The sextet is made up of previously listed Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Global Strategy Kamran Kashani (13th), Professor of Strategy and Supply Chain Management Carlos Cordon (18th), Professor Benoit Leleux (29th), the Stephan Schmidheiny Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, and Professor Emeritus of Strategy Peter Killing (41st). Making their debut on the list are Seán Meehan (38th), the Martin Hilti Professor of Marketing & Change Management, and Professor Stefan Michel (42th), Dean of IMD’s Executive MBA Program.
The Case Centre (TCC) hosts the world’s largest and most diverse collection of management cases, articles, book chapters, and teaching materials, making it the premier go-to resource for business students. For the last six years, TCC has been compiling a list of its Top 40 best-selling case authors, which expanded this year to rank the top 50.
The appearance of six IMD faculty on TCC’s list is a testimony to the caliber of the institution’s teaching research, with Kashani, Killing, and Leleux having been on the list since it was first published in 2016.
Among Kashani’s best-selling cases was Reinventing Nespresso? The Challenges of a Market Leader Under Attack, co-authored with IMD’s Dominique Turpin and Fang Liu. First published in 2013, the case examines how Nespresso, facing declining growth and market share loss, took on new competitors to sustain its success.
Cordon and Leleux collaborated with Beverly Lennox on a case series Adidas Russia/CIS and the Russian crisis: Retrench or double down, exploring how Adidas Russia/CIS became the poster child for the sportswear group by pioneering new technologies such as click-and-collect, ship-from-store, endless aisle, and RFID – all while battling an economic crisis in Russia.
Meehan wrote a case series on Ryanair Strategic Positioning. The airline had grown to become Europe’s largest by 2013 but was often unloved, with many believing the company had pushed costs lower at the expense of service. The case series weighs up Ryanair’s change program, “ALWAYS GETTING BETTER”, which was designed to turn Ryanair into the “Amazon of Travel in Europe.”
Peter Killing is known for his three-part case series on Nestlé’s Globe Program, which examines how Chris Johnson was tasked with creating and overseeing the biggest SAP rollout in the world at the food giant. The case follows Chris’ first few months on the job, involving a move to Switzerland to set up Nestlé’s new direction with a budget of 3 billion Swiss francs.
Completing the line-up is Stefan Michel, who published a case in January entitled Is Netflix Building a House of Cards?, which explores whether Netflix’s binge-spending on content to fend off competition from new streaming competitors is a sustainable strategy.
Case studies, which posit real-life business situations, are popular tools in management education to help hone learners’ ability to understand the minutiae and to analyze effectively. For more than 50 years, IMD’s faculty has developed case studies that have proven to be a timeless tool for developing the leadership capabilities of executives, irrespective of where they are on their career path.
