In 1998, Jill Medvedow was hired as the director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Her mandate was to reinvent a museum that had no permanent collection, drew a mere 25,000 visitors a year, and had few members and almost no money. This case demonstrates how Medvedow was able to rebuild (lit...

In late 2003, salt producer Compass Minerals celebrated its first day trading as a public company on the NASDAQ. Knowing that it would continue to wrestle with how to price its product and respond to competitive and environmental challenges as a publicly traded company, Compass Minerals would now ha...

Harry Markham, a pension fund investment advisor, is torn about whether to tell the board of trustees of the pension fund he is advising that he believes the value of their projected liabilities are actually much larger than what the actuaries say they are. Confronted by the differing viewpoints hel...

In the early 2010s, First Solar, a leading photovoltaic (PV) solar manufacturer, faced a series of challenges: expanding production by subsidized Chinese PV manufacturers; declining purchase subsidies in important European markets; and, declining prices for silicon, the key input raw material for it...

This case describes how leaders at Mud Bay, a chain of pet products based in Pacific Northwest, changed the way they operated their business from 2014 to 2017. They adopted a framework that included heavy investment in people with operational choices that leverage that investment by increasing produ...

In June 2007, Mexico-based CEMEX became one of the world’s largest suppliers of building materials after attaining a majority stake in Australia’s Rinker Group. Just 24 months earlier, the company had acquired U.K.-based RMC. While CEMEX’s successful growth strategy could be attributed to its unique...

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...

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 mid-2018, the U.S. auto industry was in the early stages of what many believed would be a significant evolution in how people thought about and used cars. The future would be dominated by electric and autonomous vehicles. Car ownership in which people paid for a hard asset with all its bells and ...

The Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA) is an outpatient clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital responsible for conducting preoperative assessments of surgical patients prior to their procedures. Set in June 2009, this case study describes the conditions of this busy outpatient clinic prior to a pro...