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On Friday, February 22, 2019, following an unexpected and disappointing earnings report, The Kraft Heinz Company's stock price fell 27%, wiping out $16 billion in market value. CEO Bernardo Hees had announced that the company had taken a $15.4 billion asset write-down, that the company would be cutting its annual dividend from $2.50 to $1.60 and that it was under SEC investigation for accounting irregularities related to its procurement process. $8.3 billion of the asset write-down was related to a loss in value of the firm's intangible assets, specifically its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands. As Kraft Heinz looked ahead to the future, it was time to recalibrate its brand management strategies. With $50 billion in brand assets remaining on its balance sheet, effectively managing its brands going forward was critical to avoiding another brand asset write-down and to regaining the $8 billion brand value the company had just lost. Was Kraft Heinz's brand asset write-down the beginning of the end of the market dominance of "Big Food" brands across the board or was it idiosyncratic and a result of the firm's brand management resources, capabilities, and strategies?

Set in 2018, the case describes how Zang Hao, the CEO and co-founder of Iuiga, a Singapore based e-commerce start-up, eschewed the conventional e-retailing model by acquiring complete control over its value chain including ownership of the items retailed through the adoption of original design manufacturer (ODM) business model and marketing of its brand in addition to storage, logistics, and distribution. Under the ODM model, Iuiga contracts the manufacturers of large global brands known for their superior quality to manufacture the same products for Iuiga, and then proceeds to retail it directly under its own brand name at much lower, and transparent, prices on its online platform. By targeting quality-conscious customers with a range of products in the home and living category, Iuiga's sales grew fivefold within the first eight months of its launch. However, soon after, the sales growth began to plateau. One of the key reasons identified for the slowdown was the limited market reach of the brand due to its presence only on the online medium. With e-commerce penetration in Singapore at only 5 percent, the majority of the consumer market lacked awareness of the Iuiga brand and the value it offered. This led the company to consider creating an omni-channel presence by opening a pop-up store to drive face-to-face customer engagement and boost Iuiga's brand building efforts. However, this raised many concerns. Would Iuiga's current team be able to manage both the online portal and the pop-up store? With the omni-channel platform entailing unavoidable additional expenses such as rental, people, services and integration costs, would it undermine the strength of Iuiga's core business model? Also, the brick & mortar space was an unchartered territory for its management team, with no prior experience to bank upon. Most importantly, would Iuiga be able to convert the offline footfall to online traffic?

In 2013, Educate Girls (an Indian nonprofit working to increase the number of girls enrolled and learning in school), partnered with Instiglio, a startup specializing in financial instruments for social programs in developing countries to create the first Development Impact Bond-a financial instrument similar to a Social Impact Bond. UBS Optimus, a Swiss foundation, agreed to act as the investor and the London-based Children's Investment Fund Foundation would reimburse UBS Optimus' initial investment and pay returns if Educate Girls met or exceeded a set of predetermined goals. Instiglio would broker the deal and IDinsight, a new evaluation organization would conduct the evaluation. Agreeing on the evaluation design, however, proved challenging. An evaluation was vital to the DIB because success payments hinged on its findings, but Educate Girls was concerned that the investors and evaluators were not considering the realities of program implementation when proposing complex evaluation methods. Whereas, the investors and evaluators were not interested in backing a DIB where the impact findings could be open to question. This case places students in the decision room with the DIB parties and asks them to grapple with the tradeoffs social organizations and evaluators often have to face. The 8-minute video supplement can be used toward the end of the class discussion to reveal to students how the parties resolved their differences and signed on to the DIB.

Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy's founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments with cleaners at a convenient time and check the cleaner's ratings. Started in 2012 after the founders struggled to find trustworthy, affordable cleaning services while MBA students, by 2015, Handy enjoyed considerable success. Handy was one of the emerging platform companies in the gig economy that connected customers to service providers and sought to disrupt everything from transportation to grocery shopping to deliveries. Like many of these companies, Handy classified service providers as 1099 independent contractors, rather than hiring them as W-2 employees. Doing so often meant lower labor costs for companies and greater flexibility for workers. The companies' reliance on contractors was controversial. Workers, some argued, displayed all the marks of employees - they performed work that was integral to the companies' business and companies exercised control by telling them which jobs to accept and where and by using ratings systems to influence behavior. Facing two misclassification lawsuits of their own while still pushing toward profitability, Handy's founders must decide how to respond.

This case explores the interplay of global corporations, management styles, and local traditions through the high profile arrest of auto industry icon, Carlos Ghosn, in November, 2018. The case allows students to debate opposing theories that led to the arrest, and examines several key themes, such as leadership challenges in an increasingly global market, role of culture, and the design and role of incentive and governance mechanisms. The case also allows for discussions on personal accountability in light of misbehavior.

In August 2017, the Myanmar military commenced a brutal pogrom of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The genocidal campaign marked the most recent and decisive of a series of ethnic cleansing efforts fueled by contention around race, religion, and national identity. Yet the violence came as a shock to the international world, who had watched Myanmar emerge out of a decades-long oppressive military dictatorship into an economically and socially liberalizing democracy in recent years.<br/><br/> Within three months, neighboring Bangladesh found themselves the home of 750,000 Rohingya who had fled across the border. A developing nation of 165 million, it struggled to allocate resources to what became the largest refugee camp in the world. As the Myanmar government navigated international outcry against and domestic support for the violence, Bangladesh navigated its next steps: should it allow the refugees to remain, or should they send them back? And what role did international actors, many of whom had economic stakes within Myanmar, play in this humanitarian crisis?

In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual imagery, which has traditionally been generated not by the retail channel rather than by manufacturers. Catalog retailers, in particular, are famous for visually romancing the category. As a comprehensive offering, Wayfair hosts over seven million SKUs on its site, so it must solve for the lack of visual assets from manufacturers by generating visual assets of its own. Initially, the company embarks on a plan to produce these images using traditional photography studios and professional staffs, but costs mount and throughput is too slow. Seeking a solution, Shah and Conine assess the likelihood of using technology - specifically, high-resolution 3D modeling from low-resolution 2D images - to address the challenge. Resolving this issue is especially pressing, given that Wayfair has just launched private label lines and a host of what it calls lifestyle brands, which require support from high-end visual merchandising. As a consequence, the question of how to provision visual assets becomes a question of how fast Wayfair can grow. This case presents the factors involved in deciding what direction to take - a reliable path using traditional methods or a risky path using bleeding-edge technologies.

Raksul, 2018 Forbes Japan "Startup of the Year," ran an e-commerce platform drawing upon thousands of individual suppliers. Launched as a business-to-business printing services marketplace, Raksul had recently expanded to operate both a logistics/delivery marketplace and a television advertising marketplace. Each marketplace faces its own growth challenges; at the same time, the CEO must consider whether and how each marketplace can enhance the others.

This case examines the scale-up of the startup Eureka.com, an online customized gift shop. Started by a female entrepreneur in Turkey, Eureka has been the platform for providing customized gifts to individual buyers, offering professional marketing products for corporate clients, and serving designers and artists to market their creations. The case examines Eureka's financial and market position. It describes the application of managerial accounting and operations management, analyzes the performance of a startup, and investigates the necessary financial and operational decisions that the startup will have to make to scale up. This case is designed to be used in either managerial accounting or operations management courses related to entrepreneurial ventures. It contains topics important to both disciplines: contribution margin, return on invested capital, operations planning and inventory management, and performance management. The case provides an opportunity to focus solely on topics of concern to one of the specific courses or to integrate materials from both.

Yulife is a digital-first life insurance and rewards company that is seeking to disrupt the centuries-old life insurance market. Its founders are a combination of insurance industry veterans and executives in finance, wealth management and gaming. The challenge the company faces is that it cannot go to market alone: it has to work in some capacity with industry incumbents to achieve the growth it seeks. The case provides detail on yulife's goal of transforming the industry by focusing on the consumer; on improving their health. It also provides an overview of the life insurance industry which, in many ways, has been unchanged since its founding over four centuries ago. The challenge for yulife is how it can navigate the relationships and requirements in the industry so as to allow its consumer- and technology-focused offering to thrive.

In March 2015 London-based management consultancy Clarasys found itself in crisis. Established in 2011, the company had experienced consistent growth since foundation and had expanded staffing levels to service new business accordingly. But it was still in start-up phase and a perfect storm of events had suddenly hit the firm: two potential growth projects were unexpectedly shelved, meaning almost 50% of consultants were no longer on billable client projects, and the company accountants admitted to having made a serious mistake in VAT payments, which meant Clarasys had to make a double payment, for two years' VAT returns, at the same time.

PERTH, AUSTRALIA, September 2016. Torsten Ketelsen's history, for the last 30 years, had been deeply intertwined with that of garnet, the hardest industrial sand. He very much created a market for it, then brought GMA Garnet to a market leader position with a 40 per cent global market share. GMA Garnet's success was based on the exceptional quality of the product and on the company's complete control over the whole production and distribution cycle, from mining to processing, logistics, shipping and distribution to the final user world-wide as well as reprocessing and recycling. The industrial success story also benefited from the support of its controlling shareholder, Jebsen & Jessen Family Enterprise, a true master of entrepreneurial partnerships. But how did the Jebsen & Jessen Family Enterprise's overarching legacy, values, governance, business model and growth strategy contributed to the success of GMA Garnet? How will this relationship support or hamper the ambitious goals set for the company's future? What were the implications of the family firms' commitment to environmental mining practices and a circular economy in that context?

In 2011, the Rhode Island (RI) legislature established the Commission on Health Equity and charged this group with writing a report on health disparities every two years. The case protagonist, Dr. Harper Avery, Director of Minority Health at the RI Department of Health, has recently assumed the co-chair position on the Commission of Health Advocacy and Equity in RI. Through the experiences of Dr. Avery, the reader sees the issues involved when a multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral group must work together to create the health disparities/health equity report. Such issues include how to define "health disparities" and related terms, what health outcomes and behaviors to choose to report, where to get the data required for the report, and how to measure disparities with the data obtained. Additionally, the reader is encouraged to consider the multiple perspectives of the Commission members and the various constituencies they represent. This case study takes the students through the process of developing a state-level health disparities report.

In June 2018, subsequent to the widespread reporting around a privacy breach, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's 33-year-old founder, Chairman and CEO, was under pressure from the lawmakers to act on protecting the privacy rights of individuals. Facebook's lax policies allegedly allowed an app developer to sell Facebook users' data to Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm. Cambridge Analytica was accused of using Facebook users' data to profile and influence the voting intentions of British and American people. The disclosure of this news left Facebook tremendously vulnerable to criticism from the general public, media, and lawmakers. This resulted in an 18% drop in the company's stock prices. After two rounds of intense testimonies before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, lawmakers were still baffled by how Facebook was planning to address privacy issue given their business model that sacrificed user data for making the profit. Zuckerberg faced the difficult task of deciding how best to protect the privacy of users to prevent similar adverse events in the future, while maintaining profit. His options included (1) making some fundamental, and perhaps philosophical, changes in firm's value proposition (2) imposing stronger privacy protection measures, and (3) improving ethical decision-making in privacy protection through the governance adjustments.

This case comes in two parts, the first part is the written case and it paints a picture of a current business situation (December 2015) in the emerging industry of recycling - ripe with quality issues, some defined, many not. It challenges the student to come up with a quality-based plan of attack specifically for the purpose establishing a sustainable position in the community for the WM MRF. The detail in the case describes residential single-stream recycling supply chain from its mixed-material collection through sorted and bailed-delivery to recycling customers. The second part of the case is a data set to compliment the detail of the written case. It includes a spreadsheet of over 390 sampled receipts over a two-year period and includes over 5000 lines of detail. The student is challenged to explore this data and characterize and consider it managerially using statistically sound methods. How might insights from that analysis support the MRF's plans for improvements?

Vista Outdoor Inc. was a publicly traded company that competed in both Shooting Sports markets (e.g., firearms and ammunition) and Outdoor Products markets (e.g., hydration systems, sports helmets). Weak performance resulted in the initiation of a comprehensive strategic review of the company's business portfolio in November of 2017. This review was ongoing in February of 2018 when a 19-year-old former student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida with a semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle and killed 14 students and three educators. Surviving students at the school rallied the nation and asked for more action to prevent gun violence. On March 1, in response to customer petitions, both Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) and Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) announced they would stop ordering and stocking Vista Outdoor brands like CamelBak and Bell because the company also manufactured guns (including semi-automatic, AR-15 style rifles similar to the one used in the Parkland shooting) and because they didn't believe that Vista Outdoor was doing enough to advance the national conversation on responsible gun ownership. As the case concludes, students are put in the shoes of Vista Outdoor CEO Chris Metz who must decide how to respond to the actions taken by its retailers and whether the current national debate about guns and gun control should be factored into the ongoing strategic review of the company's business portfolio.

Zorbas Bakeries Case presents a decision situation. The case setting is Nicosia (Cyprus, EU), December 2014. Zorbas Bakeries, a large family-owned Cypriot company, was considering a bold new initiative - opening a new concept store abroad, in New York. Moreover, it wasn't just about opening one shop, but the shop that would be used as the pattern for all future international franchise stores. Such a project would be most unorthodox for a local family-owned company and would involve multiple risks. The managing director of the company Demetris Zorbas took up the responsibility for this project in early 2014. He had to finalize the plan before the decision by the management team at the end of 2014. "Are we fully ready to go to New York? Will we be able to compete in this difficult market? What are the projected financials for the new 'test case' store? Will this project add value?" The case requires students to do first a standard NPV analysis, and then presents an opportunity to introduce students, in a relatively easy way, to the rather complex but increasingly important concept of 'real options' in finance, an extension of the traditional DCF analysis. Students who are aware of the limitations of the standard NPV model, and can identify and understand real options, become ultimately more sophisticated users of the traditional DCF analysis and are ultimately able to make better investment decisions. The case also emphasizes that a financial analysis is an important determinant of the future strategy, although clearly not the only determinant. It is crucial for students to understand the strong link between finance and strategy.

"Arizona Medical Doctors" (disguised) seeks a cost-effective solution to improve its medical claims coding quality. The new Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management learns that a contract was signed with a software firm to develop and implement, for the first time, an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that will combine natural language interpretation and machine learning for Evaluation & Management (E&M) medical coding. If it works, the new system will improve E&M coding quality at a very low cost compared with the company's current human quality control process. The VP needs to decide whether to go forward and if so, how to mitigate the significant project and business risks. The case introduces students to two branches of artificial intelligence: natural language interpretation (newer, riskier technology than speech recognition) and machine learning. Students are challenged to recognize the relationship between IT project risks and business risks, spot high-level IT project risks and consider how to mitigate them, and to consider implications for managing rapidly-evolving emerging technologies in health care and other contexts.

Co-founded by Raghav Kapoor in Singapore in 2014, Smartkarma was an innovative e-commerce-based independent platform for providing investment research - conceived in response to changes in banking industry regulations post the 2008 financial crisis. New industry regulations required investment research to be a separate entity from sales in banks and financial institutions. Consequently, large investment banks looking to slash cost centres had started to outsource investment research. Smartkarma used a Subscription based business model. Independent analysts could publish research content on the platform and client organisations brought monthly subscriptions to access all content. Analysts were paid based on revenues generated from their content, determined by quantified value add (QVA) calculation model. By the end of 2017, Smartkarma had established itself as Asia's largest investment research platform with more than 14,000 insights across several verticals. It had also expanded geographically, establishing offices in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, and London. Smartkarma's CEO and co-founder, Kapoor, however, was aware that the firm's business model was susceptible to several risk factors, including very short-term client commitment, economic downturns and industry regulations. Kapoor chose a strategy of quickly acquiring as many clients as possible, as well as continuously building a pool of insight providers to create an early mover market advantage. Would Smartkarma be able to scale from being an Asian leader to dominate globally? Ease of entry, informational efficiency, and simplicity in replicating an independent investment platform, made it extremely difficult for such a business to beat the market on a sustained basis. Would focusing on the quality of research and transparent payment be enough to make Smartkarma the choice for asset managers in large banks? Could the company's subscription-based business model stand the test of time?

This research-based case uses the circumstances surrounding Virginia-based Smithfield Foods' (Smithfield's) buyout offers from multiple foreign firms to examine the political and cultural constraints of a regionally rooted global firm in pursuing its strategic objectives. Smithfield's senior leadership receives offers from three firms, ShuangHui International (ShuangHui), JBS S.A. (JBS), and Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF), based in China, Brazil, and Thailand, respectively, to acquire all of Smithfield's outstanding assets and liabilities. Smithfield's history was one of aggressive growth through acquisition, skirting government regulations, and truculence with respect to labor and environmental activists. However, as revenues plateaued, the firm faced increasing investor pressure to either trim costs or sell off portions of the company to improve shareholder value. Though the company's operations crossed continents, its identity and brand were tied to southeastern Virginia. Would it be best for the company or its shareholders to sell? If so, to whom? What risks would the firm face, politically and culturally, if it decided to do so? Because of its many details, the instructor teaching this case can approach the content from a number of strategic or leadership perspectives.