May 2021

Accounting
Accounting for Bitcoin at Tesla - New!
In February of 2021, Tesla revealed that it had purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin, totaling
7.5% of the company's cash. This announcement came after a series of cryptocurrency-
related tweets from Elon Musk, the company's CEO, and a surge in cryptocurrency values.
The announcement was met with mixed reactions by stock investors and market
participants. This case centers around the accounting treatment of Bitcoin at Tesla: what
does the company's choice of accounting treatment say about Bitcoin as an asset, and
what are its implications for Tesla's profitability measures under the Generally Accepted
Accounting Principles? The case also raises questions about whether investing in Bitcoin is
consistent with the company's strategy, and whether Musks' public communications
constitute a form of market manipulation.

A Note on Income Statements: A Beginner's Guide - New!

If you can understand football scoring or read a recipe, you can understand an income
statement, with the help of this note. It is important to understand an income statement
because it tells investors or any stakeholder of a company whether or not the company is
making money. An income statement also gives information to company managers to make
better forecasts and decisions.

Hudson St. Clair: Exit or Operate? - New!

In February 2017, four co-founders were deciding whether or not to launch their new
custom suit business, Hudson St. Clair. The company would manufacture made-to-
measure suits in Detroit, Michigan, and sell them online, across the United States. The co-
founders approached Hulin Partners, a private equity company to see if it would be
interested in investing in the idea, but the company offered instead to buy the business.
 May 2021

The four founders need to determine whether they would infuse their own equity and grow
the business or sell the business plan and existing contracts to Hulin Partners. To decide
what to do, the team first needed to understand the current business environment, evaluate
the product and marketing strategy, and project the new venture’s financial performance for
the first three years of operations.

CareGroup, Inc. - Notable!

Care Group is a coalition of Boston hospitals. In FY1998, it incurred an operating loss of
over $34 million, and a decline in its equity of more than $104 million. This contrasts with
very positive performance in the previous two years. The goal is to determine why this
happened.

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 May 2021

Entrepreneurship
BauZentral: Compensation and Governance in the Family
Firm - New!
In 2017, the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief financial officer (CFO) of Swiss-based
BauZentral, a privately owned family business, faced a restructuring challenge. BauZentral
produced and sold electrical systems, plumbing systems, and smart security and energy
solutions. In 2014, when the current CEO took over from his father, the company needed to
address the growth associated with its successful international acquisition strategy.
However, the firm’s historical structure maintained tight family control, which needed to
change to address the realities of the international expansion. The CEO and CFO
recognized that the firm had too many different regions with different market conditions,
products, and competitive environments to be effectively run from the head office. The CEO
and CFO planned to use the family constitution and the firm’s financial targets as criteria to
devise a governance system to align the interests of management with the interests of the
family owners. Their aim was to restructure the organization to achieve the firm’s goal of
becoming a global supplier while also respecting the family’s values. What type of new
governance and compensation structure should they design for the firm?

Julia Madeline-Coho and Uptown Hound - New!

Julia Madeline-Coho has decided to start a business—Uptown Hound—that will entertain
pets while their owners are away from their homes in the medium-sized mid-Atlantic city of
Greenwood. Madeline-Coho’s dog Louis (or Lou, as she preferred to call him) was her
motivation, along with a dinner guest, Tara Holmes, who she met in her family’s house.
Holmes was a Darden School of Business graduate concerned about her dog, Winnie,
being home alone all day while she was working.

Madeline-Coho has been doing research for her potential business and has some
decisions to make, such as what services to offer these dogs and what to charge for them,
and if and when she should hire any employees. Another decision was whether to expand
her services to include cats as well as dogs.
 May 2021

CashDrop (A) - New!

In July 2020, Ruben Flores-Martinez had launched a startup, CashDrop, which provided
easy and cheap sales options for small businesses. The Covid-19 pandemic helped
CashDrop quickly grow. Flores-Martinez, who had previously sought and been denied
venture capital funding, suddenly found CashDrop being pursued by venture capital. The
case discusses Flores-Martinez's background as an undocumented immigrant in the United
States, his previous business ventures, and his concerns about the influence of venture
capital on business. The case also discusses the American and global payment platform
landscape.

Enigmo - New!

Codecademy: Where to Next? - New!

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 May 2021

Finance
MJD Manufacturing: Capital Budgeting Decisions during a
Pandemic – New!
In April of 2020, an Ivey Business School HBA graduate, and chief executive officer of
automobile parts manufacturer MJD Manufacturing (MJD), recognized the potential
opportunity to invest in new machinery and retool some of MJD’s operations to produce
COVID-19-related supplies. Specifically, she was considering whether or not MJD should
produce personal protective equipment. Aside from analyzing the financial viability of the
potential investments, she had to consider three factors: First, how long the COVID-19
pandemic might last, as the timeline of the pandemic underpinned the potential investment
decision; second, how an investment would be financed; and third, the qualitative aspect of
the decision. Specifically, she had to consider how she could help her community at a time
when many businesses were shrinking and furloughing employees.

Ferrari: Valuation of the Prancing Horse - New!

Ferrari – the prancing horse – had opened at the top end of its target price range – $52 per
share in the U.S. – raising nearly $1 billion for Ferrari's owner, Fiat. Like most IPOs, the
share price of RACE (the ticker symbol for Ferrari), settled in the weeks following the
launch. But now many analysts and mutual fund managers were all asking the same thing:
Was Ferrari a promising equity or simply another of the equity eye candy IPOs to hit the
market in recent years?

China Rapid Finance: The Collapse of China's P2P Lending

Industry - New!
China's peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry had over 3,000 platforms at its height in 2015.
China Risk Finance (CRF) was one of the country's P2P success stories. With over 1
million borrowers using CRF's platform, it raised $60 million in its 2016 IPO on the New
York Stock Exchange. Yet the pace of P2P's rise spooked financial regulators, sparking a
crackdown on the industry that would lead to its demise in China. This B case tracks CRF's
tumultuous attempts to salvage its business in the face of sudden and sweeping changes
 May 2021

to the rules governing its industry as well as the lengths to which the Chinese government
went to ensure the stability of its financial system, even at the expense of its development.

Time Value of Money: The Buy Versus Rent Decision - Notable!

A recent MBA graduate had been renting a condominium, and a similar unit next door had
just been listed for sale. Now facing the classic buy-versus-rent decision, the young grad
decided it was time for her to apply some of the analytical tools she had acquired in
business school — including “time value of money” concepts — to her personal life.

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 May 2021

General Management and Strategy

SATS Ltd.: Building Capabilities for the Future - New!

SATS Ltd., an airline service provider headquartered in Singapore, was the largest air cargo
terminal operator at Singapore’s Changi Airport. As a key player in the Asia-Pacific region, it had
built its reputation as one of the top air cargo terminal operators in the world. With meticulous
strategic planning, it had developed technological capabilities to navigate through many
challenges and stay ahead of its competitors. In 2019, multiple challenges were arising from the
external factors that had transformed the nature of the global air cargo value chain. An
impending labour crisis, coupled with changing customer expectations and the threat of
substitutes, meant that the company faced a fresh set of challenges. To fight these challenges,
it had to decide whether to further develop its automation capabilities or to focus on driving
digitalization within its operations to improve its operational efficiency.

Feihe: Achieving Competitive Advantage through Strategic

Transformation - New!
Following the 2008 China milk scandal, Chinese infant milk formula products were regarded as
unsafe, and Chinese consumers were preferring to pay high prices for the products of foreign
brands. As one of the few companies not involved in the milk scandal, China Feihe Limited
(Feihe) was able to maintain steady growth in product sales in the medium- and low-end market,
but it did not have a differentiation advantage over foreign brands; therefore, its sales results in
the high-end market were poor. In 2015, Feihe carried out a strategic transformation and
repositioned its brand proposition, which led to increased customer value. The company also
launched a new product series, which allowed it to create a competitive advantage. In 2019,
Feihe was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. However, other brands started to imitate
Feihe in developing products that were suitable for Chinese babies, which made investors doubt
whether or not Feihe could maintain its competitive advantage. What action should Feihe take to
maintain its competitive advantage and its position in the market?

Sunshine: The Million Dollar Email - New!

The Sunshine Foundation of Canada (Sunshine) was a national, Canadian-focused, self-funded
charity established in 1987 and headquartered in London, Ontario. In the second half of 2020,
the chief executive officer (CEO) and president was deciding how to create an effective email
template that would serve the larger organization as the first point of contact for potential
donors. Sunshine’s relationships and donor pipeline were the organization’s lifeline, and with
 May 2021

strong competition in the non-profit milieu, the CEO knew securing funds in the individual-giving
category would be difficult. How could she outline Sunshine’s differences and highlight why the
prospective client would be interested in becoming a donor? How could she convert these
prospects into new Sunshine donors?

Abelana Game Reserve: Community Partnership Driving Shared Value

in Ecotourism - New!
In 2020, the chief executive officer of Abelana Game Reserve in South Africa was considering
the arrangement between the game reserve and the Mashishimale community, who owned the
land. He had promised to provide added value to the land by highlighting four pillars of focus:
land, community, business, and investors. Two lodges were formally opened to guests in March
2020, but the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all business activities—until
September 2020, when the government began easing lockdown restrictions and the
shareholders met to discuss tourist bookings and expansion plans. The management team had
an ambitious and exciting overall vision for the game reserve, but there were more pressing
challenges to consider, including a collaborative cross-sector partnership, training and
developing workers, creating jobs in the community, and supporting local businesses. Were
there other shared value ideas to consider for more employment opportunities and growth within
the community?

Wellington Brewery: Growth Decision in a Crowded Beer Market - New!

In late June 2019, the president of Wellington Brewery, a medium-size craft brewery located in
Guelph, Ontario, Canada, wanted to determine the best growth strategy for his company. He
also hoped to recover recent expenses incurred for a major expansion of the company's
operations. Although the business's growth across the province was the main objective, he also
needed to consider various potential options and other factors. Wellington Brewery faced the
challenges of an unpredictable and oversaturated market. Ontario's craft brewery industry was
characterized by unexpected growth, shifting consumer preferences, and intense competition for
shelf space at limited retail outlets. The president urgently needed a plan for continuing
Wellington Brewery’s expansion, and to ensure it remained relevant and financially strong
during challenging times.

Walmart- Flipkart Deal: In Search of Stability - New!

In May 2018, US-based multinational retail giant Walmart Inc. (Walmart) took control of India’s
biggest e-commerce platform Flipkart Internet Private Ltd. (Flipkart). Despite being the industry
leader, Flipkart had been continuously losing market share to Amazon.com, Inc. (Amazon) and
was looking for support from a deep-pocketed investor. This created an opportunity for Walmart
to enter the Indian e-commerce industry, bypassing regulations governing foreign direct
investments. However, the unprecedented growth of Amazon, new foreign direct investment
rules in India, Reliance Industries Ltd.’s entry into e-commerce, and challenges due to COVID-
19 all created unexpected turbulence for the new partners. How would the Walmart–Flipkart duo
overcome these challenges? Would Walmart divest its investment in Flipkart and end its
aspirations to become one of the largest e-commerce companies in India? Or would the duo
overcome these challenges together and emerge as winners?

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 May 2021

Information Systems
BTS: Success and Risk with Fans and Influencers on Social
Media - New!
Korean pop music (K-pop), once limited to an Asian market, broke its cultural boundaries
and became global in 2012 when Psy’s song-and-dance video “Gangnam Style” went viral
around the world. The subsequent global success of the Korean idol boy band BTS
confirmed that K-pop had a place in an international music market. With international
performances and major US awards since its debut in 2013, BTS was carefully analyzed by
those who wanted to identify the reasons for its success. Factors such as the band’s active
use of social media and quality transgenerational content were commonly identified, but
media reports pointed mainly to the influence of the band’s fan group, or ARMY, and its
social media influencers, known as hommas, as reasons for BTS’s success. Big Hit
Entertainment (Big Hit), BTS’s talent agency, needed to sustain the band’s unprecedented
success. What should Big Hit consider in developing a sustainable competitive advantage
in a global music market increasingly taking advantage of new media?

Broadband-X: Enterprise Resource Planning

Implementation - Notable!
Broadband-X, is a small-sized electronic contract manufacturing company. The company
had been using QuickBooks accounting package and Excel sheets to manage its
processes. As the company grew, Brian, the owner, noticed that the current model was not
capable of efficiently managing the production processes and decided to acquire an
enterprise resource planning (ERP) package. Brian tried to implement the system
employing its current human resources. However, he realized that ERP implementation
required a company-wide change management effort. Brian hired Zayan Preet to champion
the ERP implementation project. Preet analyzed the system, conducted interviews to figure
 May 2021

out the issues and the priorities, and began working on an implementation strategy and a
project plan.

LiveRamp in 2020 - Notable!

The LiveRamp in 2020 case follows the story of Anneka Gupta as she rises from one of
LiveRamp's first product managers to president and head of products and platforms,
responsible for overseeing the company's product, engineering, marketing, and general
and administrative functions.

Creating a virtual internship at Goldman Sachs - Notable!

Goldman Sachs runs an annual internship for over 3,000 participants, spread across
dozens of the firm's global offices. In 2020, the team brought all its resources to bear to
transform the internship program into a fully virtual format in just a few short weeks. The
new all-virtual internship faced challenges, but also benefited from unexpected
opportunities. As the program ended, the team reflected on what worked, what they would
change, and what the future of the internship program at Goldman Sachs could look like in
2021 and beyond.

NEC Corporation in 2020: Innovating for the Future - Notable!

In 2020, NEC focused on providing advanced IT, network, and data solutions, including
cloud computing, AI and machine learning, Internet-of-Things platforms, and 5G networks
as well as communication equipment installations. An award-winning company, NEC
ranked fifth in the world in AI-related patents. The case study describes NEC's pathway
towards accelerating in-house innovation, and commercializing what its global labs had
invented. In 2013, the company established a Business Innovation Unit (BIU) to boost in-
house innovation, and tap into the sense of urgency, risk-taking, and promise of rewards
that helped drive technology start-ups elsewhere. In 2018, the BIU formed a Silicon Valley
subsidiary called NEC X to structure a new inside-out accelerator. By 2020, two start-ups
had graduated from the program, and others were well underway. Could NEC X become a
trailblazer, creating new standards and processes for inside-out accelerators?

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 May 2021

Marketing
Kinsip: Marketing Spirits, Maple Syrup, And Hand
Sanitizer - New!
In May 2020, the three cofounders of Kinsip House of Fine Spirits (Kinsip), a craft distillery
located on a farm in Prince Edward County, Ontario, Canada, felt a great sense of
accomplishment. The distillery had a varied product mix that included light and dark spirits,
a broad variety of bitters, and cask-aged maple syrup. However, in March of 2020, the
business had retooled to produce hand sanitizer in response to the shortages resulting
from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a distillery, Kinsip already produced
ethanol for its regular products, which was also a key ingredient in the composition of hand
sanitizer, and in combining this with their production and bottling expertise, were able to
meet the needs of the community quickly and effectively. Before long, Kinsip had added
hand sanitizer to its list of products for sale to the public. Should the cofounders make hand
sanitizer a regular Kinsip product offering?

Viet Nipa: A Young Entrepreneur’s Sweet Endeavour - New!

In May 2019, a Vietnam-based entrepreneur was wondering which strategy would work
best to sell nipa honey, the first product launched by his nipa palm products company, Viet
Nam Nipa Development Company Limited (Viet Nipa). The product was launched in
February 2019 and the entrepreneur had been selling the nipa honey at trade fairs, through
partnerships with three popular resorts in his home district, and on a sales platform on Viet
Nipa’s Facebook page. He was reaching out to grocery retailers in Vietnam with sale
propositions, but to no avail. Should the entrepreneur continue to pursue business-to-
consumer (B2C) distribution or leverage his company’s operational and manufacturing
capabilities to shift to a business-to-business (B2B) operation? What was his target market
and how should he tailor Viet Nipa’s marketing strategy and tactics to these consumers?
Should he also consider taking nipa honey to the international market?

Crayola: Environmental Disruptions Affecting Its Back-to-

School Strategy - New!
Founded in 1885, Crayola has since established itself as US-based iconic brand with a
 May 2021

wide array of quality products and deep connections with consumers, retailers, and
licensing and business partners. By March 2020, Crayola had achieved category
leadership and was outselling the majority of its competitors. It was on trend with new
products and online content for educators, parents, and children—all with the goal of
inspiring creativity among children. Crayola had also created strong relationships with and
earned the respect of retailers, who had come to value the role Crayola played in their
business, especially during the two most important retail seasons: back-to-school and
Christmas. At the beginning of the second quarter of 2020, Crayola had to make some
critical decisions. The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus across the United States had led
to business and school closures across the country (and the world), as well as personal
physical restrictions. Crayola needed to immediately focus on three key areas: maintaining
company culture, collaborating with partners to preserve the volume of back-to-school
revenue, and ensuring a strong supply chain to meet consumers’ needs. These three
actions would ensure that Crayola could take advantage of key opportunities and continue
creating strong and sustainable relationships with educators, parents, and children.

Kalahut: Where is Art and Culture Needed Most? - New!

Kalahut: The House of Arts (Kalahut) was an Indian e-commerce site that connected
instructors specialized in traditional Indian arts and cultural forms with customers interested
in these services. Since its launch in July 2020, it had mainly served customers in India;
however, it had also seen modest engagement on social media platforms and its website
from individuals outside of the current customer pool. As the COVID-19 pandemic had
resulted in both increased web traffic to e-commerce sites and an increase in the number of
people looking for new activities while in lockdown, Kalahut hoped to take this opportunity
to expand into a new market. In late 2020, Kalahut’s co-founder needed to decide which of
three potential market countries to enter. Which would be the most suitable avenue for
expansion?

Market Disruption Strategies: The Transformation of

Xiaomi - New!
After breaking into China's smartphone market, where it becomes a leading brand, Xiaomi
sees sales stagnate and then decline as the disruption strategy that empowered its rise
loses momentum. As competitors counter every move, targeting its core consumer
segment, the company urgently needs to reignite growth and develop a sustainable
competitive advantage. The case describes the changing market landscape, Xiaomi's
product portfolio, distribution systems, partnerships, brand management, promotion and
pricing. The question is whether to remain focused on smartphones-on which Xiaomi's
reputation has been built-or transform into an IoT 'ecosystem' encompassing a wider range
of product categories. The challenge is to understand the respective pros and cons and
formulate a detailed implementation plan for the chosen strategy.

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 May 2021

Management Science
Skyrose Marketing Agency: Predicting Consumer
Demand - New!
As a result of recent success and rapid growth, the Skyrose Marketing Agency team was
becoming overwhelmed with significant variation in workload levels. The vice-president,
who was responsible for managing the company’s clients from the beverage industry,
wanted to smooth the team’s workload level to improve morale. She also wanted to remain
attentive to her clients’ needs, which could increase as peak holiday seasons approached.
The vice-president was considering using Google Trends to predict how popular certain
beverage products would be in the future so that her beverage company clients could
predict future sales volumes. She hoped that by forecasting proxy sales for three specific
clients she could gain key insight to help her smooth the volume levels of her team’s
workload, without having a negative impact on her client relationships.

Understanding Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis in Hotel

Booking - Notable!
A management science professor had an unpleasant experience with a hotel she stayed at
in New York City. Consequently, she wanted to figure out if hotel ratings were enough to
recommend a hotel, or if customers’ text reviews could be used as more important and
accurate indicators of customers’ hotel experiences. The exercise serves as an introduction
to the topic of text analytics—specifically, sentiment analysis—and introduces the concept
of text mining and the importance of dealing with unstructured datasets. Much of the
exercise focuses on the method and rationale behind document indexing and the
subsequent weighting of the indexed terms through term frequency–inverse document
frequency. Textual data from customers’ hotel reviews are provided to apply the text mining
 May 2021

techniques and to provide insight for a better decision-making process that would help the
professor in her next hotel booking.

The Best Hitter in Baseball - Notable!

In 2017, a sports journalist based in Houston, Texas was confused about his editor’s latest
idea. His editor had emailed him the night before proposing an article on the best (and
worst) Major League Baseball hitters of all time. The first step was to provide a list of the
players that would be profiled. This meant finding the 10 best (and worst) batters. However,
after ranking the players, could he quantify the probability that he ranked them incorrectly?
Because the article was based on data, he had to justify his choices and he wanted his
decisions to be based on sound statistical grounds.

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 May 2021

Operations Management
Atrae: Human Resources with Humanity - New!
Atrae Inc. was a Japanese software firm providing platform matching services for job
recruitment in the software engineering industry. As compared to traditional Japanese
firms, Atrae adopted a unique approach to managing its employees. Instead of the rigid
hierarchy and top-down management approach that typified a Japanese firm, Atrae had a
flat organizational structure and heavily relied on decentralized decision-making and
individual motivation. The company’s unique culture was viewed as a key driver of its
business success—success that the company’s founder and chief executive officer wanted
to advance with a public listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. However, while the public
listing would allow Atrae to grow substantially, it would also necessitate formal
organizational checks and balances that could harm the company’s organizational culture.
Would a public listing propel Atrae to greater heights or would it result in the company’s
demise?

Growth Hacking Online Education - New!

This case explores the work of a Darden faculty member, Alex Cowan, to assess the
demand for a public version of the software development course he taught at Darden. It
was no secret that with the technology sector surging, general management jobs in tech
were both a growing category and exciting career trajectory. However, managers in the
sector tended to work in small, interdisciplinary agile teams. Creative confidence in going
from idea to design to code was now a hot topic, and Cowan, who had three years of
experience helping students go from zero coding knowledge to building functioning
applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a single week, believed he could extend the
offering to the general public. The market had plenty of learn-to-code offerings, but Cowan
wanted to reach generalists whose primary goal was collaboration within a team of tech
specialists.

After creating a minimum viable product (MVP), Cowan set out to test his idea using
qualitative interviews, learner personas, jobs-to-be-done descriptions, emails, social media
 May 2021

posts, and a landing page for the prospective course. If he offered this course to the public,
would people enroll?

Staffing at the Global Guidance Group - New!

Makayla Nnadi, vice president of operations at the Global Guidance Group, must determine
a staffing plan for the upcoming year. She must balance the costs of overstaffing with those
of understaffing in the face of uncertain demand for future services. Students are tasked
with conceptualizing a model to help answer how many staff members would be necessary
to deliver the work sold in 2022. They must determine the information needs to construct a
staffing model that evaluates the tradeoffs between reactive and prospective hiring.

This case would be suitable for use in a first-year operations or decision analysis course or
inan elective or course module covering optimization.

Artificial Intelligence Here and Now: Managing through Hype

and Reality - New!
What tangible use does artificial intelligence (AI) have in a typical business setting? In this
fictional case, Viviana Valenty, chief technology officer of e-commerce company Corellia,
must decide how to incorporate AI in Corellia’s business model to satisfy its main investor.
She considers potential use cases for AI in each of Corellia’s five departments: finance,
customer service, marketing, operations and warehouse, and content. Each department’s
needs and opportunities are unique, and she must weigh how feasible it is to implement AI-
based solutions in each case and how they will affect Corellia's stakeholders, including
investors and workers. In which department should she recommend Corellia implement AI?
How much funding should she request? Finally, should Corellia implement the AI initiative
in-house or through outsourcing?

Anna White: Lean Thinking at Acme Funding - New!

Anna White, process engineer at Acme Funding (Acme), a mortgage-loan-processing
company, is considering a redesign of the loan-closing process. She is evaluating a
centralization/decentralization system called pods, similar to manufacturing cells, as a
process redesign. Data is given for the student to analyze the implications of this approach
and suggest alternatives. Students must calculate utilizations and capacities of both the
centralized and decentralized systems. They need to consider both costs and benefits in
order to make a decision.

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 May 2021

Organizational Behaviour & Leadership

Amazon: Legal Woes, Crisis, and Resilience - New!
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jeff Bezos, the chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc.
(Amazon), became the world’s richest person by adding US$6 billion to his net worth by the
end of March 2020. While the worth of other billionaires was decreasing because of the
unprecedented market volatility created by the pandemic, retail sales surged to a record
level for Amazon. To meet the additional workforce requirements created by the sudden
rise in demand, Bezos announced a new hiring drive for Amazon’s warehouses and
delivery network. The announcement came when Amazon’s labour practices were under
the scrutiny of New York State and New York City authorities for the disputed “wrongful
termination” of a warehouse worker. Amazon’s conduct was vehemently condemned by
labour unions, labour supporters, the media, and New York City authorities. At the same
time, Amazon employees expressed their concerns about the hiring of additional workers,
as more workers could further aggravate the workplace safety issues at the company’s
warehouses. Bezos vehemently claimed to be committed to workers’ health and safety and
announced new paid sick leave and hazard benefits policies for workers who were not
working from home. Was the authorities’ scrutiny of Smalls’ termination and the workplace
safety measures at Amazon’s facilities a signal of legal battles looming for Amazon? Was
Bezos protecting the wellness of his employees? Did the new policies and safety measures
point toward a change in Bezos’s crisis management strategy? How could Amazon move
from a greed/profit perspective to a profit with purpose perspective? How should Amazon
manage in an almost permanent crisis-like situation?

Jamie's Market: Challenges Hiring and Onboarding Temporary

Workers - New!
In 2020, the flagship location of Jamie's Market, a specialty supermarket retailer in
 May 2021

California, struggled to hire enough temporary workers to meet the increased staffing
demand resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The new assistant manager, who had
been recently transferred to the company's flagship store, was tasked with figuring out what
had gone wrong and recommending changes to ensure that the store would have enough
qualified workers for the remainder of the pandemic (or until store sales returned to pre-
pandemic levels, whichever occurred first). The assistant manager looked into the
company’s hiring and socialization processes, spoke with both temporary and permanent
workers, and identified at least two reasons for the challenges in hiring temporary workers:
insufficient advertising of the job listing for temporary workers, and little or no effort to
socialize temporary workers once they were hired. Based on these conclusions, what
changes should the assistant manager recommend when hiring the next group of
temporary employees?

Apturja Power Limited: Human Resources Analytics - New!

In April 2020, the business head and the human resources head at Apturja Power Limited
(APL) were anxious about the rising levels of new-hire turnover across all five power plant
locations. Out of 2,000 employees hired in the past two years, half had left the organization
within a year of joining. High attrition posed an issue for APL's cost-competitiveness
strategy by not only increasing hiring costs but also nullifying the time and energy spent in
acquainting and training employees to APL's requirements. Both department heads wanted
to identify reliable indicators so that they could develop an appropriate action plan to
reduce new-hire turnover and thereby strengthen APL's human capital.

Public Services Canada (A): Mattie Johnsen - New!

Mathilde Johnsen was a highly motivated environmental systems engineer in the real
property branch of Public Services and Procurement Canada. Johnsen advanced a job
grade about every 18 months, and in 2016, she successfully applied to the management
stream. In 2019, after completing an MBA, Johnsen pursued an opportunity in the
executive stream of the civil service. Her past behaviour raised concerns for the selection
committee, who decided that, rather than promote Johnsen, they would give her a one-year
secondment in the executive position so they could assess her growth. Unfortunately, her
inability to deal effectively with subordinates, peers, and superiors resulted in Johnsen’s
effective demotion and transfer out of the department. Could this unfortunate career
derailment have been avoided?

Embraer E-Jets E2: Flying High - New!

This field-based case chronicles how Embraer, a recognized market leader in Brazil’s
regional aircraft industry, designed and developed an almost entirely new aircraft, the E2-
190. Given the success of the E1-190, a project to redesign that successful product was a
bold move. Yet the E2 project excelled. It surpassed industry expectations, including being
under time and under budget, and it logged many firsts, such as setting a world record for
 May 2021

first flight and triple flight certification. The case explores how the project team created work
groups and teams embedded within the company and leadership values to guide actions
and decisions during this project, which was large in both scale and scope. Throughout the
case, executives execute a change process and use influence and project-management
tools, especially critical chain analysis, to align business practices with human behavior and
scale the program with 98.5% scheduled reliability.

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