Home of the calibration case method.
Accelerate your understanding of business by browsing our case selections. Pick a concept, and then read the cases within them. As you read, compare and contrast between each case: what are some surprising similarities? What are some surprising dissimilarities?
Doing this simulates what experts do when they examine cases in business and investing. Learn more →
And growing! The case library receives steady updates of new Calibration Cases.
Mark cases as read, and view your progress through a concept series.
Know when a new case is published, or new series begins.
Business expansion can be fraught with danger. This concept sequence covers cases of companies that grew successfully, as well as those that died from over-expansion.
Cases of companies building or managing effective employee culture, for the purpose of effective organisational behaviour.
A collection of cases on counter-positioning as a competitive advantage.
Branding is one of the hardest competitive moats to build, and one of the most powerful.
How entities — companies, firms, protocols — design effective incentives to accomplish effective goals.
How businesses and businesspeople deal with disruptive shifts — where something they believed to be true, or that they had built their business around, changes at a fundamental level.
The Four Seasons competitive advantage is excellent service, delivered consistently. This is enabled by a particular org structure and employee culture — a form of counter-positioning. But how do they maintain that advantage when entering a country with hospitality norms that are ... very different from their own?
There’s a saying that goes ‘if you can’t beat them on the straights, beat them on the bends.’ Rolex was the one Swiss watch house that benefited from the Quartz Crisis, leapfrogging all of its closest competitors. This is how they did it.
The hotel industry is one of the most cyclical ones there is. How do you build a ‘blue chip’ hotel company in such a cyclical industry?
A synthesis of all the known public sources on how the Pritzker family made their wealth. The Pritzkers own the Hyatt Hotel chain and Marmon, an industrials conglomerate. This is a story of incredible capital allocation.
Four Seasons is known today as the most consistent scaled luxury hotel brand. But how did it shift from hotel owner to asset-light manager, and how did it scale?
How the BlackBerry phone was killed by the iPhone ... a not-so-straightforward story of technological disruption.
How a so-called technological disruptor, Netflix, was nearly killed by the incumbent, Blockbuster, before it made a grievous error.
It’s difficult to imagine today, but databases were once a hot technology, in a crowded field. This is the story of how Oracle won the database wars of the 70s.
Ford was the only American automaker who didn’t need a bailout in the Great Recession. How did they adapt to an unprecedented financial calamity?
Amazon is known as one of the few dotcom darlings that survived the dotcom bust. This is how they did it.
McKinsey founded his eponymous firm, but died before it scaled globally. This is the story of how McKinsey’s protege Marvin Bower built McKinsey into the firm we know today.
How an accounting professor started a firm that changed the world.