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On Thursday, July 13, 2017, the project manager and the chief executive officer for A-Media Limited were making a significant decision about their company. They could quickly increase their billboard hoardings by 20 per cent by pre-emptively erecting giant mega boards in five locations of interest to a major client. This was a significant opportunity, but it presented several significant risks. One major risk was the client’s need to have the mega boards ready before the Christmas season. The client would not commit to renting the space until the boards were at least 90 per cent completed. Was this time frame too short to confirm the prime locations, secure all government permits, hire suppliers and subcontractors, and erect the five structures? How could A-Media Limited manage five geographically dispersed projects simultaneously when the scheduling, supervising, suppliers, city permits, and city inspectors would be different in each location? The project manager had to quickly determine the feasibility of the project, which involved building a detailed schedule and budget.

In the rush to develop vaccines, many strains of viruses are used in laboratories in an effort to help humanity. However, the same samples used to develop life-saving vaccines could potentially be used to develop weapons of biological warfare. This case looks at the scenario from multiple perspectives in an effort to discuss the ethics of virus usage, storage and regulatory oversight given the differing economical situations and motivations of the actors.

On January 2, 2018, the chief executive officer of a private company in Karachi, Pakistan, Imaam Spinning Mills (Imaam), was planning to expand the company’s product line and enter the weaving business by setting up a new weaving plant. He asked his chief financial officer to conduct a financial evaluation financial evaluation of the project. To do so, she needed to calculate the weighted average cost of capital, using the comparative method to calculate the cost of capital for the unlisted firm based on financial data from Imaam and comparable firms, and determine the feasibility of the project.

Annie Anthony, the chief financial officer of Liz Motor Corp. (Liz), was attempting to use capital budgeting to evaluate an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) project using all the available quantitative and qualitative information. Anthony had planned an ESG project, which would help the company adopt solid-state battery technology for most Liz electric vehicles and reduce the carbon footprint of electric vehicle batteries by 39 per cent, to improve the company’s ESG and sustainability. The technology was so new that Liz would be the first major automaker to use it on a large scale. It would increase sales and the profit margin in the long run but would also require a heavy initial investment to allow Liz to adopt the technology. With all the information needed for a thorough capital budgeting analysis, Anthony believed she was ready to develop a framework to comprehensively evaluate this critical project. She also needed to do ten sensitivity analyses based on ten different scenarios.

In January 2022, the vice-president of technology for Nata Supermarkets was reviewing the company’s performance against its competitors for the 2021 calendar year. The company had been performing poorly both based on its internal metrics and against competitor growth rates. The vice-president also noticed that many competitors began revealing new data analytics initiatives in their annual reports. Many companies experienced industry-leading growth because of these changes and upgraded their guidance for the following year. To compete with an increasing number of data-driven competitors, Nata Supermarket created its internal data set to collect information on customer shopping habits and customer demographics such as age, educational background, and frequency of complaints. With the emergence of visualization tools and data analytics, the vice-president was wondering what useful insights could be drawn from its internal data set. Could this information be useful to resolve various issues such as targeting promotions and forecasting demand?

Kae Jonishi, the protagonist in the case, is a marketing analyst at Force Energy (Force). Her company has advertised with Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the past and has gained moderate amounts of exposure from these marketing campaigns. However, Jonishi’s manager wants to increase the company’s exposure to MLB fans. One way to do so is to sponsor teams that are likely to advance into the MLB post-season, or playoffs. The top performing teams during the MLB regular season advance into the playoffs and increase their fan base, which results in greater marketing exposure for advertisers.<br><br>Jonishi has access to a data set that contains aggregate team statistics for offence and pitching performance during all MLB seasons from 1995 to 2019. With adequate knowledge of both baseball and data science, Jonishi begins by analyzing and visualizing the data. She then builds a machine learning model that can predict whether a team will make the playoffs. Using this model, Jonishi can input future offence and defence performance predictions to determine if the team would have advanced to the playoffs in previous years.

In July 2022, a senior data scientist for Guell Appliances was aggregating customer reviews from the company’s recent appliance launch. The previous month, the company had launched a revamped product line that required a significant amount of investment in research and development. The success of the product line was paramount because it defined the success of the company. The senior data scientist wanted to apply modern analytical techniques to thousands of product reviews to thoroughly understand the preferences of customers, based on what they were saying about their new appliances.

Jonathan Gray, the head of Digital Assets at NorthCentral Bank, was tasked with deciding how the bank should approach the growing demand for cryptocurrency (crypto) investment products and services. As the fintech industry continued to grow rapidly and younger digital consumers expressed a desire for crypto-friendly products, the bank had to decide how to proceed. Gray considered three options: maintaining the status quo and not offering crypto products; developing investment-only products and services around digital assets; or becoming a meaningful ecosystem player by offering wallets and enabling users to acquire crypto assets and use them natively on blockchains. Each option had its own benefits and risks, and Gray had to decide which path is best for NorthCentral Bank to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving fintech industry.

Hope Medicals owner, Shiva Aruguman, was considering entering the online pharmacy market. Hope Medicals was a local pharmacy in Madurai, India’s Tamil Nadu state, and Aruguman was at a strategic crossroads—he had to decide whether to expand into the online pharmacy market. With the challenges (financial and non-financial) of integrating the “brick” and “click” modes of his pharmacy business, Aruguman had to conduct an analysis based on capital budgeting and run a Monte Carlo simulation to determine the potential profitability and risks of such a venture.

In late 2020, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company (Goodyear)’s chief executive officer, Richard Kramer, told Cooper Tire & Rubber Company (Cooper)’s chief executive officer, Bradley Hughes, that Goodyear would submit an acquisition proposal by the end of the year. Goodyear had spent the last two years enduring global weakness in the automotive industry and the onset of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed to Goodyear’s stock falling 70 per cent below its high of $35 in 2018. Kramer attributed the stock’s decline to an “industry downcycle,” and one analyst speculated that a merger could provide much needed cost and revenue synergies. Goodyear had used mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to achieve scale and fuel its growth in the past, and Kramer’s team needed to decide if a merger with Cooper could help them weather the downturn and emerge stronger. Kramer and his team identified several cost synergies, totalling $165 million per year. They also expected efficiency and tax synergies with a present value of at least $700 million as well as revenue synergies. Goodyear was considering using a combination of debt, stock, and cash to finance the transaction. To avoid earnings per share dilution from issuing too many shares as merger consideration, they were working with financial advisor J.P. Morgan to secure up to $2.314 billion of new debt financing. Kramer told Hughes that his team would work over the year-end holidays to provide “a revised proposal or other update” in January 2021.

In July 2022, upon his return from vacation, Lamar Gilbert, the head of the French subsidiary of successful Swedish unicorn Virtual AB (Virtual), found himself abruptly grappling with an unsettling reality. Leo Svennson, his closest direct report, had been accused of sexually harassing two female colleagues. As he pursued an investigation into the allegations, Gilbert also realized Svennson had blatantly disparaged his authority behind his back. The French unit was in disarray and Svennson’s conduct was not the only cause. Despite Gilbert’s flattering track record, his influence had waned. In addition to removing Svennson, it was urgent for him to demonstrate more effective leadership behaviours and new influence tactics to put the French subsidiary back on track, before it was too late.

Sexual Harassment in Virtual Workplaces is a collection of eight vignettes set in India that describe various sexual harassment incidents perpetrated by supervisors, colleagues, and clients at virtual workplaces involving video calls, social media groups, and online chats. The harassment occurred both as one incident and as a series of incidents and consisted of behaviours such as requesting video meetings, comments about appearance, sharing pictures without permission, verbal put-downs, offensive comments, and sexual propositions, all of which led to adverse impacts on their targets.

The president of Siyuan Energy (Siyuan) faced the long-standing problem of a very high rate of top management turnover. By 2019, Siyuan had grown to five hundred employees and ¥170 million in revenue; however, over the past decade, the turnover rate of executives had grown dramatically. Few of the externally hired executives lasted even a year, and now a number of long-time internal executives were also leaving. Morale was declining at the same time that the company was facing growing competition. Action was required to address the problem, but analysis was first needed to understand whether such high turnover was due to systems or leadership, or both.

In October 2019, the director of human resources at SMP India Design Centre had a difficult situation to address. She had received a sexual harassment complaint against a senior team member from two female employees, both of whom were relatively new in the organization. Acting promptly based on the organization’s procedures manual and policies, the director initiated an enquiry. A detailed investigation found the accused guilty of gross misconduct. However, the surprising punishment handed down by the organization was only a warning letter. It seemed that taking any other action would go against the company’s best interests. The director of human resources felt torn between her responsibility to provide a safe and positive workplace for employees versus being a custodian of the corporate brand and public image. But how could she ensure a healthy working environment if the company ignored serious issues such as sexual harassment against its own employees? Should she fight the company’s ruling and provide her own advice to employees? Would her loyalty to the organization be questioned if she decided to support the two victims of sexual harassment?

Manuel Hernandez, mill manager at Duoro Mine (Duoro), located near Arequipa, Peru, was considering options for increasing output to take advantage of a recent spike in commodity prices. It was Wednesday, January 25, 2023, and prices for copper and gold, the main products of Duoro, were trading at historical highs compared to their five-year average. The mine manager had asked Hernandez to make recommendations about increasing production, and Hernandez had identified three options. Students are expected to evaluate each option and decide which, if any, would address Diaz’s objectives of increasing output and minimizing financial risks.

In August 2021, the co-owner of the property management and rental business Nassau Property Partnership, located in London, Ontario, asked his brother, a senior partner in a tax firm, for help with the tax structure of various operational and strategic decisions, both for his business and personal affairs. The business managed well over the COVID-19 pandemic, but several recent major events required advice from an experienced tax professional. Regarding his personal life, the co-owner was considering retiring from his company, which was a partnership, and had already put down a deposit on a second home in Florida. He wanted to fund the remaining part of the purchase through either a sale of his business interests to his daughter or through the sale of his family cottage. However, both of these decisions may have repercussions.

Public service union Local 892 was the union representing faculty at North City College (NCC) in Kingston, a mid-sized city in Canada’s Ontario province. NCC had approached Local 892 to request a local agreement exempting the college from following the collective agreement’s clause forcing it to hire someone permanently if they were on contract for over twelve months. The union had to decide whether to allow NCC to hire librarian Sharrod Alasa for an additional twelve-month contract or force the college to decide to either end Alasa’s contract or hire him to a permanent position.

A young paralegal joined the London, UK law firm Darby & Fox LLP in August 2020. The position was a one-year contract during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paralegal was subjected to employee discrimination and harassment, starting with a requirement to be in the office, unlike other workers, because she was a newly-hired contract-based employee. She endured overwork, job threats, and simultaneous work assignments from an associate partner, as well as his spouse and colleague. Workplace conflict aggravated her situation, receiving increased workload, longer work hours, lack of compensation for overtime, delegated work from other paralegals, and monitored office activity. Even the process for approval of time off work was changed, making it more cumbersome for her to take a one-day leave. The paralegal wondered how to resolve her situation.

In September 2019, the project manager of Washington, DC, technology company Zinthro found a serious calculation error in her company’s bid for a major government project. When she discovered the mistake, the bid had already been accepted and the project was well under way. The issue threatened her working relationship with several key individuals related to the project, including the executive overseeing the project, the client representative, the team that put together the original bid for the project, fellow project managers, and team leaders. Although she was not the one who made the mistake, she was the one who had discovered it and had to decide what to do next. Who should she talk to about the error? Who should be told first? How should she deliver the bad news?

In 2022, the newly appointed general manager (GM) of the global cookie business at Groupe Aliments Choix must build his business unit in the throes of a major corporate shift in strategy and structure. The newly announced corporate changes are a challenge to the GM because of his unit’s traditional country-centred approach to business. He is under added pressure because he has been given just forty-five days to develop an action plan. His recommendations will include structural changes and targets for building new organizational capabilities. As a new leader in a new position, the GM also needs to assess his own capabilities relative to the challenging tasks ahead.