November 2023

Heineken’s International Expansion

Asserting his lifelong motto “I don’t sell beer, I sell warmth”, Alfred ‘Freddy’ Heineken passed away on 3 January 2002, aged 78. Known for his flamboyant lifestyle and fiery personality, Freddy was also the driving force in growing Heineken into an international brand. Heineken had the la...

February 2023

Lynda Weinman

By John Mullins

Lynda Weinman and her husband Bruce Heavin had built a modest but thriving training business, focused on teaching users how to put the latest digital graphic design tools, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, to work. Having survived a difficult period following the terrorist attacks in New York City ...

August 2021

Natura &Co: Sustainability at Scale

By Stefano Turconi, Pranjal Singh, Rui Wang

Established in 1969 as a cosmetics lab in the city of São Paulo, Natura grew briskly over the ensuing decades and by 2004 it had become Brazil’s largest beauty company. Unlike its competitors, Natura was built on the principle of reconciling socioecological sustainability with value creation. Dur...

September 2005

Red Bull: The anti-brand brand

By Nader Tavassoli, Nirmalya Kumar, Sophie Linguri

In 2004, Red Bull found itself at a crossroad, challenged with defending its 70% worldwide market share of the €2.5 billion energy drinks category that it had pioneered. Through a combination of buzz marketing tactics, decentralised distribution and sponsorship of extreme sports and pop culture ev...

July 2020

Haier in 2014: An entrepreneurial juggernaut facing a world of platforms and ecosystems

By Michael Jacobides, Lisa Duke

Until the 2010s, China had been known for inexpensive products and efficient, low-cost production and for copycat or OEM products rather than for leading-edge innovation. Yet, in a few short years, Chinese firms turned to quality and innovation, drastically increasing their market share. A shining e...

June 2020

Zensar Technologies

By Julian Birkinshaw, Tanvi Deshpande

The case study describes the digital transformation of Zensar Technologies Ltd. under CEO Sandeep Kishore. Zensar was a mid-tier IT services company based in Pune, India; profitable and successful but without any obvious differentiating features and with relatively weak growth. On his arrival in 20...

February 2019

Jack Ma at Alibaba: Building a Learning Organisation

By Herminia Ibarra, Jessica Spungin

In September 2018 Alibaba’s co-founder and executive chairman, Jack Ma, announced his plans to step down from the $420 billion Chinese internet company to pursue philanthropy in education. The case describes the evolution of Alibaba’s corporate strategy from Chinese e-commerce pioneer to a compl...

April 2019

Clarasys: Born Agile by Taking Groups Seriously

By Randall Peterson

In March 2015, London-based management consultancy Clarasys found itself in crisis. Established in 2011, the company had experienced consistent growth since foundation and had expanded staffing levels to service new business accordingly. But it was still in start-up phase and a perfect storm of even...

January 2020

Sofar Sounds: Charting the next stage of growth

By Julian Birkinshaw, David Mather, Bryan Stroube, Aharon Cohen Mohliver

This case traces the development of a live entertainment company, Sofar Sounds, from a conversation among three friends about their frustrations with live music events, through early success and now to a point where the CEO, Rafe Offer, has to make important decisions about its future growth. Sofar ...

July 2011

Simon Cohen (D) Epilogue

By John Mullins, Darice Gubbins, John Walker

This is part of a case series. Simon Cohen parked his Acura SUV outside his Monterrey office, let the fingerprint scanner check his ID to open the door, and jogged upstairs past the huge poster showing containers and cranes at the port of Manzanillo. He paused for a moment in the company's boardroom...