The most promising candidates in your company may not be where you expect.

Sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 caught small- and medium-sized Chinese enterprises off guard, such as Ciyang Garment Factory (CY) in Zaozhuang City, Shandong Province. Many migrant workers could not come for work on time because of the outbreak, and Li Qiang-the founder and general manager of CY-felt uneasy about defaulting on orders and worried about future lawsuits. The experienced garment maker Liu Ning, who had been working in .....more

Wahl Clipper Ningbo Ltd. is a wholly owned company of Wahl Group, a century-old American enterprise, in China. Owing to a crisis in 2008, Wahl (Ningbo) was on the verge of bankruptcy. Qian Moxing was appointed as a general manager at the time of the crisis. In line with the proverbial saying ''new broom sweeps clean'', ''A new person makes many changes''. Qian was enlightened with traditional Chinese culture. Therefore, .....more

In 2019, Bestore Co. Ltd. went public on the mainboard of China''s Shanghai Stock Exchange. With the mission of bringing Chinese delicacies to the world, the RMB 6 billion-revenue company proposed an ambitious revenue goal of RMB 100 billion with the new financial resources acquired from the public offering. Bestore expanded from its base market, Wuhan city, in central China to southern and eastern parts of the country. It opened flagship .....more

Despite their embrace of agile methods, many firms striving to innovate are struggling to produce breakthrough ideas. A key culprit, according to the authors, is an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making. Today''s discovery-driven innovation processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, from which ideas to pursue to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, and so on. But these choices are .....more

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands such as Allbirds, Casper, Peloton, and Warby Parker have creatively found a weakness in the marketing citadel of incumbent brands. By using data gleaned from daily interactions with customers, these brands have been able to adapt how they serve their unique customer communities across a start-to-finish purchase journey. The best of them have parlayed that ability into a profitable business model applied across multiple .....more

Chief marketing officers are vital to international expansion--if given the right authority and limits.

This case is the third installment in a series about the 10-year cultural and digital transformation of Pfizer''s Global Clinical Supply organization. In 2011, Michael Ku became Pfizer''s Vice President of Global Clinical Supply (GCS) after the company had undergone three large-scale mergers and acquisitions. Ku and his new leadership team set out to build a proactive, end-to-end, digital and physical clinical supply chain. It took .....more

Spreadsheet supplement for UV3559.