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Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021
Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies
Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.
Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.
Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.
Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four. Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls, Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.
Other year-end data for 2021 showed:
- Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
- Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
- The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
- Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
- A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
- Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
- The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.
CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.
All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .
And the Top 40 cases studies of 2021 are:
1. Hertz Global Holdings (A): Uses of Debt and Equity
2. Coffee 2016
3. Hertz Global Holdings (B): Uses of Debt and Equity 2020
4. Glory, Glory Man United!
5. Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive
6. The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?
7. Strategy for Norway's Pension Fund Global
8. Prodigy Finance
9. Design at Mayo
10. Cadbury
11. City Hospital Emergency Room
13. Volkswagen
14. Marina Bay Sands
15. Shake Shack IPO
16. Mastercard
17. Netflix
18. Ant Financial
19. AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics
20. IBM Corporate Service Corps
21. Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms
22. Alternative Meat Industry
23. Children's Premier
24. Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)
25. Palm Oil 2016
26. Teach For All: Designing a Global Network
27. What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit
28. Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options
30. Project Sammaan
31. Commonfund ESG
32. Polaroid
33. Connecticut Green Bank 2018: After the Raid
34. FieldFresh Foods
35. The Alibaba Group
36. 360 State Street: Real Options
37. Herman Miller
38. AgBiome
39. Nathan Cummings Foundation
40. Toyota 2010
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Case Study: Organizational Design
A fast-growing, $400-500 million consumer manufacturing company was looking to restructure to become more efficient. They were in search of clearer roles, measures of accountability and increased communication across functions.
Key Challenges
- The company’s organizational design was overly complex in terms of end-to-end process, leading to poor cross-functional visibility.
- Roles were duplicative and redundant, resulting in inefficient processes and a lack of accountability and governance.
- Functional groups were experiencing communication breakdowns, with unclear handoffs and a lack of cross-sharing of technical, product and customer information.
Our Solution
Our consulting team worked with the company’s leadership to design the optimal future state of the organization. We analyzed their current state to understand how the business operates, developed clear job descriptions and completed an organizational redesign. A comprehensive change management strategy, developed in partnership with management, guided the transition.
- Service Catalog – We worked to define the activities conducted in the current organization down to the sub-process and activity level by role.
- Activity Analysis – We took the time to understand processes, resources allocated, and time and effort required to complete tasks.
- Organization Design Guiding Principles – We used strategic planning objectives, defined, and prioritized guidelines and objectives for redesign decisions.
- Future State Organization Design – We developed a preliminary view of the organization to socialize, gather input and gain alignment.
- Complete Organization Sizing Analysis – We determined appropriate sizing of the functions and departments based upon benchmarks along with current and forecasted demand.
- Change Management Plan – Based on the final future state organizational chart, we mapped current roles and people to new roles and documented areas of change. We communicated the new organizational direction, role changes and new role responsibilities to the organization, and held follow-up meetings with impacted employees.
The Results
The company gained an effective organization design with clear role responsibilities and defined cross-functional processes. The result was a higher-performing team with the right number of employees in place. Performance improvements were directly measured by the timeliness of new product launches, and the quality and reliability of service to customers.
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