Valeur Absolue: Values-based entrepreneurship

Boards are playing an increasingly active part in shaping change efforts.

September 2024 marks a turning point in corporate management and a drama in the management world, which began with an essay by Paul Graham, patron of Silicon Valley's leading startup incubator, Y Combinator.Graham coins a new paradigm, the founder...

The world’s most famous referee shares his insights for business leaders on how to make the best decisions in the moment – on or off the pitch

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Discover how "The Leadership House" framework empowers leaders to overcome challenges. Explore its six pillars—trust, teamwork, shared values, goals, accountability, and empowerment.

Entrepreneurial families play a vital role in shaping the global economy and society. These families, engaged in creating and managing businesses across generations, share a commitment to long-term growth, wealth preservation, and legacy building.

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IMD Dean of Research, Anand Narasimhan, shares his insights on fostering a resilient, empowered, and engaged workforce.

It’s time to retire the word ‘empowerment’ so that women can step into their innate power.

In the 2010s, card processing – Mastercard’s flagship service – started showing signs of commodification as new, nimble players (typically, fintech startups thriving on digital) entered the payment processing space, and customer preferences evolved beyond plastic cards and traditional contact payments. To re-energize its central position and its ability to capture value, Mastercard – as the incumbent – had to make bold decisions. The case details Mastercard’s approach to conceptualizing and building a global platform ecosystem that upholds the principles and design elements of modularity (i.e. interoperability and scalability) and optionality. Today, Mastercard's services, based on application programming interfaces (APIs), integrate with a variety of platforms and offer flexibility to businesses that require customized payment solutions. All along, the company has accommodated a high level of internal disruption. The case also explores the nature of Mastercard’s systematic collaboration with fintechs – players that often started out as competitors in specific parts of Mastercard’s value chain. It describes the company’s engagement with fintechs as fostering collaboration and co-creation and facilitating access; in other words, opening doors and sharing tools with partners. The case presents observations and quotes by CEO Michael Miebach, whose career trajectory at Mastercard – spanning Africa & Middle East experience, fintech partnerships, product management and the CEO role – sheds additional light on the philosophy and values that have driven the company’s transformation to a technology powerhouse and self-described original fintech.