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Dolf van den Brink, CEO of HEINEKEN, left the company's global headquarters in Amsterdam for a company retreat. Over the next three days, the entire executive team would gather to discuss the company's future. The preliminary results for 2022, presented during the recent two-day Capital Markets Event, were positive, and the company's progress on its key strategic pillars painted an encouraging picture - a sign that HEINEKEN's EverGreen strategy was in full swing. However, rising prices and global inflation were expected to put pressure on operating costs and consumers' purchasing power. In addition, geopolitical and macroeconomic developments were threatening to create a post-pandemic world characterized by uncertainty and volatility. Finally, society was changing at a rapid pace, along with consumer and customer expectations. In June 2020, when van den Brink was appointed CEO at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he was faced with a daunting task. Not only did he need to lead the company through an unprecedented crisis, he also had to future-proof the organization well beyond the end of the pandemic. In February 2021, after months of exchanges with over 200 colleagues around the world, van den Brink unveiled the company's new strategy, EverGreen. This multiyear plan was designed to turn HEINEKEN into a highly adaptive organization capable of thriving in a dynamic and fast-paced environment, while at the same time creating long-term sustainable value for stakeholders. The strategy was underpinned by HEINEKEN's analysis of its core strengths, emerging macro trends and perceived opportunities. As van den Brink made his way through the evening traffic, he thought about the upcoming company retreat, which he felt was coming at just the right moment. The team needed to reflect on EverGreen's implementation while deep-diving on key strategic initiatives that, if successfully implemented, would future-proof the company for years to come.

It was on Monday. 4 July 2022, when Swarovski's newly appointed, first-ever external CEO, Alexis Nasard, began his challenging journey of guiding the company back to a profitable growth trajectory. In past years, Swarovski experienced strong market growth and share gains from its well-established position in the costume jewelry segment. However, the company had started to face competition within the jewelry market and rampant digitalization trends threatened to weaken the company's stronghold on mid-range luxury jewelry and grand physical stores. In response, Robert Buchbauer, who had previously taken over the management of Swarovski as CEO in April 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, told a news agency at the company's headquarters, "We are forced to reimagine and rescale our entire Swarovski business." However, Buchbauer's vision for the company's growth was not well-received by Swarovski's family board members. Just 18 months after his appointment, he resigned from his role due to differences with the family. On Friday 22 July 2022, after just two weeks as Swarovski's newly appointed CEO, Nasard was reflecting on the journey ahead as he left the company's headquarters in Wattens, Austria. He knew he had important choices to make to get the company back on track. Building on the company's unique strengths and learning from the difficulties faced in the recent past, he pondered, which strategic initiatives should he prioritize to restore Swarovski back to its former glory?

This topical case covers the period from 2019 to 2022, when Prakash Arunkundrum, head of global operations and sustainability at Logitech, was focusing on reducing the company's carbon footprint. It recounts how he and his team gained internal support to embark on an ambitious carbon labeling initiative and created a transparent methodology to assess, validate and communicate the life cycle carbon value of Logitech's products. The case highlights Logitech's journey to becoming climate positive, based on four key pillars; 1) reducing carbon in its products, 2) transitioning to renewable energies, 3) restoring forests and supporting climate impacted communities, and 4) rethinking how to support and enable reuse. However, Prakash realized that the real hurdle would be gaining industry-wide adoption of carbon labeling by other companies and competitors in the tech sector. Logitech tried to garner support for Carbon Clarity by making its approach open source, by investing significant time and energy to raise awareness about the benefits of carbon labeling, and by holding discussions with interested companies, including competitors. Yet despite interest from other companies, they had not yet committed to supporting Carbon Clarity. Prakash was baffled as to why they would not commit and wondered how to make progress to drive sustainability.

Sunit Raj was the Vice President, Marketing of Schematic Software Company (SSC), a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company. He was pondering how to preserve the company's growth momentum it had achieved over the last few years. In the third quarter of 2021, the company's valuation reached USD 25 billion, representing a year-over-year gain of 50%. Within 12 years of operation, it had over 50,000 employees worldwide and over 100,000 paying customers in more than 150 countries. Raj had to decide the company's future direction among new territories, buyer segments and product categories that would bring revenue and aid in sustaining its growth.

In December 2022, Juan Luciano, Chairman and CEO of agribusiness and nutrition giant ADM, considered the next phase of the historic company's future. Beginning in 2011 when he joined as COO and moving into his tenure as CEO in 2015, Luciano led a transformation of ADM from a commodities-focused trading company to a customer-centric solutions firm. Upon coming aboard at ADM, Luciano saw changes in the agribusiness industry that warranted pivots in ADM's business strategy to ensure long-term success. To shepherd the company through a changing industry, Luciano conceptualized three "strategic horizons"-general timeframes to pursue specific goals. The first horizon was aimed at getting ADM financially fit including raising ROIC above WACC and reducing CapEx. The second horizon was characterized by moving closer to customers through identifying global macro-trends and offering corresponding products and services to generate better margins. As part of the second horizon, ADM acquired flavor company and food and beverage solutions provider WILD Flavors which resulted in Luciano creating a Nutrition division that used rapid design-for-market capabilities to create complete product solutions for customers. As a leader, Luciano exhibited the traits of both a learner (e.g., seeking out a variety of perspectives before ultimately making key decisions himself) and a teacher (e.g., utilizing drawings, vivid analogies, and hands-on demonstrations). Luciano needed to define the company's next horizon. He knew his general goal was sustainable growth, but balancing profitability with innovation and pace of change with durability of change could prove challenging in the years to come.

Virgilio "V" Bento, CEO of Sword Health-a startup that provided virtual physical therapy to patients in self-insured firms via AI and sensor technology with supervision by a physical therapist with a doctorate-considered how to increase its U.S. market share. To do so, it could use lower-cost supervisors, such as health coaches; sell a direct-to-consumer product; or work with retailers, among other options. Sword Health's main competitor, the unicorn-valued Hinge Healthcare, had the first-mover advantage, but Sword had FDA clearance, a fuller stack of applications and higher-credentialed supervision. Sword and Hinge charged the same price to the client. How should Sword Health best optimize its business opportunities? This case is suitable both as a general business case for undergraduate and MBA students of any level with focus on strategy, entrepreneurship, digital health, artificial intelligence, muscular skeletal issues, the healthcare industry, and physical therapy.

Shantanu Bhattacharya, Professor of Operations Management at Singapore Management University (SMU), observed how waste in Singapore was incinerated before it was poured into the country's only landfill. The government wanted to maximise the country's limited land resources by using waste-to-energy (WTE) plants that would decrease the volume of waste that was deposited in landfills. Additionally, the heat generated could be used to generate electricity. In 2005, Keppel Seghers was awarded a public-private partnership (PPP) contract to develop the country's fifth WTE plant. This would be the first incineration plant in Singapore to employ technology from a local company. The PPP structure would allow the government to save on the capital outlay and capitalise on private sector expertise. Keppel Seghers would have to ensure that it would be able to provide sufficient incineration capacity. Bhattacharya supported the waste management strategy but knew the landfill had a limited lifespan. He hoped to study more innovative waste management solutions in the future.

At EY, Jeff Wong served as chief innovation officer beginning in 2015. In this role, he was responsible for driving innovation and inoculating EY against potential threats to its $45 billion revenue global business. Wong's role advanced and grew with his success in launching initiatives for EY around artificial intelligence, blockchain, Web3, and automation among others. Through it all, Wong built the Global Innovation team at EY from a $5 million budget to hundreds of millions of dollars, returning $5 to $6 to EY for every $1 invested-within a year from when the investment was made.

This case is a study of the initial discovery of penicillin and how it came to be a mass-market product. The discovery of penicillin is fascinating first and foremost because of its direct, life-saving benefits and because of the context of World War II that surrounded its rise. Throughout the case, an argument is made for the importance of this invention not only for the society of the 1940s, but for our society today. Students are introduced to a handful of the individuals and institutions involved in the discovery and development of the technology, providing them with the information necessary to consider the people, institutions, and other factors that led to the drug's success. Students consider especially the role of intellectual property during penicillin's rise to success, as well as the cultural and legal differences between Britain and the United States related to the patenting of medical discoveries.

During an Allianz Benelux SA (Allianz) board meeting held in early 2019, Allianz's chief financier officer (CFO) had a profound discussion with Allianz's chief data and analytics officer (CDAO) on improving the company's profit and loss (P&L) statement by targeting problematic cases among disability claims related to Allianz's life insurance product. It appeared that certain claims had very long durations, leading to recurrent payouts surpassing the total amount of premiums. Consequently, there were too many claims that could translate into future losses. If this phenomenon persisted, Allianz could lose millions of dollars in revenues. Therefore, the CFO contacted the CDAO and his data office and requested that the team identify the client segments in which the most problematic cases of disability claims occurred. Additionally, the CFO wanted the data office to build a predictive model that could estimate the duration of a claim, to adapt the premium coverage to specific customer segments.

Jarsh Safety received an order of 500 units of its Model S helmet. However, the order must be delivered within 15 days. Jarsh Safety was founded by three engineering college peers, who conceptualized air-conditioned, industrial safety helmets. This innovative revolutionary product offered industrial workers not only safety but aesthetics and comfort. The founders hoped that the product could change the perception of safety helmets from mandatory wear to desired wear. The case details the production process, staffing, raw material required and procurement lead time.

The Akooda case describes the challenges confronting founder and CEO Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA '17) in 2022 as he attempts to boost sales. Launched in November 2020, Akooda was an AI company that mined 20 different sources of digital data, from tools like Slack, Google Drive, Jira, and Salesforce. Akooda's interfaces helped companies with knowledge management, process tracking, and onboarding employees by allowing managers to display real-time topics that teams and individuals engaged in during their actual work. Gonczarowski's company had begun to develop a reputation for helping companies generate insights previously obscured by the disparate software technologies used in day-to-day work. Despite strong growth, a large prospective client wanted Gonczarowski to use Akooda's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to surveil, monitor, and measure the performance of individual employees. But Akooda's category was nascent, and Gonczarowski feared that providing companies with invasive monitoring tools would cause employees to distrust Akooda, hindering its ability to generate insights from employees' public-facing data. The case describes how Akooda impacts managers' roles in information-abundant but physically disconnected environments and Gonczarowski's needed to walk a tightrope between providing insights about company operations and monitoring previously private communications and activities.

Although Mary Barra, chief executive officer (CEO) of General Motors Company (GM), had faced her fair share of challenges while leading GM, Tesla Inc. (Tesla) posed a tougher competitive challenge than anything that had come before. Despite groundbreaking progress with electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous driving, and sustainable development, GM was now living in the shadow of Tesla, which, to some extent, had leapfrogged industry incumbents to become the most valuable car manufacturer in the United States. Further, major EV developments from old rivals from Detroit, Europe, and Asia, as well as blooming EV start-ups-some backed by technology giants-only compounded Barra's worries. GM had achieved significant success in adapting to the coming age of EVs, but it also faced a number of questions: Was GM's current strategy sufficient to sustain the company's success? What technologies, capabilities, or products would be needed for GM to thrive in the new era of global mobility?

The mobile phone industry is notorious for its lack of sustainability. Fairphone started as a campaign to draw attention to 'conflict minerals' and the plight of tantalum miners. It became a social enterprise by launching its first 'fair phone', the FP1, with conflict-free tantalum. The FP2 was more broadly sustainable, with a five-year lifespan, replaceable parts, and recycling of old handsets, but it was expensive and appealed mostly to die-hard 'dark greens' who valued sustainable living over functionality. When Eva Gouwens joined as CEO in 2017, she was charged with making Fairphone more commercially oriented, while staying true to its ESG mission. The case describes the changes made and the make-or-break product launch of the FP3. Despite positive initial results, Fairphone had some way to go to turn the FP3 not only into a commercial success but an example to the rest of the industry. https://publishing.insead.edu/case/fairphone-3-commercializing-radical-sustainability

Over the past decade, Asian companies have been launching accelerated and wide-ranging digital transformation initiatives. This has enabled some of them to become leading national and even international players, as well as digital pioneers in their respective industries. This case examines the successful digital transformation undertaken by the Chinese company Midea, one of the world's leading home appliance manufacturers. By digitally transforming the company, Midea improved its financial performance and reshaped its business on a wider scale. While many cases that address digital transformation focus on the early phases of the process, Midea's case illustrates a successfully completed digital business transformation. This allows participants to have an overview of the entire digital transformation journey and see what the potential outcomes might be.

This case set describes the gale of creative destruction that came with the rise of refrigeration and the creation of a globalized food supply chain, examined through the life of Charles Tellier, a French entrepreneur and inventor of the refrigerated ship that completed the first successful transoceanic shipment of fresh meat. It takes place largely during the mid- to late 19th century, a time of increasing globalization and disruptive social change. Tellier was a visionary inventor who saw refrigeration's potential to transform the world's food supply and improve nutrition and quality of life for the growing middle classes through improved year-round access to high-quality, perishable animal protein. While he was a dedicated and ultimately successful inventor, he struggled to fund his pursuits and manage stakeholders in his endeavors. The A case rests on a pivotal moment when Tellier's refrigerated transport technology showed early promise, but Tellier and the owners of the company disagreed on the appropriate next steps to verify and capitalize on this early success.

In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published "Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options," which, among other things, detailed the connection between livestock agriculture, particularly beef, and its adverse impact on the environment, including land, soil, and water degradation as well as the reduction of biodiversity. Raising livestock contributed, globally, to 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The report presented a problem for McDonald's, one of the world's largest fast-food restaurant chains, which was one of the largest global purchasers of beef, at 500 million pounds annually. Bob Langert, McDonald's Vice-President of Sustainability, was tasked by the CEO to create a "bold, offensive strategy" in sustainability. Langert knew that for McDonald's to consider its operations truly sustainable, it should begin to look beyond fixing incremental problems within its current system and instead consider transforming the beef system itself. Because of its global reach and international scale, McDonald's was ideally situated to lead the US beef industry to explore more sustainable practices. The company already had a track record of sustainable transformation in waste, packaging, and recycling. However, Langert knew it would not be an easy task, since there would be many environmental organizations as well as the National Beef and Cattlemen's Association that would be scrutinizing McDonald's efforts. Langert and his colleagues would need to navigate the large cast of characters-internal and external, both individuals and organizations-in their efforts to address the issues around livestock agriculture and sustainability.

Patricia Skeen, a well-respected full professor at a prestigious business school at a major university, has accepted the role of chairing the school's important Academic Design and Delivery Committee (ADDC). During the week she was given to think about the role and to come to a decision, she gave some serious thought to how she wanted to lead her peers in such an endeavor. In this case, students are asked to engage in a similar reflective mode, identifying the commitments and to-do list with which they would undertake this, or any other similar, important task. The setting is simply one where the protagonist must lead from a collegial position absent any budget, any personnel decision-making authority, or an official title/position other than serving one term as committee chair and as an on-going colleague. This case is suitable for an undergraduate- or graduate-level introductory course on leadership and/or teams. The case provides an opportunity for students to consider the leadership qualities of those that they have observed when leading peers, their own prior experience leading groups of peers, and then synthesize and crystallize their own best thinking on how they would subsequently want to approach their next opportunity for leading peers. The case is fairly open-ended, thus galvanizing students' reflective thinking and refinement of their shared perspectives.

This fictional case introduces students to interactive presentations through the situation of a US craft beer company that is developing a new beer product. The case discusses an organizational push to incorporate technology to help drive decision-making throughout. It opens with a product manager who is starting to design a new beer flavor and feeling pressure from his boss to embrace the CEO's desire for interactive presentations. Having relied on static presentations previously, the manager searches for guidance to get started. This case is taught at Darden in a first-year MBA elective business communications course, "Storytelling with Data." It could also be used in a module on producing interactive presentations. The material can be taught in tandem with an introductory lesson in Tableau, Power BI, or some other interactive presentation program.