MIT Sloan Case Studies

On October 29, 2018, Indonesia’s Lion Air flight 610, a nearly new Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet, plunged into the Java Sea at 400 miles per hour, killing all 189 people on board. Eight days later Boeing issued a bulletin to all 737 MAX 8 and 737 MAX 9 operators stating that “erroneous angle-of-attack data” ...

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 ...

The Project Management Simulation is a realistic, interactive system dynamics “management flight simulator” in which participants play the role of project managers for a complex project.

The Beer Distribution Game, one of the oldest and most widely used management simulations, is now available online as an interactive multiplayer websim.

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...

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 July 2015, MaryAnn Camacho joined Quest Diagnostics’s National Customer Service (NCS) organization as its Executive Director. Quest was the leading provider of diagnostic services and solutions in the United States. Camacho was hired to turn around an organization that had gone through a complex ...

In late 2004, Walt Bernstein, the director of production control for Toyota Motor Manufacturing’s Macon, Georgia operation, was notably frustrated with the plant manager for ChassisCo, a Toyota supplier. There were quality and conformance issues with the rear suspension cradle that ChassisCo was man...

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...

Dr. Frank Young, who joined Huntington University Hospital’s Center for Cardiac Medicine in 2011, was confounded when he discovered that the percentage of patients who received blood transfusions was significantly higher than the national average. It was no secret that patients who received blood tr...