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Supplements the (A) case.

Impact investing, Social entrepreneurship.

MBA, EMBA, Executive Education.

CareCross Health describes the impact due diligence leading up to an investment into CareCross Health by impact investor Palm Capital. The case follows the protagonist, Caitlin Stevens, CEO of Palm Capital, as she identifies CareCross Health as a potential investment target, performs an initial screening of the company and visits the company and its sites as part of an in-depth impact due diligence.

By the end of this case, the student should be able to consider the critical steps associated with conducting an impact due diligence; understand the challenges associated with conducting an impact due diligence, with a particular focus on due diligence in an emerging market scenario; analyse a potential impact investment, in this case CareCross Health, and make a preliminary recommendation on whether the investment is viable from an impact perspective; identify the trade-offs between private sector and public sector provision of services to low-income groups, and consider unintended consequences in analysing the impact of a social enterprise; and prepare possible scenarios and weigh the potential outcomes of various arrangements to ensure alignment of investor objectives.

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 1: Accounting and Finance.

This case presents an overview of the confectionary industry, a description of the Hershey Foods Corporation, and a look at the company's strategies and the impact of these strategies. The case focuses on the unintended consequences that result from the implementation of dramatic new strategies for a company and what occurs in a company town that displays a very strong paternalistic culture. Some analysts had previously thought that Hershey's profitability and its close relationship with the town, the trust and the school made the company untouchable, but events proved otherwise.

After reading this case, the reader will feel compelled to answer the following questions. What is the best strategy for future growth of Hershey? How important is organizational culture on a corporation's strategic direction? Should the company indeed be sold to a larger corporation?

The case is written for MBA or senior undergraduate courses on communication global strategy, leadership or strategy implementation.

The case is written for MBA or senior undergraduate courses on communication global strategy, leadership or strategy implementation. The case can be taught towards the end of a communications course to learn about crisis communications and the importance of understanding the local institutional and socio-political contexts, including the media during a crisis. For a strategy implementation class, this case can be used in the segment focusing on action and leadership.

An extremely difficult situation arose for Uber Cab, a US-based company operating in India, on December 8, 2014, when its taxi services were banned by the Delhi government due to growing anger over the suspected rape of a 27-year-old female executive by one of its drivers. Uber Cab claims that it offers the “safest rides on the road”, but this episode proved otherwise, as the accused was identified as a repeat offender. Initial interrogation by the police highlighted the negligence of the company regarding background checks and police verification while recruiting driver partners. The police further revealed that the driver did not have a Delhi Transport Authority-issued license. Furthermore, the company was not able to provide a call log to police, as such information was said to be gathered at the company’s headquarters in New York. To handle this situation, Uber Cab suspended its operations until the company could apply for a fresh registration and trade license. What was the significance of this incident to a brand like Uber Cab? Could its effect on the regulation of taxi services have been anticipated? How and when should the brand have reacted? Looking forward, what contingency planning would be appropriate? Should brand management, customer service management or the human resources department have been held accountable, or did the responsibility lie elsewhere in the organization?

The expected learning outcomes are as follows: to understand how institutional differences can create unintended consequences for an multinational enterprise working in an emerging market (early-stage institutions); to understand the critical role of a country manager in mobilizing the local organization and the headquarters to respond to a crisis; also, the role of the headquarters to provide flexibility and support to the local executive; and to understand the inevitable role of the local press in an organizational crisis, and the need for business leaders to deal with the press effectively.

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 6: Human Resource Management.

The learning outcomes are as follows: identifying and prioritising of stakeholders’ needs during crises; gaining insight into applying contextual intelligence in leaders’ decision-making on philanthropic investments; and evaluating initiatives by differentiating between creating shared value and corporate social responsibility.

On 15 March 2020, Bruno Olierhoek, Chairman and MD, Nestlé East and Southern Africa considers his dilemma of where to focus his community support initiatives during COVID-19, which could reflect their company’s purpose of enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future in their response to the crisis? Also, creating shared value (CSV) was in their DNA as a company, and they wanted to do more than philanthropic gestures; therefore, they had to decide carefully about leveraging their strategic partnerships in the relief effort. The case highlights existing community involvement projects, pre-COVID-19, which illustrate multi-stakeholder collaboration. These existing trust relationships and partnerships are then leveraged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The case highlights unintended consequences of Nestlé’s gesture of donating food products to the 5,000 frontline health-care workers for specific stakeholder groups, such as the positive emotional responses of Nestlé’s own employees. These events in the case relate to existing theoretical frameworks, such as corporate citizenship which elicits pro-organisational behaviour in stakeholder groups.

Postgraduate programmes MBA or MPhil.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 7 Management Science

This introductory case considers the very sudden and large drop in market value of Oracle Systems' equity associated with two announcements in 1990. These announcements cause investors to revise their expectations about the future growth of Oracle Systems, perhaps the most rapidly growing U.S. corporation in the 1980s. The tasks for the student are to evaluate both the import of the announcements and the company's financial health. The case provides a first exercise in financial statement analysis and lays the foundation for two important financial themes: the concept of financial health and the financial economic definition of value and its determinants. The case also presents an interesting profile of an aggressive chief executive officer and suggests some potential unintended financial consequences of extreme aggressiveness.

The assignment is to design a plan that aligns patient satisfaction scores with quality care metrics. The instructor’s manual (IM) introduces models for designing and implementing a strategic plan to approach the quality improvement process.

This is a field research case. The author(s) had access to the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and other members of the management team, meeting with them on numerous occasions. Cleveland Clinic Florida (CCF) provided the data included in the appendices. Additionally, relevant hospital data, also included in the appendices, is required to be made public on Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) databases. Accordingly, all data and information are provided by original sources.

Osmel “Ozzie” Delgado, MBA and COO of CCF was faced with a dilemma. Under the new CMS reimbursement formula, patient satisfaction survey scores directly impacted hospital reimbursement. However, the CCF patient satisfaction surveys revealed some very unhappy patients. Delgado pondered these results that really made no sense to him because CCF received the highest national and state rankings for its clinical quality at the same time. Clearly, patients were receiving the best medical care, but they were still unhappy. Leaning back in his chair, Delgado shook his head and wondered incredulously how one of the most famous hospitals in the world could deliver such great care but receive negative patient feedback on CMS surveys. What was going wrong and how was the hospital going to fix it?

This case is designed for graduate Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), Master’s in Health Sciences Administration (MHSA) and/or Public Health (PA) audiences. While a healthcare concentration is useful, the case raises the generic business problems of satisfying the customer to increase brand recognition in the marketplace and displacing competition to increase annual revenues. Indeed, the same analysis can be applied in other heavily regulated industries also suffering from a change in liquidity and growth occasioned by regulatory change.

Organisational Development, Organisational Behaviour, Leadership Change.

Master of Business Administration, postgraduate studies, middle or senior managers on open programmes.

The case focuses on the dilemma that Douglas Lines, Nedbank’s Divisional Executive for Strategic Business Unit, South Africa, faced when a new sense of urgency was required to cultivate a culture of collaboration in Nedbank to overcome their silo-mentality.

Examine the current and recommend the preferred culture of Nedbank to enable collaboration; critically analyse and evaluate the suitability of the current structure recommend restructuring; insight into how contextual leadership contributes to collaboration in organisations; present judgement of strategies in initiating and enhancing collaboration to overcome silo-mentality.

A DVD is available with link and password. Teaching Plan and slides are available. The four learning outcomes are posed as questions for groups to discuss and model answers are provided as well as linking them to relevant literature.

CSS 7: Management Science.

This case focuses on ethics issues arising from the tobacco trade. Government as regulator of that trade and guardian of public health faced complex political, financial and ethical issues in discharge of its responsibilities. The harms resulting from tobacco use were well-known and had generally attracted adverse decisions from governments everywhere. The company offering tobacco products for sale, Carreras Ltd., had generally continued to do well financially despite those adverse decisions. Government, in the present case, had introduced legislation to penalize tobacco use in public places, and in so doing, raised several ethical issues such as punishing smokers for using a legal, widely distributed product; classifying cigarettes as harmful to health yet allowing its wide distribution and sale; continuing to derive substantial tax revenue from sale of a harmful product; enabling Carreras to profit from sale of said harmful product; offering little help to smokers to break their nicotine addiction. Students should be asked to identify and recommend solutions to the ethical issues faced by: the government and its “point man”, the Minister of Health as they sought to reduce the public’s use of a harmful product. The smoker who may be even addicted to a product is known to cause or contribute to a host of serious diseases. Students were to identify and recommend solutions to ethical issues faced by the players in the case. One of these players was Carreras whose operations were facing severe regulatory and public relations headwinds. Another was the nonsmoking public whose health was put at risk even though they did not use the product. The sentences could be reworded to read; Carreras, in its continued efforts to justify selling a harmful product. Nonsmokers who, despite not using the product, suffered adverse health consequences because of its use by others.

Cigarette smoking has been linked to a long list of serious diseases including several cancers, cardio-vascular disease, pulmonary ailments and stroke. Despite several government actions over the years to reduce cigarette smoking, it remained widespread and continued to take a heavy toll on public health. The government’s latest gambit, the Public Health (Tobacco Control) Regulations introduced in 2013, represented the first legislation specifically designed to restrain smoking in “public places”. Carreras Ltd., a subsidiary of British American Tobacco (BAT), had been the only significant provider of cigarettes in Jamaica for several decades and in the period allocated for public feedback, mounted a fierce assault on the Regulations, and galvanized other private sector interests to join in that effort. The case addresses the interaction between government’s roles as guardian and financier of public health, the public’s right of choice, and a company’s right to sell a legal product, albeit one deemed harmful to public health. That government derived substantial tax receipts from trade in that product added another layer of complexity to the matter. The Minister of Health, Dr Fenton Ferguson, was the government’s point man and our protagonist.

Final year University students of Management would have been exposed to ethics theories. Many management courses do not devote enough effort to the study of the interplay between the ethical, financial, and legal and the issues that can arise therefrom to complicate decision-making. The case was structured to invite exploration of this interplay.

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

Agile software development, Knowledge workers and Lean thinking as a management system

The case lends itself to students of business management, or aspiring consultants, who have been exposed to operations management in general and Lean thinking specifically. It is an advanced case study, assuming prior knowledge in these subjects and approaches the subject matter from an organisational development point of view, rather than a pure operations point of view. It is thus well suited to an elective on operational excellence on an MBA or in executive education courses in Lean thinking

The case starts with Mark, manager of a software development team, hearing that he will have budget for two new developers who will join his team in the coming year. While the extra help could be useful, he was considering what the impact of new people would be on the productivity of the team, which he felt was already stretched. Mark continues to consider the entire development chain and how code changes were implemented to ACSESim’s (the company’s primary product) graphical user interfaces. Having recently been acquired by an American company, he was also under pressure to start to adopt some of the parent company’s systems, which would constitute a fairly disruptive, but necessary, change, particularly for future collaborations with other developers in the parent company. With two new developers, experience taught Mark that development could slow down owing to training efforts. To minimise disruption, he was wondering about how to get the new developers up-to-speed quickly and streamline their operations within a changing corporate environment. The case highlights the different mechanisms that were in place at ACSESim, including the use of issue trackers; Kanban boards; version control software; automated systems; stand-up meetings, etc. Each of these mechanisms is discussed briefly and shows the value they added to the development practices that were in place. This also allows students to understand Agile practices and what Lean thinking might mean in a knowledge work environment and then to consider what the proposed changes might mean and how they could be deployed.

To gain an understanding of how Lean and Agile principles can be applied in a software development environment and Lean knowledge work in general To consider the best way to manage new hires so that they can become productive in a Lean or Agile software development environment, whilst dealing with pressures to migrate to new systems.

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: 9: Operations and Logistics.