Gene Lee Navigates the Darden Takeover

Joshua D. Margolis; H. Lawrence  Culp; James  Barnett; Aldo  Sesia

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised September 2018)

Gene Lee Navigates the Darden Takeover

by Joshua D. Margolis, H. Lawrence Culp, James Barnett and Aldo Sesia

Abstract

Following a full takeover of Darden Restaurant’s Board of Directors, Darden COO Gene Lee is weighing an offer to become interim CEO.

Keywords: shareholder activism; Investment Activism; Crisis Management; Personal Development and Career; Decision Choices and Conditions; Food and Beverage Industry; United States;

Language: English

Format: Print

18 pages

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Citation:

Margolis, Joshua D., H. Lawrence Culp, James Barnett, and Aldo Sesia. "Gene Lee Navigates the Darden Takeover." Harvard Business School Case 418-015, March 2018. (Revised September 2018.)

Karen Bruck, Corporate Sales Director at MercadoLibre, Latin America's largest e-commerce platform, needs to make a decision about one of her managers, who, while analytically savvy, has an approach that does not fit in with the company's culture.

Indigo Agriculture used a digital-enabled research and development (R&D) process to launch its initial product, microbial coatings for agricultural seeds, which increase crop yields while reducing the need for fertilizers. In doing so, the company developed direct relationships with farmers, in contrast to typical agricultural supply chains that use intermediaries. The company then launched a marketplace platform to link growers directly to crop buyers, again disintermediating the market. Indigo Agriculture is now considering launching an initiative to incentivize farmers to engage in regenerative agricultural practices by setting up a carbon market that could pay them for sequestering carbon into their soils. If scaled globally, the idea could sequester as much as one trillion tons (a teraton) of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere into agricultural soils, but pursing the idea has many risks.

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019 (Revised June 2020)

Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.: Extending a History of Life-Changing Innovations (A)

Ryan Raffaelli, David G. Fubini and Aldo Sesia

This case examines the leadership challenges associated with maintaining a culture of innovation in established organizations. It asks students to step into the shoes of a leader faced with making several tough decisions about when to invest (or to stop investing) in radical innovation projects. Corning CEO Wendell Weeks, who nearly bankrupted the company in the early 2000s when he overinvested in fiber optics, must initially decide if the company should enter a then-risky deal with Steve Jobs to produce the glass covers for the first generation iPhones. The case then asks students to analyze the Corning’s 157-year innovation agenda that started with the development of a bulb-shaped glass encasement for Thomas Edison's new incandescent lamp. In the years that followed, Corning made investments that led to products such as PYREX cookware, fiber-optic broadband cable, LCD television screens, Gorilla Glass, and a recent bet on pharmaceuticals. At the end of the case, Weeks must decide if Corning should continue to invest in a new pharmaceutical packaging product that held enormous promise, but had already cost the company $200 million in R&D and might divert resources and attention from other key business lines.

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Organizational Culture; Innovation Leadership; History; Technological Innovation; Investment; Decision Making;

Citation:

Raffaelli, Ryan, David G. Fubini, and Aldo Sesia. "Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.: Extending a History of Life-Changing Innovations (A)." Harvard Business School Case 419-003, April 2019. (Revised June 2020.) View Details

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