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Norlha Textiles was a yak wool enterprise located on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Founded in 2007, the company designed and produced yak wool textiles made by Tibetan nomads and sold globally to customers that included such luxury brands as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Yves Saint Laurent. In 2015, the company employed 120 local people, enabling them to adapt to the modern world while preserving their local traditions. Also in 2015, the local government invited the company to expand its model to another nomadic community on the Tibetan Plateau. Although this seemed to be a good opportunity to grow the company’s influence, the chief executive officer hesitated, reflecting on the pros and cons. Was such a partnership the right opportunity to grow the company?

In June 2018, the wedding dress industry in Suzhou, China, was confronted with "the harshest clampdown," which required all unqualified wedding dress factories to move out within one week. The initiative from the local government had been expected, although its speed and force were surprising to the founder and chief executive officer of Suzhou Beibao E-Commerce Co. Ltd. (Babyonline). Established in 2012 and engaged in cross-border e-commerce of wedding dresses, Babyonline was unlikely to be affected by the clampdown. However, changes across the wedding dress industry as a result of the initiative had started the founder thinking about issues in the management of his company. At the end of 2015, Babyonline had moved to a make-to-stock system, which lowered costs but seemed to have raised inventory issues. Particularly in recent times, selective selling by some sales representatives had led to structural inventory problems. The founder wondered how he should resolve the inventory issue.

A social entrepreneur running a business in Khayelitsha, near Cape Town, South Africa, made and distributed healthy bread-based products for consumers in a poor community through his social enterprise, the Spinach King. His aim was to improve consumers’ eating habits and help them improve their health. In early 2014, after facing and overcoming many difficulties related to starting this social enterprise start-up in a resource-constrained context, this entrepreneur had a successful business. The business model had evolved over time, and while it was still small in scale, the owner was convinced that it was ready to scale. He needed to determine what business model would be most appropriate going forward and how he could implement it.

The co-founders of Prosper, an early-stage start-up offering a mobile application–based interview preparation and coaching service, were preparing a report for an upcoming meeting with private equity investors. The co-founders sought a CA$1 million seed investment and had to choose where to allocate marketing funds. Should they bias the marketing mix toward students reached via educational institutions or families, or toward professionals making a career switch? They knew that success or failure would depend on their ability to craft a compelling narrative and lay out a realistic marketing plan that would lead to an increased user base and greater revenue growth.

In August 2018, the founder of Speak-On, was finalizing plans for his company’s first year of operations. Speak-On was a learning tool used in classrooms to help students improve their communication and public speaking skills. Having worked on developing a prototype all summer with financing from the Government of Ontario, the founder needed to understand the cash needs for his company. He planned to project a cash budget for fiscal year 2018 and do a sensitivity analysis on his projections to determine the amount of additional financing needed. Did Speak-On require external financing, and would the line of credit support the cash needed?

In 1993, when the Chinese economy was in a major recession, Beijing’s Greatwall Enterprise Institute was founded by six consultants. The company eventually found its niche providing strategic and operational consulting to the governmental agencies (administrative committees) that managed science and technology parks. These agencies had witnessed explosive growth in China since the early 1990s. In 2019, with more than 350 consultants, headquarters in Beijing, 12 branch offices throughout China, and an annual revenue greater than ¥200 million (US$30 million), Greatwall Enterprise Institute faced new threats and opportunities: its success with so many government administrative committees meant that there was little room for it to grow in this area. The company wondered if it should expand to other local governments and their agencies in China. Or would business firm clients and the international market offer new opportunities?

GLAMI was launched in October 2013 in the Czech Republic as a fashion search engine with a focus on providing consumers with an accessible platform. It operated a neatly organized online fashion catalogue that consisted of combined products from fashion e-shops that functioned throughout various countries. Through its five years of existence, GLAMI had expanded throughout Europe and Asia. Fashion retailers and e-shops partnered with GLAMI as free or priority members, and had their items placed throughout GLAMI’s website. The company’s business model functioned through a cost-per-click (CPC) model, where GLAMI would charge priority members according to how much they were willing to pay per click. In August 2018, due to its success and the increasing size of the fashion industry and the online retail space, GLAMI was looking to expand beyond its current boundaries to a high-growth area—Latin America. However, considering the vast differences among Latin American countries, GLAMI was finding it difficult to narrow down the list of countries in which to explore international expansion.

In 2015, a Shanghai businessman contacted the director of ObiSoft, an American software company, to request becoming the company’s partner in China. Over the next two years, they proceeded to develop the partnership and grow ObiSoft's business in China. The Shanghai businessman became ObiSoft’s partner and master reseller in China. In 2018, the Shanghai businessman proposed moving the company's research and development on software to China, and ObiSoft scheduled an August 2018 board meeting to discuss this issue. What should ObiSoft’s board decide regarding the company’s software development and future in China?

WittyFeed, an emerging digital content and technology company, was launched in September 2014 by three friends in the small Indian town of Indore. Within four years, the company had become one of the world’s largest creators and distributors of content that was followed and circulated online. In the process of scaling up and becoming larger, WittyFeed’s founders faced many challenges in areas like technology, distribution, and talent. These internal and external market issues interacted in a constantly changing environment. In January 2018, the founders were in the process of finding strategic solutions that would help their company double its existing number of monthly impressions to achieve 1 billion touchpoints, while becoming independent of its dominant revenue source, Facebook. What strategies could the founders deploy to reach this target?

The Dot autonomous agricultural platform, manufactured by SeedMaster Manufacturing, an innovative farm equipment manufacturer in White City, Saskatchewan, was a driver-less vehicle designed to replace the farm tractor. This vehicle allowed large-scale farmers to spend more time focusing on the farm business while the Dot platform planted, sprayed, or conducted other farm-field activities. In late 2019, the reliability and safety of the disruptive Dot technology when left unattended was not yet fully tested. Issues of sales, training, and servicing were yet to be determined. The company had identified three potential commercialization paths for consideration: Should it focus on retailing Dot and Dot-ready implements through a network of farm dealerships in a traditional manner? Should it create a Dot showroom and sales-and-service team, selling primarily online in a virtual showroom, like Tesla? Or should it create a “pop-up” custom seeding and spraying business to further revise the technology while promoting it?

At the end of March 2018, the director of the Barcelona office of Street Child, a charity organization with headquarters in the United Kingdom, was looking back at the changes he had introduced in 2017. The Barcelona office was responsible for growing Street Child in continental Europe, so it was internally known as Street Child Europe. Since January 2018, the office had added a paid employee. This employee was also the director of Street Child Netherlands and a former program support officer in Sierra Leone. The office could now employ up to eight interns, twice as many as before. However, Street Child Europe still needed to accomplish five key tasks: address its governance structure, clarify its brand positioning, consolidate its fundraising strategy, increase the appeal of its international volunteer program, and sett up an internal system to use its network effectively. The director needed concrete and executable strategies to ensure stable and sustainable growth of the charity across Europe.

In 2018, iQmetrix Software Development Corp. (iQmetrix), a software development corporation headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, had experienced exponential growth and success over the past two decades. To preserve its innovative culture, iQmetrix restructured using the increasingly popular self-management system holacracy, which was intended to empower individual employees to plan, monitor, and regulate their own work tasks. One year later, iQmetrix’s head of People and Culture wanted to examine the outcomes of this implementation. To do so, she conducted a company-wide survey of employee perceptions of holacracy and several important indicators. The survey also collected qualitative feedback about the holacracy implementation. What would the survey responses tell her about employees’ perceptions of holacracy and about the effectiveness of its implementation at iQmetrix?

In March 2017, the director of operations at Namratha Oil Refineries Pvt. Ltd., a leading manufacturer and distributor of high-quality packaged coconut oil in southwest India, faced a challenge. Because of inefficiencies in the company’s packaging division, pouches, jars, and bottles were being overfilled with coconut oil, leading to an “oil giveaway” that had weakened the company’s bottom line. The director analyzed the current processes and discovered improper data recording, frequent breakdowns, poor allocation of the maintenance crew, and an improper inventory management system. His experience told him that the existing production facilities were sufficient to meet the company’s requirements, and therefore, the existing processes needed to be streamlined to ensure minimal or no loss of oil. What strategy should he recommend to reduce losses and restore the company’s profitability?

In October 2014, Carestream Health Inc. (Xiamen) (CHX) was faced with a supply chain disruption caused by a labour dispute involving most of the ports on the west coast of the United States. The work-to-rule strike was having a considerable impact on the operations of the ports and was putting pressure on CHX’s lean supply chain. In particular, the supply of wide rolls of films, the key material to CHX operations, was compromised. In an emergency meeting, CHX’s management team discussed using other shipping options. One of these options, (airfreighting) appeared to be feasible but costly. The meeting’s leader who was the director of the Asia Pacific Lean Six Sigma asked the management team to determine when CHX should use airfreight for its supply of wide rolls, how many rolls should be airfreighted each time, and what the best mechanism would be to govern the use of airfreight.

The overarching vision of the global nongovernmental organization Transparency International was to free the world from corruption. Transparency International Ukraine (TIU) was founded in 2014, after three failed attempts, to tackle the high level of corruption that had taken hold of that country. Over the first two years, the chief executive officer faced significant organizational issues that hindered the organization’s performance; he appointed an external hire as chief operating officer to help facilitate a transition to a new, more professional team in Kyiv and to turn the organization around. As the two seasoned professionals worked collaboratively to revamp the organization, they realized they faced challenging external and internal pressures. Not only were they tackling highly corrupt public officers and colluding oligarchic elites, they were also faced with alienated volunteers, who questioned their ability to transform TIU. In 2017, they had made some progress but still faced many barriers. How could they reinvent the organization without risking burnout?

In 2019, the general manager of the Xiamen branch of Eastern Lotus Bank was facing difficulties overcoming customer-introduced variability, which significantly influenced the efficiency of the bank’s front-office service. She needed to analyze and summarize the different types of customer-introduced variability. Then she had to identify potential strategies that would enable the bank to accommodate this customer-introduced variability while maintaining a high-quality customer service experience. She also needed to decide how to allocate and arrange the limited human resources at the bank efficiently and effectively. To make these decisions, she had to systematically evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the front office under both pooled- and separated-resource allocation scenarios. For instance, how long did customers have to wait for services in each different resource allocation scenario? Moreover, how well were the limited human resources (staff) utilized under each scenario?

Indus Valley Telecom Ltd. (IVTL) wanted to set up an optical fibre cable plant at its subsidiary, Cosmic Equipment Company Ltd. The general manager of IVTL had hired an outside consulting agency that determined that the project was technically viable. Next, in January 2016, the general manager needed to conduct a comprehensive economic viability study of the project before presenting the proposal to IVTL management for approval. The decision of whether to proceed now depended on the outcome of the economic assessment.

Health Services Software (HSS) was a software company specializing in software for hospitals. Founded by a health care team with first-hand knowledge of the issues facing hospitals, HSS had first mover advantage. At the onset of HSS’s operations, hospitals had capital funding that allowed them to acquire the software with five-year licensing agreements. Five years later in 2016, as the licences were expiring, the hospitals no longer had the capital funding and could not afford a large cash outlay from their operating budgets for a new five-year licence. In light of the change in funding options for the hospitals, HSS was considering whether to move to an annual-subscription-based software. But before the team could establish the prices for the software, they needed to better understand the company’s cost structure. HSS hired a consultant to conduct the costing exercise.

Cipla Limited was a pioneer in inhalation therapy in India, and was globally acclaimed for its range of inhalers for obstructive airway diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In 2014, the company wanted to take inhalation therapy to the masses, especially in the rural and semi-urban areas of the country. This required strengthening its reach at the general practitioner level (among primary care physicians) and extending optimal medical care to patients who were otherwise sub-optimally treated. The company proposed a further increase to the sales and marketing budget, but the head of Cipla Limited’s respiratory division had a different viewpoint. He proposed establishing a lateral structure of doctors as knowledge experts to urge practitioners to adopt inhalation therapy, as he had done in a successful trial in Delhi. The company was looking forward to implementing this second option across the country, but there were various issues to resolve with such an unconventional approach, and challenges were anticipated in the plan’s implementation and expansion.

In January 2017, the owner and founder of Storehouse Tea based in Cleveland, Ohio, was considering the company’s next move. Storehouse Tea focused on providing organic, fair trade certified teas, and the founder was committed to operating her business in a way that would have a positive impact in the world by providing work to local refugees. However, she wondered how she could scale this impact. Among her options, she could introduce product extensions, pursue geographic expansion, target larger accounts, or hire additional employees. But which avenue for growth would best allow Storehouse Tea to further its core mission?