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The manager of the catalog division of an art gallery is attempting to prepare an assessment of the divisions financial performance.

Similar to Case TCG121. The department of neurology within a department of medicine is attempting to build its budget. The chair of medicine has asked the division head to give him a business plan, which is presented in the case. The chief must decide how credible the plan is. To fully understand what is going on, the budget-building (and business plan) effort must be taken down to the individual provider level.

Industry leaders should adapt to changes in the business context and consider different ways to grow. Advances in technology had shifted software demand to the cloud. As a result, Microsoft announced a strategic shift in direction from its existing 'Windows first' strategy to an 'AI/cloud first' strategy to capture the increasing demand for digital transformation solutions. In line with this change in the overall firm strategy, Microsoft had to come up with a viable go-to-market plan that would align its new commercial strategy with sales, partners, products, services, and customers in order to drive long-term growth without hurting current revenue or profits. The case outlines the challenges involved in transforming the sales strategy of a well-established firm to better serve customers.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador became president of Mexico on December 1, 2018. His election, and the victory of his new Party, MORENA, represent a sharp shift to the left by Mexico's political system. Previously, President Peña Nieto and his party, the PRI, had initiated and implemented the Pacto-a long overdue series of institutional and structural reforms. Yet even after several years, Mexico had not shown significant improvements in productivity, or growth. With U.S. relations at a low point, thanks to President Trump's neo-isolationism, Mexico elected Obrador as a nationalistic response. It remained to be seen how his new policies would affect Mexico's growth.

Nico Shea founded Cumplo in 2011 to enable peer-to-peer lending for consumers before changing the company's focus to small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Cumplo was a financial technology ("fintech") company that provided a platform for SMBs applying for a loan to be matched with investors willing to fund that loan. The platform further differentiated itself among SMBs by allowing companies to use unpaid invoices as collateral. Despite significant issues in the beginning with regulators, Cumplo operations in Chile grew to become one of Latin America's largest business crowdlending platform. Cumplo facilitated its first loan in Mexico in February of 2018, a month before the local government passed a new law regulating fintech companies. This enabled the team to work closely with regulators to create rules that would prevent bad players from damaging the industry and not be surprised by the rules that were enacted. While the team also faced challenges in establishing Cumplo's Mexican operations, after months of work they built a high-performing and motivated team. Having proven the Cumplo business model to be successful in both Chile and Mexico, Shea was anxious to begin more rapid expansion. Now that Cumplo had been successfully established itself in the largest Spanish-speaking market, Shea considered expanding to the second largest market of Spanish-speakers, the United States.

After five centuries of colonialism, four decades of civil war, an extended experiment with Marxism-Leninism, and nearly four decades of rule by a single man, José Eduardo Dos Santos, Angola finally has a chance to realize its enormous economic potential. A country blessed with enormous resources of oil, gold, and diamonds, it also has some of the most fertile remaining untilled land in Africa. However, since the end of fighting in 2002, Angola's vast wealth has been squandered by a small elite tied to the single party that has ruled the country since independence, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). In a country with a per capita GDP of over $4,000, the vast majority of the population subsists on less than $2 per day, and little investment has been made in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Can the country's - and the MPLA's - new president, João Lourenço implement the necessary reforms to unlock Angola's economic potential, or will the existing power structure prevent the sort of change that is required if Angola's people are to finally see the benefits of independence?

Roush Performance manufactured and marketed factory-modified performance vehicles and high-end aftermarket automotive performance parts. Since its inception, Roush Performance had focused on building its engineering technology competency and diversifying its product portfolio to grow sales. Many of its engineers were proud to be on the forefront of technological innovations with the company. In contrast, Roush's marketing and sales divisions had a somewhat passive role. The sales culture was stagnant, and sales compensation, a key factor in motivating salespeople, had remained unchanged for 25 years. Sales compensation is one of the key elements in an organization's sales management strategy. It is used as a primary mechanism to motivate salespeople and represents the lion's share of a firm's expenditures. Sales organizations have to constantly update their compensation practices to continually motivate their salespeople as the firm's sales strategy changes to adapt to evolving market conditions. In 2018, Roush's growth was down, and its salespeople had become shortsighted and complacent. A new sales compensation plan seemed necessary to better align salespeople with Roush's goals. The case outlines the challenges of designing a new sales compensation structure that can better motivate salespeople. The case focuses on salespeople but can relate to other employees and, thus, applicable to general HR management.

Describes the entrepreneurial leadership of Jack Manning Bancroft (JMB), a young Australian Indigenous university student who created the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME), a nonprofit organization he formed to respond to the problem of Indigenous high school students completing high school at less than half the rate of non- Indigenous students. The case traces the strategic, organizational and cultural challenges JMB faced in building an organization that eventually offered mentoring partnerships to 8000 Indigenous students in 350 high schools throughout Australia. Furthermore, the AIME students were completing school and going on to university at the same rate as nonindigenous students. The case concludes as JMB contemplates taking his successful, sophisticated model to the United States.

In August 2017, AMC Networks Inc. (AMCN), a New York City-based cable television provider, faced a lawsuit from the creative talent behind the hit show The Walking Dead. The lawsuit charged that AMCN used its vertical integration into content development to reduce the profits available for distribution to participants. For AMCN, which was originally a content distributor, expanding into content creation through its AMC Studios had several benefits. However, the industry was changing with the advent of online streaming services such as Netflix Inc., Hulu, and Amazon Prime, as well as an industry-wide shift among cable networks to offer proprietary content. These changes had an impact on the relationship between the business and the creative side of the industry. AMCN's chief executive officer had to decide how to respond to the lawsuit.

In December 2017, the corporate vice-president of Microsoft Corporation's Devices division was considering two options to chart a strategic course for the next few years. Since first joining Microsoft Corporation in 2004, one of the vice-president's key roles had been to oversee the strategic direction of the personal computing hardware business. The company, which was headquartered in Washington State in the United States, had a multitude of products and services that presented both opportunities and challenges for its future. Microsoft Corporation had to decide between two project options that represented growth in different business areas in Asia Pacific. The first option was to launch new products from the company's Surface division in the Asia Pacific market. This could be Microsoft Corporation's opportunity to showcase its holistic devices ecosystem to prospective customers in the region. The second option was to intensify efforts to market and sell the firm's cloud solutions. This could further differentiate Microsoft Corporation as an early mover enabling enterprises to migrate to the cloud.

In September 2018, the leadership team of Agarwal Packers and Movers Limited (APML) gathered for a meeting at the company's headquarters, located in the heart of New Delhi, India. The founder was considering whether the company should go public by the end of 2019. Since APML's inception in 1987, the team had worked hard to create a healthy brand recall, establish customer loyalty, and build a robust financial base. However, in the 18 months leading up to the intended initial public offering, the founder needed to consider two key questions: How could the company create and maintain service differentiation in an industry characterized by low entry barriers and limited pricing flexibility? How could it deliver quality service to retain customer loyalty?

First National Healthcare (FNH) runs a large network of hospitals and has worked to systematically reduce waiting times in its emergency departments. One of FNH's regional networks has run a successful marketing campaign promoting its low ED waiting times that other regions want to emulate. The corporate quality manager must now determine whether to allow these campaigns to be rolled out and, if so, which waiting time estimates to use. Are the numbers currently being reported accurate? Is there a more accurate way of estimating patient waiting time that can be easily understood by consumers?

How Richard Taylor, an African-American real estate developer, created an opportunity for African Americans to invest in a downtown Boston deal to build a major hotel.

Educators and entrepreneurs alike are excited about the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to change the way learning will look like in the future. There is a confluence of factors such as the availability of large sources of rich, granular data; fast connectivity; powerful processing capabilities at a lower cost; and the ubiquity of mobile devices driving the imagination of entrepreneurs who are envisioning a world powered by AI to change the way learning should happen. One of the exciting companies to emerge in this field is Liulishuo. Founded in 2012, Liulishuo operates mobile apps for English speaking practice and uses AI technologies to power personalized, adaptive learning experience. Co-founder Wang Yi and his colleagues believe that AI technologies could be a disruptive force in every aspect of English learning, including proficiency improvement and test preparation. They believe that AI technology could benefit English learners around the world and make everyone a global citizen.

The Universidad Privada Boliviana (UPB), the Private University of Bolivia, was founded in 1993. Not long after, in the late 1990s, civil unrest erupted with coca growers battling police in the streets outside the campus. Students and faculty fled, the prior President retired, and the University was functionally insolvent. Manuel Olave was hired as Rector (President) in 1999 to salvage the struggling school. Charged with turning around the struggling university, Olave realized that head-on competition would not help UPB thrive. Instead of benchmarking against leading universities, Olave formed a team to explore growth opportunities, using blue ocean methodologies like the Buyer Utility Map, Strategy Canvas, and Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create (ERRC) Grid. Based on insights from the blue ocean shift process, UPB made a series of strategic moves to capture untapped demand for higher education that was more affordable and of higher value for students. Two decades later, UPB is ranked the best private university in Bolivia, enrollment is at capacity, and the school is planning a third campus. The case comes with a first-hand video interview with Manuel Olave describing his blue ocean shift. The video can be downloaded for teaching purposes from https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/teaching-materials/upb/ Also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

The case focuses on blockchain (and distributed ledger technology or DLT) - a 'hot' area of fintech - and on R3 as a fintech consortium that includes some of the world's largest banks, financial institutions and regulators. R3 started out as a family office in 2014 and evolved into a fintech company focused on the application of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Within three short years it had built a global consortium of 80 members from the financial services industry, including Barclays, J.P. Morgan, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and UBS. The consortium's efforts resulted in an open-source DLT called Corda, geared towards handling increasingly complex transactions and regulatory oversight. Although Corda was inspired by blockchain, R3 did not view it as a blockchain product. In May 2017, R3's Series A raised US$107 million in funding to continue the development and implementation of Corda and expand its Lab & Research Center. Barely a year later, speculation arose that R3 was exploring an IPO.

The case discusses supply chain risk management: how to leverage the structure of a supply network to assess its resilience, focusing on the consequences of disruption rather than the causes, as is traditionally done. The proposed framework, presented in a 2014 HBR paper by Simchi-Levi, Schmidt and Wei, describes how a consultant, Ann Van Delft, applies this framework when assessing the supply chain risk for her client a large telco internet service provider. Telco had recently experienced several outages due to equipment malfunctioning and a shortage of spare parts, resulting in the loss of some customers to its competitors. Ann was hired to deal with these issues as senior management felt the outages were damaging Telco's brand, and would deter new customers.

This case study highlights the opportunities and economic, environmental, and social value generated by one of the nation's largest college dining operations, the University of Michigan's MDining. The case describes the MDining leadership team and their holistic approach to implementing local and sustainable food sourcing initiatives. The team's challenges in implementing an aspirational local sourcing program and gaps in the ecosystem encourage students to discuss potential solutions. The case covers the important role a university can play in improving food sustainability on campus, especially through student clubs, projects, and employment and research opportunities. More broadly, the case highlights challenges that large institutions can face in implementing local sourcing and what role institutions can play in ensuring sustainable food services procurement.