In 2018, Swedish furniture maker IKEA was undergoing a significant transformation. Challenged by the rise of online shopping and changing consumer behavior, and mourning the death of its founder, the Company's top executives knew they had to step out of their comfort...

The greatest challenge to the sustainability of our current era of globalization comes from within the United States. Most Americans have come to reject globalization. We must discern the lessons from the parts of the developed world where the backlash is also...

The case examines the focus of an early stage company, and how an unexpected external incidence can threaten or void the business model. It encompasses issues such as minimal viable product, defining and pivoting a business model, organizational requirements for a...

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 520-055.

Teaching Note for HBS No. 520-053. This is a teaching note for the case “Danone: Changing the Food System?” The case examines the efforts of one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies to resolve the social, environmental, and economic issues within its...

Policymakers in many parts of Europe and the United States are struggling to bring the rapidly spreading Covid-19 pandemic under control. In doing so, they are repeating many of the mistakes made in Italy, where the pandemic turned into a disaster. A major contributing...

The case discusses the strategy of CIAM, a French activist investment firm, involved in a case of a buy-out of minority shareholders in the telecommunications sector. Altice NV, an international telecommunications company based in the Netherlands that owned more than...

Concerned about the slow growth in the tire market, Florent Menegaux, Michelin’s CEO, set out to redefine the company as a mobility company. As part of this growth strategy, Michelin started offering a host of services such as fleet management and tire-as-a-service. In...

How should ZEISS, the German manufacturer of precision optical and optoelectronic systems manage two historic businesses that operated fairly autonomously? The Industrial Quality Solutions (IQS) business sold measurement equipment to manufacturing companies in sectors...

Jean-Claude Le Grand had dedicated almost his entire career to following talent at L'Oréal. He strongly believed that L'Oréal's workforce needed to be diverse in order to ensure creativity and innovation. In early 2018—as he was about to take up the position of EVP for...

The case discusses the strategy of DER SPIEGEL, the leading news magazine in Germany, in the aftermath of the discovery of a fake reporting scandal. It had come to light that one of DER SPIEGEL’s own reporters had falsified and made up entire articles for years,...

In November 2019, Ilham Kadri, CEO of Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals and advanced materials group with annual revenues of more than 10 billion in 2018, announced the group’s mid-term strategy, eight months after she took the helm as Solvay’s 11th CEO. The case...

Hoping to get ahead of potential digital disruption at Klöckner & Co.—one of the world’s largest steel and metal distributors—CEO Gisbert Rühl set up both kloeckner.i (KCI), an internal transformation arm, and XOM Materials (XOM), an independent industry platform. KCI...

The Dutch East India Company’s board of directors must decide what to do about an impending legal requirement to liquidate the company’s assets and return to shareholders their capital and any profits earned during a ten-year lock-up period. The charter granted to the...

The case relates the decision made in the A case and what happened in the aftermath.

Supplements the (A) case.

A new environmental regulation known as IMO 2020 was creating what one industry analyst called “the biggest shakeup for the oil and shipping industries in decades.” According to the new regulation, all ocean-going ships would have to limit their sulfur emissions by...

A new environmental regulation known as IMO 2020 was creating what one industry analyst called “the biggest shakeup for the oil and shipping industries in decades.” According to the new regulation, all ocean-going ships would have to limit their sulfur emissions by...