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Businesses rely on solid marketing strategies to boost sales—yet the tools used to evaluate these strategies often provide misleading results,...
- January 2021 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Jumia's Path to Profitability
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company’s path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company...
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Keywords:
Retail;
Business Models;
Business Model;
Business Startups;
Emerging markets;
For-profit Firms;
Strategy;
Technology Platform;
Information Technology;
Technology Adoption;
Value Creation;
Globalization;
Entrepreneurship;
Competition;
Expansion;
Logistics;
Profit;
Resource Allocation;
Diversification;
Corporate Strategy;
Retail Industry;
Technology Industry;
Africa
- October 2020
- Case
Unison Capital Korea: Gong Cha
By: Victoria Ivashina and Sangyun Lee
In the Spring of 2017, Soomin Kim, Founding Partner of Unison Capital Korea, and his team were debating the potential exit of Unison Capital Korea’s investment in Gong Cha Korea, the sole local franchisor of the premium milk tea brand that they proprietarily sourced...
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- September 2020
- Case
Hot Wheels: Launching The Mixed Play Experience
By: Elie Ofek, Andres Terech and Nicole Tempest Keller
Chris Down, Global Brand General Manager for Hot Wheels, and his team from the Advanced Play Group within Mattel, Inc., had developed an entirely new “mixed play” product experience that blended familiar Hot Wheels play in the physical world with breakthrough play in...
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- August 2020
- Supplement
Migros Turkey: Scaling Online Operations (B)
By: Antonio Moreno and Gamze Yucaoglu
The case opens in February 2020 as Ozgur Tort and Mustafa Bartin, CEO and chief large-format and online retail officer of Migros Ticaret A.S. (Migros), Turkey’s oldest and one of its largest supermarket chains, are looking over the results of the fulfillment pilot the...
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- 2020
- Article
A Practical Approach to Sales Compensation: What Do We Know Now? What Should We Know in the Future?
By: Doug J. Chung, Byungyeon Kim and Niladri B. Syam
Personal selling represents one of the most important elements in the marketing mix, and appropriate management of the sales force is vital to achieving the organization’s objectives. Among the various instruments of sales management, compensation plays a pivotal role...
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- June 18, 2019
- Article
Research: Investors Reward Companies That Talk Up Their Digital Initiatives
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Wilbur Chen
A study of how companies disclose their digital initiatives on earnings calls and written communications finds that more firms are using these technologies, that financial markets reward companies that disclose such initiatives, but that financial performance...
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- February 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Sales Force Management at Nobel Ilac
By: Doug J. Chung and Gamze Yucaoglu
Nobel Ilac was a Turkish generic pharmaceutical company marketing more than 100 drugs in 20 countries and, as of 2017, had over 2,500 employees worldwide. Nobel had implemented a transformation strategy—more specifically, a customer segmentation plan—whereby the sales...
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- November 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Case
Israel at 70: Is it Possible to (re)Brand a Country?
By: Elie Ofek and Sarah Gulick
In the spring of 2018, Israel was set to celebrate its 70th anniversary. While there was much to rejoice in reaching this milestone, the country’s brand image internationally was far from ideal. Past efforts to impact perceptions of Israel, spearheaded by the Ministry...
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- September 2018
- Case
Hunley, Inc.: Casting for Growth
By: John A. Quelch and James T. Kindley
Hunley, Inc. manufactures rods for the niche sport of fly fishing. It specializes in freshwater rods that are perceived as "middle-market" products, targeted at "avid" fly fishers. In the face of declining revenue and a decreasing price per unit sold, the company's...
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- June 2018
- Case
Candor at Clever
By: Ethan Bernstein and Om Lala
Clever, a high-growth EdTech company based in San Francisco, had grown quickly in market share and headcount. As with many high-growth companies, however, early employees (many of whom had never managed people before) had been given the opportunity to manage teams, and...
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Keywords:
Performance Feedback;
Talent Development And Retention;
Talent Management;
Feedback;
Difficult Conversations;
Radical Candor;
Scaling Start-ups;
Scaling And Growth;
Developing Effective Managers;
Effective Managers;
First-time Managers;
Kim Scott;
Clever;
Bay Area;
Silicon Valley;
Interpersonal Communication;
Talent And Talent Management;
Human Resources;
Leadership Development;
Management Practices And Processes;
Management Skills;
Management Style;
Organizations;
Organizational Culture;
Performance Evaluation;
Conflict And Resolution;
Technology Industry;
Education Industry;
San Francisco;
United States
- April 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Tesla-SolarCity
By: E. Scott Mayfield and Emil N. Siriwardane
On June 21, 2016, Tesla Motors, Inc. announced its offer to acquire SolarCity, bringing CEO Elon Musk one step closer to completing his goal of moving the world from a hydrocarbon-based economy to a solar-electric one. Markets and analysts were mixed in their reaction...
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- February 2018 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
Yunnan Baiyao: Transforming a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise
By: Michael Chu, William C. Kirby, Nancy Hua Dai and Yuanzhuo Wang
This case tells the story of how Wang Minghui, Chairman of Yunnan Baiyao Group since 1999, transformed a single-product traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) state-owned enterprise (SOE) into a major diversified consumer health player in China's highly competitive...
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Keywords:
State-owned Enterprise (soe);
Competition;
Traditional Chinese Medicine;
Yunnan;
Yunnan Baiyao;
Consumer Health;
Enterprise Transformation;
Transformation;
Health;
Business History;
State Ownership;
Private Ownership;
Business Strategy;
Commercialization;
Competition;
Consumer Products Industry;
Health Industry;
Pharmaceutical Industry;
China
- September 2017
- Case
Blackstone's Julia Kahr at the Summit
By: Paul A. Gompers, John D. Dionne and Amram Migdal
In 2009, Blackstone, the New York-based alternative asset and financial services firm, committed to invest up to $750 million into Summit Materials, a new company in the aggregates sector (i.e., construction materials, such as crushed stone, sand, gravel, cement,...
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Keywords:
Roll Up;
Private Equity Roll Up;
Aggregates;
Aggregates Materials;
Construction Materials;
Business Ventures;
Acquisition;
Leveraged Buyouts;
Business Growth And Maturation;
Engineering;
Construction;
Finance;
Capital;
Equity;
Private Equity;
Financial Instruments;
Investment;
Housing;
Management;
Goals And Objectives;
Growth And Development Strategy;
Growth Management;
Personal Development And Career;
Management Teams;
Planning;
Problems And Challenges;
Value;
Valuation;
Value Creation;
Construction Industry;
Financial Services Industry;
United States
- March 2017 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
BYJU'S The Learning App
By: John Jong-Hyun Kim and Rachna Tahilyani
BYJU’S The Learning App (BYJU’s) is India’s largest K-12 education app with about 300,000 annual paid subscribers. The mobile app uses a mix of video lessons and interactive tools to personalize learning for every student. Although there is room to grow exponentially...
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- February 2017 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
ExxonMobil: Business as Usual? (A)
By: George Serafeim, Shiva Rajgopal and David Freiberg
Climate change was becoming an important societal and business issue as more governments were introducing climate change related regulations and investors became increasibly worried about stranded assets within oil and gas firms. In September 2016, the U.S. Securities...
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- October 2016 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Essent: From a State-Owned Utility to a Commercial Company
By: Ananth Raman and Elena Corsi
Patrick Lammers, Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) for the Dutch energy company Essent NV, once a state-owned company, was pleased with the progress Essent’s consumer (“B2C”) business had made: Earnings Before Income Tax (EBIT) for B2C had gone from a loss of €18 million...
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- August 2016
- Teaching Note
Reworking Office Space: Industry City, Brooklyn
By: Arthur I Segel and Alexander W. Schultz
Jamestown is contemplating how to best lease a portion of their new development along the Brooklyn waterfront: Industry City. The 6-million-square-foot, mixed-use development is meant to accommodate Brooklyn’s growing innovation, creative, and “maker” communities....
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- August 2016 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
Nirvana Vihar Rehabilitation Homes
By: Shawn Cole, Andreas Rotenberg and Thomas van den Aarssen
Kumar Builders (KUL) was finally nearing completion on the four luxury condominium towers that comprised the first phase of its bold vision for the redevelopment of more than 70 acres of prime real estate in downtown Pune, India. The Nirvana Hills development also...
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- June 2016 (Revised March 2017)
- Case
Reworking Office Space: Industry City, Brooklyn
Jamestown is contemplating how to best lease a portion of their new development along the Brooklyn waterfront, Industry City. The 6 million square foot, mixed-use development is meant to accommodate Brooklyn’s growing innovation, creative, and “maker” communities....
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- May 2016 (Revised March 2020)
- Teaching Note
Cyberdyne: A Leap to the Future
By: Doug J. Chung and Mayuka Yamazaki
Cyberdyne Inc. was a Japanese technology venture founded in 2004 by scientist Yoshiyuki Sankai to commercialize a hybrid assistive limb (HAL). HAL was a robotic exoskeleton system for people who had difficulty walking due to nervous system disabilities resulting from...
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