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Luke Thomas, owner and operator of Healthy Eats (HE), was considering the future direction of the business following an inflow of cash from a silent investor. HE was a meal prep delivery service located in London, Ontario that focused on fueling healthy lifestyles with locally sourced ingredients. Having proven the business model in London, Thomas was considering two distinct growth alternatives: opening a second kitchen in Hamilton, Ontario, or doubling down on securing new corporate clients. Regardless of his decision, Thomas also wanted to revisit HE’s fiscal 2023 marketing strategy to ensure sales projections were met despite a limited budget.

<p align="justify">The Solidarity Fund (the Fund) was established in March 2020 by a business group in South Africa to support the South African Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. By September 2022, the Fund had proven highly effective and helped stabilize the healthcare system, provided economic support to the most vulnerable, and also encouraged the population to get vaccinated. Gloria Serobe, the Fund’s chairperson, was happy to have seen it succeed and complete its objectives. She pondered its future as lockdowns eased and the initial hardships of the pandemic slowly dissipated. The President of the Republic of South Africa personally contacted Serobe and asked that the Fund not be closed so that it could be maintained for future crises. Serobe and the board of directors needed to determine what options were available for the Fund—should it remain dormant or be closed?

STEPN was a one-year-old lifestyle app designed to incentivize routine physical activities like walking, jogging, and running by providing individual financial rewards for participants. The app was part of the move-to-earn (M2E) category of blockchain games. Within a short time, STEPN had established an exceptional track record of both financial performance and enterprise valuation and had achieved unicorn status. However, by January 2023, the Web 3 app was on the verge of being caught in what was known in the world of blockchain games as a death spiral. The prices of its flagship product and its exchange medium were both dropping, and the company’s net profits were also in decline. The co-founders needed to determine not only how to head off a death spiral in the short run but also how to sustain the business in the long run.

Ghost Tree Invitational (Ghost Tree) was established in 2007 as a non-profit organization. In the past, Ryan Chackel, the president of Ghost Tree, had organized a yearly two-day event in Bend, Oregon, to raise funds for donations to local non-profit organizations. The event included a golf tournament on the first day and a large outdoor dinner event on the second day. Ghost Tree had relied on sponsor dollars, donations, and ticket sales in a business model that had worked well until a recent change with the participating venue. In all previous years, the venue was donated free of charge to Ghost Tree, but this changed in 2022; Green Links Golf Resort would no longer be able to support the tournament, and the venue would now be an additional expense. Chackel needed to develop a new business model that would make financial sense while also staying true to the non-profit organization’s values. Was there a way to address the financial burden while also maintaining the ability to continuously donate to other non-profit organizations? How could Ghost Tree overcome these financial difficulties?

Established in August 2011 in India, Frontier Markets (FM) was one of the largest social commerce platforms working with women influencers and with a strong following of rural customers. Starting out as a clean-energy product company, FM adopted a gender-smart strategy to bring rural-based women entrepreneurs on board as the company’s representatives in rural villages. The company leveraged an extensive network of women entrepreneurs, known as Sahelis, through the Meri Saheli e-commerce app. Using the app, the company delivered products and services in finance, agriculture, health care, climate, digital, and essential services. In 2022, FM had over 20,000 Sahelis working with 432,000 rural families, implementing over 25 million solutions through direct sales and doorstep delivery. The firm’s founders considered expanding geographically to become India’s largest women-led commerce platform. They wondered how they could add 10 million new customers and generate over US$54.16 million in revenue in the next two years. What was the best option for achieving this ambitious growth: expanding in new markets; adding new product categories; or adding new strategic partners?

Outland provided a global communication and exhibition platform for artists and collectors. Outland conducted art transactions in the form of cryptocurrencies, addressing challenges prevalent in the traditional creator economy. Renowned artist James Jean collaborated with Outland in 2022 to release a new hand-drawn digital art series called Fragments. The series received widespread acclaim. The fans had high expectations for Fragments’ narrative derivative work, "Adrift," set to launch in 2023. The platform aimed to establish a fan community centred around Jean and his work. However, fans wanted to interact with the artist and participate in the secondary creation of his work, while also receiving better financial returns. How would Outland establish an intellectual property licensing mechanism to increase non-fungible token (NFT) creators and holders an enhanced financial return?

Global health and wellness industries worldwide have been changing rapidly. In China, traditional Chinese supplements brand Guanzhan was founded in 2014 with the aim to provide younger consumers with new types of supplements that would satisfy their changing needs. The company employed a “New Retail” model to best serve the targeted consumer groups, who, compared to their older counterparts, knew little about traditional medicine and had higher taste and convenience requirements for supplement products. As of when the case was written, Guanzhan's ready-to-eat fish maw products had become one of the leading supplement product categories in the Chinese market. Looking into the future, the company sought to expand their footprint offline and develop new products that would satisfy the offline markets.

The case looks at an organisation called CSG Group (CSG), which successfully diversified over the span of several years to become an integrated facilities management and talent services provider. Along their journey of diversification, they acquired a business which had misrepresented its finances – however this was only discovered after the sale had gone through. The financially distressed acquisition threatened the future viability of the company and required a swift turnaround in order for the organisation to remain afloat. Many varying turnaround strategies were implemented, and the division ended up successful. During the turnaround, the protagonist took the opportunity to restructure the divisions and merge multiple businesses inside

The implementation of the OKR-based Performance Management System (PMS) in Quick Heal, an Indian cybersecurity company came about because of Ms. Reetu Raina, the CHRO’s revelation about loopholes in the existing PMS that needed to be addressed. The old PMS had a rigid top-to-bottom approach without any mechanism for frequent feedback. Moreover, not every individual goal was tangible or aligned with the organizational strategy. As a result, it had become challenging to differentiate between high and low performers, and Quick Heal was missing out on a chance to grow as a company. The organization faced several challenges during the implementation process of the new OKR-based PMS, such as employees’ resistance to change, slow transformation of the traditional goal-setting process to a more agile approach and other barriers towards the new system’s adoption. Employees questioned the need and relevance of the new PMS amidst the uncertainties of the post-pandemic work norms and strongly resisted the transition. Mixed reviews from the department heads left Raina puzzled and wondering about the pitfalls of the transition, the implementation process and overall the potential of the new OKR-based PMS as a tool to create a performance-based culture at Quick Heal.

NSGC Information Technology Co., Ltd. (NSGC Technology) is both a cybersecurity enterprise engaged in technological innovation and a software firm focusing on cyber range construction and cybersecurity talent cultivation. It boasts a long history of doing business with the military industry, and it has produced a wide range of competitive cyber range products. At its inception in 2014, NSGC Technology initiated XCTF, a CTF (capture the flag) competition ranking first in Asia and second in the world, which earned the company a strong international reputation. NSGC Technology started to tap the global market in 2017 and has fostered an international outlook over many years of overseas practices. Its products and services are now available in more than twenty countries. While competing with leading global manufacturers, it has developed insights into the cyber range sector and become the only internationally competitive Chinese enterprise in this field. However, as the company marched from the military industry into non-military fields, it became trapped in low-level industry competition in 2021. In addition, the company’s overseas business has been severely impacted since 2020 by the COVID-19 outbreak. At the beginning of 2022, facing challenges at home and abroad, NSGC Technology had to carefully examine the relationship between domestic and global markets and formulate a new corporate development strategy.

The production supervisor of Gupta Furniture was tasked with selecting a mode of production that not only met the demand for the company’s best-selling product, the office interior chair, but also minimized the overall cost of production. The firm’s operations manager had stressed that the chosen production strategy should enable the company to meet demand at the lowest possible cost. As such, the brief was to prepare a comprehensive aggregate plan based on the forecasted demand scenario, considering how much to produce and when to produce in addition to determining which strategy among those traditionally applied would give the best results. The major challenge lay in planning and scheduling inventory, and determining regular production, overtime production, subcontracting, and employment levels over a medium term of 9 to 15 months, though both the short-term and long-term implications of these quantitative decisions also had to be taken into account.

Soulpepper Theatre Company (Soulpepper) underwent a significant transformation under the leadership of its new co-leaders. The co-leaders not only navigated the aftermath of a crisis in 2018 that saw the immediate resignation of a well-known artistic director accused of sexual harassment but also steered the company towards a bright future aligned with an ambitious five-year strategic plan. The plan, endorsed by the board of directors, was a crucial step towards recovering from the tarnished reputation and elevating Soulpepper to global recognition, rooted in the excellence of its productions and celebration of Canadian creativity. However, as the theatre was laying down the building blocks for renewal, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing significant disruptions in the Canadian theatre scene and necessitating a re-evaluation of the co-leaders’ strategic approach.

In August 2022, Neetu Yadav and Kirti Jangra, co-founders of Animall, reflected upon their experience of starting a business in a highly competitive and fragmented Indian livestock management market. The industry suffered from a shortage of skilled workforce, inadequate infrastructure, and needed better access to modern technology. Yadav and Jangra were tasked to consider the competition in the digital space, assess the difficulty in penetrating a geographically and digitally remote market, and to build farmers' trust to grow the business. Yadav identified four opportunities for growing the business: expansion in veterinary services, providing nutrition advice, focus on particular animal breeds, and entry into other Indian states.

One afternoon on January 10, 2020, Zhengting Chen, the chief executive officer of Sichuan Zhiyuan Digital Finance Information Technology Co., Ltd. (Zhiyuan), was reading an internal report on the company’s performance. Founded in 2013 in Chengdu, Zhiyuan was one of the first platform companies to provide traditional supply chain financial services in southwest China. Zhiyuan had experienced a decrease in both annual revenue in 2019 and year-over-year growth rate of membership. So, Chen wondered how the Zhiyuan’s digital transformation could help attract customers and sustain the company's long-term growth by ensuring the authenticity and transparency of transactions.

The case describes the nature of the challenges facing Osman Arbee, CEO of Motus Holdings Limited (Motus) and his executive committee (exco) as they led the business through the challenges inherent in the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the South African government’s initially stringent response to it. Arbee and other exco members explain the competing interests of different stakeholders and highlight the urgency with which they needed to act to ensure the long-term viability of the business. Motus is an integrated automotive holding company based in Ekurhuleni, near Johannesburg, South Africa. Its four divisions include Import and Distribution, Retail and Rental, Motor-Related Financial Services, and Aftermarket Parts.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Niagara (BBBSN) was a not-for-profit (NFP) organization that offered mentoring and other programs for children and youth. The organization recruited and deployed volunteers in a variety of positions, including those available through its mentoring program, thrift store, bingo halls, and periodic fundraising events. However, while demand for BBBSN’s services was increasing, the number of people willing to volunteer their time was declining. Since BBBSN was a newly amalgamated organization that had combined three Niagara-region Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) agencies over the past two years, the fundraising and events coordinator of BBBSN also had to develop an integrated volunteer recruitment and fundraising program that would create a stronger voice for BBBS in the whole Niagara region.

In August 2022, Anthony Tan, co-founder and CEO of Flirtual, a virtual reality-based dating platform was deciding whether to hire a new employee or work with a consultancy to complete a major rewrite of the platform’s code. Flirtual had experienced high user growth, resulting in performance issues among some of its users. Tan wanted to decide how to continue growing its users while addressing these challenges.

In August 2022, a student pursuing his master of business administration degree in Mumbai at one of India’s top business schools found himself in a despondent situation as he prepared his curriculum vitae (CV) to apply for an internship position at Golden Tobacco Company. He had written an email to his former project supervisor (a senior fellow of the MIT Media Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), requesting him to approve the project the student had worked on under his supervision as relevant experience for the internship position. In response, the student received an email from his supervisor with one terse line: “Is this an order?” With a deadline that very evening to submit the CV, the student was in a tizzy. Where had he gone wrong in his email to prompt the terse reply from his former supervisor? How could he fix the situation? And how could he prevent such a situation when writing emails in the future?

Nora is an intelligent, hard-working employee in her first managerial role. As she attempts to move from a role as a contributor to that of a leader, she struggles to effectively manage her workload, her boss, and her team. While she is prepared to do what it takes to be successful, the characteristics that got her to her current level are not those that are needed in her new position. In other words, while she is technically adept, motivated, and customer-focused, this is no longer enough. Nora needs to identify what she can do—and what resources and support she should ask for—to fulfill her potential in this new role.

In April 2023, Maxwell Cutler, director of marketing and sweet potato sales at Race-West Company (Race-West), faced a daunting challenge of high demand for produce in the week leading up to Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. With a responsibility to ship 35–40 truckloads per day, Cutler was under pressure to ensure timely deliveries to satisfy and retain customers. Despite his best efforts and collaboration with his cousin Rachel Pisarz, who managed onion sales, multiple incidents disrupted the transportation process. Cutler received phone calls and emails reporting missing drivers, misloaded shipments, late deliveries, truck breakdowns, and extreme weather conditions. These disruptions resulted in significant financial losses for Race-West as well the loss of some customers. Determined to resolve the situation, he wondered what steps he could take to address these challenges and implement measures to avoid encountering similar issues in the future.