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Data for the case came from public sources, including legal proceedings, court filings and Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The authors perused hundreds of court documents and identified 28 that were most relevant to this case. The authors also used press interviews with the women highlighted in the case. The authors have no relationship with the company and no one from the company has reviewed the information presented in this case. As the case is drawn from sworn legal testimonies, interviews and related documents in the public domain, the authors did not have to seek approval for publication.

Pinterest touted itself as “the nicest place on the Internet.” It had an almost 80% female user base and purported to have an inclusive culture that embraced diversity. However, in June 2020, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, two former female employees of color violated their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to publicly accuse Pinterest of racial and gender discrimination. In August 2020, Pinterest’s former Chief Operating Officer, Francoise Brougher, filed a lawsuit charging the company with gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination, and authored a public blog post titled, The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity, detailing her own experience with the company’s discriminatory culture. Three days later 236 of Pinterest’s 2,545 employees staged a virtual walkout and 445 employees signed a petition in an attempt to change Pinterest’s policies and culture. The case provides a brief overview of Pinterest, including its mission, values and organizational culture, and details several incidents and complaints by female and minority employees. The case questions whether employee complaints are a relatively narrow issue involving disgruntled former employees who did not fit at the organization or a much broader issue involving discrimination and managerial neglect in creating and maintaining a nondiscriminatory, inclusive culture. Students are encouraged to evaluate the situation in which Co-Founder, Board Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Ben Silbermann finds himself, evaluate the actions taken and decide if Silbermann should take any additional actions to address the discrimination claims and ensure a positive culture for all employees.

This case is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate level courses in organizational behavior, human resource management and business law or any course where discrimination and workplace culture are discussed.

The case was created via an interview of the protagonist.

The case describes the dilemma a young leader, Captain Bryson, faces after a few months in his new organization. Amid a routine meeting, two of CPT Bryson’s direct reports get into a verbal (and nearly physical) altercation over a relatively benign issue. CPT Bryson must decide how to handle the conflict at that moment. Further, the organization is resource constrained, so the personnel will be working in the same organization for at least the next six months. Therefore, CPT Bryson must try to diagnose the types and sources of conflict so that he can decide on how to manage the conflict in both the short and long terms.

This case is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate level courses on leadership and management. The case is useful for teaching lessons (or electives) on conflict management, developmental communication (counseling), emotional intelligence and power and influence.

This case and its companion, UVA-F-1560, were awarded the 2012 Wachovia Award for Excellence in Teaching Materials - Innovative Case. In November 2006, Alec Berg, a successful hedge fund manager, must decide whether to invest in the initial public offering (IPO) of the Hertz Corporation. The IPO followed a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Hertz that was completed in December 2005 by three prominent private equity firms that had combined to purchase Hertz from the Ford Motor Company for $14.9 billion. The LBO sponsors had borrowed an additional $1 billion on top of the buyout financing to pay themselves a special dividend in June 2006. This loan would be repaid with the IPO proceeds and any remaining proceeds from the IPO would go to the sponsors. The IPO generated widespread criticism with respect to the speed with which the IPO was conducted and the payment of special dividends. In the face of this criticism, the demand for the Hertz IPO weakened, and the offer price was reduced from the initial file price range of $16–$18 to just $15. Berg must assess whether at $15 per share, Hertz offers an attractive investment for this fund. The case provides the necessary information for students to analyze the sponsors' returns on their investment in Hertz and the attractiveness of the $15 offer price to public shareholders. The case also offers an opportunity for students to discuss the controversy surrounding the payment of special dividends and the claim that private equity sponsors invest with a long-term perspective that creates value for the company.

This case is underpinned by multiple motivational theories, including Maslow’s Hierarchy, Alderfer’s existence relatedness growth, equity theory, expectancy theory and Herzberg’s two-factor theory.

This data was gleaned from the protagonist and corporate documents. Names have been changed to conceal the identity of the firm and its employees.

Vivienne consistently earned high-performance ratings at her firm. She designed the internal firm university, a permanent learning program. She then noticed other employees being promoted based on her work. She was not offered a promotion, so she conducted a job analysis. Based on those findings, Vivienne decided to develop and present a retitling proposal for her promotion to a title better aligned with the level of work she performed. This case analyzes Vivienne’s organization, the firm university program, and her retitling proposal using management theories, human resources laws, and concepts, and it leads to an important career crossroads.

Undergraduate courses: organizational behavior and human resource management.

Derived from field and telephone interviews, e-mail communications, and secondary sources, this two part case describes how Gerald Mahoney, a shoes salesman in a Foley's Department store, is faced with a problem - Macy's has bought out the Foley's chain and, in doing so, has upscale the product line of shoes and altered his commission-based compensation system. These changes have resulted in less sales for Mr. Mahoney and therein lower commission - a difficult situation since he, his wife, and his daughter were barely getting by on his currently salary. Part A of the case describes an opportunity that presents itself to Mr. Mahoney; to leave his current job with a guaranteed low salary with possible additional income from commissions for a job selling residential homes which becomes purely commission-based to start with after three months of a salary plus commission pay that includes job training. In Part B Mr. Mahoney has decided to take the sales job with ABC Home Builders and receives his assignment. He finds that the working conditions of the sales office are not conducive to selling. His office is located in the rear of a trailer that is extremely run down and is paired with a competitive, noncommunicative saleswoman. The case ends with Mr. Mahoney feeling hopeless and alienated.

This two part case has been written primarily for an undergraduate junior level course in career planning or sales management and deals with the issues of recruitment, placement, training, and compensation. The case may also be employed in a course dealing with human resource management (from an individual's perspective), salesmanship, and organizational behavior.

The case can be used in strategic management, international business or ethics courses. In strategic management courses, students will be able to identify political relationships as sources of a firm’s competitive advantage. Students will also understand the role of ethics in the firm’s competitive advantage. In international business courses, the students will be able to analyze the role that corruption and bribery play in the analysis of a country’s institutions. Students will also understand how corruption in a host country influences a firms’ decision to internationalize. Finally, students will understand the challenges that firms face when serving customers in other countries. In ethics courses, students will understand the nature of state/business corruption, i.e. the abuse of public office for private gain and the concept of state capture, i.e. managers controlling the political system for their advantage. Students will be able to analyze the decision of whether to collaborate with unethical partners or customers.

Bell Pottinger Private (BPP) was a British public relations (PR) firm with a successful but questionable reputation of helping famous critical figures and despots improve their public image. In 2016, Lord Tim Bell and the other leaders of BPP were asked to create a PR campaign for the Gupta family. The Guptas were a group of businessmen headed by three brothers who migrated from India to South Africa in the early 1990s. By the 2010s, they had built a business empire allegedly thanks to a corrupt relationship with the President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma and his family. The press and prosecutors were increasing their investigations on these relations. The case has two parts, which address two separate challenges and can be taught as standalone cases or in a sequence in two sessions.

MBA and Executive Education.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 5: International business.

Jim Keyes, CEO of Dallas-based Blockbuster Inc., was facing the biggest challenge of his career. In March 2010 Keyes was meeting with Hollywood studios in an effort to negotiate better terms for the $1 billion worth of merchandise Blockbuster had purchased the year before. In recent years, Blockbuster's share of the video rental market had been sharply decreasing in the face of competitors such as the low-cost, convenient Redbox vending machines and mail-order and video-on-demand service Netflix. While Blockbuster's market capitalization had dropped 47 percent to $62 million in 2009, Netflix's had shot up 55 percent to $3.9 billion that year. The only hope for Blockbuster, as Keyes saw it, was to shift its business model from primarily brick-and-mortar physical DVD rentals to increased digital and mail-order video delivery. In Keyes's favor, the studios were more than willing to provide him with that help. Hollywood wanted to see Blockbuster win the video-rental wars. Consumers still made frequent purchases of DVDs at its store—purchases which were much more profitable for studios than the rentals that remained Blockbuster's primary business. Blockbuster had made efforts at making its business model more nimble, but the results had been disappointing, and its debt continued to skyrocket. By the end of 2009, the company's debt had climbed to $856 million, its share of the $6.5 billion video rental business had fallen to 27 percent, and its revenues had tumbled 23 percent to $4.1 billion.

The objective of this case is to discuss how different business models and supply chain structures impact the financials of the firms in the DVD rental business. In particular, the goal is to convey that the characteristics of the movie (recent/big hit or old/eclectic) affect whether it is best rented from a centralized or decentralized model. In addition, as streaming gains market share, the impact will be different for movie types and business models.