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After more than 1,100 people lost their lives in the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh, executives of Joe Fresh, a Canadian fashion and lifestyle brand, had to respond. Along with numerous other Western retailers, Joe Fresh had sourced much of its merchandise from the Rana Plaza factory. The disaster evoked an emotional public reaction, ranging from sympathy to outrage. The clothing industry had become a critical part of Bangladesh’s economy, and this was not an isolated incident. How would the Rana Plaza incident affect the public perception of Joe Fresh, and what could the company do to improve that perception? More fundamentally, how could Joe Fresh balance its competitive position, obligations to shareholders, and customer demands with ethical sourcing?

Mahindra & Mahindra Limited was the largest manufacturer of farm equipment in India, with a more than 40 per cent market share. It manufactured five different tractor brands in the domestic market, including a brand of mini-tractor, the Yuvraj 215 NXT. This brand was targeted at small farmers with less than two hectares of land, who were primarily dependent on bullocks or power tillers for farming but aspired to own a tractor to increase productivity at an affordable price. Although such farmers formed over 70 per cent of the farming population, the penetration of tractors in this segment was the lowest. While the situation demonstrated high potential, selling tractors in this segment was challenging due to low product awareness, limited access to information, and low financial resources among target customers. With such a product in its portfolio, how should Mahindra & Mahindra Limited promote the Yuvraj 215 NXT among small and marginal farmers?

In June 2013, The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) launched Coke Life, a naturally sweetened but sugar-reduced carbonated soft drink. Coke Life complemented TCCC's established product line consisting of Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero. Coke Life substituted a portion of the sugar component with stevia leaf extract and contained 35 per cent less sugar than Coca-Cola Classic. TCCC claimed that “Coke Life is for adults looking for a great tasting Coke but [one with] fewer kilojoules and [that is] sweetened from natural sources.” Affected by governmental interventions, such as the implementation of special taxes and warning labels, the consumption of soft drinks had slowed down significantly, which had caused leading soft drink manufacturers to introduce “green” product modifications of their traditional beverages. When TCCC launched Coke Life, the market for carbonated soft drinks was highly competitive and was shrinking in part due to concerns over soft drinks contributing to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Was Coke Life likely to be successful? Or was it simply a “greenwashed” product in a highly segmented market?

In September 2015, Susie reflected on the performance of her personal investment portfolio over the past seven years. Susie had invested in two exchange traded funds (ETFs): Lyxor ChinaH and Lyxor MSIndia. She was now considering Lyxor USDJIA as a third ETF to diversify her risk. This analysis would involve the concept of portfolio diversification and the application of the capital asset pricing model. In addition, Susie would need to calculate mean returns, standard deviations, covariances, correlations, betas, and required returns in order to fully assess the merits of her decision. Although Susie had been satisfied with her portfolio performance over the past seven years, the high growth in these two emerging markets had fizzled out lately. Should Susie diversify her portfolio or remain invested in China and India only?

In 2012, All Nippon Airways diversified into Japan’s emerging low-cost carrier market by launching two new low-cost carriers: Peach Aviation and AirAsia Japan. After one year, Peach Aviation experienced financial losses and operations failures; after two years, the company announced cancellation of many flights. The second carrier, AirAsia Japan, ended its operations in 2013, and was later restructured as Vanilla Air, a wholly owned subsidiary of All Nippon Airways. Why was a highly successful flag and legacy carrier unable to successfully run a low-cost carrier in Japan?

In 2013, United Bank of India (UBI), predominantly present in the eastern and northeastern parts of India, faces considerable difficulty in managing its swelling amounts of bad debt. A forensic enquiry by an external agency has identified some serious problems in the bank’s credit appraisal process, loan disbursement procedures, and non-performing assets (NPA) detection system. With the bank’s year-over-year growth of NPAs surpassing the growth of its credit, the management team faces the urgent task of developing an effective turnaround strategy to bring the bank back into a profit position.

In April 2015, Dan Price, chief executive officer and founder of Gravity Payments, a private credit card processing and financial services company, announced that every employee would receive a minimum annual salary of US$70,000 over the next three years. Price said he was concerned about the increasing pay gap in the United States and news of his bold move went viral, causing debate over employee compensation plans and the wealth gap in society. At first, there was applause for his radical actions, causing an initial rise in new business. However, there was almost an immediate backlash both internally and externally. One senior worker at the company resigned, claiming that lesser-skilled workers would simply clock in and out while highly skilled workers were not similarly compensated with raises. A lawsuit was filed by Price's brother, a minority shareholder, who believed that the move would hurt the company. A number of clients left Gravity Payments while other companies criticized the move, saying it made them look stingy. Price attempted to tackle pay inequality by increasing salaries, but this created controversy. Employees were not the only stakeholders affected by Price's actions. What should Price do now?

in 2011, the senior management team at TransCanada Corporation in Calgary, Alberta, was stunned by the U.S. Department of State announcement that it was deferring its decision on a presidential permit, which was required for all construction of infrastructure crossing U.S. international borders. The infrastructure in question was the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would create a 2,735-kilometre direct route for Canadian crude from the Alberta oil sands to refineries in Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast. Because the pipeline would pass through environmentally sensitive landscapes, especially in the state of Nebraska, non-governmental organizations, climate change activists, citizens, celebrities and federal and state politicians pressured the Obama administration to halt the project. Company executives had initially seen the Keystone XL pipeline as a readily achievable, financially significant and strategically compelling venture but now wondered whether they had missed the indications and opportunities to avoid controversy. Extensive advertising campaigns and intensive lobbying in Washington did not seem to have improved the likelihood of the pipeline’s construction. What could be done now to increase the likelihood of permit approval and bring the Keystone XL pipeline to fruition?

In February 2015, Facebook’s Free Basics platform was launched in India by Internet.org, a partnership between Facebook and six mobile service and device companies. The platform was meant not only to enable Internet access on a smartphone but also to deliver low-cost Internet connectivity to the masses. Internet.org had already successfully launched Free Basics for a population of eight million people in nine countries across Asia, Africa, and South America. In India, however, the platform was not well received by a few eminent corporations and, more importantly, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The launch of Free Basics stirred a nationwide debate about whether Internet.org was trying to control Internet services in India, creating an imbalance among the existing telecom service providers and causing a disproportionate development of business opportunities. Would Free Basics succeed in its goal, or would it be banned across India?

The purpose of this note is to give a brief introduction to dynamic programming. The note introduces dynamic programming terminology and notation and provides motivation for why these problems are difficult to solve. Five examples illustrate how dynamic programming can be applied in a variety of settings.

This case introduces the key features of Google’s wearable technology product “Glass” and illustrates the tensions that Google faced over the development and marketing of this product. The case goes on to highlight the growing backlash that Google experienced when promoting Glass.

The co-founder and chief executive officer of The Asylum, a movie production company headquartered in Burbank, California, must decide whether the company needs to explore other avenues for growth or change its current business model to boost profitability. The company has developed a unique imitation strategy to reduce the uncertainty of financial success in filmmaking – its “mockbuster” business model is to produce B-rated movies that use plotlines similar to that of major Hollywood films already in production and release them at the same time as or just before the comparable Hollywood film. It can thus take advantage of the large marketing and promotion campaigns that large film production studios employ to promote their films while producing a substantially cheaper (but somewhat similar) film. To date, all of these mockbusters have been profitable, but changes to property rights regulations and increased litigation cases may come to affect the bottom line. There are three options going forward: maintaining the status quo, focusing even more on producing mockbusters or shifting toward completely original film production. What should the company do to ensure future success?

An equity analyst at a value fund considers pitching to his fund manager the Canadian software maker Constellation Software Inc. The last software company he pitched was rejected for failing to meet the value fund’s investment criteria of low analyst coverage and small market capitalization with either a strong competitive advantage or a low price-earnings ratio and a low price-to-book ratio. The analyst has heard that Constellation Software is earning very high returns on invested capital deployed and wonders whether the company’s current valuation makes it a great business investment at a fair price.

In December 2014, after receiving poor service on a flight, a senior vice president at Korean Air lashed out at the flight attendants and delayed the flight’s departure until the chief attendant was returned to the gate. Following a tepid apology from her father, Korean Air’s chief executive officer, her actions drew a public backlash because they exposed the sense of entitlement prevalent among rich family conglomerates in South Korea. How should she have reacted in the face of the service failure? Why had she become the target of a public backlash? What could Korean Air do to mitigate the negative effects of this incident?

Theranos Inc. (Theranos) was a medical diagnostics enterprise based in Palo Alto, California. Having developed an innovative blood-testing system for deployment in clinical trials by pharmaceutical companies, Theranos was keen on extending the use of its system to individual consumers in the United States and Mexico. In leveraging growth opportunities for its innovation in the burgeoning field of personalized medicine, the company’s chief executive officer faced two managerial dilemmas: How should Theranos navigate the chasm between early adopters (the pharmaceutical companies) and mainstream consumers? And how should Theranos navigate the cost-benefit trade-off, as perceived by individual consumers, in a bid to promote product adoption in the mainstream market?

By the summer of 2015, Flipkart Online Services Pvt. Ltd. of Bangalore, India, had become a significant player in the Indian e-commerce industry. The company started its online operations with an inventory model, focusing on books, but expanded to a marketplace model with music, movies and mobile phones. Its fashion retail portal Myntra, acquired in 2014, closed its website operations on May 1, 2015, and moved to an app-only platform to take advantage of the increasing use of smartphones by the Indian population for Internet searches and purchases. Although it experienced some initial losses, the parent company announced in July that it would also be moving to an app-only platform in September, becoming the first e-commerce company in the world to adopt this strategy on such a scale. Will this innovative move lead to further success and become a game changer for the industry or is it a step taken too soon into a future trend?

The U.S. Federal Reserve System's decision to taper its quantitative easing program triggered large capital outflows from India, and the rupee depreciated by 13.7 per cent from June to August of 2013. Firms dependent on imports complained of rising costs, but exporters stood to benefit from the depreciation. On a macro level, economic growth dropped and inflation remained high, raising concerns that the much-touted “India growth story” was over. India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, faced the difficult task of fighting inflation and stopping the rupee's decline once the economic growth had slowed down. Expectations were high for an appropriate action from the bank, even as room for policy maneuverability appeared limited.

In 2015, Burger King, one of America's oldest fast-food chains, continues to face fierce competition from McDonald's, Wendy's and the emerging fast-casual restaurant chains. As a result, Burger King needs to develop a marketing mix that will distance it from its competitors and narrow the gap with McDonald's, the industry leader. The marketing mix will also influence Burger King’s allocation of resources between domestic and international markets.

In 2009, the Tata Nano entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the lowest priced car in the world. It was predicted that with the Nano, the Indian car market would expand by 65 per cent. But despite the car’s initial popularity, the final demand for it was low. By 2012, the Nano plant was operating at only 25 per cent of its capacity, and by 2014, Nano production was limited to only three days per week. After introducing the Nano Twist and trying to reposition the Nano as more than a “cheap car,” Tata Motors was considering permanently ceasing production of the Nano and using the plant to manufacture other sedans. What had gone wrong with the Nano and what was in store for its future?

At dawn on May 29, 2015, Swiss authorities acting on behalf of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation entered a plush hotel in Zurich, Switzerland to arrest nine senior executives of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), soccer’s global governing body, as delegates from across the world convened to elect a president to lead them for the next four years. The incumbent president, who had been in office since 1998, at first refused to step down, but pressure from the media, sponsors and fans as the investigation escalated forced him to resign a few days later. The organization’s signature event, the World Cup, had grown into a quadrennial cash cow through the shrewd sale of broadcast and marketing rights. Now, charges of corruption were forcing its governance and practices into the limelight. How could the executive forge a path ahead and what steps were needed to repair the organization’s reputation and survival?