個案總覽

In January 2016, Silvio Elías, co-founder and CEO of Veritas, Catalonia's leading organic supermarket chain, headed to a meeting with the company's board to present the alternative options to enter in Madrid. At that time, Madrid was thriving like no other Spanish region and stood out as an attractive market for expansion. Most of all, operating in the nation's capital accounted for an instrumental step forward on the path to accomplish Elías' overriding vision: turning Veritas into Spain's organic food leader. Nonetheless, Spain's organic food retailing landscape was changing very rapidly, with increased, fierce competition from a diverse range of players. Against this competitive backdrop, Elías wondered if Veritas should approach Madrid by opening their own stores, following the same strategy it had used to rise as industry leader in Catalonia. Eroski, a conventional supermarket chain, had also reached out to Elías to offer Veritas an opportunity to display some of its private label products at Eroski's stores in Madrid as they did in Catalonia. Elías needed to make the final decision on his recommendation to the board.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer must figure out how to handle an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. His head of sales and CFO are constantly at each other's throats, and the tension is having a bad ripple effect on their teams and the rest of the organization. Should he change the company's compensation scheme to encourage better collaboration, get the executives coaching, or do more team-building activities? Or should he fire one or both of the warring executives? This fictional case study by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden features expert commentary by Scott Salmirs and Dale Winston.

At the end of 2018, international markets were no longer paying a premium for Ecuadorian roses. Despite globally recognized product quality, mainly attributed to a longer vase life, Ecuadorian rose growers found it extremely difficult to achieve attractive levels of profitability. A multi-year analysis of US-based data showed just how pronounced this trend was (see Exhibit 1). Being one of Ecuador's chief exportable products, and generating more than 100,000 jobs, the industry needed a change. How could this small Latin American country reimagine how it competes in this global market?

This case provides an inside glimpse into the unraveling of crisis management effectiveness at the hands of an organization's leader. In the dark of night, a runaway train owned by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) jumped the track, setting off pools of fire that decimated the tranquility of the French-Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic. More than 1.5 million gallons of petroleum crude oil, spewed from 62 of the train's tank cars, turned the town into an inferno. Forty-seven townspeople were incinerated. In the heart of town, homes and businesses were destroyed. Every crisis tests the mettle of its leaders. This case captures lessons of what not to do when representing your organization in crisis. The tragedy is a dramatic platform to explore and evaluate the extraordinary challenges that leaders encounter in crisis, from untangling causes and contributing factors attributable to their organization, to facing into the devastating impact. Through verbatim transcripts contained in the case and publicly-accessible videos, details are brought to light as they unfolded, including crisis leadership offenses of speculation, finger-pointing and cross-cultural insensitivity.

This case provides an exceptional opportunity to evaluate attribution and fact, error and blame, active failures and latent conditions as an organization manages a crisis that it has caused. At approximately 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 2013, an unmanned runaway train owned by the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway (MMA) derailed, burst into flames, and set off explosions that destroyed the center of Lac-Mégantic, a quiet town in Québec, Canada. Forty-seven victims were incinerated as residential, commercial, and historical buildings and the people in them were swiftly reduced to ashes. Unlike many other crisis-based cases that focus on executives and managers, the protagonist is an operator, an MMA train engineer, who is publicly scapegoated by his company's chairman even before the facts are in. Despite facing charges of criminal negligence causing deaths, the engineer, out-of-towner Tom Harding, reaps the support of Lac-Mégantic residents, including many whose families, community, dwellings, and businesses have been decimated by the tragedy.

This short, fictitious case provides a basis for discussing brand valuation for several purposes (e.g., capitalization of intangible assets on post-M&A balance sheets, input into managing and leveraging the brand across the business, setting transfer prices to optimize international taxation, setting rates for brand licensing agreements, evaluating brand ROI, and co-branding revenue splits between parties). It does so from the perspective of a luxury brand's chief marketing officer (CMO), Lena Müller, who is furthermore worried how the choice of valuation method might affect her annual bonus. Lena is particularly concerned by the vastly different valuations ascribed to leading brands by two of the leading league table providers, Brand Finance and Interbrand, who use different methods to do so.

Mike Maples Jr. founded the micro-VC firm Floodgate in 2006, after a successful career as an entrepreneur with two startup IPOs under his belt. At the time, he had identified a group of overlooked founders in Silicon Valley: those who wanted to raise only $1 million or less, a growing group since costs involved in launching a company had been declining significantly as a result of technological advancements and innovative management approach, such as "lean startup". In the following decade, he invested in a stream of successful companies, including Twitter, Digg, Chegg, Twitch.tv, Demandforce and Weebly. In the mid-2010s, however, the Micro-VC category, which Maples had helped create, was quickly becoming crowded. Additionally, the sources for early-stage funding multiplied: angel investors, "super-angels", crowdfunding platforms and traditional later stage VCs expanding into seed investing turned into competitors. The combination of intense competition and high availability of investable funds had one natural consequence: founders could command higher valuations and choose from many potential investors - it was an entrepreneurs' market. Determined to preserve his position as a thought-leader and successful investor in Silicon Valley, Maples set off to understand how he could, once more, positively influence the VC industry through an entrepreneurial approach. Based on deep analysis of past investments, he developed a suite of frameworks to help entrepreneurs navigate their companies' trajectories at a time when getting to the next funding round and commanding ever-richer valuations became an obsession in the entrepreneurial community.

Agriculture was Ireland's largest indigenous industry. Its agri-food sector was export-driven, with almost 90% of production exported. Bord Bia was the Irish government agency charged with the promotion, trade development and marketing of the Irish food, drink and horticulture industry. Bord Bia's CEO, Tara McCarthy, was shaping the government agency's new strategy amid a volatile socio-political environment (with Brexit and other cross border trade issues) and in light of consumer trends in the macro food and drink industry.

With hundreds of suppliers providing a medical inventory that delivers medicine to nearly 4 million patients a year, Shanghai General Hospital is looking for new ways to improve its medical supply chain. The current system not only takes up too much of pharmacists' time for menial stock-taking duties, but is also labor intensive and prone to error. Wang Xingpeng, the hospital's chief executive, wants to better utilize medical professionals' time and allow pharmacists to do more clinical work for patients. Further complicating the issue is a new set of government rules that will require hospitals to sell medicine at cost, meaning that what was once an income source will soon become a cost burden. The hospital is planning to establish a new supply system with one of its suppliers, Shanghai Pharmaceutical. How should the new system address existing issues? And as Wang reviews the strategic partnership, how can he align the new partner's interests with the hospital's objectives? This case demonstrates the components of a medical supply chain in a hospital and the challenges associated with managing such a supply chain. It allows students to discuss ways to streamline the supply chain. The case can also be used to explore topics in strategic partnerships, in particular, vendor-managed inventory systems, and offers background for discussion of the risks and considerations when introducing a third- party strategic partner into the supply chain.

The e-payments industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years, especially in Asia, driven in part by technology developments such as the high adoption of smart phones and the boom in e-commerce. The digital innovation of e-payments adoption and diffusion requires the creation and sustaining of an ecosystem. This case describes the e-payments ecosystems of China and Singapore which differ in their development trajectories as well as their resulting configuration, raising important issues for discussion regarding ecosystem design and evolution.

Dr. Vera Cordeiro founded the NGO Instituto Dara in 1991 to help poor families break the cycle of poverty and illness in Brazil. She and her team of employees and volunteers developed a holistic methodology to address the multidimensional sources of poverty based on the pillars of health, housing, citizenship, income, and education. After introducing the seeds of this approach, the case examines the evolution of the organization's attempts to grow its social impact in Brazil and beyond-including a loose network of sister organizations, social franchising, licensing agreements, and government adoption.

After experiences in managing a clothing business and a family-run sugar mill, Edgard Corona (hereinafter "Corona") had a ski accident that wound up changing his life. He founded Smart Fit - a fitness center based on a value-oriented model that has achieved remarkable growth in a short period. The company, established in Brazil in 2009, by the end of 2017 had more than 1.5 million members in six Latin American markets and ranked as the absolute industry leader in the continent and the fourth largest gym chain in the world. Smart Fit's mission was to provide everyone with access to high-level physical activity - "to democratize high-end fitness". However, the model seemed easy to copy - so Smart Fit management decided to develop a package of customer features and expand rapidly. In addition, Smart Fit faced new competing business models, for example, a new smartphone platform that gave users entry to clubs located in Latin America, Europe and United States. Corona feared that intense and rapid expansion might risk customer satisfaction. Indeed, overseas expansion strained the company's financial and managerial resources. However, the question remained: Should Smart Fit devote continued efforts to sustain its high-growth path in Brazil and abroad?

Fishbowl is a social media app that allows professionals to connect with other relevant professionals both within their company and across industry. Unlike many other social media apps, on which users typically present idealized portraits of themselves, on Fishbowl, people get real. Fishbowl prides itself in being a "safe space" that allows users to feel comfortable interacting with candor - whether to ask difficult questions in order to give and get advice, or just to vent or crack jokes. A key part of the user experience is the ability to post anonymously. But to ensure relevance of posts, when a user signs up, Fishbowl verifies their identity by requiring them to provide their full name, employer email address, LinkedIn account and contact list. Fishbowl has several hundred thousand users and is now looking for ways to monetize the platform. As such, founders Loren Appin and Matt Sunbulli face a mission-critical decision: should they integrate employers into the platform? Although formally integrating employers would provide a much-needed revenue stream, at the same time Appin and Sunbulli worry that doing so could destroy the user experience. Is formalizing employer relationships antithetical to the safe space they have created?

Since its founding in 2014, Malus Analytics International (MAI), a US-based player in the analytics consulting industry, had focused on helping its clients move to cloud-based computing and database management. However, by 2018, this strategy had left many of MAI's customers vulnerable to "Shadow IT," an information technology (IT) phenomenon where employees used computing devices, data, and software that were not provided, approved, or sanctioned by an organization's IT department for work. Twenty of MAI's top clients had experienced data breaches as a result of the use of unsanctioned applications. In response, MAI's management team needed to develop a collaborative plan to help ameliorate the natural tensions between the chief information officers and the end-users. The plan needed to balance security requirements and resource management with innovation and flexibility.

On April 2, 2017, the two founders of Foxcore Retail were preparing for a third summer managing their small retail business in Ontario, Canada. They had spent the weekend reviewing budgeting, staffing schedules, and inventory planning for their biggest expansion to date. There was only one pressing concern that had not been solved. In the past, employees had tracked sales by hand, on paper, which led to headaches when it came to calculating sales representatives' commissions. Additionally, the two partners knew that by not documenting key information about each sale, they were missing the opportunity to collect valuable data that could provide insight into the performance of employees, events, and products. As the business grew, they were starting to notice the impact of these inefficiencies on customer service, and it was clear that this was the right time to implement a more disciplined database system.

In January 2017, the founder of Sunton Manufacturing in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, China, boarded a flight to Cambodia. He had to tackle the performance issue of the company's garment manufacturing joint venture (JV) there-after two years in operation, it had run out of cash. After meeting with his JV partner, he concluded that the existing JV in Sihanoukville was beyond repair. He now needed to decide whether to exit Cambodia or to remain there, albeit in a different city and with a new partner. A new factory would require further investment. If he quit Cambodia, could his company survive and develop in the future?