Cold Call

Founded in 2010, Supercell was a Finland-based mobile gaming company that had developed and launched five global hit mobile games: Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Hay Day, Brawl Stars, and Boom Beach. The company’s early philosophy was that it could produce hits by designing the company with a structure and culture that would prove compelling to the industry’s top talent. Developers worked in small, autonomous groups called cells with little oversight. The formula was a success. Supercell had nearly $2 billion in annual revenues, and Clash of Clans alone had generated gross revenues of over $10 billion since inception. However, the company had not released a hit game in five years.

In 2023, CEO Ilkka Paananen and the company’s leadership team decided to restructure the company into two divisions—New Games and Live Games. The New Game cells would retain the small team structures, which were largely flat and non-hierarchical, but the Live Game cells would add more traditional structure and hierarchy to exploit franchise hits. Now, Paananen wondered if Supercell could continue to attract top talent despite its shift to more traditional ways of managing the business.

Senior Lecturer Jeffrey Rayport and host Brian Kenny discuss the case, “Supercell 2.0: Clash of Plans,” and the question at its crux: What would it take to restore the company’s winning streak?

You have a strategy you believe in. But what happens when your boss doesn’t? “Cold Call” presents this bonus episode from the podcast “Coaching Real Leaders,” where host and executive coach Muriel Wilkins works with an ambitious leader whose plan to drive growth is at risk because she hasn’t been able to get the alignment she needs from her boss. They explore what’s behind the resistance and how she can approach the relationship, and the strategy, differently. The conversation illustrates a key challenge at the heart of strategy execution: getting the people who need to support your idea on board.

With viewership of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in decline, the country’s Culture Minister must recommend a new funding model for the venerated public institution which will allow the broadcaster to succeed in an increasingly competitive media environment.

Harvard Business School senior lecturer Henry McGee and host Brian Kenny discuss the case, “The Future of the BBC: Public Ownership vs. Privatization,” and the different structures an institution like the BBC could have in order to operate in a financially sound and culturally impactful way.

Sometimes the only way to win is by finding the courage to lose. Cold Call presents a special episode from TED’s Fixable podcast. In it, the show’s hosts, Leadership Coach Anne Morriss and Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei, challenge leaders to “dare to be bad” in order to free up capacity to excel at more important things. They share insight on the power of a strategic “no,” the value of ruthless prioritization, and how Steve Jobs and Apple delivered breakthrough innovation by strategically underperforming. Frances also explains why you can’t always trust your own instincts, and Anne reflects on the lessons she learned in her early days of parenting.

AthenaHQ, a startup that helps brands monitor, protect, and optimize their visibility across conversational AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini was founded in 2025. The company, co-founded by Andrew Yan, built a platform that enables major consumer brands, B2B software companies, and marketing agencies to track their share of voice, correct factual errors in AI responses, and manage their reputation across generative answer engines.

In the case, “AthenaHQ: Building Brands for AI Search,” Yan faces a call with a global automaker after its newest vehicle has quietly vanished from chatbot recommendations. He must evaluate the platform’s expansion as he confronts core industry dilemmas: how AI disintermediates traditional marketing, who should own generative engine optimization (GEO) inside an organization, and how to prove value on an unattributable channel.

In this episode, Harvard Business School associate professor Julian De Freitas and AthenaHQ co-founder and CEO Andrew Yan join host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, exploring how marketers are navigating the new world of GEO, the so-called “dark funnel” of customer engagement, and the need for brand managers to optimize for brand sentiment and accuracy not just search rankings.

How do you scale innovation in a fragmented system you don’t fully control? That is the challenge Highland Electric Fleets faced as it worked to replace diesel school buses with electric vehicles across the United States. While Highland provided financing, infrastructure, and fleet operations, success depended on external partners, including manufacturers, utilities, and districts. Delays and disruptions forced the company to stay nimble and deliver under pressure.

In 2024, Mass General Brigham, the largest health system in Massachusetts, piloted an AI-powered ambient note-taking program among a subset of clinicians to address increasing rates of staff burnout and turnover —  largely driven by the administrative burden of clinical documentation in the electronic health records (EHR). The pilot program aimed to test AI tools which used natural language processing to record, transcribe, and summarize physician-patient encounters, reducing time spent on documentation and allowing physicians to focus more on patient care. Early results showed promising reductions in clinician burnout, intention to leave, and increased physician efficiency. But concerns about the technology, including the generation of inaccurate notes with errors or hallucinations, made physicians resistant to learn and adopt it into their workflows.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Susanna Gallani and host Brian Kenny discuss the challenges leadership at the health care organization anticipated as they considered scaling the AI technology responsibly in the case: The AI Scribe: Enhancing Physician Presence and Curbing Burnout at Mass General Brigham.

In early 2025, Thomas Graham, CEO of Metaphysic, a leading AI generative video company confronted fundamental questions about who should control digital identity in a world where AI could perfectly recreate human likeness. Founded in 2021, Metaphysic first rose to fame through viral deepfake videos. It achieved a significant milestone with “Here,” the first major film to use AI for de-aging actors, including Tom Hanks. Operating at the intersection of entertainment and ethics, Metaphysic had two revenue streams: high-end content creation for Hollywood studios and a platform allowing individuals to own and control their digital likeness. The case explores how Hollywood’s longstanding “separated rights” framework—ensuring creators maintain ownership of their work beyond contracted uses—provided a foundation for Metaphysic’s business model and the basis for creators to capture value from new uses of their talent with AI.

However, as AI increasingly codified expertise across sectors, from consulting to private equity, these protections do not extend; employers own workplace data by default. In such environments, when an individual’s expertise can be digitally captured, replicated, and monetized, the case examines who can capture value, and the pivotal role of claiming data rights in complex multi-party negotiations.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Zoe Cullen and host Brian Kenny explore the tensions between individual rights and commercial applications of AI and the central question of what protections must be forged today to ensure professionals in the future continue to contribute and be compensated in the case, Metaphysic AI: Rethinking the Value of Human Expertise.

In 2025, Harvard Art Museums considered using generative artificial intelligence in a marketing campaign to increase visitor engagement and membership. Looking to boost attendance and appeal to a younger audience base, and facing intensified competition for leisure time, the Museums’ marketing team explored animating a canonical artwork using AI-generated avatars as part of a digital campaign. While the approach promised novelty and attention, it raised internal concerns about brand authenticity, interpretive authority, donor relations, and reputational risk—particularly given broader cultural anxieties surrounding AI and the museums’ association with the Harvard brand.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Julian De Freitas and Harvard Art Museums Director of Marketing John Connolly join host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, Harvard Art Museums: When Art Meets Artificial Intelligence. They explore tensions between innovation and brand stewardship in cultural marketing, organizational barriers to new technology adoption, and the strategic use of emerging technologies in brand management.

In March 2024, The Atlantic announced a strategic content and product partnership with artificial intelligence giant OpenAI. OpenAI would license The Atlantic’s content to train its models and respond to user queries, while The Atlantic would receive a fee, privileged access to OpenAI’s technology, and “premium” positioning within the tech giant. At the time, over 70 similar deals had been struck between publishers and AI companies.

The Atlantic’s journalists, however, were incensed, concerned that partnering with OpenAI was “a devil’s bargain.” The New York Times had also just sued the tech giant for allegedly using 16 million pieces of the Times’ copyrighted content without permission to train its large language models. Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire owner of The Atlantic, had to consider what was in the magazine’s best financial interest and what impact a continued partnership could have on the magazine’s journalism—and more broadly on the ideas landscape as a whole. But, what responsibility did Powell Jobs have to protect creativity and expression? Was Jobs undermining The Atlantic’s reputation, or was she bringing a new business model to bear on an industry facing major headwinds?

Harvard Business School Professor Caroline Elkins joins host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “The Atlantic and OpenAI.” They explore the question, “Is AI creative?” and how the answer affects not only journalism as we know it, but considerations for whether we can harness AI to enter an age of increased creativity for humankind.