Fortuga Artisans Leadership Case Study Analysis: How to Complete All Three Milestones and the Final Presentation
A component-by-component guide to the leadership case study project — how to identify and connect problems to course theory in Milestone One, evaluate and recommend strategies in Milestone Two, build an assessment plan in Milestone Three, and structure a 14-slide professional presentation that covers all critical elements with APA citations.
The Fortuga Artisans leadership case study analysis is one of the more demanding course projects in a leadership curriculum because it requires four connected deliverables built on the same case — three milestone papers and a final professional presentation. Students lose marks on this project in predictable ways: Milestone One describes problems without connecting them to leadership theory; Milestone Two recommends strategies without defending why they fit the context; Milestone Three builds an assessment plan so generic it could apply to any organization; and the final presentation slides restate the papers as prose paragraphs rather than presenting findings as a consultant would. This guide walks through every deliverable — what each one requires, what analytical work each section demands, and what the grading criteria are actually looking for.
This guide explains how to approach each milestone and the final presentation. It does not complete the analysis for you. The arguments, applications of theory, and recommendations must come from your reading of the Fortuga Artisans case study and the leadership theories and concepts covered in your specific course. Use this guide to understand the structure of each deliverable, the analytical moves required at each stage, and the common errors that reduce marks at each submission point.
What This Guide Covers
Project Structure and How the Deliverables Connect
The project is built as a layered analysis. Each milestone builds directly on the previous one, and the final presentation synthesizes all three. Understanding the dependency before you begin prevents the most common structural error: treating each milestone as a standalone paper rather than as a chapter in a single cumulative argument.
The assignment explicitly states: “Please use the same information from the other 3 papers.” This means you are not conducting a new analysis for the presentation — you are translating the analysis from your three milestone papers into a professional presentation format. The work happens in the milestone papers. The presentation organizes, visualizes, and communicates that work to an audience. If your milestone papers are weak, the presentation will be weak. Complete the milestones with enough depth that the presentation has substantive content to draw from.
How to Read the Case Study Before Writing
Every deliverable in this project requires you to cite specific evidence from the Fortuga Artisans case — “specific examples” are required in Milestone One, and the Leadership Strategies: Evaluation section explicitly asks what evidence supports your reasoning. Reading the case once and writing immediately produces analysis that is too abstract to satisfy these requirements. A structured reading approach produces the concrete case evidence you need.
First Pass: Identify Facts
Read the full case without taking notes, building a mental map of who the key figures are, what decisions were made, what the organizational structure looks like, and what outcomes are described. Do not analyze yet — just absorb the narrative.
Second Pass: Tag Problems
Re-read and mark every place the case describes a leadership failure, organizational tension, employee response issue, or strategic misalignment. For each mark, note the specific page or passage and write a one-sentence description of the problem it illustrates.
Third Pass: Map to Theory
For each problem you tagged, ask: which leadership theory or concept from my course materials does this connect to? Write the theory name next to the case evidence. This third pass is what makes Milestone One an analysis rather than a case summary.
Keep a Case Evidence Log Before You Write Anything
Before drafting any milestone, create a simple two-column document: left column lists specific case evidence (with location markers), right column lists the leadership principle or theory it connects to. This log is the raw material for all three milestone papers and the final presentation. Having it prepared means you will never struggle to find an example — and it ensures your analysis stays grounded in the case rather than drifting into general leadership commentary.
Milestone One: Problems and Issues
MILESTONE 1 — 2 PAGES — APA FORMATMilestone One requires two distinct tasks: establishing leadership context and illustrating problems. Students who conflate them — writing a narrative of what happened in the case without separating context from problem analysis — produce papers that are descriptive rather than analytical. The rubric rewards clear identification of problems with specific case evidence and explicit connection to course leadership principles.
Part 1: Establishing Leadership Context
Before identifying problems, you must establish what leadership style, approach, and strategy are in operation at Fortuga Artisans. This is not a summary of what happened — it is a classification of the leadership approach using the frameworks from your course. Does the leadership reflect a transactional or transformational style? Is it servant leadership, situational leadership, or another approach? What does the case evidence tell you about how leaders at Fortuga conceptualize their role and relate to employees?
This context section is typically one paragraph — enough to orient the reader to the leadership environment before the problem analysis begins. It sets up the problems: the problems are problems partly because of this leadership context.
Part 2: Illustrating Problems with Specific Examples
Each problem you identify must be illustrated with a specific example from the case — not a paraphrase of the case’s general situation but a particular incident, decision, or dynamic described in the text. Then connect that example to a course principle: name the leadership concept it violates or exemplifies, explain briefly what that concept predicts, and show how the case evidence confirms or complicates it.
A two-page paper has room for three to four well-developed problems. Do not try to cover every issue in the case — select the most significant leadership problems and develop each one with both case evidence and theoretical grounding.
[Case Summary — Does Not Meet Expectations] Fortuga Artisans experienced problems with employee morale. The leadership team made decisions without consulting employees, and workers were unhappy with the changes. This created a difficult environment for everyone involved.
[Problem Analysis — Direction to Aim For] A central leadership problem in the Fortuga Artisans case is the absence of participative decision-making during [specific decision or change described in the case]. When employees were not included in the decision process, the result was [specific employee response described in the case]. This pattern is consistent with what transformational leadership theory identifies as a failure of individualized consideration — the leader’s inability or unwillingness to recognize followers as active contributors to organizational problem-solving, not passive recipients of decisions (Bass & Riggio, 2006). The consequence, as the case illustrates, was [specific outcome], which directly undermined organizational cohesion at a critical growth stage.
The analysis version names a specific problem, cites a specific case moment, names the leadership theory, explains what the theory predicts, and connects it to a specific consequence. Every sentence does analytical work.
Connecting Case Problems to Leadership Theory
The connection between case evidence and course theory is where most Milestone One papers fall short. The assignment requires problems to be connected to “leadership style, approach, and strategy” — which means naming the theoretical framework, not just using leadership vocabulary loosely. The following frameworks are commonly applied in case analyses of this type and are likely covered in your course materials. Use those your course specifically addresses.
| Leadership Framework | What It Explains in a Case | What Case Evidence to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Transformational Leadership | Whether leaders inspire change through vision, motivation, and individualized attention — or rely on transactional exchange without inspiring higher-order commitment | How leaders communicate change, whether employees are motivated by purpose or only by incentives, whether leaders model the values they expect from others |
| Situational Leadership (Hersey & Blanchard) | Whether leadership style is matched to employee readiness and task complexity — or whether one style is applied uniformly regardless of context | How leaders respond to different employees or situations, whether direction vs. support ratios shift appropriately, evidence of mismatched leadership style for a given task |
| Change Management Frameworks (e.g., Kotter’s 8-Step) | Whether change was implemented with urgency communication, coalition building, vision clarity, and reinforcement — or whether steps were skipped | How change was introduced, who was involved in planning it, whether a clear vision was communicated, how resistance was handled |
| Servant Leadership | Whether leaders prioritize employee growth and well-being as a prerequisite for organizational performance — or subordinate employee needs to organizational targets | How leaders respond to employee concerns, whether development and support are built into the leadership model, evidence of leader-as-resource vs. leader-as-authority |
| Organizational Culture and Leadership | Whether leadership behaviors reinforce a healthy, values-aligned culture — or create cultural misalignment between stated values and lived organizational experience | Gaps between organizational mission or stated values and actual decisions, how new employees are socialized, whether the culture supports or undermines the strategy |
Milestone Two: Leadership Strategy
MILESTONE 2 — 3 PAGES — APA FORMATMilestone Two is the analytical and prescriptive core of the project. It requires two distinct intellectual tasks: evaluating the leadership strategies already employed in the case using four specific lenses, and selecting and defending additional strategies you recommend. Both tasks require more than description — you must defend your evaluation and choices, which means building arguments grounded in case evidence and course theory, not just stating positions.
The Four Evaluation Lenses: Flexibility, Sustainability, Change Management, and Organizational Goals
The critical elements section names four specific dimensions on which you must evaluate Fortuga Artisans’ leadership strategies. Each is a separate analytical question, and each requires case-specific evidence — not general claims about what good leadership looks like. The rubric asks for evidence for the basis of your reasoning on every dimension.
Flexibility
To what extent does the leadership strategy reflect flexibility? Flexibility in leadership means adapting style, approach, and decisions to changing conditions, different employee needs, and evolving organizational contexts. Identify specific moments in the case where the leadership either demonstrated flexibility — adjusting to new information, responding differently to different employees or teams — or failed to, applying a fixed approach despite signals that adaptation was needed. Your analysis must include evidence: what specifically did leaders do or not do, and what does the course framework for flexible leadership tell you about what that evidence means?
Sustainability
Does the leadership strategy promote sustainability? In leadership contexts, sustainability refers to whether the approach creates conditions for long-term organizational health — developing people, building culture, managing resources responsibly, and preventing burnout or turnover. Look for evidence in the case of whether leadership decisions were oriented toward short-term results at the expense of long-term capacity, or whether they invested in the conditions that make continued performance possible. Connect your assessment to your course materials on sustainable leadership or related frameworks.
Change Management
Does the leadership strategy foster effective change management? This is the most theoretically rich dimension to evaluate because change management has well-documented frameworks — Kotter’s eight steps, Lewin’s unfreeze-change-refreeze model, ADKAR — that provide specific criteria against which the case can be assessed. Identify the changes Fortuga Artisans implemented or attempted, assess which change management steps were followed and which were skipped or mishandled, and use the framework your course covers to defend your assessment. This section should be more than “change was handled poorly” — it should specify which aspects of change management were deficient and why.
Organizational Goals
Does the leadership strategy further organizational goals? This dimension requires you to identify what Fortuga Artisans’ organizational goals are — which the case should make clear — and then assess whether the leadership behaviors and strategies in the case are aligned with those goals. Give examples. A leadership strategy that generates short-term productivity while creating attrition, conflict, or cultural damage may appear to advance goals in the near term while actually undermining them. Your analysis should address both the direct and indirect effects of the leadership strategy on organizational goal attainment.
Selecting and Defending Recommended Strategies
The second half of Milestone Two asks you to identify the leadership problems from the case and select appropriate, innovative leadership styles, approaches, and strategies to address them. The critical elements require you to evaluate both appropriateness and innovation — two distinct criteria that your selection must satisfy.
Appropriateness: Why This Strategy for This Problem
Appropriateness means the strategy fits the specific problem, the specific organizational context, and the specific population of employees described in the case. A strategy that works well for a large bureaucratic organization may be entirely inappropriate for a small artisan company with a particular cultural identity. For each recommended strategy, explain what problem it addresses, why it is suited to Fortuga Artisans’ specific context, and what course framework supports the match between this strategy and this type of problem. The appropriateness argument must be specific — not “transformational leadership is appropriate” but “transformational leadership’s emphasis on individualized consideration addresses the specific problem of [named problem] because [reason grounded in case evidence].”
Innovation: What Makes a Strategy Innovative Here
The critical elements ask whether the strategies are innovative and why — or why not. Innovation in leadership strategy does not mean unprecedented or experimental. It means applying approaches in ways that are novel relative to the existing practices in the case, that introduce new thinking about the leadership challenges present, or that combine established frameworks in ways that produce better outcomes than the current approach. If you recommend a standard leadership approach (servant leadership, coaching leadership), explain what is innovative about its application in this specific context — how it differs from what Fortuga Artisans has done, and what new value it introduces.
The assignment uses the word “defend” — not “describe” or “explain.” A defense requires you to anticipate counter-arguments and address them, or to provide evidence strong enough that the position can withstand scrutiny. When you recommend a strategy, a defense means: here is why this strategy is appropriate, here is the evidence base supporting it, here is why an alternative approach would be less effective in this specific context. Recommendations without defense are preferences; recommendations with defense are professional analytical positions. APA-cited course resources and peer-reviewed literature are the evidence base for your defense.
Milestone Three: Assessment Plan
MILESTONE 3 — 3 PAGES — APA FORMATMilestone Three shifts from diagnosis and prescription to evaluation design. You are now designing a plan that would allow Fortuga Artisans to determine whether the leadership strategies — both those already employed and those you recommended — are actually working. The assessment plan must address what to measure, how to measure it, how to ensure the measurements are valid and reliable, and how results should be interpreted and acted upon.
The most common error in Milestone Three is writing an assessment plan that is too generic — a plan that could be submitted for any organization’s leadership evaluation without any changes. The rubric rewards specificity: the measures you identify should be tied to the specific outcomes the Fortuga Artisans strategies are designed to produce, and the data collection methods should reflect the specific organizational context and employee population described in the case.
Employee Feedback and Performance Metrics
The assessment plan must incorporate both employee feedback (qualitative or survey-based input from the workforce) and performance metrics (quantitative organizational data). These two data streams address different questions and require different collection methods. A plan that only addresses one of the two does not meet the critical elements.
What to Include for Each Data Stream
Employee Feedback
- Engagement surveys: Structured surveys measuring employee satisfaction, sense of purpose, trust in leadership, and perception of communication quality. Administer at baseline and at defined intervals post-implementation. Identify specific constructs to measure that connect to the leadership strategies you recommended — if you recommended servant leadership, measure perceptions of leader support and employee growth opportunities specifically.
- 360-degree feedback: Multi-source feedback from subordinates, peers, and supervisors on leadership behaviors. Particularly useful for assessing whether leaders are demonstrating the specific behaviors associated with the strategies you recommended. Specify which leadership behaviors will be rated and by whom.
- Focus groups or structured interviews: Qualitative data on employee experience of leadership changes. Useful for surfacing themes and nuances that surveys cannot capture. Specify the format, who will conduct them, and how data will be analyzed.
Performance Metrics
- Productivity and output data: Measures connected to the organizational goals you identified in Milestone Two. If Fortuga Artisans has production targets, sales benchmarks, or quality standards, these are the metrics. Track before and after strategy implementation.
- Turnover and retention rates: Particularly relevant if the leadership problems identified in Milestone One included disengagement, attrition, or morale issues. Track voluntary turnover rates quarterly and compare to pre-intervention baseline.
- Absenteeism rates: A proxy measure for engagement and organizational health. Significant shifts in absence patterns can signal changes in workforce experience that precede turnover or performance decline.
- Goal attainment rates: Whether teams and individuals are meeting performance targets. Track both the rate of goal achievement and the quality of goal-setting conversations between leaders and employees — a proxy for the quality of the leadership relationship.
Validity, Reliability, and Data Interpretation
The critical elements specifically require you to address how measurement will ensure validity and reliability. These are technical measurement concepts that must be applied concretely to your specific assessment plan — not defined in the abstract.
Ensuring Validity
Validity means your measures actually capture what they are intended to capture. For employee surveys, validity is threatened when questions are ambiguous, culturally biased, or measuring a different construct than intended. In your assessment plan, address validity by specifying that you will use established, validated survey instruments rather than ad hoc questions — and cite the instruments you recommend. For example, if you plan to use an engagement survey, name a validated instrument (Gallup Q12, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale) and note that its content validity has been established through research. For performance metrics, validity is threatened when proxy measures are used as if they directly measured the target construct — explain why the metrics you chose are valid indicators of the leadership outcomes you are assessing.
Ensuring Reliability
Reliability means measurements are consistent across time, administrators, and conditions. For survey data, reliability requires standardized administration procedures — the same survey delivered in the same format, with the same instructions, under similar conditions — so that differences in scores reflect real changes rather than administration variation. For performance metrics, reliability requires consistent data collection practices: the same operational definitions applied to the same data sources at each measurement point. In your assessment plan, specify the standardization procedures that will ensure reliable measurement. Name the time intervals at which data will be collected, the administrator responsible for data collection, and the procedures for handling missing data or inconsistent reporting.
Data Interpretation and Future Actions
The assessment plan is not complete without specifying how results will be interpreted and what actions they will trigger. Define in advance what constitutes evidence that a strategy is working — not just “improvement” but a specific threshold: a 10-point increase in engagement score, a 15% reduction in voluntary turnover, a statistically significant change in goal attainment rates. Specify who will review the data (a leadership team, an external consultant, HR), how often formal reviews will occur, and what decision rules will guide action. If engagement scores decline despite strategy implementation, what happens? If a metric shows no change after two quarters, what triggers a strategy modification? These decision rules are what distinguish a real assessment plan from a measurement checklist.
The Final Presentation: Structure and Slide Design
FINAL PRESENTATION — 14+ SLIDES — APA CITATIONSThe final presentation requires a minimum of 14 slides, including an opening and closing slide. It presents findings and recommendations as a consultant would — which means the presentation is designed for a specific audience (company leadership at Fortuga Artisans), uses professional visual formatting, and communicates key findings with enough clarity and specificity that the audience can act on them.
The most common error in the final presentation is converting the milestone papers into prose slides — pasting or lightly editing paper paragraphs into text boxes. This produces slides that are difficult to read, fail to communicate findings effectively, and do not reflect the professional presentation standard the assignment requires. Each slide should make one main point, support it with a specific evidence item or visual element, and connect to the overall argument of the presentation.
14-Slide Map for the Presentation
The following slide structure covers all critical elements required by the assignment and maps directly to the content from all three milestone papers. Each slide description identifies what the slide presents, what content from your milestones to draw from, and what form the content should take on the slide.
The 14-slide minimum is a floor, not a ceiling. If the change management evaluation is particularly complex, give it a dedicated slide. If you have four or five recommended strategies, each with a specific defense, one slide for all of them will be too crowded — split to two. The map above gives you the minimum viable structure; add slides wherever the content requires more space to communicate clearly. What matters is that every critical element from the assignment prompt is addressed somewhere in the presentation, and that the presentation reads as a coherent, consultant-quality analysis — not a collection of disconnected slides.
Where Most Submissions Lose Marks
Milestone One Describes the Case Instead of Analyzing It
Retelling the Fortuga Artisans narrative in chronological order and labeling the events as “problems” without applying leadership theory to explain why they are problems and what specific course principles they illustrate. Description is not analysis — and the assignment explicitly requires problems to be connected to course principles, not just identified.
Instead
For each problem, use a consistent analytical structure: name the problem, cite the specific case evidence, name the leadership theory or concept that classifies it as a problem, explain briefly what that theory predicts about this situation, and state what the case evidence confirms. That structure — problem → evidence → theory → connection — produces analysis, not description.
Milestone Two Evaluates Without Evidence
“The leadership strategy lacked flexibility because good leaders need to adapt to changing conditions.” This claim applies to every organization and provides no case-specific evidence. The rubric asks for evidence for the basis of your reasoning — which means the evidence must come from the Fortuga Artisans case, not from general leadership principles.
Instead
For each evaluation dimension, identify a specific moment in the case that provides evidence for your assessment. State what the evidence shows, then explain what a flexible (or sustainable, or change-ready) leadership strategy would have looked like differently in that moment. The contrast between what happened and what the framework would predict is what makes the evaluation analytical rather than declarative.
Milestone Three Assessment Plan Is Generic
“We will survey employees and look at performance data to see if the strategies worked.” No specific instruments named. No measures tied to the specific outcomes the recommended strategies are designed to produce. No validity or reliability procedures specified. No decision rules for what happens when results come in.
Instead
Every element of the assessment plan must be specific to Fortuga Artisans’ context and tied to the specific strategies from Milestone Two. Name the instruments. Set the measurement intervals. Define the success thresholds in advance. Specify who reviews results and what decisions follow from different result patterns. A plan specific enough to be implemented earns full marks; a generic template does not.
Presentation Slides Are Prose Paragraphs
Pasting or minimally editing paper paragraphs into slide text boxes. Slides with five or six full sentences per bullet point. Dense text that requires the audience to read the slide rather than listen to the presenter. This is the most visible sign that a student has converted a paper into a presentation rather than creating a presentation from scratch.
Instead
Each slide makes one main point and supports it with no more than five to six bullet points of seven words or fewer each. The slide carries the headline — the presenter’s spoken narrative carries the elaboration. If you cannot express a slide’s main point in a clear six-word title and three supporting bullet points, the slide is trying to do too much. Split it or cut content.
Missing APA Citations in the Presentation
The assignment explicitly requires all resources used to support the presentation to be properly cited in APA format. Presenting findings without in-slide source indicators, or including a references slide that cites different sources than those actually used in the presentation content, are both citation errors that affect the professionalism of the deliverable.
Instead
Include an abbreviated in-slide citation (Author, Year) on any slide where you state a fact, quote a definition, or reference a framework from the literature. Compile all full references on the closing references slide. The standard is the same as in the papers: every claim that comes from a source requires attribution at the point where it appears.
- Milestone One: 2 pages, leadership context established, each problem illustrated with specific case evidence and connected to a named course principle, APA citations and reference list
- Milestone Two: 3 pages, all four evaluation lenses addressed with case evidence, recommended strategies named and defended for both appropriateness and innovation, APA citations
- Milestone Three: 3 pages, employee feedback and performance metrics both addressed, specific instruments or measures named, validity and reliability procedures specified, decision rules for data interpretation included, APA citations
- Final Presentation: minimum 14 slides, opening slide and closing/references slide both present
- All critical elements from the assignment prompt covered somewhere in the presentation
- Slides make one point each — no prose paragraphs on slides
- In-slide APA citations on any slide drawing from external sources
- Full reference list on the closing slide in APA format
- Presentation reads as a consultant’s deliverable — findings stated as conclusions, not as questions or narratives
- Content in the presentation is consistent with and drawn from the three milestone papers
Frequently Asked Questions
The Research Foundation: Why Case Study Analysis Is the Standard Method for Applied Leadership Learning
Leadership case study analysis has been the dominant pedagogy in applied management and leadership education for over a century — pioneered at Harvard Business School and adopted across MBA, leadership, and organizational behavior curricula worldwide. The method works because leadership is fundamentally a situated practice: the theoretical frameworks that explain leadership behaviors only become analytically useful when applied to concrete organizational situations where the complexity, ambiguity, and competing pressures of real organizations are present.
The Harvard Business School case method — the foundational framework behind most leadership case study assignments — treats the case not as a problem to be solved but as a situation to be analyzed, interpreted, and responded to using multiple theoretical lenses simultaneously. That is exactly what this project asks you to do: apply flexibility, sustainability, change management, and organizational alignment frameworks to the same case simultaneously, recognizing that the organization’s challenges cannot be fully explained by any single theory but require an integrated analysis across frameworks.
Understanding this pedagogical context helps you approach the project correctly. The goal is not to find the right answer about what Fortuga Artisans should have done — it is to demonstrate that you can identify leadership problems, apply the relevant course frameworks to analyze them, defend a position about appropriate strategies, and design an evaluation plan to determine whether those strategies are working. Each of those capabilities is what the grading criteria are assessing, and each is a transferable professional skill that the assignment is designed to develop.
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