In April 2020, Rachel Jarrett, President and COO of wedding technology company Zola, called a meeting with the organization''s key decision-makers. The company had previously launched three business expansions: a vendor marketplace, a wedding apparel division, and a honeymoon-planning service. However, the March 2020 onset of COVID-19 had prompted many couples to delay or cancel their weddings, and it was unclear how long the pandemic would .....more

The case follows Ashraf Abu Issa, CEO and chairman of Abu Issa Holding (AIH), as he contemplated the fate of his company''s regional expansion. AIH was a Qatari diversified holding company, whose primary business was luxury retailing and distribution. Abu Issa had set his company on a path of aggressive regional expansion since 2012, rapidly opening new stores in neighboring countries, most notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In July 2017, .....more

Companies across all industries are putting personalization at the center of their enterprise strategies. For example, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Starbucks, and Nike have publicly announced that personalized and seamless omnichannel experiences are at the core of their corporate strategy. We are now at the point where competitive advantage will be based on the ability to capture, analyze, and utilize personalized customer data at scale and on how .....more

Total shareholder return (TSR) has become the definitive metric for gauging performance. Unlike accounting measures such as revenue growth or earnings per share that reflect the past, TSR is based on share price and thus captures investor expectations of what will happen in the future, which is its chief attraction. The problem is that TSR conflates performance associated with strategy and operations with that arising from cash distributions (dividends .....more