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Aster Retail (AR) is the retail pharmacy division of the Aster Dr Moopen's Healthcare (ADMH) Group. The group delivers healthcare services across the Middle East, India and the Far East, with a portfolio of hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres and retail pharmacies. AR, under the leadership of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jobilal Vavachan, is well known for its people-centric approach, unique culture and innovative human resource (HR) practices. AR has won multiple awards for HR practices, service quality and business performance. In a recent corporate restructuring (2018), “Aster Primary Care” was carved out by combining the group's Clinics and Retail businesses. This case discusses the evolution of AR's HR journey and the challenges associated with integrating culturally diverse businesses without compromising the values of ADMH and its promise, “We'll Treat You Well.”

Organizational Behavior and Strategic Management.

MBA, Management/Executive development programs.

This case study can be used effectively for understanding the nuances of employee loyalty, especially if there is a cost of employee loyalty. While Anand Finance is happy that its workforce has largely been loyal, the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times force it to chart new course of action. The newly appointed Business Head, Ashok Singh's challenges compound when he finds that there was not’t a single innovation or best practice adopted over the past three years. Given his mandate to make Anand Finance as the Walmart of financial services, can he aspire to rally the forces behind the new mission? This case study facilitates an interesting discussion on the significance of operational and strategic alignment at organizations in the backdrop of an interesting story of Anand Finance, one of the leading non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) in India. The non-alignment was noticed by Ashok Singh (Singh) who took over as the Business Head of Anand Finance. While the company boasted of long-standing employees, Singh was quick to notice that the company had been paying a cost for employee loyalty. What was the cost of employee loyalty? Singh could also sense that the company was in a state of active inertia. Expected to make Anand Finance Walmart for financial services by 2025, Singh had a big task at hand given the lack of strategic orientation of the employees. What would be the likely course of Singh's actions? As the case study deals with strategic dilemmas related to the organizational culture, it can be suitably used for organizational behavior and strategic management courses. This case study is meant highlight that even if an organization is operationally sound and successful, it cannot afford to be strategically disoriented, as its strengths may prove to be its weaknesses with changing business conditions.

At the end of this case discussion, the participants are expected to know the merits and demerits of employee loyalty and the implications of the same for organizational change; whether employees’ relatively longer stints at companies would contribute to active inertia (as defined by Donald N. Sull in Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Companies Go Bad”); and the ways to align operational orientation with strategic mindset, especially in the case of employees who rose through the ranks and had been serving the company for relatively longer period.

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GiveIndia is an online donation platform that bridges the gap between the donors and credible Non-Governmental Organizations. The focus of GiveIndia has been on individual donations with a vision to create a culture of giving, where every Indian donates at least 2% of their income for the poor. In 2013, the Government of India introduced Corporate Social Responsibility Bill, which mandates corporates to invest at least 2% of their profits in CSR activities. At present, GiveIndia has not been seeking corporate, but now they find themselves at the right position to exploit this opportunity. Dhaval, the CEO faces a dilemma. Corporate donations could significantly increase his funding; however, it could also lead deviations from the mission to creating a giving culture. There were other problems to contend with, such as the question of investing in GiveIndia brand, how to pitch business reasons for philanthropy and employee compensation and retention issues.

The case offers a unique opportunity to understand the market dynamics of a young luxury brand that aspires to empower women and pursue the broader goal of marketing sustainability in an emerging market. The discussion would enable learners to conduct environmental analysis and assess implications of crisis (current pandemic) on business, understand the marketing mix implications for a firm with societal orientation, learn to design effective brand positioning strategies and plan social and market driven brand strategies to ensure sustainable growth.

Gauri Malik, an investment banker-turned-social entrepreneur, forayed into the luxury home décor and furniture market with Sirohi, in 2019. In a market driven by exclusivity and design appeal, the brand had sustainability at its core. Malik worked with 200 women, from a conservative rural base in India to create traditional products that were hand-made with recycled natural fibres and upcycled plastic wastes. Driven by the goal of securing the livelihood for a larger group of women artisans, Malik wanted to scale up from 350 to 5000 products in the next five years. Hence, for materializing her ambitious plans she sought answers to- Could her home-trained women artisans deliver the promise of quality and finesse to support Sirohi scale up as a luxury brand? While it was extremely critical for Sirohi to have an articulated image-she wondered if the parallel focus on the up-market luxury brand image and sustainability-create competitive advantage or lead to diffused positioning?

Classified as MODERATE in terms of difficulty level, the case can be effectively used in post-graduate programmes for foundation courses on Marketing Management, elective courses on Brand Management or Sustainability Marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

thyssenkrupp Steel Europe, a major European steel company, operates a so-called push-pickling line (PPL) in Bochum, Germany. The PPL produces a particular type of steel strips that are sold to B2B customers, mainly in the automotive industry. In spring 2014, a senior vice president of thyssenkrupp Steel's production operations and one of his production managers notice that over the span of ten years the production facility regularly did not meet its planned production volumes. They set out to determine the drivers for the deviations from planned production figures with the ultimate goal to improve the production planning process at the Bochum PPL. Students will step into the shoes of Markus Schulze a production manager at thyssenkrupp Steel as he searches for performance drivers at the Bochum PPL and analyzes recent production data to build a forecasting model for production planning.

The learning outcomes are as follows: first, identify the characteristics of born-global SMEs, and how these characteristics facilitate their global expansion shortly after the company’s inception. Second, demonstrate that companies work with limited resources, typically and notably newly established companies, and that these resources should be allocated according to a carefully determined strategy. The resources focussed on in this case pertain to marketing. Third, examine entrepreneurial marketing and its various manifestations. An understanding of how this type of marketing is used by companies for international expansion is expected. Fourth, assess the role of digital marketing and how social media forms an important part of digital marketing. Particular attention is paid to the use of digital marketing, notably social media, in international expansion. Fifth, develop critical thinking skills with respect to strategic business decisions, such as whether to expand a business into foreign markets or to consolidate locally; and how best to penetrate foreign markets, given the nuances and complexities specific to these markets.

This teaching case is about The Duchess, a recently developed and launched virgin alcohol-free and sugar-free gin and tonic beverage. The adult soft drink was originally launched in South Africa, and just 18 months later became available in international markets (the UK and Belgium). The founders and protagonists of the case, Johannes le Roux and Inus Smuts, face the dilemmas of creating a competitive local brand while also looking to access new markets and internationalise as a born-global firm.

The target audience for this case comprises students enrolled in tertiary business education programmes who have already had some sort of work experience and hands-on exposure to real-world business. MBA and EMBA students, as well as those enrolled in post-graduate studies specific to marketing, international commerce and entrepreneurship, would be suitable candidates.

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CSS 8: Marketing

After completion of the case study, the students will be able to understand the importance of being culturally savvy when working in a culturally diverse environment and managing people from different cultures; critically reflect on the risks resulting from the absence of a clear direction from the company’s top management regarding unifying corporate values and a diversity policy for cooperation across cultures; be aware of best practices in implementing diversity management (DM) initiatives in the company; and learn that changes in the strategic orientation (i.e. focus on automation projects) must be cascaded down to hard elements of structures, processes and systems, as well as to soft elements of skills, staff and management style.

The Kuwaiti branch of a Japanese corporation specialising in control systems and instruments, Rising Sun IT, hired a German professional, Alex, to handle the increasing demand for automation from customers. This recruitment followed several unsuccessful attempts by the company to deliver more advanced automation solutions. Recognising the need to adapt to Kuwaiti customer requirements or risk losing market share, Japanese management understood the importance of transforming their engineering staff. Failure to achieve this next automation step would result in a steady decline in market share and ultimately impact the company’s survival. However, Alex, who was supposed to lead automation projects, was confronted with opposition from the Indian engineering staff and managers. He was not able to find common ground with the staff and perceived issues such as lack of communication, delays in work schedules, missed deadlines and high levels of absenteeism, as a sign of low work morale. Although he tried to increase the awareness of his supervisor and other managers by informing them repeatedly about the problems regarding employee behaviours, his interventions went unheard. He felt ousted by his fellow colleagues and the other employees. Besides, from Alex’s point of view, the Japanese top management did not provide clear directions to the staff and explicit support to Alex in his efforts. This case study highlights three dimensions of Alex’s problem with establishing and maintaining working relationships with other people in the company:▪ Alex’s cultural “blindness” and ignorance of differences in work behaviours that ultimately led to his inability to build solid and trustful relationships with other employees. The case study demonstrates Germany’s performance-oriented and individual-centric culture versus India’s family- and community-oriented culture and the Japanese employees’ strongly hierarchical and company loyalty-oriented culture.▪ Lack of support from the Japanese top management to Alex, which is connected with a wider problem of the lack of a systematic strategic approach to managing a culturally diverse workforce. The case study pinpoints the rhetoric–reality gap in DM in the company, where the diversity, equity and inclusion programme and corporate values were applied only formally and had little attention from the leaders as well as non-managerial employees.▪ Employee resistance to change: The lack of positive communication from the top management level in the company regarding automation projects and the lack of support for Alex’s mission in the company resulted in steady resistance to executing projects, which endangered the company’s survival in the market. Also, one part of Alex’s problem with building a working relationship with the Indian engineering staff was based on the fact that others perceived him as the automation “change agent” – an advocate and catalyst of an undesirable change connected with adverse consequences on employment in the Indian community.

This case is intended for discussion in undergraduate management and business study programmes.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 6: Human resource management.

International marketing, distribution channel management, market entry, strategic management.

Masters level management students and executives specializing in distribution channel management. This case can also be applied to Masters level analysis of strategic marketing.

The case examines BBMCI, a wholly owned subsidiary of a multinational making an entry in the Indian consumer appliances market. The focus of the case is the distribution aspect of the market entry strategy, its formulation and implementation.

The key learning objective is to evaluate distribution channel design and monitoring mechanisms. The case examines the linkage of distribution strategy formulation and the implementation challenges in a large and internationally extended sales organization. The key takeaway would be the need to change the distribution strategy as the organization's position in market evolves.

Teaching note.

The learning outcomes are as follows: to demonstrate the phenomenon of strategic inertia in organizations and the impact this has on the type of renewal process that is undertaken; to differentiate between environmental and organizational adaptation strategies and synergies; to apply practical steps of renewal by outlining the influential forces and distinct stages of the process; and to create a practical framework that organizations can use as a guideline for sensing and reacting to changes in the business environment.

The case study examines the strategic renewal processes of Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) for the period 2012–2019. Amplats is the world’s largest producer of platinum group metals (PGMs). Despite the adversarial business environment of the South African PGM mining industry, six years into its new strategy, the organization had emerged debt-free and was poised to be sustainable. This posed a unique dilemma in strategic decision-making, namely, how to maintain a strategic renewal process. Chris Griffith, CEO of Amplats, was about to retire, but realized that the organization had yet to fulfil its potential. The ambition of the organization was to redefine the industry benchmark for performance across multiple pillars of value for different stakeholders, and to become the most valued mining company by 2023. Set in 2019, the case invites students to look back at the symptoms of strategic inertia at the time of Griffith’s appointment as CEO, and to define the nature and stages of the renewal that the organization underwent. This will provide insights that will enable an examination of the application of a framework for continual strategic renewal.

Postgraduate business students

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy

The case would be specifically useful in courses related to Corporate Governance, Board Dynamics, Leadership, Organizational Behaviour, Corporate Ethics and Strategic Management.

For Post-graduate/Doctoral and Executive Programme/Management Development Programme level courses in Corporate Governance, Board Dynamics, Leadership, Organizational Behaviour, Corporate Ethics and relevant areas of Strategic Management.

The case relates to the imminent departure of Raamit Pell, the founding CEO of Xcelent Services, an educational service provider, to his parental organization at Kozerton after completing his current five-year term. Raamit had moved from Kozerton to become CEO of Xcelent Services. Many of Raamit’s senior executives at Xcelent were not happy about his decision to return. They felt that his departure at this moment might, on the one hand, slow down the ongoing major expansion plans and on the other aggravate a mutiny, under covert Board patronage involving a powerful clique of certain senior executives. The parental agency finally agreed to release him. On the day of Raamit’s farewell, where surprisingly even the clique members were present, many executives appeared sad. Observing the mood, Raamit wondered whether his decision to return to Kozerton was the right one.

To understand the internal governance, leadership and behavioural environment of a company. To understand the impact of internal power equations of a company on the morale of its people. To analyze both the inconsistency between the stated goals of the organization and the revealed actions of its top decision-makers; and the lack of restraint on the power struggle among the top actors of the organization. To identify effective strategies for addressing such issues in future so that their fallouts would be minimized. To relate the behaviour in an organization to the organizational behavioural theories related to leadership, corporate governance, corporate ethics, managerial behaviour and agency problems.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 11: Strategy.