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Emsad, a company in the oil and gas industry, needs to improve its safety record. The company has safety systems and safety professionals but has not established safety as a core value. Safety is based on compliance and enforcement and production is often seen as more important than safety. The company is seeking a major new client and undergoes a safety audit as part of the client's qualification process. The audit reveals various issues and now Emsad must decide what needs to change to improve safety performance.

In 2012, just before the Christmas holiday season, a 13-year-old girl, McKenna Pope, filed a petition of complaint to Hasbro, a leading North American toy manufacturer. She wanted to end gender stereotypes in children's toys. Hoping to fulfill her younger brother's Christmas wish, Pope realized that there was only one pink and purple variant of the Easy Bake Oven available in the market. The oven was viewed as gender specific (only for girls) making boys reluctant to play with it. Even the commercials and the packaging of the toy featured only girls, creating a reluctance among young boys to play with it. Pope decided to write to Hasbro with the support of an online collaborative platform called change.org. The petition questioned Hasbro's product planning and created awareness about the firm's gender based marketing strategies. Surprisingly, the petition gathered support from not only parents, but also from some of America's culinary experts who voiced their concerns about creating a divided culture.

The senior vice-president for sustainable investing at the U.S.-based Pax World Funds, a leader in socially responsible investing, needed to identify and invest in companies for the company's Pax Ellevate Global Women's Leadership Fund, an investment fund that promoted labour rights through gender equality. The fund had more than US$200 million in assets under management, a 25 per cent one-year rate of return, and a three-year annual rate of return of 10 per cent. In June 2018, a newly hired analyst was asked to evaluate a company to determine its suitability as a potential gender-lens investment target for the fund, using specific socially responsible investing criteria. She wondered how she should evaluate the company. What characteristics would make it suitable as an investment target for the fund?

India's airline industry was an oligopoly, with six major players in the market. IndiGo, launched in 2006, had become India's largest airline and a dominant player, after having taken advantage of market conditions, including a rise in per capita income that led to increased demand for air travel. However, in 2018, after a decade of consistent profitability, IndiGo was experiencing a decline in profits that was affecting its share price. The airline's management needed to consider how the company could sustain its market-leading position over the long term and even increase profits, while accepting the minimal control it and its competitors had over ticket prices, amid an atmosphere of rising costs for aviation fuel and personnel costs.

Founded in 2008, Harsh Electricals was a supplier of electrical goods and home appliances to retailers in three states of southern India. After the company's first few years of success and high profitability, the founder observed a steep decline in profits. In 2013, the founder was considering shifting the business to manufacturing and supplying air coolers, but needed to build a business plan that addressed the costs of manufacturing, the break-even point, and the new venture's projected financial statements.

This case study describes Tieqilishi (TQLS) Group's corporate social responsibility initiative in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China. Case A, set in 2016, describes the poverty-stricken Liangshan prefecture. Famous for 'cliff villages' (villages on top of high mountains accessible only via ladders on steep cliffs), Liangshan had the largest population of Yi ethnic people, who lived in the autonomous region governed by their own set of traditional customary laws. Inhabiting remote mountainous areas, the isolated Yi people were plagued by poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse and AIDS. Lei Wenyong, Chairman and Founder of TQLS, had to decide whether TQLS should participate in the poverty alleviation program at Liangshan. Headquartered in Chengdu, Sichuan, TQLS was a leading enterprise in China's agriculture industry, specialising in animal husbandry and the production of animal feed and processed food. TQLS had a history of making charitable contributions to society in the past, but investing in Liangshan would require careful consideration.Case B traces TQLS senior management's decision to proceed with the development of a pig farming industry in Liangshan in 2016, and the many challenges they faced along the way, such as stringent environmental regulations, delays in obtaining government loans, poor transport infrastructure and manpower shortages. Case C is set in 2017, and describes the short- and long-term measures undertaken by TQLS to overcome those challenges. The company's CSR projects in Liangshan proceeded well, and were marked by the co-founding of the Liangshan Commercial Poverty Alleviation Institute with the local government, collaborations with universities, setting up of training centres and Yi Cultural Study Centres, and plans to build primary schools in the villages. In this final part of the case, Lei came to the realisation that a more effective poverty reduction approach could be achieved through collaboration with other companies.

The case explores Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse's mission to disrupt the global payments industry by leveraging the cryptocurrency XRP. Students will learn about Bitcoin and the blockchain industry, as well as Ripple's unique crypto business model. The case provides an opportunity to navigate the areas of distributed technology, platforms, regulation, and global payments, from the perspective of a San Francisco software startup with over $20 billion in digital assets.

This case examines the leadership challenges associated with maintaining a culture of innovation in established organizations. It asks students to step into the shoes of a leader faced with making several tough decisions about when to invest (or to stop investing) in radical innovation projects. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks, who nearly bankrupted the company in the early 2000s when he overinvested in fiber optics, must initially decide if the company should enter a then-risky deal with Steve Jobs to produce the glass covers for the first generation iPhones. The case then asks students to analyze the Corning's 157-year innovation agenda that started with the development of a bulb-shaped glass encasement for Thomas Edison's new incandescent lamp. In the years that followed, Corning made investments that led to products such as PYREX cookware, fiber-optic broadband cable, LCD television screens, Gorilla Glass, and a recent bet on pharmaceuticals. At the end of the case, Weeks must decide if Corning should continue to invest in a new pharmaceutical packaging product that held enormous promise, but had already cost the company $200 million in R&D and might divert resources and attention from other key business lines.

Thierry Breton, chairman and CEO of IT company Atos, faced a pivotal juncture. After spending eight intense years scaling the company globally to over 100,000 employees in 70 countries, he was ready to take the next crucial step. Breton was convinced that rapid digital shockwaves would cause transformative disruption and become key to competitiveness for companies, including his own. To take the digital leap, Breton needed Atos to undergo dual digital transformation - defined as redesigning the underlying processes and competencies of an organization to become more adaptive using digital technology, from artificial intelligence and machine learning to the Internet of Things, while simultaneously guiding customers through the same changes. Breton had also struck a high-profile partnership with Google to deliver cloud design and artificial intelligence to customers. But now that the deal had been announced, Atos had to deliver. The firm's top leadership was split on how to equip Atos' large workforce for its digital transformation. In one view, Atos needed to motivate the majority of its employees to voluntarily complete digital certification programs. In another view, on-the-job learning was the best way to train both technical and non-technical employees in the digital skills relevant to their respective roles. Breton had to determine which approach would be the fastest and most effective way of upskilling his workforce to meet the demands of dual digital transformation.

From quitting a stable post-MBA job and starting FINDMINE, a start-up in the retail technology space, to finally negotiating venture capital investment offers, Michelle Bacharach-and FINDMINE-had come a long way. Two years of uncertainty with virtually no outside capital raised, a pivot from B2C to B2B, two accelerator programs, and numerous meetings with potential investors and customers had made her an entrepreneur who was comfortable with difficult times and choices. However, none of that had prepared her for the decision she faced in March 2016. After over two years of scraping by, Bacharach had finally found investors interested in putting in much-needed funding to help move FINDMINE forward. Just hours before signing the deal, however, one of the investors had requested additional terms at the last minute: he asked for advisory shares and, most importantly, he wanted to add pernicious terms that seemed very unusual. Bacharach's decision was bound to define the future of FINDMINE and, ultimately, her own career as an entrepreneur.

Aperture Investors is a startup investment firm that seeks disrupt the asset management industry through competitive differentiation by charging investors primarily when its portfolio managers outperform the marketplace. Headed by Wall Street veteran Peter Kraus and backed with substantial and patient seed capital, Aperture seeks to attract both star portfolio managers and assets from mutual funds and hedge funds. Kraus believes that his innovative business model addresses the current dysfunctional fee and incentive structures in the industry, which have led to long-term market underperformance, and that Aperture will address the reasons that are motivating investors to shift to cheaper, passively-managed index and exchange-traded funds.

Nimit Sawhney scrolled through the tweet stream on his phone, unsure of what to make of it on August 6, 2018 or how to respond. Voatz, the Boston-based startup he co-founded and led, provided a mobile-voting platform. In March of 2018, had successfully piloted the new technology to enable U.S. servicemembers stationed abroad to vote securely in West Virginia's primary election. Two West Virginia counties had participated in the first test. Thirteen people voted from their mobile phones, a much more convenient alternative than the other options available to service members abroad. The very first West Virginia voter to use the app called it "slick." Two dozen West Virginia counties were preparing to make mobile-voting via Voatz an option for their citizens living abroad in the general elections slated for November. But the August tweets threw this plan into question. Kevin Beaumont tweeting as @GossiTheDog retweeted a CNN article about Voatz and the upcoming November election with his own commentary: "This is going to backfire." He accused Voatz of operating with out-of-date security for remote logins. It would get worse from there. And Sawhney's task was to figure out how to make it better.

Peter Alkema, chief information officer of Business Banking at First National Bank in Johannesburg, was puzzling over ways to ensure that codeFest, the event he had inaugurated, would continue to thrive beyond 2018 without his direct involvement. His brainchild had begun in 2015 as a one-day hackathon with 100 participants. Three years later, it had grown to become a six-day coding and innovation extravaganza. Now, in May 2018, Alkema wondered what features of codeFest should continue into the future. What should be improved upon? And what novelties should be injected to take the event to the next level?

After more than a decade of development, US-based Synergy Pharmaceuticals Inc. (Synergy) received marketing approval from the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) for its first drug, Trulance, which targeted a large market that had only two other approved competitors. Synergy now needed to scale up from a research-and-development shop to a sales-and-marketing powerhouse. The company had not partnered with a larger pharmaceutical company during the regulatory review process, which was typical for smaller drug development companies, and as a result, it retained 100 per cent of the sales revenue but had virtually no in-house sales or marketing capability. In September 2018, the company was heavily indebted and the stock was priced below US$2; many wondered if Synergy had been right to go it alone or if it should continue that strategy for developing the lucrative North American market. With a new chief executive officer, Trulance sales beginning to accelerate, and other products moving through the FDA approval process, Synergy needed to decide whether to stay the course and become a full-fledged pharmaceutical company or seek a partner and stick to its research and development competency.

Industria de Diseño Textil, SA (Inditex), primarily through its flagship brand Zara, had grown to be the world's number-one fashion manufacturer and retailer with the introduction of what many considered a disruptive fast-fashion business model. However, Inditex's chief executive officer insisted that this term failed to describe the company's business model accurately. Like other successful business model innovators, Inditex in 2019 was faced both with new competitors who had successfully copied and enhanced key components of its approach and with the growing desire of fashion conscious consumers to shop online. Inditex needed to find a way to continue to differentiate Zara in this evolving industry while capturing more than its share of the tremendous market growth anticipated for the future.

Atikameksheng Anishnawbek was a First Nations community near Sudbury, Ontario. The reserve, described in the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, encompassed much of the Sudbury mining camp, which produced an estimated CA$1 trillion of mineral resources. At issue was the boundary of the reserve, which was much smaller than agreed upon, and whether Atikameksheng could claim a share of the value. The reserve had not been surveyed until 34 years after the treaty was signed, which resulted in discrepancies, the most significant being that the surveyed reserve boundaries were much smaller than agreed upon and described in the treaty, thus excluding a great deal of the mineralized land. Atikameksheng did not have any agreements in place, nor was the community receiving compensation from the two largest companies mining the land, despite the high value of extracted minerals. In 2018, in the context of the ongoing boundary and compensation disputes, the chief had to decide how best to focus his energies to facilitate community economic development.

Service systems are inherently subject to variability, whether through customers, service providers, suppliers, or unexpected events. Yet customers demand excellence and consistency regardless of this variability. In general, there are two ways to handle this variability-through people or through processes. We use the concept of robustness to describe these two approaches. This case uses an inventory mishap at a pet store to explore the need for robust people in a service system subject to variability. The case gives students the opportunity to explore the implications of lack of robustness when people face unexpected variability. A day-shift manager at a pet store, Martin Fesmire, thinks nothing of selling two rabbits to his best customer. But when the rabbits have a litter of bunnies overnight, Fesmire's professional world is thrown into turmoil that will grow to involve his boss, the corporate legal department, the CEO, the highest court in America, and an ever-increasing number of disputed rabbits. This tongue-in-cheek story allows for a discussion of the strategic tradeoffs between investing in robust people versus investing in robust processes.

In October 2016, Wilf Blackburn, the CEO of Prudential Assurance Company Singapore (PACS) started an organisational transformation journey to reposition PACS as the number one insurance company in Singapore. Earlier that year, PACS' market share had fallen from 22 per cent in the previous year to 17 percent, pushing the company to the number two position. But plummeting market share was not the only reason for concern. There was brimming dissatisfaction amongst employees within the organisation over long work hours, a hierarchical work culture and dwindling bonuses. PACS was a subsidiary of Prudential plc (Prudential), and had a long successful history in Singapore. It had been the performance powerhouse of the Prudential Corporation Asia (PCA), but in 2015, the company lost two key bancassurance partnerships. As a result, PACS annual new business premiums dropped by US$ 82.7 million, and its market share slipped by almost five percentage points. The following year, PACS lost a long-standing high performing agency to its competitor. Once, considered the fortress of Prudential's business in Asia, PACS had many challenges to overcome. The company hardly relied on its regional office (PCA) due to its previous stellar performance, and, there was undoubtedly little trust between the regional office and Singapore office. Internally, there was discord between departments, and each unit preferred to work in silo. Hierarchy was pervasive and performance was sales driven; targets set were not aligned to expectations. Moreover, PACS had seen five CEO appointments over a span of 10 years. Each CEO had his own unique, quite contrasting style of leadership, and this quick succession of changes yielded different business strategies, with many not seen through their full completion. As the incoming CEO of a troubled first world business, what approach could Blackburn take to turn around the organisation?