This case focuses on how to think about personal and business ethical dilemmas. The case presents three ethical dilemmas: two hypothetical scenarios presented to Kiara in her ethics class, and one real situation in her personal life. While dilemmas one and two may be unethical but legal, dilemma three involves an actual crime. Kiara has been working as a cosmetologist at her aunt's salon for thre
Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the inter
Sam Washington is a young single mother looking to get back into the workforce six months after giving birth to her daughter, Kiki. Sam has lined up an interview for a secretarial position at Glass & Duvall, an accounting firm. The A case covers the morning of the interview from Sam's perspective, including details about what she does in the waiting room as well as her actual answers to the inter
Early in 2019, Wingtech CEO Xuezheng Zhang faced one of the biggest challenges of his career. China-based Wingtech, which Zhang had founded 13 years earlier, had rapidly grown into one of the world's top manufacturers of mobile phones and intelligent devices. But Wingtech didn't manufacture its products' key component: microchips. Most of the chips it used were purchased from American and European
Jason has had a string of bad luck: he was fired from his job, his car got repossessed, he had to move back in with his mother when he was unable to make rent on his apartment, and his girlfriend dumped him. He is feeling unmotivated and discouraged, but also recognizes—at his mother's insistence—that he needs to start contributing to the household. Following his mother's orders, he heads to the l
Hank Carlson, once a successful businessman and a well-respected member of his community, spent nearly two years in prison for check fraud. When he was caught, the community turned on him instantly, and his family suffered financially and socially as a result of his deeds.
Carlson did his time grudgingly, believing himself to have been the scapegoat of a Justice Department that was overcompensati
A recently hired marketing executive has been incentivized to grow sales and exploit a newly opened market. The tasks for the student are to evaluate the liberal credit and inventory support the company is extending to its distributors, and consider what information and metrics might be used to evaluate the risk and potential returns from these policies.
This short, fictional case chronicles the story of Susan Hughes, the CFO for 4 Sisters Construction Co. (4SCC), who introduces the economic profit (EP) construct to her fellow executives (and sisters) as a viable means for signaling to owners the value the company created for them that year. As such, she has also created a one-step reference table that converts their more familiar earnings before
This case examines the key issues facing MetLife, a major company in life and annuity (L&A) and—to a lesser extent—property and casualty (P&C) insurance. The case provides an opportunity to analyze the business models of insurance companies, the main risks they face, and the broad investment strategies they pursue. The case also discusses how technology (including insurtech), regulation, and risk
This set of caselets gets to the heart of the ethical issues embedded within the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced forms of automation technology in the workplace. Employee surveillance, customer privacy, replacing workers with machines and programs, using new data-mining techniques in the hiring process, and more—the multilayered dilemmas these new opportunities pr
This case considers a $10 million investment in an outpatient surgery center by a not-for-profit community hospital in rural South Carolina. A member of the purchasing department, R. D. Scott, is invited to complete a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis of the investment opportunity to help quantify the financial costs and benefits of the project in this not-for profit context. The analysis maint
Sara Hughes, the CFO at Sports Equipment, Inc. (SEI), is striving to make financial analysis more easily and uniformly done by the company's investment center managers. As such, she has presented her boss COO George Noland with a pair of tabular tools for deconstructing profit variances into three component parts. Those three parts pertain to the variance amounts due to: (1) utilizing more net ass
