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- August 2021
- Case
Allbirds: Decarbonizing Fashion
By: Michael W. Toffel, Ken Pucker and Eren Kuzucu
Allbirds is a footwear startup focused on simple design, comfort, and sustainable natural materials. The case describes the company’s product development process that works with suppliers to develop natural materials including wool and sugarcane to substitute for...
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Keywords:
Decarbonization;
Climate Impact;
Environmental Strategy;
Innovation;
Product Design;
Supply Chain Management;
Innovation Strategy;
Innovation and Management;
Product Development;
Climate Change;
Environmental Management;
Environmental Sustainability;
Apparel and Accessories Industry;
United States;
California
- June 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Nissan's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Ananth Raman, William Schmidt and Ann Winslow
In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan’s supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from...
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- June 2021
- Case
Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (A)
By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green
Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a...
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- June 2021
- Supplement
Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (B)
By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green
Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a...
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- June 2021
- Supplement
Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (C)
By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green
Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a...
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- June 2021
- Supplement
Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (D)
By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green
Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a...
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- June 2021
- Case
Mobileye 2021: Robotaxi and/or Consumer AV?
By: David B. Yoffie, Danielle Golan and Nicole Tempest Keller
In March 2021, Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Mobileye, was preparing to meet with Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently....
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Eliminate Strategic Overload
As companies respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges, they ask more and more of their employees. But organizations often have very little to show for the efforts of their talented and engaged workers. By selecting fewer initiatives with greater...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Companies' Responses to Social Activism: A Resource Reconfiguration Perspective
By: Yanhua Bird, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Private politics scholarship portrays companies’ organizational vulnerabilities as opportunities for social activists because they signal openness to change. But meaningful organizational change requires not only openness to change, but capacity to mobilize resources...
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- Article
Manage the Suppliers That Could Harm Your Brand: Know When to Avoid, Engage, or Drop Them
By: Jodi L Short and Michael W. Toffel
The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical...
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Keywords:
Auditing;
Agency Cost;
Quality And Safety;
Quality Management System;
Quality Management;
Unions;
Environmental Management;
Globalization;
Goods and Commodities;
Governance;
Labor;
Labor Unions;
Wages;
Working Conditions;
Operations;
Supply Chain;
Safety;
Quality;
China;
Bangladesh;
Asia;
Pakistan
- March 2021
- Article
On the Direct and Indirect Real Effects of Credit Supply Shocks
By: Laura Alfaro, Manuel García-Santana and Enrique Moral-Benito
We explore the real effects of bank-lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all Spanish firms with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset of all corporate loans from 2003 to 2013 to estimate...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Sourcing Monitors to Monitor Your Sourcing: Strategies to Manage Shilling and Shirking by Supply Chain Auditors
By: Ashley Palmarozzo, Jodi L. Short and Michael W. Toffel
Multinational corporations (MNCs) hire auditors to assess business partners’ compliance with quality, working conditions, and environmental standards. Independent third-party auditors are widely assumed to outperform second-party auditors employed and thus controlled...
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- January 2021 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Aptiv PLC Board of Directors (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Aptiv’s board must decide whether a joint venture with an auto maker is the right next step in the company’s efforts to develop and commercialize a production-ready autonomous driving system. While many commentators believed that Aptiv’s self-driving technologies had...
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Keywords:
Automotive Industry;
Bankruptcy Reorganization;
Board Of Directors;
Board Committees;
Board Decisions;
Board Dynamics;
Corporate Boards;
Innovation And Strategy;
Legal Aspects Of Business;
Spin Off;
Strategic Alliances;
Strategic Change;
Strategic Evolution;
Supplier Relationships;
Technological Change;
Corporate Governance;
Governing and Advisory Boards;
Innovation Strategy;
Going Public;
Joint Ventures;
Leadership;
Restructuring;
Technological Innovation;
Transformation;
Auto Industry;
Europe;
United States
- November 2020 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Sercomm: Operating in China Amid COVID-19 and Beyond
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Gary P. Pisano and Bonnie Yining Cao
The COVID-19 pandemic had forced a production cut in the factory of Sercomm, one of the world’s major telecom equipment producers, in China. The case explores and highlights the challenges that Chief Executive Officer James Wang faced: How could Sercomm recover and...
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- October 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
Twiga Foods: Revolutionizing African Retail (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Pippa Tubman Amerding and Wale Lawal
Twiga is a leading agricultural produce supplier in Kenya offering services to mostly informal retailers. Under Peter Njonjo, a co-founder and Twiga’s new CEO, the company is considering multiple options for expanding its business, including offering packaged foods and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation
By: Laura Alfaro
We develop an incomplete-contracts model to jointly study firm boundaries and the allocation of decision rights within them. Integration has an option value: it gives firm owners authority to delegate or centralize decision rights, depending on who can best solve...
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- October 2020
- Article
The Supply Chain Economy: A New Industry Categorization for Understanding Innovation in Services
By: Mercedes Delgado and Karen G. Mills
An active debate has centered on the importance of manufacturing for driving innovation in the U.S. economy. This paper offers an alternative framework that focuses on the role of suppliers of goods and services (the “supply chain economy”) in national performance. We...
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- September 2020
- Teaching Note
TransDigm in 2017: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 720-422. TransDigm was a highly acquisitive company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and commercial customers. Over the ten years ending in 2016, its stock price had increase ten times,...
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Keywords:
Value Capturing;
Pricing Strategy;
Supplier Power;
Buyer Power;
Porter's Five Forces;
Bargaining Power;
Monopoly;
Aerospace;
Acquisition Strategy;
Value Drivers;
Ethical Behavior;
Regulation;
Growth Strategy;
Business Ethics;
Defense;
Procurement;
Sustainability;
Value-Based Business Strategy;
Acquisition;
Ethics;
Private Equity;
Financial Strategy;
Growth Management;
Performance Evaluation;
Business Strategy;
Competitive Strategy;
Horizontal Integration;
Value Creation;
Competitive Advantage;
Aerospace Industry;
Air Transportation Industry;
United States
- August 2020
- Supplement
Luckin Coffee (B): Revelations of Fraud
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman
This case describes revelations of fraud at Luckin Coffee, beginning with an anonymous report in January 2020 and continuing with the company’s admission in April 2020 that it had inflated its revenues by 2.2 billion RMB ($310 million), almost half its reported...
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- August 2020
- Article
Improving Working Conditions in Global Supply Chains: The Role of Institutional Environments and Monitoring Program Design
By: Jodi L. Short, Michael W. Toffel and Andrea R. Hugill
Activism seeking to improve labor conditions in global supply chains has led many transnational corporations to adopt codes of conduct and monitor suppliers for compliance. Drawing on thousands of audits conducted by a major social auditor, we identify structural...
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