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The We Company (WeWork) rented office spaces for long-term leases, turned them into hip offices, and then offered them for short-term leases. Its charismatic cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann, explosive growth funded by significant cash injections from SoftBank and its USD100bn Vision Fund, and a pre-IPO valuation of USD47bn ensured the company was one of the most talked-about unicorns in August 2019. WeWork's valuation was similar to that of a high-tech stock with high price multiples. From FY 2016 to FY2018, its losses totalled USD3.3bn, outstripping revenue at USD3.1bn. After release of Form S-1 pre-IPO filing documents, numerous financial analysts and the press scrutinized WeWork. In addition to its lower than expected financial performance, some questioned WeWork's business model, its governance model, and its valuation. In the weeks that followed, the IPO was withdrawn, WeWork announced plans to lay off 2,000 staff, Neuman was removed as CEO, and Softbank doubled down on its bet in order to keep the company going. This latest share purchase by Softbank valued the company at USD8bn, compared to USD49bn two months earlier.

On November 3, 2016, Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE) launched a bid for Singapore-based food and beverage company Super Group Ltd. (Super). JDE had already acquired 60 per cent of the shares but needed another 30 per cent in order to delist the company and take it private. The minority shareholders of Super faced the task of evaluating whether the offer from JDE was reasonable and whether they should tender or hold on to their shares. Their decisions would depend on the valuation of Super's shares, based on financial and other relevant and available market information.

Prashant Parameswaran was confounded by the behavior of consumers. On the one hand, there was a growing awareness on health foods and on the other hand, the diffusion of healthy snacks was not as fast as the indulgent snacks. The consumer mindscape, with respect to healthy snacking was cluttered with healthy cookies, bars, fruit juices, low-diet offerings, baked savories, milk additives and yoghurts (to name a few categories). Parameswaran had also found, that several of the healthy snacks had a sizable percentage of sugar and saturated fat that may make the claims on health benefits questionable. In addition to the claimed health benefits, there was glitz and glamor associated with the ads of most of these brands that featured attractive ultra-thin models, celebrities, and models. Such models used by the brand, portrayed unattainable fitness and looks that were stunningly aspirational in nature. Were consumers really interested in healthy snacking or was it just a passing fad? How were these offerings associated with healthy snacking judged by consumers? Do glamorous ads change the focus of the consumers, who may otherwise be inclined to prefer health to indulgence, when it comes to snacking? Were consumers aware of the labeling used by brands? Were there differences between consumer segments that were deeply interested, in healthy snacking and other segments that were interested in health but were unable to change their behavior? How do consumers consider different unrelated offerings that promise health? How should a new offering be launched? The case is about the usage of attitudinal aspects to understand the attitude of consumers towards the snacking domain and their impact on branding in the Indian context.

The case captures the dilemma of founders of an enterprise when they are faced with a hostile acquisition bid: whether to acquiesce - cede control and maximize their wealth - or to resist and run the risk of losing both. Set in 2019, the case provides a rich description of the takeover battle between the founders of the software services firm, Mindtree and the leadership of the bidder, L&T, a widely diversified conglomerate. It invites the students to review the choices of the founders Mindtree as they vehemently opposed the bid even as the leaders of L&T sought to present their takeover proposal as a "gentlemanly overture". The case is also significant because hostile acquisitions are rare in India and thus provides a singular opportunity to discuss the role of the board in such situations, particularly their role as mentors guiding strategic choices of firm leaderships.

This case describes the sourcing contract selection challenge faced by an electronics manufacturing company. The company must decide whether to continue the existing wholesale price contract, or should they switch to the quantity flexibility contract suggested by the supplier.

Shashi Jaligama, Managing Director (MD) of GUS Education India (GEI) and his colleague, Nikhil Patwardhan, Senior Director, Client Services held a review meeting with the core team at the end of the workday on April 17, 2020. After the meeting, they looked back with pride on the high level of growth that had been achieved and the high-performance organizational culture they had instilled. However, they reminded themselves that they needed to adopt some initiatives to sustain the rate of growth as well as introduce systems and processes to support the next stage of growth while maintaining the organizational culture. They were concerned that the culture could get diluted with increase in the number of new employees, and their own inability to spare as much time in engaging with employees as they had done in the early stages. Both acknowledged that there were some signs of strain in customer and employee experiences, which needed to be addressed at the earliest. They also wondered if there was something more than culture that needed to be articulated to sustain the high performance as the organization scaled.

This case describes the managerial challenge faced by a mid-size hardware and software services company in determining the course of action that needs to be taken to address certain productivity and quality concerns raised by their customer. As the managing director of the company investigates the cause of the poor quality and under-productivity of a project team, he receives a plethora of equally plausible causes along with supporting data. The challenge is to sift through the myriad problems and causes in a systematic manner to identify the best course of action. This case is rooted in a B2B service business setting and can be used to comprehensively demonstrate the application and utility of the various quality control tools for managerial decision making.

The case tracks the rapid evolution of Yes Bank from a new private sector bank in 2003, to being regarded as a highly successful mid-size bank a decade later, to finally going through significant governance challenges that eventually led to burgeoning non-performing assets (NPAs) and a potential collapse necessitating a rescue by the government. It also briefly discusses the details of the bailout plan to rescue the bank. The case is useful for a discussion on the choices made by the founder of the bank over the years which led to phenomenal growth but may have also led to its eventual collapse. This allows for a discussion on the role of various corporate governance mechanisms that operate in an organization (such as the board of directors, legal rights of shareholders, auditors, external observers, and regulators), and the extent to which each mechanism can satisfy the commonly expected governance objectives. The case also presents an opportunity to debate the justifications for a regulator, especially when they potentially limit the rights of shareholders in an organization.

Georgia State University had developed a reputation for driving student success by nearly doubling its graduation rate for students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. It did so while growing its student body and the proportion of Black/African American, low-income, and first-generation students-groups with historically lower postsecondary graduation rates compared to national averages. Georgia State's Student Success team, led by Tim Renick and Allison Calhoun-Brown, used a data-based approach to deploy micro-grant programs to retain students, implemented predictive analytics to improve student advising, and optimized course sequencing to help students graduate before they exhausted their financial aid. In 2016, they faced a growing "summer melt" problem where nearly 20% of incoming students who committed to attend never actually enrolled at Georgia State-and many never enrolled at any college. At the same time, they wondered how to balance continuing to incrementally improve student success at Georgia State and scaling their efforts to help the many other universities facing similar problems who sought to learn from their experience.

In summer 2020, Stephane Bancel, CEO of biotech firm Moderna, faces several challenges as his company races to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The case explores how a company builds a digital organization, and leverages artificial intelligence and other digital resources to speed its operations, manage its processes and ensure quality across research, testing and manufacturing. Built from the ground up as such a digital organization, Moderna was able to respond to the challenge of developing a vaccine as soon as the gene sequence for the virus was posted to the Web on January 11, 2020. As the vaccine enters Phase III clinical trials, Bancel considers several issues: How should Bancel and his team balance the demands of developing a vaccine for a virus creating a global pandemic alongside the other important vaccines and therapies in Moderna's pipeline? How should Moderna communicate its goals and vision to investors in this unprecedented time? Should Moderna be concerned it will be pegged as "a COVID-19 company?"

The COVID-19 crisis has revealed a great deal how national leaders cope with rapid change and make decisions with far-reaching consequences at a time of uncertainty. Not only have they struggled with the unpredictability of the pandemic but with the intricacies of intra-national and international politics. This case series examines in depth the diverging approaches taken by the leadership in five countries - China, France, Singapore, Sweden and the US - with the goal of exposing the common missteps and hurdles encountered during the months when the coronavirus crisis first emerged, challenging students (via group work) to reflect on the lessons learned.

As a global leader in healthcare technology, Philips had an important role to play in the COVID-19 pandemic. The surge in demand for life-saving medical equipment by hospitals around the world presented high-stakes opportunities for the company. At the same time however, national governments in most countries were compelled to implement safety measures that greatly affected commercial activity. The production and flow of physical goods were heavily impacted, leading to widespread disruption of global supply chains, which pulled a great deal of media focus on the topic of supply chains generally. The lockdown in China alone caused a global supply shock that many companies were ill-prepared for. Philips' Healthcare business units, particularly in diagnostics and respiratory equipment, faced critical supply challenges during the Corona crisis which garnered media attention both at home and abroad. In order to capitalize on the high demand for medical equipment, CEO Frans van Houten knew that Philips needed to overcome several hurdles to produce and deliver enough inventory to meet that demand. Furthermore, subsequent pandemic waves and other forms of crises could well cause future supply chain disruptions of the same scale and severity within the healthcare sector and beyond. Aware of the many challenges ahead, van Houten had to decide whether to revise the company's global sourcing strategy to future-proof it in a post-COVID-19 world - and, if so, how.

In 2019, Ai Hua Ong, Group Chairperson, Asia Pacific of Johnson & Johnson (J&J), was ruminating over the choice of Singapore as the company's regional headquarters (RHQ). While political stability, ease of doing business, a start-up friendly and open innovation ecosystem and supportive government regulations had built an ideal climate for the city to function as a base for a RHQ, many other cities in Asia provided tough competition to the city country. Moreover, while co-location had been widely recognised as one of the drivers towards the effectiveness of the innovation ecosystem - emerging technologies like hologrammatic communication could make the need for the RHQ model outdated. In the R&D space, the need for a skilled workforce could be alleviated by employing technologies like Artificial Intelligence. For the purpose of collaboration, blockchain technology could be applied to enable firms to share data more securely over longer distances. The use of Internet of Things (IoT) in the biomedical sciences sector, could reduce the need for being close to the consumer for R&D and market research; while the increased use of 3D printing devices could make Singapore's advantage as a logistical hub in the region less salient, as designs could be shared virtually and printed locally. Amidst such tugging tensions, Ong wondered if Singapore would continue to remain an attractive destination as an RHQ? Would its innovation-ecosystem suffice as a sustained differentiating factor? Could the concept of Technology Hub be an alternative path?

In November 2019, Tommy Leong, Zone President, East Asia & Japan (EAJ), of Schneider Electric, a French multinational corporation (MNC), hosted regional clients in the Singapore HQ building. He highlighted how the company would capitalise on digital transformation to help create a futuristic city. Despite the high operating costs, Singapore was an ideal location for a regional HQ because of its first-rate infrastructure, strategic location and business-friendly corporate ecosystem. Through the Economic Development Board, the government actively pitched to MNCs and provided concierge services when possible. Schneider Electric was the global leader in energy management and industrial automation with strong growth prospects due to increasing urbanisation and digitisation trends. Leong had identified ASEAN as the growth region for the company. How could he create customised solutions for the business requirements of clients?

Associate Professor Chng Wee Joo, Director of the National University Cancer Institute Singapore (NCIS), started to move the treatment of cancer patients out of the hospital to the community and patients' homes. This innovative business model was implemented to manage the lack of space in the hospital and to reduce costs for patients. Chng also believed that an environment of strong family and community support would strengthen the morale of patients and result in fewer hospital readmissions. While Singapore had a reliable and balanced healthcare system, it faced higher healthcare expenses due to prolonged life expectancies and an ageing population just like other industrialised countries. Sedentary lifestyles, traditional diet habits and an increasingly polluted environment had led to an increase in cancer cases and cancer becoming the leading cause of death. The rising demand for cancer treatment had pushed the existing infrastructure and resources in hospitals to its limits and the shortage of hospital beds had resulted in a strategy to keep patients "out of the hospital" as long as possible. Operating under the National University Health System (NUHS) healthcare cluster, NCIS was a specialty centre designed to gain synergy by addressing all aspects of care related to the disease. With the clustering of public healthcare services in Singapore in 2017, NCIS now had the opportunity to incorporate primary care and end of life considerations in the care journey of a cancer patient. With his specialty in myeloma, a type of blood cancer, Chng led his team to focus on shifting healthcare out of the hospital and into patients' communities and home and started experimenting to deliver treatment outside of the hospital. Chng succeeded in treating myeloma in the outpatient clinic and subsequently in the patient's home. After the initial success, his team began working on similar projects in other type of cancers.

In January 2013, the chief executive officer and the department heads of Shoppers Stop Limited, India's largest department store chain, met to discuss the Indian government's imminent clearance of direct foreign investment applications by major global retailers. To prepare for the upcoming challenges from international competition, the head of the non-apparel department was asked to prepare a strategy. After discussions with the other department heads, he decided to recommend a sense-and-respond business model. However, he was unable to complete his plan because the head of distribution and logistics was unavailable until the following week. In part B of this case, the head of the non-apparel department met with the head of distribution and logistics to assess the advantages and disadvantages of centralized and decentralized distribution and logistics structures. The head of the non-apparel department was considering an expansion to an online business, and knew that a dedicated, efficient, and cost-effective distribution and logistics system would ensure its success. He had a preliminary plan for a sense-and respond strategy but had some lingering questions. Which key elements of this strategy did the organization already possess? How could Shoppers enhance these capabilities in the future? Would the company need a major distribution and logistics restructuring to improve its sense-and-respond capability?

GrocerMax, an online grocery retailer based in Gurugram, India, had grown steadily since its inception in 2015, managing to gain a foothold in the highly competitive online grocery market. GrocerMax had also succeeded in achieving higher average order values than many of its rivals. However, in mid-2016, the company faced a number of challenges. As a new entrant, its familiarity and brand awareness among consumers was likely much lower than that of the established competition. How could GrocerMax increase its reach? What promotional activities and marketing strategies could GrocerMax's management team adopt to drive more traffic to GrocerMax's website and increase sales while keeping costs under control?

In late 2017, the founder of Maple Tree Cancer Alliance faced a new challenge. In 2011, she had launched the non-profit organization to improve the quality of life for cancer patients by providing them with individualized exercise training programs, nutritional guidance, and emotional support during and after cancer treatment. In six years, the organization had expanded to 10 locations in Ohio and Pennsylvania; however, the founder wanted to strategically extend the organization throughout the United States, crossing the geographical and administrative boundaries of the healthcare system. One of her biggest challenges was to identify a growth model to stay sustainable. How could she position the organization for further growth?

In the summer of 2020, Jan Swartz, President of Princess Cruises, was persevering to lead her company back from the depths of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Diamond Princess, one of Princess Cruises' 18 ships was the site of one of the earliest large outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China. The outbreak led to hundreds of cases, at least a dozen deaths, media scrutiny, government investigations, and legal proceedings. In early March 2020, Swartz made the decision to pause all global operations of her company, the first cruise company to do so. Six months later, how could Princess Cruises restart operations safely and profitably?

Michael Joyce, Vice President of Inventory Management at JOANN, championed an effort to develop and implement an inventory allocation analytics tool that used advanced analytics to predict in-season demand of seasonal items for each of JOANN's nearly 900 stores and optimize store-specific inventory allocation decisions guided by these predictions. After the analytics tool had been in use for a full season of products, Joyce was surprised to hear that not everyone was pleased with its outcomes. With all of the concerns raised, should Joyce halt the use of the analytics tool for the next season?