Under the visionary leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Nintendo) of Japan had transformed from a small founder-controlled business to a global and professionalized firm. Yamauchi’s death in 2013 had the potential to affect Nintendo’s corporate financial policy. Following his passing, Yamauchi’s family was left with a huge inheritance—but also an exorbitant inheritance tax bill. The family sought advice from Nintendo on how to deal with the matter. How could Nintendo solve this financial trouble in a way that balanced the interests of both the family and Nintendo’s management?

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Standard Chartered Bank (Singapore) Limited (Standard Chartered) was part of an international banking group that focused on the creation of wealth across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As part of its commitment to corporate social responsibility, Standard Chartered launched a project in 2012 called Silver Lining, a community project that aimed to support elderly Singaporeans in meeting their financial and health care needs. Silver Lining had overcome a number of challenges since its inception, choosing appropriate partners and finding ways to help young volunteers overcome language barriers to work with elderly clients. It had also joined with other organizations to collaborate on offering supports and services to seniors in the community, some of whom were dealing with poor mental health. In early 2017, Standard Chartered had to make some key strategic decisions in order to ensure the continued relevance of Silver Lining and justify the need for continued funding for the project.

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Hiap Hoe is a family-controlled property group, with its flagship company, Hiap Hoe Ltd., listed on the Singapore Exchange since 2003. Teo Guan Seng, the founder, involved several of his children in the business and tried to share his love and wealth with his expanding family as much as he could. However, in 2012, he found himself in the midst of a divisive family feud. Eventually, he saw no other option than to break up the family holding company, give up his ownership, resign as Chairman, and to withdraw from the group he had so painstakingly built in the course of six decades. Even worse, his family’s squabbles were widely discussed in Singapore’s newspapers, and he was personally criticized in the media and in court. …

In mid-2017, the regional head of Operations and Supply Chain at Sika AG, a Swiss specialty chemicals leader that developed solutions for building and automotive industries, faced a new challenge in the company’s epoxy flooring supply chain. She was tasked with identifying a robust solution that would both satisfy a shortened lead time and provide spare capacity to accommodate future growth. How should she proceed with these tasks?

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In early 2014, Standard Chartered PLC, a British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London, England, announced its restructuring plan. The announcement triggered positive reactions in both stock and bond markets. Nevertheless, the eventual profitability was not what was expected. Moving forward into 2015, how would a rational investor have taken advantage of such a corporate restructuring event?

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On July 7, 2015, a power fault during the evening commute led to a system-wide disruption on SMRT, Singapore’s heavily used mass rapid transit lines. Train service on both lines was shut down for more than two hours, affecting more than 413,000 commuters. The public was outraged at the scale of the breakdown and how ineffectively it was handled. Detailed investigations revealed the breakdown to be a result of maintenance lapses, and SMRT was criticized for its failure to provide clear and timely information and instructions to passengers. Following the breakdown, the company embarked on a service recovery process encompassing various new initiatives. This case illustrates the tensions SMRT faced during and after the breakdown, and its journey to recover the public’s confidence in is transit services.

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Malaysian palm oil company IOI Corporation Berhad (IOI) developed from a plantation company in Malaysia to become a vertically integrated manufacturing company with a range of higher value manufacturing businesses across Asia, Europe, and the United States. The rapid expansion into what the chief executive officer (CEO) called a “mini-multinational” placed greater demands on IOI and its leadership. The CEO had struggled to simultaneously achieve growth, innovation, control, and coordination, and the company had experienced a sustainability crisis in 2016. In early 2017, the CEO needed to decide whether to approve an ambitious growth strategy—proposed by IOI’s specialty oils and fats team, which led most overseas operations and handled IOI’s most innovative products—to be achieved by 2025. While he was eager to expand IOI and strengthen its position as a widely admired Asian family multinational, he also needed to weigh the constraints. He could not risk growing the company faster than the leadership’s ability to control it.

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Since 2000, China’s Jiuzhai Valley National Park (Jiuzhai Valley) had been experiencing a sharp increase in the volume of tourists it received. The park contributed significantly to the surrounding area’s economy: in 2015 and 2016, it contributed more than 60 per cent of the total admission income received from the four major scenic parks within the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province. However, pollution and noise due to the influx of visitors presented a constant threat to Jiuzhai Valley’s ecosystem and environment. Despite Jiuzhai Valley’s fairly advanced and disciplined approach to park management, there was no easy solution to the problem it faced in trying to balance its economic success and sustainable environmental initiatives. Attempts to manage information using digital and smart technologies and “big data” were still in their early stages, and had yet to yield the expected benefits. How could the park balance conservation and development to attain sustainability?

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A key contributor to the business reputation and success of Caterpillar Inc. (Caterpillar) was the company’s reliable aftermarket service. Caterpillar’s Asia Distribution Centre in Singapore processed urgent spare parts orders received from dealers located in 10 Southeast Asian countries. In 2017, the operations team was working to develop a rigorous analytical method for making daily decisions about how to ship the spare parts. Shipments were consolidated by country destination and needed to optimize the interests of three stakeholders: (1) Caterpillar, which wanted to minimize freight costs; (2) dealers, who wanted to receive the spare parts in the shortest time possible; and (3) freight forwarders, who wanted to be rewarded for their on-time delivery performance.

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The Tan Group began as a small construction company in the aftermath of World War II. It made its name in hotels and grew into a well-known property company in Indonesia. But it struggled during and after the Asian crisis of 1998 and experienced nearly two lost decades. Four siblings of the third generation took control of the Tan Group after their father’s passing, but each had different ideas and interests on how to revive their family’s legacy. Yet, they had to make a decision on how to put the group back on a growth path while incorporating individual interests and complying with their father’s wish to continue the business together as a harmonious family.