expansion and success. Many now questioned whether the project would truly benefit Kenya