All cases
August 2021
Fatima Akilu: The rise of a quiet leader (A)
By Randall Peterson
In 2015, Fatima Akilu found herself sitting at the kitchen table with her sister, shocked and saddened by what has just happened to her, wondering what to do next. Should she fight to defend her reputation? Or return to a quiet life away from the big government role she has just been fired from? Fa...
August 2021
Quiet Charisma: Fatima Akilu at the Neem Foundation
By Randall Peterson
When Fati Ibrahim lost her husband and eldest son after Boko Haram insurgents attacked their town of Gwoza in north-eastern Nigeria, she wasn’t alone. She was one of dozens of women who lost family members, homes and livelihoods. Three years later, she found herself queueing outside a tent near Ma...
August 2021
NiPay’s Pricing Conundrum – Compact Case Study
By Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg
NiPay is a software provider competing in the Nigerian business-to-business payments market. Founded by Idaku Ibrahim nearly 20 years ago, NiPay sells two products to retailers and other merchants, which enable individual shoppers to transact either online or via a mobile device....
July 2021
The ‘Funding Buffet’: Understanding the sources of capital to finance your venture – Technical Note
By Luisa Alemany, Gary Dushnitsky
This technical note is an introduction to the world of financing entrepreneurial ventures. It is a primer on the different stages of a business and the different types of financing available. Most of the capital that high-growth entrepreneurial businesses will secure to fund their future plans is pr...
June 2021
Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset (Chinese)
By Herminia Ibarra, Aneeta Rattan
When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he inherited a firm fading toward irrelevance, plagued by internal fights and inertia. Earlier that year his wife, Anu, had given him a best-selling book by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck entitled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, su...