Cold Call

In early 2023, the entertainment app TikTok reached close to one billion users globally, placing it fourth behind the leading social networks: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Can all four of these networks continue to attract audiences and creators -- or will growing social media competition eliminate one or more of these big players?

In 2020, just a few months after the US began to shut down in order to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus, Serhant had time to reflect on his career as a real estate broker in New York City. He considered whether he should stay at his current real estate brokerage or launch his own brokerage during a pandemic. Each option had very different implications for his time and flexibility.

mPharma, headquartered in Ghana, is trying to create the largest pan-African health care company. Their mission is to provide primary care and a reliable and fairly priced supply of drugs in the nine African countries where they operate. Co-founder and CEO Greg Rockson needs to decide which component of strategy to prioritize in the next three years. His options include launching a telemedicine program, expanding his pharmacies across the continent, and creating a new payment program to cover the cost of common medications. Rockson cares deeply about health equity, but his venture capital-financed company also must be profitable. Which option should he focus on expanding?

In 2020, the Mars Petcare leadership team found themselves facing critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe generated demand for substantive change, and Mars Petcare's 100,000 employees across six continents were ready for visible signs of progress. How should Mars’ leadership build on their existing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and effectively capitalize on the new energy for change?

Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work initiative aimed to accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization and prepare its workforce for a digitalized and highly automated era. But despite its success over the last three years, the program still faces significant challenges in its implementation. How should Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, best prepare and upscale its workforce for the future? And is it even possible to lead a systematic, agile workforce transformation across several geographies while accounting for local context?

In late October 2022, Elon Musk officially took Twitter private and became the company’s majority shareholder. He needed to take decisive steps to succeed against the major opposition to his leadership from both inside and outside the company. What short-term actions should Musk take to stabilize the situation, and how should he approach long-term strategy to turn around Twitter?

In 2020, AmerisourceBergen Corporation agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed nationwide against the company for its opioid distribution practices, which critics alleged had contributed to the opioid crisis. AmerisourceBergen’s legal and financial troubles were accompanied by shareholder demands aimed at holding the company’s leadership accountable for their role in the addiction crisis. Should the board reduce the executives’ pay, or would that ignore the larger issue of a business’s responsibility to society?

The city of Wenzhou in southeastern China is home to the country’s largest privately owned mental health hospital group, the Wenzhou Kangning Hospital Co, Ltd. It’s an example of the extraordinary entrepreneurship happening in China’s healthcare space. But after its successful initial public offering (IPO), how will the hospital grow in the future?

Zak Pym Williams, son of comedian and actor Robin Williams, had seen how mental health challenges, such as addiction and depression, had affected past generations of his family. He began considering proactive strategies that could help his family’s mental health, and he wanted to share that knowledge with other families. But how can Pym Williams help people actually embrace those mental health strategies and services?

In Stockholm, Sweden an upstart battery maker, Northvolt, is trying to recreate the value chain for European car manufacturers making the switch to EVs. With two founders from Tesla and two experienced financiers at the helm, the company seems bound for success. But can they partner with government, scale fast enough, and truly be part of the climate solution?

James Mwangi, CEO of Equity Bank, has transformed lives and livelihoods throughout East and Central Africa by giving impoverished people access to banking accounts and micro loans. He’s been so successful that in 2020 Forbes coined the term “the Mwangi Model.” But can we really have both purpose and profit in a firm?

When serial entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM) received her seven-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), she created United Therapeutics and developed a drug to save her life. When her daughter later needed a lung transplant, Rothblatt decided to take what she saw as the logical next step: manufacturing organs for transplantation. Rothblatt’s entrepreneurial career exemplifies a larger debate around the role of the firm in creating solutions for society’s problems. If companies are uniquely good at innovating, what voice should society have in governing the new technologies that firms create?

Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) is an Indian nonprofit famous for creating low-cost prosthetics, like the Jaipur Foot and the Stanford-Jaipur Knee. Known for its patient-centric culture and its focus on innovation, BMVSS has assisted more than one million people, including many land mine survivors. How can founder D.R. Mehta devise a strategy that will ensure the financial sustainability of BMVSS while sustaining its human impact well into the future?

Cold Call is celebrating 200 episodes with a special five-part series during the week of April 24, 2023. Each day that week, Cold Call will release a new episode. To kick off the week-long celebration, the show’s producers have each picked their three favorite episodes from the archives for listeners to revisit.

Headquartered in Kitengela, Kenya, Sian Flowers exports roses to Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian and its distributors used international air cargo to transport them to Amsterdam, where they were sold at auction and trucked to markets across Europe. But when the Covid-19 pandemic caused huge increases in shipping costs, Sian launched experiments to ship roses by ocean using refrigerated containers. The company reduced its costs and cut its carbon emissions, but is a flower that travels halfway around the world truly a “low-carbon rose”?