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Autosalon Klokočka Holding s.r.o. (Autosalon Klokočka), a Czech Republic-based car dealership, needed to change its business ways. A family-owned car dealership, the company was founded in Prague in 1988 by Jan Klokočka. In the last thirty years, the company had grown into one of the largest authorized car dealers in the Czech Republic by providing a comprehensive range of services to car owners. But the automobile industry had been among the most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. As automotive companies braced for a revival, they had to be prepared to undergo significant modifications to alter how they operated and generated value for consumers. Despite its continuous expansion over thirty years, Autosalon Klokočka had been experiencing substantial slowdown and financial losses. In 2020, the company recorded a significantly lower revenue than in the previous years. By early 2022, it was still unclear how long the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic would last and how changes in customer behaviour and capabilities, supply chains, channels, original equipment manufacturer strategic choices, and other crucial factors would affect Autosalon Klokočka. As the company found its financial position vulnerable, Jan Klokočka needed to determine how to mitigate negative consequences and create growth opportunities. How could the firm adapt its existing business model to improve profits in the next three to five years?

In 2021, Robert, a highly qualified immigrant from the United Kingdom, had recently joined PLT Consulting (PLT), a multinational management consulting company, as a junior consultant in the Tallinn, Estonia, office. This professional services firm had a strong international brand. However, Robert soon realized that the organization catered both internally and externally to more local demands. In particular, his lack of local language proficiency made the organization a challenging work environment for him, both professionally and socially. Robert raised the issue with his boss, who invited him to a meeting with representatives from PLT's human resources department and his work team. What concrete steps could they suggest that would help resolve the situation?

This case presents a dilemma that professional golfers face when having to choose a target point for landing the ball. Key to this case is to acknowledge uncertainty as reflected in less-than-perfect accuracy. Thus the ball will land in a ""cloud"" around the intended target. On such a cloud, some spots (e.g., the fairway) are better than others (e.g., sand bunkers or rough). There is therefore a conflict between advancing the ball as close to the hole as possible, while at the same time reducing the chance of being in trouble on the next shot. The idea is to find a sweet spot between these two competing goals. To operationalize this problem, we use data from the Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) tour to estimate the average number of shots to complete the hole as a function of (i) distance to the hole, and (ii) type of surface (fairway, rough, recovery, sand, or the green). The case comes with a companion Excel spreadsheet, UVA-QA-0953X, which shows a map of a classical hole in the PGA Tour (the 10th at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles). This Excel file also displays a heat map of a bivariate normal around any chosen target, and a heat map with the average number of strokes to complete the hole. Students' goal is to understand the model and use it to find a good target.

Founded in 578 AD, Kongo Gumi was a family-owned business until 2006, when the firm went into liquidation to pay its creditors. While its demise is briefly covered, the case study is focused on its longevity. A renowned builder of traditional temples, in a country where these are major tourist attractions, Kongo Gumi has left an indelible mark on Japanese culture and history. Many of the temples built by its carpenters are listed and some are UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The "Moral Complexity in Leadership" series of cases and teaching notes help business instructors harness the power of fiction to prepare students for the moral and ethical dilemmas they will face throughout their careers. Meaningful fiction challenges students intellectually and emotionally; it reveals the inner worlds of human players and enables learning that can be difficult to access through case studies, commentary, or reporting. Through literature, students will wrestle with the kinds of problems they will face as leaders looking to make courageous decisions aligned with their moral codes. The works in this series represent a wide range of settings, viewpoints, and cultural frameworks; the characters are complex and contradictory, and the systems within which they operate (whether family, organizational, or cultural) influence them in varied ways. These cases have been taught to executive, full- and part-time MBA student audiences for many years. The series aims to increase students' understanding of moral frameworks and to enhance their skills in facilitating and participating in healthy and productive dialogue about complex and provocative issues. This installment of the series, "Hubris and Humility," examines the short story "Dead Men's Path," by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. In the story, Michael Obi, the new headmaster of the Ndume Central School, hopes to modernize the school and surrounding community, both of which are deeply rooted in traditional ways and customs. However, he ultimately pays a high price for his "misguided zeal," which did not take into consideration the context or the interests of the school's stakeholders. Obi's experience offers powerful lessons to leaders tempted to implement their ideas in--and impose their values on--organizations or communities before taking the time to listen and learn. It highlights what can happen when leaders ignore the risks of hubris and fail to recognize the limits of their perspective.

The case describes how Zhuiyi, a leading conversational artificial intelligence (AI) start-up in China, developed its growth strategy and made transitions in the face of product commercialization challenges. The crux lies in the low customer satisfaction rate of AI products, which could be endogenously attributed to mismatched expectations among customers and the founding team in the product development process as well as to the lack of vertical industry knowledge among executives and employees. Zhuiyi needs to make a strategic choice between: a) developing new AI products by making large and risky research-and-development investments or b) devoting more resources to product customization and expanding the market through client diversification.

Child Rights and You (CRY) was a non-governmental organization (NGO) started in 1979 in India. The organization experienced pan-Indian growth and later expanded to international locations. While CRY was partnering with state governments to increase its impact and reach, the global environment was shifting toward sustainable development. At the same time, the Indian government statutorily mandated companies with a specific turnover or net worth to spend 2 per cent of their profits on corporate social responsibility activities. In 2022, CRY's chief executive officer, Puja Marwaha, had four focus areas: education, health and nutrition, child safety and protection, and children's participation in improving their lives. She was looking at scaling up the organization and faced four major challenges: funding, regulatory compliance, employee retention, and technology infrastructure. Marwaha was in a dilemma about how to obtain more support from corporates as well as increase the impact of funding.

In May 2021, the majority shareholder and chief executive officer of Ontrak Inc., a US health care services company, established two 10b5-1 trading plans to sell approximately one million shares of stock he acquired by exercising expiring warrants. Before he began the process to execute the first 10b5-1 plan, Ontrak Inc. had just lost its largest client. Three days into the process for the second 10b5-1 trading plan, the company announced that it was losing another major client. On March 1, 2023, two concurrent insider trading lawsuits were filed against the chief executive officer by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and by the United States Department of Justice. The lawsuits contended that he sold his stock the day after filing the plans instead of waiting a set number of days, commonly known as a "cooling-off" period. However, the chief executive officer was arguing that a cooling-off period was not mandatory when he sold his stock, insisting that the "government [had] clearly overreached in this case." He was forced to prepare a defence against two separate lawsuits filed against him.

Lisa LaFlamme was the trusted face of CTV National News. In 2022, she was at the height of her career. It was therefore a shock to her colleagues and viewers when, on August 15, 2022, she posted a video on Twitter to announce that she had been abruptly ousted from CTV by its parent company, Bell Media Inc. (Bell Media). Bell Media was hit with seemingly never-ending waves of negative press, including speculation that sexism and ageism had been the reasons behind LaFlamme's ousting. The choice to get rid of LaFlamme, and the manner in which that choice was exercised, had lasting negative effects that Bell Media surely had not anticipated. Looking back, was replacing LaFlamme unequivocally the wrong choice? Or could it have been handled in a way that would have prevented such backlash?

In 2013, Aoibheann O'Brien and Iseult Ward founded FoodCloud, a non-profit social enterprise that aimed to address food waste and food insecurity issues. Through its technology platform, Foodiverse, FoodCloud connected surplus food from retailers with community groups in need. By 2022, the company had partnered with Tesco Ireland and Tesco UK, and was rolling out its solution in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. O'Brian and Ward were eager to scale their solution globally, but funding the growth of a non-profit posed a challenge. Options included spinning off Foodiverse into an investment-seeking entity or retaining non-profit status to raise a social impact bond. The founders also sought to amplify their impact in Ireland to position the country as a leader in food waste reduction. The co-founders wondered whether to focus on developing an exemplary local sustainable food system or expand their proven technology solution globally, and where to find the funds for their chosen path.

The Nuqul Group was established in 1952 by Elia Nuqul, a Palestinian refugee who fled his hometown in 1948 with his family to Jordan. He overcame many hardships in his initial years there, but subsequently started a trading business that grew to become one of Jordan's largest family businesses. Its flagship company, Fine Hygienic Holding (FHH), was a leader in hygienic paper products across the Middle East and North Africa. In March 2023, Ghassan Nuqul, a second-generation family member and chairman of FHH, was at a crossroads. Following his father's death in 2022, Ghassan and his three siblings decided to split the Group's assets among themselves so that each branch of the family could forge its own path. They were in discussions to finalize the details of the agreement. What would this mean for the future of the family? Would it make the family stronger, or would it weaken family ties?

Israeli generative artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs was founded in 2017 to realize the vision of true machine intelligence. It sought to reinvent writing and reading and in 2020 it launched Wordtune, an app using GenAI software to offer alternate text suggestions to help improve users' prose; in 2021 it released Wordtune Read, an app that summarized documents. In 2021 the company unveiled its first Large Language Model (LLM), and it also offered five application program interfaces on its Studio platform. Following a 2023 partnership with Amazon Bedrock, AI21 Labs' LLM was available to third parties. After Generative AI burst onto the global scene in 2022, AI21 Labs considered the best strategy to stay relevant among tech giants in the GenAI arena.

As 2017 was drawing to a close, birddogs' founder and CEO, Peter Baldwin, was working with his CFO Jack Sullivan to prepare for 2018. Their task at hand? To predict the demand for their product in the coming season, determine the appropriate investments in working capital, and explore financing options. birddogs was a nascent direct-to-consumer apparel brand that had carved its niche in men's athletic shorts. The firm was coming off a stellar year, having more than doubled its sales over the previous year. This swift expansion, however, wasn't without its fair share of challenges-primarily in managing working capital, with inventory being the chief concern. The speed of birddogs' growth caught its inventory management off-guard, resulting in out-of-stock situations for about one-third of its products during 2017. Historically, the company had followed a conservative approach to inventory investment, which often led to stockouts. Baldwin had always favored this prudent approach to ensure the company did not overextend itself. Yet, times were changing. Encouraged by the prospect of increased visibility from upcoming publicity, Baldwin and Sullivan began to entertain the idea of a bolder, more aggressive investment strategy. The future was bright, and they were prepared to seize it.

"This case follows the decision-making process of Erik Wolfe, senior product marketing manager at Sound Agriculture, an agriculture technology company, to develop a go-to-market strategy for a new product. Founded in 2013 and financed through venture capital, Sound Agriculture was generating revenue by 2020 thanks to the success of its flagship product, the foliar spray SOURCE. It is now April 2022 and Sound Agriculture needs to quickly explore options for continuous revenue growth to hedge against a potentially slower venture capital investment pace. An initial feasibility study identified a viable opportunity in entering the turfgrass market with a SOURCE-inspired derivative product. The study suggested that a 5% share of the golf course market was obtainable within five years. Wolfe has a timeline and high-level strategy but faces many challenges including: Defining the target market and developing a product name, logo and packaging; projecting future financial scenarios based on assumptions; aligning Sound Agriculture's sustainability mission with the golf course market. Students will use a supplemental MS Excel worksheet (that accompanies the case) to guide them in preparing and analyzing financial data to support their marketing strategy decisions."

Second Place Winner; 2023 DEI Global Case Writing Competition Rhino Foods is a U.S.-based Benefit Corporation (B Corp) owned and operated by the Castle family. A food ingredients supplier to global brands, the company grew to $60 million in annual revenue by 2019. Rhino Foods was best known for inventing and manufacturing the cookie dough found in Ben & Jerry's top-selling ice cream flavor. The case's central topic is how Rhino creatively emphasized inclusive hiring and retention, though balancing people-centric, product quality, and financial goals were continuing challenges. Many Rhino employees were new Americans who came through waves of refugee resettlement programs. Integrating these non-English-speakers into a production floor laden with heavy machinery necessitated investments such as translating the operations manual, adding subtitles to training videos, and pairing new employees with experienced workers with the same native language. Religious and cultural factors new to Rhino became important, as well. Rhino then began to recruit people who had dropped out of the labor force, including coming out of incarceration or rehabilitation for substance use. It created a No Background Checks program to remove barriers to entry like proof of past experience or having a criminal history. Students are challenged to suggest how the leadership team can better understand employee turnover, provide innovative methods of support, alleviate employee concerns regarding new hires, and continue to grow the company in a healthy way.

Honorable Mention; 2023 DEI Global Case Writing Competition This case combines a strategy issue (merger) encompassing the disciplines of organizational behavior and human resource management. Issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) are intertwined in the case, ranging from gender discrimination to sociocultural and hierarchical social class discrimination. The case provides a glimpse into one context (Peru), using a realistic fictional situation, as an example relatable across cultures and a variety of industry and organizational settings. In less than two years, Sweet Mountain Bakery (SMB) lost substantial market share in Peru's cookie market. Top management was shocked to find the main reason was the high-growth performance of a relatively small firm in the country's Andes Mountains area, All You Knead (AYK). The competition became so fierce that employees of SMB and AYK regarded each other as rivals to defeat. In late 2022, after several aggressive yet ineffective competitive moves, SMB solved the situation with a buyout of AYK. Unanticipated in this merger was a set of serious DEIB challenges that emerged post-acquisition. Negativity between the two groups of employees undermined company efforts to attain synergy and efficiency and increase productivity. Students put themselves in the shoes of Victoria Huaman, SMB's new human resources vice president. She is the only woman and the only previous AYK manager among the direct reports to the CEO. Her task is to prepare a report addressing not only DEI issues but also the issue of belonging.

First Place Winner; 2023 DEI Global Case Writing Competition American clothing company Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co.) had a diverse workforce and prided itself on not discriminating against employees based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender. LS&Co. reported treating its employees equally and with gender pay parity. It had diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) initiatives in place. However, in May 2020 the company recognized that women held a minority of higher-level positions and Latinx/Hispanic and Black employees were underrepresented, as well. Consequently, the company hired Elizabeth A. Morrison as its new chief diversity, inclusion & belonging officer. Morrison's challenges included developing a talent pipeline of Black designers; ensuring pay equity in all the company's markets; improving the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce; and establishing an ongoing inclusive culture. With LS&Co. as an example of a firm with both DE&I shortcomings and accomplishments, students can understand the concepts of diversity, racial discrimination, pay parity, gender equity, and inclusion, and how to apply them in business settings.

In January 2022, the vice-president of technology for Nata Supermarkets was reviewing the company's performance against its competitors for the 2021 calendar year. The company had been performing poorly both based on its internal metrics and against competitor growth rates. The vice-president also noticed that many competitors began revealing new data analytics initiatives in their annual reports. Many companies experienced industry-leading growth because of these changes and upgraded their guidance for the following year. To compete with an increasing number of data-driven competitors, Nata Supermarket created its internal data set to collect information on customer shopping habits and customer demographics such as age, educational background, and frequency of complaints. With the emergence of visualization tools and data analytics, the vice-president was wondering what useful insights could be drawn from its internal data set. Could this information be useful to resolve various issues such as targeting promotions and forecasting demand?

In July 2022, a senior data scientist for Guell Appliances was aggregating customer reviews from the company's recent appliance launch. The previous month, the company had launched a revamped product line that required a significant amount of investment in research and development. The success of the product line was paramount because it defined the success of the company. The senior data scientist wanted to apply modern analytical techniques to thousands of product reviews to thoroughly understand the preferences of customers, based on what they were saying about their new appliances.