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The learning outcomes of this study are as follows:

1) illustrate the project management failures that contributed to the fire accident at Grenfell using a fishbone diagram;

2) identify and classify the power and influence of various stakeholders involved in a brownfield project using a relevant framework; and

3) elaborate the need for following effective stakeholder management processes and project leadership, especially in the context of a refurbishment/renovation project.

On 14th June 2017, the Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London, UK, caught fire. The fire raged for 60 h and around 72 people lost their lives. Many criticized the response of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) and their lack of preparedness to respond to such an emergency. There were calls for Dany Cotton, the Chief of LFB, to resign. However, there had been a major cladding-related refurbishment at Grenfell, and subsequent investigations revealed that the use of combustible materials, a lack of compliance with the fire-safety norms and a blatant disregard for resident safety had contributed to the fire. The tragedy was a cumulative outcome of failure on two counts: effective project management and stakeholder management during the process of refurbishment, especially in the context of a low-cost housing project. Given this situation, this case considers whether Dany Cotton should own up to her responsibility and resign from her position. In the process, the case considers Grenfell refurbishment from the theoretical lens of project management in the construction management scenario to understand the factors that could have led to an “avoidable” tragedy.

Postgraduate students of construction management; final year undergraduate engineering students who have a foundational course on project management; and architects.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 2: Built environment.

This case is designed to enable students to understand the role of women in artificial intelligence (AI); understand the importance of ethics and diversity in the AI field; discuss the ethical issues of AI; study the implications of unethical AI; examine the dark side of corporate-backed AI research and the difficult relationship between corporate interests and AI ethics research; understand the role played by Gebru in promoting diversity and ethics in AI; and explore how Gebru can attract more women researchers in AI and lead the movement toward inclusive and equitable technology.

The case discusses how Timnit Gebru (She), a prominent AI researcher and former co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google, is leading the way in promoting diversity, inclusion and ethics in AI. Gebru, one of the most high-profile black women researchers, is an influential voice in the emerging field of ethical AI, which identifies issues based on bias, fairness, and responsibility. Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 after the company asked her to retract a research paper she had co-authored about the pitfalls of large language models and embedded racial and gender bias in AI. While Google maintained that Gebru had resigned, she said she had been fired from her job after she had raised issues of discrimination in the workplace and drawn attention to bias in AI. In early December 2021, a year after being ousted from Google, Gebru launched an independent community-driven AI research organization called Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) to develop ethical AI, counter the influence of Big Tech in research and development of AI and increase the presence and inclusion of black researchers in the field of AI. The case discusses Gebru’s journey in creating DAIR, the goals of the organization and some of the challenges she could face along the way. As Gebru seeks to increase diversity in the field of AI and reduce the negative impacts of bias in the training data used in AI models, the challenges before her would be to develop a sustainable revenue model for DAIR, influence AI policies and practices inside Big Tech companies from the outside, inspire and encourage more women to enter the AI field and build a decentralized base of AI expertise.

This case is meant for MBA students.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CCS 11: Strategy

This case is intended to illustrate to readers the challenges faced in 2011–2013 by Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, as he guided his company into the exploding tablet market. Faced with the tough decision between focusing on the e-reader market—which Amazon had come to dominate with its Kindle product line—and making a foray into tablets—for which it had no expertise—Bezos chose the latter. Amazon sought to combine platform assets to create an end-to-end experience that would let users find a “sweet spot” in the mix of features and services. This strategy involved critical decisions such as selecting a customer segment to target and a positioning for the new product, dubbed the Kindle Fire, as the tablet market rapidly evolved. The Kindle Fire was designed to put the full Amazon experience right into the laps of customers, and Bezos was betting that his customers would see the Kindle Fire as the physical manifestation of all things Amazon. To achieve this, Amazon was willing to heavily subsidize the Kindle Fire hardware device. The key assumption was that the superior end-to-end experience Amazon had carefully created would lead to incremental purchases of content as well as physical products and services, and the margins thus gained would outweigh the hardware subsidy.

• Position and define target segments for a new product relative to competition as well as to a company's own products

• Articulate a competitor's strategy and how to compete against an incumbent with a disruptive business model and a differentiated position

• Discuss selling an experience (as opposed to a product or device) and how to create a differentiated service experience

• Determine pricing, analyze business model, and calculate revenue/profit for a technology product

Position and define target segments for a new product relative to competition as well as to a company's own products

Articulate a competitor's strategy and how to compete against an incumbent with a disruptive business model and a differentiated position

Discuss selling an experience (as opposed to a product or device) and how to create a differentiated service experience

Determine pricing, analyze business model, and calculate revenue/profit for a technology product

For four years, Valerie Thorpe was Director of Accounting for Taurus Construction. She was fired by the company's owner, Vic Bullard, when she refused to falsify accounting entries. Bullard's directive would have lowered profits, thereby deceiving his business partner and committing tax evasion. Until her firing late in the spring of 2011, Valerie had a few concerns about Bullard's lack of ethics in his business dealings. However, she has not questioned him previously because of her own emotional condition after the unexpected death of her husband. During the spring 2011 semester in graduate school, Valerie was inspired when her classmates recounted their own experiences of resigning from jobs because of unethical managers and owners. Valerie had thought of resigning from Taurus; but, Bullard fired her first. Six months after her firing, Valerie is seriously contemplating whether she should report Bullard's tax evasion to the Internal Revenue Service.

Field Based Research. Interviews with the case protagonist.

The case is suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses in business ethics, accounting ethics, entrepreneurship, income tax accounting and an undergraduate auditing class.

This is a real-life case applying ethical frameworks coverage of which can be challenging as students perceive those theories and frameworks as “dry.”

The case describes the evolution of Bangladesh's garment industry, the second largest garment exporter in the world, and its operational problems. The focus is on the fire that occurred on November 24, 2012 at Tazreen Fashions, a unit that is a part of a global supply chain for US and European retailers. The case explores the role of the government, western retailers, industry association and NGOs subsequent to the fire, and shows how increasing CSR expectations of corporations are making them take on responsibility for what should be that of the government or the garment unit.

Secondary sources; published materials.

International Business, Business and Society, Supply Chain Management, Doing Business in Emerging Markets.

Corporate social responsibility stakeholder theory market entry.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The Homegrown case is designed for teaching corporate social responsibility and business ethics at undergraduate and graduate levels. The case may be used on a variety of courses including: corporate social responsibility, business ethics and corporate social responsibility, and business ethics.

In May 2003, the headline of the East African newspaper screamed “The Kenyan Horticultural Industry under fire.” The industry was accused of exploitative labor policies with respect to working conditions, workers' welfare, sexual harassment, and exposure to harmful pesticides by the key stakeholders led by the Kenya Human Rights Commission. The stakeholders had announced plans to conduct national and international campaigns against the flower growing and exporting companies in Kenya. Mr Richard Fox, the Managing Director of Homegrown was worried that the publicity had adversely tarnished the image and reputation of the horticultural industry in Kenya as a whole, including Homegrown. He wondered how best to respond to these allegations. Should Homegrown wait to see what the competitors and other stakeholders would do, as these were industry-wide problems or should Homegrown take the lead? And if so, what should be the scope of the programs, given the diverse nature of the issues? He had to make decision quickly.

The case provides opportunity for students to analyze, discuss, and debate topical issues in CSR. At the end of the case, students should be able to: identify emerging CSR and ethical issues facing the horticultural industry in Kenya; analyze the cost of implementing CSR programs in business organizations; evaluate the impact of CSR programs on business performance; justify and defend choices on CSR, and ethical decisions.

Not included.

Marketing, Sports marketing and Social media marketing.

Graduate level.

This case, based on field research and multiple secondary sources, documents the 12-month period since early 2014 during which Cricket South Africa (CSA) developed the Protea Fire brand for their national men’s cricket team, known as the Proteas. In mid-2014, Marc Jury, the Commercial and Marketing manager of CSA set up a project team to take the previously in-house Protea Fire brand public. With the 2015 Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand less than a year away, Jury worked with a diverse project team of Proteas players, cricket brand managers and external consultants to build a public brand identity for the national team, to nurture greater fan affinity and to mobilize South Africans behind their team for the World Cup. The project team developed a range of Protea Fire multimedia content as the core of the campaign. These included video diaries, scripts which were written by the Proteas players themselves, player profile videos, motivational team-talk videos and good luck video messages featuring ordinary and famous South Africans. Having invested in creating this content, the project team faced the difficult task of allocating a limited media budget to broadcast and amplify the content. Another significant challenge was to ensure that the Proteas team values were authentically communicated across all content, including via the social media strategy using Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. As the World Cup tournament kicked off on February 14th 2015, South Africa was well placed to overcome their previous inability to reach a final, although Jury wondered whether another exit in the knockout round would weaken the strong and positive emotions the Protea Fire campaign had ignited. With the last two balls remaining in South Africa’s semi-final game against New Zealand on March 24th 2015, and the home team requiring just five runs to win, Jury joined 60 million South Africans hoping that Protea Fire was strong enough. The case concludes with South Africa losing the semi-final game and Jury turning his attention to how the #ProteaFire campaign should respond.

This study aimed to analyse the development of a sport team brand and a megaevent campaign; to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of a marketing campaign; and to consider appropriate brand responses to the team’s failure to deliver on expectations.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The learning objectives of using this case are as follows: to understand the concepts of organizational structure, organizational culture and organizational change; to expose students to the problems that may encounter organization when it intends to bring changes in culture; to stimulate students’ understanding of the necessity to build positive organizational culture; to advance students’ knowledge about oil and gas industry; to develop students’ understanding of using Levin’s model of cultural change; and to illustrate the challenges that an organization might face while changing its existing culture.

This case teaches about the importance of boosting positive organization culture to accept organizational change. Stardust was established in 2013 as Petronas Carigali Sdn Bhd’s subsidiary. The company was established to manage small and marginal field in Malaysia which was under the oil and gas field that had smaller reservoir and lasted for four to five years. On 2014, Stardust was given an opportunity to take over one of the fields to manage. However, during the process of handing over the facility and field from the parent to the new company, the tanker caught fire in one of its pump in the pump room. The fire resulted substantial damage to the pump room; two out of four pumps were totally damaged. It delayed the oil production for more than a month. Total estimated damage due to the fire incurred RM19m losses. Direct cost included replacing two new 400 kW pumps, repairing the damaged pump room with new manifolds and painting, and cost of shutdown production for 40 days. Investigation was initiated to identify the causes of the fire which revealed that human error, mostly peoples’ negligence was one of the major reasons along with location, equipment and procedure. The Health, Safety and Environment department of the company was given the task to create ‘Living Safety’ culture among the crew. Being the head of this department, Tarmizi found it very challenging to inculcate the culture ‘Action Today, Perfect Day Tomorrow’ and was thinking how to instill this culture with zero failure by the end of the calendar year which is December 2016. The time was running fast as the parent company emphasized to handle the situation urgently and to ensure that the similar incident will not happen in the future. If it re-occurs, it will jeopardize the trustworthiness of Stardust with the other parties involved and also the parent company might not allow the company to operate other facilities, which will put the company at stake to remain competitive in the oil and gas business.

This case is suitable to use in advanced undergraduate level, MBA and MSc to teach organizational behavior and organizational theory courses.

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 7: Management Science.

The learning outcomes of this study are to assess the shared value model and elaborate on new multi-stakeholder approaches to business, where the stakeholders include the founders, investors, partners, employees, clients and the surrounding community; to consider the synergies between community development, environmental stewardship, sustainable business practices and the long-term health of organisations and communities, considering these as the new fundamentals of business; to examine the interconnectedness of vision, strategy, purpose and leadership in creating and evolving the shared value model; to explore the relationship between shared value practices and collective well-being, and a specific reference to nurturing transformative experiences through nature, personal development and community upliftment is made; and to assess Grootbos’ ability to translate their purpose and value proposition into a strategy and sustainable vision with a possibility of Grootbos achieving global impact through its evolving model, beyond the founder.

This case study explores the evolution of Grootbos Private Nature Reserve and Foundation, a luxury hospitality lodge and award-winning ecotourism destination, from humble beginnings in the Western Cape of South Africa to a global example of conservation, community, commerce sustainability and transformative experiences. The establishing of Grootbos and its growth and widespread recognition can be attributed to the vision and inspirational leadership of its founder, Michael Lutzeyer. Although much success has been achieved in conservation, community upliftment and individual development of community members within their region, Lutzeyer’s and ultimately, Grootbos’ vision extended well beyond South Africa and aspired to elevate their floral kingdom and model of development and conservation to a global platform of awareness. Although a shared value vision and strategy had transformed the business, placing Grootbos as a leader in transforming their industry and sparking an evolution in the shared value model itself through the interjection of transformative experiences, the larger question remained: How can Grootbos extend the impact, towards people and planetary well-being, beyond the scope of their individual place-based business and their industry? And in terms of the dilemma Lutzeyer and the management team at Grootbos faced: How will this vision and global ambition continue through succession, beyond Luzeyer’s personal drive at the helm?

Experienced leaders within a graduate degree program, executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) or executive education in the areas of leadership development, strategy, shared value and international business.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS4: Environmental management.

Cummins Generator Technologies India Limited (CGTIL) was in the process of setting up a world-class factory at Ranjangaon based on “lean” production principles. The project team, however, went a step ahead and married “green” with “lean”. While lean is about taking the system inefficiencies out, the green is about harmony with nature. The case is about CGTIL's journey of deriving synergies between seemingly conflicting objectives of lean and green.