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Athena

In early 2019, Beth Daniels, CEO of Athena Bancorp (Athena or Athena Bank), reviewed the five-year plan that she had created with her team. When she founded Athena Bancorp in 2016, people had told her she was crazy. Daniels recalled, “Everyone said banking is a mature, overregulated industry that would go the way of the dinosaurs.” However, she was passionate about community banking and about the role that community banks could play in revitalizing the locations where they did business. She also believed there was a segment of the population that was ill-served by the U.S. financial system. Daniels wanted to help these individuals—while building a growing and profitable business. Now, Athena Bank had five branches and $1.8 billion in assets. Her five-year plan called for Athena to grow to 15 branches, with loans and deposits increasing threefold over the next five years. However, Paul James, Athena’s chief human resources officer (CHRO), was concerned that Athena was having difficulty ...
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Harrahs

In 1931, the state of Nevada passed a law legalizing casino gambling. In 1935, Harold's Club opened in Reno, Nevada. In 1937, Bill Harrah opened his first club in Reno. This club was the first to attract large numbers of out-of-state patrons. Harold and Harrah’s casinos were viewed as the first successes in the history of the American gaming industry. They encouraged the development of similar private and public casinos in Nevada, making Reno, Nevada the center of the casino industry at that time. As of 2003, the industry had come a long way since its inception. A significant new expansion phase was started in the late 1980s, when Iowa and South Dakota legalized casino gambling. Nevada and New Jersey were the only two states that allowed such operations until that time. Many other states soon followed suit. In 2000, there were 11 states with commercial casinos, 23 with tribal casinos and five with racetrack casinos. The casino industry employed over 370,000 people and paid over $4...
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Amazon

On January 31, 2018, the market capitalization of Amazon.Com Inc. (Amazon) hit $702 billion, the highest level ever.2 When its fourth-quarter results were released on February 1, 2018, Amazon showed a 30-per-cent increase in revenues, to $60.5 billion for the quarter, and net income for the quarter had increased by 150 per cent, to $1.9 billion.3 From its start as a venture looking to build “earth’s largest bookstore” in 1994, Amazon was now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and founder Jeff Bezos was the richest person on earth. In 2018, Amazon had an online store that sold its own products and listed products for sale by more than two million third-party sellers.4 Since its founding, Amazon had added more than 30 store categories, ranging from electronics to furniture, selling millions of different products and making an estimated 1.2 billion domestic customer shipments in 2017.5 Amazon Web Services, the company’s on-demand cloud- computing service, generated $17.5 bil...
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CVS Health: Redefining the Value Proposition

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CVS_Health__Redefining_the_Value_Proposition 9 - 717 - 436 R E V : F E B R U A R Y 2 8 , 2 0 17 M I C H A E L E . P O R T E R J O R G E R A M I R E Z - V A L L E J O A L E X A N D R A H O U G H T A L I N CVS Health: Redefining the Value Proposition Put simply, the sale of tobacco products is inconsistent with our purpose. — Larry Merlo, President and CEO of CVS Health Introduction Founded in 1963, CVS Health (CVS) was the leading drugstore chain in the United States. Headquartered in Rhode Island, the company had grown to more than 9,600 retail drugstores and 243,000 employees operating in all 50 states in 2015. Since 2006, the company had been expanding its role in health care, moving beyond the traditional drugstore. In 2014, reflecting this new approach, the company changed its name to CVS Health and stopped selling tobacco products in its stores. In 2015, the U.S. health care system continued to evolve. Health systems were expanding and consolidating, n...
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