Patagonia: The Company That Chose to Grow Slowly
How Yvon Chouinard — a ‘reluctant businessman’ built Patagonia to show the world that it was possible to make money and do good for the environment.
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Commoncog Case Library
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 →
Full access to the Case Library is a premium feature for Commoncog Members.
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100+ cases, 20+ concept series
And growing! The case library receives steady updates of new Calibration Cases.
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Progress tracking
Mark cases as read, and view your progress through a concept series.
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E-mail notifications
Know when a new case is published, or new series begins.
Recent Concepts
See all →Incentive Design
15 cases
How entities — companies, firms, protocols — design effective incentives to accomplish effective goals.
Process Improvement
15 cases
Process improvement is harder than it looks because of a 'worse before better' dynamic. This is what that looks like.
Idea Maze
30 cases
What it's like in the search for product market fit, at the very earliest stages of a product.
Managing Employee Culture
8 cases
Cases of companies building or managing effective employee culture, for the purpose of effective organisational behaviour.
The Capital Cycle
13 cases
Cases of companies navigating the capital cycle: whether successfully, or not.
Turnarounds
9 cases
Cases of companies going through turnarounds — either successfully or no.
New Cases
See all →How Swatch Saved the Swiss Watch Industry, But Not From Quartz
This is the story of how the creation of the Swatch Group, and its namesake plastic watch, led to the turnaround of the entire Swiss watch industry.
A 92 Year Old Singaporean Distributor Closes Shop Forever
What happens when business expansion, done for entirely rational reasons, ends up tanking your company because of a once-in-a-generation disaster that nobody could have foreseen?
The Amazing Growth and Predictable Death of Ample Hills Creamery
Ample Hills Creamery exploded on the back of influential fans. And then it died. Here's why this is a textbook example of bad business expansion.
Members only
Estée Lauder: Surviving Retail Disruption
How Leonard Lauder steered the brand through a disruptive shift unlike any other.
Members only
How Mark Roberge Built HubSpot’s Sales Engine
How Mark Roberge went from engineering to sales and built a high performance sales organisation from scratch.
Process Control in a Fourth Grade Science Class
What it looks like when you apply statistical process control the a fourth grade science class.
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The Leadership Corridor: How James Kilts Built Leaders at Gillette
Apart from being a successful turnaround CEO, there is one other thing about Jim Kilts that is highly unusual: his ability to create a deep bench of executive leaders in every company he helmed. This is how he did it.
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Chris Degnan’s Journey to Product-Market Fit at Snowflake
How Snowflake’s Chief Revenue Officer Chris Degnan helped Snowflake find product market fit.
Ambani vs Wadia: the Feedstock Fight
What Dhirubhai Ambani’s fight against Nusli Wadia shows us about doing business in rising India.
Members only
Kwek Leng Beng: Winning at the Hotel Game
How Kwek Leng Beng picked the way he played the hotel game, built specifically around the way he was trained ... and won.
Members only
The Making of Kwek Leng Beng
How the son of an Singaporean tycoon cut his teeth in the game of business.
Members only