個案總覽

This case describes the transformation of the HR organisation of Mahindra's AFS sector from 2013 to 2017. The CHRO and his team designed and implemented a blueprint aimed at enhancing the strategic role of HR. The migration from a traditional to a strategic role entailed anticipating and allaying apprehensions related to the change process. The case offers an opportunity to understand the interventions aimed at building and institutionalising new capabilities and making the change process acceptable to all stakeholders. Case C encapsulates the assessment of the transformation exercise from the perspective of the CHRO and the Managing Director.

This case describes the transformation of the HR organisation of Mahindra's AFS sector from 2013 to 2017. The CHRO and his team designed and implemented a blueprint aimed at enhancing the strategic role of HR. The migration from a traditional to a strategic role entailed anticipating and allaying apprehensions related to the change process. The case offers an opportunity to understand the interventions aimed at building and institutionalising new capabilities and making the change process acceptable to all stakeholders. Case C encapsulates the assessment of the transformation exercise from the perspective of the CHRO and the Managing Director.

The (B) case situated in 2020 describes the many quick decisions taken by the fund in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the calls for social justice, and raises the question of whether and how these decisions are aligned with the long range strategy of the fund.

This case is the continuation of EMMA Safety Shoes (A): Designing a Circular Shoe. EMMA reached 100% circularity in shoe design at the end of 2019, but this impressive achievement did not mean its journey to the circular economy was over. EMMA Safety Footwear - Implementing the Circular Business maps out several milestones in the transition of its business model, recycling logistics, supply-chain management and internal culture to make the circular shoe a sustainable business. A series of events between 2019 and May 2020 push the company in the right direction, but to be truly successful means taking the lead for the entire safety footwear industry, getting stakeholders such as customers, dealers, business partners, and competitors on board.

Supplement to case W21081. Mathilde Johnsen was a highly motivated environmental systems engineer in the real property branch of Public Services and Procurement Canada. Johnsen advanced a job grade about every 18 months, and in 2016, she successfully applied to the management stream. In 2019, after completing an MBA, Johnsen pursued an opportunity in the executive stream of the civil service. Her past behaviour raised concerns for the selection committee, who decided that, rather than promote Johnsen, they would give her a one-year secondment in the executive position so they could assess her growth. Unfortunately, her inability to deal effectively with subordinates, peers, and superiors resulted in Johnsen's effective demotion and transfer out of the department. Could this unfortunate career derailment have been avoided?

Supplement to case W21081. Mathilde Johnsen was a highly motivated environmental systems engineer in the real property branch of Public Services and Procurement Canada. Johnsen advanced a job grade about every 18 months, and in 2016, she successfully applied to the management stream. In 2019, after completing an MBA, Johnsen pursued an opportunity in the executive stream of the civil service. Her past behaviour raised concerns for the selection committee, who decided that, rather than promote Johnsen, they would give her a one-year secondment in the executive position so they could assess her growth. Unfortunately, her inability to deal effectively with subordinates, peers, and superiors resulted in Johnsen's effective demotion and transfer out of the department. Could this unfortunate career derailment have been avoided?

The case opens in November 2020 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran's first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, eagerly await the results of the U.S. presidential elections. The case takes us through the challenging times between November 2019 and November 2020, as the confounders navigated Snapp through an increasingly challenging environment of sanctions, stricter restrictions of big tech companies, and since February 2020, through the operational difficulties exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that shook Iran to its core. The case highlights the challenges of operating under sanctions and the different ways the co-founders try to find to keep Snapp alive and asks how the U.S. election results could change the environment in which Snapp operates, as the two presidential candidates have vastly different approaches to their policy to Iran.

Supplement to case 720030

At the end of 2018, Applied faced questions of stakeholder management and scale. Glazebrook wanted clients to get rid of CVs altogether. To do this, they would have to help hiring managers and recruiters easily build task-based assessments of the skills that their positions required. Applied used several strategies to encourage clients to rely more strongly on skills assessments.

Susan, a first-year analyst at a trading firm, is the only woman among a tight-knit group of 30 analysts, now that Paulette has just been promoted to associate from third-year analyst. She and the rest of the analysts are summoned to an HR meeting because one of the male analysts has been putting Post-It Notes with drawings of penises in Paulette's workspace. All the analysts know who the offender is, but no one, including Susan, identifies him. After the meeting, Susan realizes that what she had considered a joke is actually harassment that could be hurting Paulette. This B case follows Susan's decision and ensuing actions.

Having just moved from the sales department to the marketing team at a start-up, Lisa is confronted with a dilemma. Part of the reason she switched departments was to improve the strained relationship between the two departments. Her first assignment is to call competitors, pretending to be a customer, to get their pricing information. Lisa doesn't want to lie, but feels a responsibility to her new boss, her old boss who advocated for her, and both her new and old departments. This B case describes her decision and its consequences. Lisa recognizes that she actually had more options to act ethically than she had thought, and decides to be more thoughtful and prepared for similar dilemmas in the future.

The case is a continuation of the part (A) of the case and focusses on the expansion of Mime restaurants to other cities. After establishing Mirchi & Mime and Madeira & Mime in Mumbai, the parent company, Squaremeal Foods Private Limited (SFPL), opened another Mirchi & Mime outlet in the city of Indore. The case describes the objectives of the company as it embarked on this expansion, and the extent to which these objectives could be achieved. It further describes a few operational issues that the company faced in the initial stages of setting up this new outlet.

This case is part of the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. To see other material in the GVV curriculum, please visit http://store.darden.virginia.edu/giving-voice-to-values. Maria Pérez has been working at IBB, one of the largest investment banks in Latin America, for only a few months, when she is confronted by a dilemma. She is working with her mentor and boss, Veronica Muñoz, on an acquisition for one of IBB's clients, and they have identified a target company. When they request preliminary information for the valuation, the accountant for the target company accidentally sends very detailed data. He calls in a panic and asks them not to use the information. Muñoz promises not to use the mistakenly sent documents, but as soon as the call is over, she tells Pérez to use all the data to inform her valuation. Pérez loves her job at IBB, but she needs to slow down and consider her actions in this moment. She does not want to lie to a business partner, as trust and honesty are integral to how she sees herself as a businesswoman. She decides to find a solution that would enable her to remain faithful to their assurance to the target company accountant, prepare an informative due diligence for their client under time pressure, and maintain her relationship with Muñoz. This B case details her decision and discusses a few ways Pérez could prepare a more coherent approach for future encounters.

During the Indian general election of 2019, the Nizamabad constituency in Telangana state found itself in an unprecedented situation with a record 185 candidates competing for one seat. Most of these candidates were local farmers who saw the election as a platform for raising awareness about local issues, particularly the perceived lack of government support for guaranteeing minimum support prices for their crops. More than 185 candidates had in fact contested elections from a single constituency in a handful of elections in the past. The Election Commission of India (ECI) had declared them to be "special elections" where it made exceptions to the original election schedule to accommodate the large number of candidates. However, in the 2019 general election, the ECI made no such exceptions, announcing instead that polling in Nizamabad would be conducted as per the original schedule and results would be declared at the same time as the rest of the country. This presented a unique and unexpected challenge for Rajat Kumar, the Telangana Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) and his team. How were they to conduct free and fair and elections within the mandated timeframe with the largest number of electronic voting machines (EVMs) ever deployed to address the will of 185 candidates in a constituency with 1.55 million voters from rural and semi-urban areas? Case A describes the electoral process followed by the world's largest democracy to guarantee free and fair elections. It concludes by posing several situational questions, the answers to which will determine whether the polls in Nizamabad are conducted successfully or not. Case B, which should be revealed after students have had a chance to deliberate on the challenges posed in Case A, describes the decisions and actions taken by Kumar and his team in preparation for the Nizamabad polls and the events that took place on election day and afterward.

In 2018, the LEGO Group defined a new way of leading to enable the company to move more quickly, to make the right decisions, to deliver its mission and the commercial momentum that sustained it, and to shape the LEGO® culture in a positive way. This new way of leading would need to be modeled at the top of the organization. That was certain. But CEO, Niels Christiansen, and Chief People Officer, Loren Shuster, believed that the task of defining the new way of leading should not be done by the Executive Leadership Team or by HR. It should be developed bottom up. The LEGO Group was no longer the patriarchy it had once been under its founder, but Shuster saw that patriarchal assumptions about leadership lingered in its culture. If the LEGO Group was going to move towards a balanced system where leadership responsibility was more distributed and less hierarchical, it would be ironic to impose this top down. A better way to start would be to invite people from different levels and different functions of the organization to answer the question: What kind of leadership do we need in the LEGO Group and how can we embed the new way of leading into the fabric of the organization so that it can be self-generative? Case B describes how the LEGO Group brings the Leadership Playground to life in the company.

By December 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had swept across the globe, creating widespread disruption in all aspects of everyday life. Almost 90 million people had been infected and nearly two million had died from the disease. By this point in the pandemic-a year since the first rumors about the novel virus began, mask-wearing and social-distancing had become routine, and millions of people were working or studying from home. Grief and anxiety were widespread due to the loss of loved ones, financial hardships, and uncertainty about when the pandemic would recede. Hoping to solve the health crisis, governments worldwide were relying on private companies to fast-track the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Meanwhile, the global economy was experiencing the worst output crisis in decades, with a recovery that was uncertain and uneven across countries, coupled with rising concerns about the levels of debt and inflation.

July 2017 was supposed to be a triumphant month for HNA Group. The latest Fortune Global 500 list showed the company had again skyrocketed in its ranking to no. 170, an improvement of over 200 positions from the year prior. Yet earlier that same July, the mysterious death of Co-Chairman Wang Jian portended a darker outlook. Over the next three years, HNA would fall as fast as it has risen. A liquidity crunch forced HNA to sell many of the assets it had purchased. The Chinese government, once a core supporter, also lost patience with HNA, fearing that the sprawling and deeply indebted conglomerate could threaten China's financial system. Chairman Chen Feng forged ahead with attempts to deleverage, but the COVID-19 crisis, which decimated HNA's core travel business, proved to be the last straw. A task force of officials, reported in the media as a "takeover" by China's Hainan provincial government, entered HNA to assess the situation. By 2021, it was clear that HNA Group would not just be humbled, it would also be broken up. Hundreds of HNA affiliates were to enter bankruptcy, the umbrella group would be restructured, and Chen Feng was legally barred from the luxuries leading HNA had afforded him. How could HNA, with its flight routes and reputation for good service, recover as an airline? Or were its founders' sky-high ambitions to see an Icarus-like end?

In January 2021, Chesca Colloredo-Mansfeld (MBA '92), cofounder and executive director of MiracleFeet, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating untreated clubfoot for good, found herself at yet another crossroad. In just over a decade, the organization, which partnered with local clinics to provide low-cost, nonsurgical solutions to one of the world's leading causes of disability, had treated just over 50,000 children in 29 countries, nailing nearly every ambitious goal to date. Notably, it had accomplished this with just over $31 million in funds raised. And with programming costs of just under $500 per child, treatment with MiracleFeet had proven to be one of the most cost-effective, high impact health initiatives in the world. But a hole remained. Over the prior decade, Colloredo-Mansfeld had faced a number of challenges. These included how best to harness the power of data to operate more efficiently and effectively, deliver the highest-quality programming, and provide meaningful data for donors that, in turn, informed the programming process in a continuous feedback loop. Indeed, Colloredo-Mansfeld had figured out how to use data to drive performance, retain and inform major donors, and manage impact but she struggled with how to scale the organization beyond the low-income model. Since inception, MiracleFeet had focused primarily on countries with poor access to health care. However, in order to solve the issue of untreated clubfoot globally, Colloredo-Mansfeld would have to figure out how to leverage data to forge a new pathway beyond low-income countries.