Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors 2022/23: No. 19

The Himalayas, one of the most fragile and diverse ecosystems in the world, needed development by which the scores of people living in the remotest and largely inaccessible regions there could have access to electricity, basic education and amenities. In 2012, Paras Loomba rolled out a social impact journey called 'Global Himalayan Expedition' wherein he designed a model for sustainable development. But the model was criticised for causing an imbalance in the naturally evolved ecosystem of the Himalayas and skeptics asked if the model was really sustainable. 

Netflix, the premier video streaming brand, was valued at USD187.3 billion as of April 2020 with a subscriber base of 182.9 million globally. However, over the years a counter narrative was woven by researchers who dug deeply into Netflix's culture through the feedback, interviews and testimonials of existing and former employees. These potential threats to Netflix's employer branding efforts were too conspicuous to be ignored. Most importantly, these reflected badly on the company's 'People over Process' approach.

Alibaba's IPO on 19 September 2014 was superlatively successful and had fetched the Chinese e-Commerce company a huge corpus of $25 billion. Founded by the charismatic Jack Ma, success had become a rule rather than an exception for this $220 billion company. Alibaba’s statistics in terms of the spread of its customer base, volume of daily transactions and the impressive profit margins could easily dwarf the likes of Amazon, eBay or Facebook. But then, entering into the next phase of growth was a different proposition altogether. Ma, who famously took pride in calling Alibaba a 'crocodile in the river', was aiming to compete with 'sharks in the ocean'.