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In August 2019, the newly appointed chief executive officer of DSS was planning for his company's future. He had two main questions to address: Having emerged from the shadow of DuPont, how should his new company be reorganized into an independent enterprise? As a stand-alone enterprise, would DSS gain credibility among its clients and employees?

This case introduces Qualcomm's licensing practices in the mobile telecom sector, with a focus on the Chinese market. The point of view adopted is that of the partners of the fictitious Xiao Xing, a Chinese mobile phone start-up that has no sales yet but requires Qualcomm's chips in order to prototype its product. There are two cases. The main issues examined in Case A are: (a) the sort of questions and issues that entrepreneurs must examine when planning a technology start-up, including financing, location, and access to seed money; and (b) the terms under which Qualcomm's chips can be procured, and the problems posed by such terms, especially regarding the royalties involved, cross-licensing provisions included in their standard agreements, and their impact on the viability of the start-up. Case B (which does not require previous study of Case A) examines the development of Anti-Monopoly Law in China and the recent measures taken by the Chinese NDRC regarding Qualcomm's licensing practices.

Supplement for product 9B20N018.

This (B) case expands upon the journey of Career Karma's three founders by presenting a fictionalized Investor Meeting scenario.

Additional Supplement to accompany product 8B20M123.

Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-Lebanese-French, is by many counts, one of the - if not the - most celebrated automotive executives of the late 20th and early 21st century. This is a two-part case about his career, leadership, and decision-making. Part A starts in 1999, the early days of Ghosn's arrival in Japan, where he went on a mission to rescue Nissan, one of the biggest Japanese car manufacturers with a long tradition that had run into trouble and was in danger of bankruptcy. Ghosn went there after Renault entered into an alliance with Nissan in 1999. The case then goes back in time, following Ghosn from when he was born in Brazil, and then moved to Lebanon and later France, where he studied and began his career at Michelin. The case ends in November 2018, with talk about the potential merger of Renault and Nissan into a single company having stalled, leaving the alliance in status quo. Part A of the case is structured around a key tension: What happens when the cosmopolitan, melting-pot, aggressive Ghosn - who made his name as 'le cost-killer' - meets corporate Japan, with its very homogenous, indirect, and conflict-avoiding culture? Part B starts on November 19, 2018, when Carlos Ghosn is arrested as he arrives at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan. The accusations against him include allegations of misappropriation of company funds for personal use and concealment of a large amount of remuneration. According to the chief prosecutor, Ghosn's wrongdoings were more serious than insider trading. The case presents in some detail the different allegations against Ghosn, and then describes the reactions of Ghosn and Nissan to the accusations. It ends with a recounting of some of the subsequent events, including the granting of bail to Ghosn. Part B of the case is meant to facilitate discussion around a key question: How could someone as successful as Ghosn have come to engage in the kinds of behaviours he was accused of?

B case to W20532

The case series titled "Indian Railways - Powering Through to Excellence (A) & (B)" are highly intricate and complex primary data pricing cases involving a public-private partnership (PPP) undertaking by the Indian government, specifically the Indian Railways (IR). The seed of the idea lived through multiple governments and IR administrations before becoming a reality. The pricing and plant development decision took seven years to execute. While the case can be viewed broadly as a study of a PPP project in India, the significant aspect of the project is that it was initiated primarily with price considerations in mind. The IR had been facing rising engine costs for its locomotives, poor asset utilization rates, exorbitant costs for replacement parts and underperformance in asset service and repair. The technology platform of its current fleet of 6,000 HP locomotives and spare components was nearly 20 years old.

The first two cases in this series are set in the financial services industry, and explore whether it is better for back-office workers to be generalists who provide the flexibility of being able to handle the complete range of transactions that the company faces or specialists who focus on a subset of the overall transaction mix. The objective is to introduce the advantages of demand pooling in reducing the variability associated with the forecasting of highly variable workloads, while also demonstrating the benefits to worker learning and efficiency improvements that can come from specialization. The case is set at the Retail Investor Group Operations of the Vanguard Group, the mutual funds and ETF giant. Karin Risi, the managing director, is faced with a back-office operation that hasn't kept up with massive transaction growth, one that is struggling under the weight of mounting client phone call and transaction volumes, client complaints, and buckling employee morale. And worse, the press was taking notice. The (A) case details the complexity in the growing backlog and frames the question of whether they should pursue a specialist model. The (B) case, for distribution in class, details the impact of an initial segmentation of workload into eight categories and poses additional questions for class discussion and analysis.

Case B focuses on the year of transformation. In January 2018 Anna disrupted ths narrative of success and told RDB it needed to transform. The case outlines the critical decisions and actions Anna initiated to steer the transformation, engage customers and staff and address concerns in the leadership team. Focusing on cultural transformation was a pre-requisite to prepare the company for digital transformation. The case provides the opportunity for participants to assess whether Anna succeeded in introducing transformation to an already successful business.

Case (B) is based on the China-U.S. trade war and discusses how this Chinese Internet security company with American capital raises Series C funding in the second quarter of 2018. Should the company seek dollar funding to grow in the global market, or opt for RMB funding to focus on the Chinese market? Of utmost importance is how to deal with a situation where U.S. investors are pessimistic about Chinese security companies, and RMB funds are unwilling to invest in businesses with a dollar funding structure.

Case (C) introduces the latest progress of Chasm Security as of the end of 2018. It then poses a very inspiring question to comprehensively summarize the case series: "If the founders had a second chance, how would the game play out?"

With the economy in a freefall, MetricStream is losing customers, hemorrhaging cash and struggling to make payroll. Several board members are threatening to quit. Others are pressing to sell the company even at dismally low valuations. It's 2008 and lightning has struck for Shellye Archambeau once again. As CEO of MetricStream, she had spent the last seven years turning a tech startup on life support after the dot-com bust into a market leader of governance, risk, and compliance software for businesses. As a black female CEO, Archambeau is no stranger to adversity. Becoming a leader had been her goal since high school and she had achieved it through decades of hard work and skillful decision making. Now she faces her most critical leadership decision. She calls a meeting with her board chairman, Gunjan Sinha, to discuss the best path forward: Sell MetricStream while offers are on the table, or try to save it by looking for a big customer of the company's risk management software against the backdrop of the financial crisis? Both options have dire consequences. Valuations are plummeting by the day. Cash is disappearing by the minute. Archambeau and Sinha need to decide and act swiftly.

This case uses the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) to set the stage for unfolding an analysis of economics and values in the decision to divest tobacco stocks and bonds from the internally managed portion of the CalPERS portfolio. Written from public sources, it offers a discussion about fiduciary responsibility for long-term retirement security and investment policies around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies for the public pension fund. The material includes financial data that further allows calculations and discussion on tobacco investments outperforming the broader market. The A case opens with the CalPERS investment committee having made a decision to recommend removing tobacco investment restrictions. The CIO reflects on whether supporting investment in tobacco firms conflicts with CalPERS's member health and health care mission. Did supporting continued divestment mean CalPERS was putting its own social priority and ideals ahead of its clients' investment goals? The case data should lead most to conclude the fund was breaching its fiduciary duty. This short B case can be handed out in class. This deepens discussion around ESG, the investment fund's duty, and retirees' frustration. Despite the CalPERS investment committee's recommendation to remove restrictions on investing in tobacco stocks, the board of administration decided to broaden limitation and extend the ban to externally managed portfolios in December 2016. Two years later, opposition to CalPERS's divestment strategy took the form of a campaign to run for a seat on the board of administration. This was followed with the appointment of another CIO who strongly supported ESG investment strategies.

Historically, personal and commercial banks (P&CB) maintained long relationships with their clients who tended to do most if not all of their banking with one bank. However, by 2017, industry-wide change was well underway as switching costs had become negligible if not non-existent. New entrants were disrupting the banking industry as digitization allowed upstarts to break through long-standing barriers to entry. RBC's Cultural Transformation, intended to reposition the enterprise for the "new normal" in the financial industry, included the creation of this team of collaboration enablers (called Operations Transformation or OT) to drive efficiencies across operations within the current fulfillment operating model and importantly to envision and enable a new digital operating model where people only intervened in a transaction when there was an exception, i.e., a transaction that fell outside the technology's capabilities. OT was tasked with enabling-through collaboration and without radical surgery-the day-to-day optimization of P&CB fulfillment activities and facilitating major change in the way work was done. At the time of the case, eighteen months in, the team was seeing mixed results, which deeply troubled its leadership. Questions abounded: Was it foolish to try to enable major change through collaboration without upending the traditional RBC organization with more radical approaches? Or was the OT group not structured correctly to enable it-and if not, what changes should be made? Was a different collaboration model needed? Internally, some questioned whether the group was optimally located within the organization (as part of the back office organization structure), since the back office was often viewed as more of a servant to the front office. Others wondered if OT's internal structure was getting in the way of its purpose.

This is a supplement to the "Accounting for Leases at American Airlines (A)" case. The (B) case describes American Airlines' financial results for the first quarter of 2020, as well as the continuing effects of coronavirus on the airline industry.

Case B contains a description of the deal between the Trust's original Sponsor (Sterlite Power) and a new set of financial investors led by KKR. The new investors first entered as an additional Sponsor and eventually replaced the original Sponsor to become the IndiGrid Trust's sole Sponsor. Through the deal, the incoming investors and the eventual Sponsor committed to buying five of the original Sponsor's transmission projects as and when they became operational, with two such operational projects to be acquired immediately. The case concludes with a summary of the consequence of this change on the outlook of the Investment Manager, now owned by the incoming Sponsor. The Investment Manager, freed from the limiting interest of the original Sponsor, had to search for investment opportunities from the perspective of incoming financial investors, which included the new Sponsor.

After a tumultuous five months, Nestle India was exonerated in the Maggi crisis just in time for Diwali. Although the mood was one of vindication, the leadership team with Suresh Narayanan at the helm, knew they faced a major challenge to regain lost glory. Stock price had plummeted along with consumer confidence which went down from over 90 to less than 5 per cent. Part B traces the efforts of Nestle India to not only reinforce the message of product quality but also to engage consumer trust. Through changes in product strategy, organisational structure, and multi-pronged communication, Maggi was able to rekindle the emotional connect with the consumer and surge back. On 30 November 2019 despite loss of market share, consumer faith and trust in 2015, Nestlé India was trading at INR 14,453/55 (NSE/BSE;~US$225) per share after hitting a record low of INR 4981 (~US$76) on 29 February 2016. Part B of the case outlines the measures Nestle India took to bounce back and asks if Nestle India's reputation is out of the woods. Could the past come back to haunt Maggi or was the worst behind them?