In July 2015, Managed by Q co-founder and CEO Dan Teran was trying to decide how best to grow the 15-month old on-demand office cleaning and maintenance company. As Teran saw it, Q, which differentiated itself from the competition by leveraging people and technology, could grow by acquiring customer...

The 2007-09 Great Recession took a huge bite out of the U.S. restaurant industry as consumers ate out less often. Even during the subsequent economic recovery, ongoing financial concerns continued to depress the appetite for eating out. The casual dining sector, situated in the middle ground between...

This case examines how Marsha Jackson, the Head of Internal Audit at RiseEngineer, deals with a whistleblower allegation of bribery in the company’s foreign subsidiary. Marsha’s compliance team conducts an investigation focused on the subsidiary’s bid on a major construction project. Students are as...

In July of 2020, the National Hockey League (NHL) and the NHL Players’ Association (NHLPA) were negotiating an agreement on a return-to-play plan for the 2019-20 season interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the two parties were negotiating an agreement to extend the league’s collec...

Throughout 2017 and into 2018, Tesla was burning through cash as the company sought to ramp up production of its Model 3 all-electric vehicle (EV). Investors were questioning whether Tesla would need to raise additional capital. While the company had been successful in the past at issuing both equit...

Since 1917, American jobs have been classified by their skill level. “Unskilled work” was said to, “require no special training, judgment, or manual dexterity, but supply mainly muscular strength for the performance of coarse, heavy work dexterity.” It was the largest category of work and included m...

In 2015, when Dan Schulman became CEO of PayPal, a digital payments company, many people thought of it as the button they clicked when paying for online purchases. In 2015, PayPal embarked on a new mission: using technology to democratize financial services. In Schulman’s words, it would “turn the ...

In a span of 11 months, FTX. a crypto exchange co-founded by Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), went from being valued at $32 billion in January 2022 to filing for bankruptcy, wiping out billions in investor money by November. Those called in to clean up the mess soon discovered that up to $9 billion in custo...

On May 15, 2017, Amazon.com celebrated the 20th anniversary of its initial public offering (IPO). The company’s first twenty years was a period of remarkable growth but with very little to show in terms of accounting earnings. This reflected Amazon’s strategy of investing in expansion and research a...