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In 2014 Alibaba debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, creating not only the largest IPO in history but this initial desire to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange was denied due to the company's desire to preserve its partner's control over decision rights. Why did Hong Kong deny Alibaba's requests to list dual-class shares or to allow its partners to nominate a majority of the board of directors, and in the process turn away a superstar in Alibaba? Why did American stock markets approve of Alibaba's governance structures, despite the warnings of many governance experts? How can investors ensure that their capital would be deployed effectively by the company's top management?

By 2014, Tencent Holdings Limited, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, had become one of the most innovative companies in Asia. It had created several leading Internet platforms to form China's largest Internet community. WeChat (or Weixin, as known to Chinese users) was one of the company's most popular mobile platforms, having grown to 200 million active users in the first two years after its launch in 2013. Shortly thereafter, WeChat rolled out a payment platform that sought to capitalize on its customer base across China. However, its president was concerned about how to expand WeChat Payment in the country's emerging mobile payment industry. Where was the next major opportunity? Tencent had to be highly creative in navigating the world's largest economy.

When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.

At the end of 2011, Fernando Lelo de Larrea (MBA 2004) and Federico Antoni (MBA 2004) decided to resign from their CEO positions in their respective mid-sized companies and start fundraising for their first early stage investment fund: Seed Innovation Trust 1. Given their lack of track record in venture capital, they decided to create a micro fund, the smallest, yet most institutional, venture capital fund possible consistent with their investment thesis. Founded in 2012, ALLVP raised the first institutional seed capital fund in Mexico to invest in innovative service-oriented, new companies. The investment thesis focused on service industries such as healthcare, financial services, and consumer internet that were experiencing high growth due to demographic and macro-economic trends, favorable non-market forces, the growing middle class and the availability of new technologies. Given the underdeveloped entrepreneurial ecosystem in Mexico, the founders established, along with the fund management vehicles, a Seed Accelerator Program, called Venture Institute that would feed the fund with high quality startups. This dual model proved key to creating a high value first portfolio and positioning ALLVP in the Mexican entrepreneurial ecosystem. Two years and twelve portfolio companies later, ALLVP raised a second, $40 million dollar (USD) fund focused on Series A and B rounds in Latin America. Given ALLVP's success, a new proactive public policy from Mexico's new government was launched and helped the seed capital industry grow from ALLVP as the first and only institutional fund in 2012 to more than a dozen funds in 2014.

By the late nineteenth century scale and managerial hierarchies had extended to several major industrial sectors of the U.S. economy. Although the precise mechanisms often varied, this process mainly involved horizontal integration, some form of legal or administrative centralization followed by vertical integration. Standard Oil represents the canonical example of this development. Standard Oil's history is also fully intertwined with the life and career of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), one of the most remarkable individuals to define the landscape of American business. Rockefeller's estimated $1.4 billion net worth in 1937 was equivalent to 1.5% of U.S. GDP. According to this metric he was (and still is) the richest individual in American business and economic history.

Muñoz Group, which supplied supermarket chains and food distribution chains around the world with fruit, flowers, juice and ice cream, was at a strategic crossroads in 2014. CEO Alvaro Muñoz had to choose the best way to achieve profit goals and provide his company with a sustainable competitive advantage. The company had already developed innovative citrus, grape and flower breeding units in efforts to keep its product pipeline on the cutting edge. The company also worked to integrate vertically-to own or control every viable piece of the supply chain-in an effort to manage the flower and produce businesses from plant to retailer. The company's stronghold was its UK and European markets, but it had expanded into North America and also eyed new opportunities in Asia. Muñoz had to decide where to focus his efforts against a backdrop of margin squeezes in the food business, competition for product from the developing world, ever more stringent quality, sustainability, and environmental standards from clients, and perennial hiring challenges.

Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao Zedong, Communist China's first leader, had left behind in 1978. The growth of markets had made China much wealthier, but also generated many social problems, including inequality, corruption, and social protests. This case discusses China's political and economic development in the 20th century to situate Xi's-and China's-contemporary challenges.

In 2011, Sherry Hunt was a vice president and chief underwriter at CitiMortgage headquarters in the United States. For years she had been witnessing fraud, as the company bought billions of dollars in mortgage loans from external lenders that did not meet Citi credit policy and sold them to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This resulted in Citi selling to GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pools of loans that were considerably defective and thus likely to default. Citi had also approved hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of defective mortgage files for U.S. Federal Housing Administration insurance. After reporting the mortgage defects in regular reports, notifying and working closely with her direct supervisor (who was subsequently asked to leave Citi after alerting the chairman of the board to these issues) to stop the purchase of defective loans, leaving anonymous tips on the FBI's and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's websites, and receiving threats from two of her superiors who demanded that she change the results of her quality control unit's reports, the shy and conflict-avoidant Hunt had to decide who she should tell about the fraud, and how. The case gives students the opportunity to recommend how Hunt should proceed based on their analysis of the stakeholders involved. To aid instructors, the case includes Kellogg-produced videos of Hunt-the only on-camera interviews she has ever given-explaining what happened after she reported the fraud to Citi HR and, later, the U.S. Department of Justice. Within the case, students are also briefly exposed to legislation and bodies pertinent to whistle-blowing in the United States, including the Dodd-Frank Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the SEC Office of the Whistleblower.

In January 2010, Benedict Clarke, general partner of a small real estate private equity venture, faced difficulty with one of his properties. When purchased in early 2007, Tulaberry Plaza was a thriving retail shopping center outside Orlando, Florida. The financial crisis and severe economic downturn forced Tulaberry's anchor tenant into bankruptcy and weakened the other tenants in the plaza. Clarke now faces pressures placed on him by his limited partners, who were shown rosy projections of the returns they would receive, and by his lender, who is presently taking most of the property's cash flow to satisfy required debt service. Clarke must devise a plan that presents the most logical and profitable way forward, while also justifying his actions to elicit the necessary support from the others involved in the transaction. The case asks students to make decisions from the perspective of Clarke, giving them an appreciation not only of the details of strategic decision-making in real estate leasing, but also of the interplay between lenders and equity partners when managing a commercial property in distress.

Microfinance is introduced into China in the 1990s. It had went through 3 phases since the beginning, namely the pilot phase when all Microfinance practices are sponsored by charity funds based on projects, the promotion phase when the government subsidized some regular financial organization and encouraged them to conduct Microfinance businesses, and the rapid development phase of commercial Microfinance companies when private capital is encouraged to enter Microfinance industry by a series of policies released by the government. CFPA Microfinance is the largest charity Microfinance Company concentrated on providing Microfinance services in the rural areas in China. It grew with the Microfinance industry in China, and experienced transformation from a charity-fund -relied NGO to a company that maintains sustainable development. Up till the end of November 2014, it covers 16 provinces, 140 counties, with 230,000 clients, and the balance of loans is 1,800,000,000 RMB. Farmers' Self-reliance Branch of CFPA Microfinance in Shangyi County was started in 2008, with a local condition of bad climate, small market capacity, and single-product economy. Soon after its opening, it had found the "Grameen-modeled" group-loan product promoted by the headquarters does not suit the local condition; it actively transferred to the individual-loan product model, and meanwhile provided value-added services. Finally, it maintained a unique place in the fierce competition in the local area, and kept zero default rate and zero overdue rate since its opening. However, in recent years, as private capital is encouraged to enter the Micro-finance industry, Shangyi branch is facing new challenges, meanwhile, the branch manager had found difficulties in complying with the rigid loan process for risk control enforced by the headquarter and meeting the local clients' needs. He believes this problem would even threaten the branch's business in the long run, and he needs a solution.

Joe Smith, senior director of merchandise management at Beautiful Bags (BB), was about to place a large order for the upcoming winter season. He had to decide how many pieces he should order of each product. But another big question whether BB should source the product from its domestic manufacturing facility, its Chinese suppliers, or some combination of the two given the timing needs, labor costs, minimum order requirements, and BB's expanding product assortment?

The Dutch company HEINEKEN, one of the leading global brewers known for its brands like Heineken, Amstel, or Desperados and for its award-winning marketing campaigns, seeks to closely integrate its long-term sustainability "Brewing a Better World"-approach into its corporate strategy. HEINEKEN had set itself ambitious 2015 and 2020 sustainability targets in six pillar areas around Energy/CO2, Water, Sustainable Sourcing, Responsible Consumption, Community/Inclusive Growth, and Health & Safety. The case zooms in on HEINEKEN's efforts in the sustainable sourcing pillar, with its work on farming standards and supplier code as well as its support for local sourcing programs in the growing African market. HEINEKEN's management finds that marketing its achievements in these sustainability areas poses new challenges though. For example, its current "mass-balance" sourcing in which sustainable and traditional material got mixed in the supply chain did not allow for effective communication on a given bottle. But was this reason enough to try to move to "segregated" sourcing, if that was even reasonable?

Susie Mulder must decide how to lead NIC+ZOE-the women's apparel brand she had recently joined as CEO-from its start-up phase into a disciplined growth phase. With growing revenues, a successful product line, and savvy private equity investors, NIC+ZOE seems perfectly positioned for growth, but the company is struggling to execute efficiently, and senior managers are torn about a key decision: whether to go into e-commerce or not.

Unique among the world's countries, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan had abandoned the traditional policy goal of increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in favor of pursuing Gross National Happiness (GNH). Famously, Bhutan ranked highly on lists of the happiest countries in spite of a tumultuous history, a low life expectancy, a dismal literacy rate, a small and undiversified economy, and low GDP per capita. Everyone, it seemed, from tourists and Hollywood screenwriters to leading development economists, looked to Bhutan for enlightenment and perspective on crises both personal and global. GNH had become the country's brand and suggested a possible future for capitalism. Was Bhutan on to something? Was there really a tradeoff between growth and happiness, and, if so, was it acceptable? In early 2014, Bhutan's newly minted Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay was faced with these questions as he deliberated on whether to approve a massive new Bhutanese-Indian hydropower collaboration that experts argued would provide energy, foreign exchange, and invaluable jobs, but which also risked undermining the country's brand as well as its happiness.

Ideas Kitchen is a medium-sized kitchen maker that specializes in customizing the modular kitchen. As a result, it has built a loyal customer base. Business has been relatively good for Ideas Kitchen, and the company has been doing well financially. It has been capitalizing on the burgeoning growth of the modular kitchen market in India. However, several foreign players have begun entering the Indian market and almost all of them have been expanding at a rapid pace either through franchise models or by opening showrooms in a number of cities. The founder of Ideas Kitchen is in a dilemma about whether to stay a niche business or to take a bold step toward expanding product range and geographical reach.

Teofilo Oil Services was a privately owned Brazilian oil services and production company. Roberto Teofilo, the owner, had started the company in 2000. Originally founded to provide oil field services, it had eventually moved into field operations management, and was now expanding into full field production. The company would now be investing significantly in field licenses and well work (revitalization of an older closed field), and not just providing fee-based services. The Brazilian government was about to ask for tenders on a number of fields, and Teofilo was interested in Field 17A. The current challenge was to decide if and, if so, how much to bid on the closed field.

Tom Henderson, engineering manager and 10-year veteran of ABCO, leads the 25-member Omega product development team. While presenting his team's performance data at a monthly briefing meeting, Henderson is subjected to the verbal jabs of Bill Fenner, ABCO's VP of Distributed Services. As the meeting progresses, Fenner becomes increasingly aggressive, causing Henderson to falter in front of his colleagues and senior executives. After learning that their boss has been "shredded" by Fenner, the Omega team reduces its exceptional performance. Part B (in the Teaching Note) reveals Henderson's next actions. Part C (also in the Teaching Note) concludes with longer-term consequences for Henderson and ABCO.

During Sir Robert Wilson's 30+-year Rio Tinto career, the company evolved from taking a reactive response to external stakeholder criticism to a proactive position to help the mining industry embrace sustainable development practices. Wilson championed Rio Tinto's efforts to transform the company with initiatives such as those that countered apartheid in South Africa; introduced conservation programs in Madagascar and Western Australia; and established the Inland Sea Shorebird Reserve project in Utah-efforts which have all become models for the mining industry. He championed the Global Mining Initiative and the Mining Minerals and Sustainable Development project to encourage the improvement of industry sustainable development practices thorough shared learning and dialogue. Along with 40 transnational companies, Rio Tinto signed the Global Compact, which supported the promotion of sustainable development. Despite all of these activities, Rio Tinto encountered significant criticism from a variety of stakeholders. As Sir Robert Wilson prepared to hand over the reins of the company to oil industry veteran Paul Skinner, he contemplated the insights he would pass along to his successor. He was certain that society's expectations of the corporate responsibility of all industry, and especially of MNCs, were going to continue to increase. He was also certain that sustainable development had to be more than a one-off effect on communities in which they operate. Yet, there were important questions to be answered: Sustainable development sounded good, but could Rio Tinto make the business case for embracing this approach? Why had some stakeholder groups persisted in believing that a mining company claiming to embrace sustainable development was a sham? What steps would he recommend that Skinner take to continue Rio Tinto's sustainable development agenda?

In April 2014, Alibaba's impending initial public offering (IPO) projected to be among the world's largest IPOs. Alibaba faced many choices regarding ownership structure, trading location, IPO pricing and IPO timing. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange seemed like a natural fit for its IPO due to geographical, cultural and language proximity. Furthermore, 86.7 per cent of Alibaba's revenues originated within China. However, Alibaba insisted on "partnership governance," and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange did not allow listing of companies with dual-class share structure. In contrast, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ did not object to Alibaba's proposed ownership structure. While the Hong Kong investors knew Alibaba's business better, the New York exchanges provided more liquidity and visibility. Against this backdrop, Alibaba needed to make difficult decisions regarding its IPO.

Christopher Lenard and his longtime friend Kimberly Slater are exploring the idea of developing a student-housing complex near the University of Wisconsin, Madison, by replicating Slater's highly successful, similar development near the University of Florida. Madison seemed to present attractive market and demographic conditions for investment in student housing in the summer of 2012. But before committing a large share of his personal wealth to the project, Lenard needs to conduct a more careful analysis of its potential risks and returns. By putting themselves into the shoes of a budding real estate entrepreneur, students will evaluate both the merits and pitfalls of various approaches to the financial analysis of real estate development projects.