How would this business case go over at Harvard?

As the country was gripped with the now quaint fears of Y2K and pondered the coming of the third millenium, on the Southside of Chicago, on streets largely ignored, Big Cat had more practical problems. For the last six years he had been the leader of the Black Kings, assuming leadership after the arrest of the former leader, Cornelius Desmond, who died in jail and did not appoint his successor. The Black Kings was one of Chicago's feared gangs, and now it was a gang in trouble. Big Cat had anywhere from 150 to 200 gang members who answered to him, but he also had to answer to them. He had to keep them happy, keep them paid, and keep them in line. But all this took money, and the money was not coming in as easily as it had just a few years ago, when crack users saturated the area and supported the gang's drug trafficking enterprise. Unlike the past, when the gang was a social center and its leaders sponsored gang parties, gambling, basketball parties, and other nondelinquent activities for its members, Big Cat's men expected gang membership to deliver the benefits of corporate position: namely, a steady income and a mobility path to greater future down the road.

Big Cat knew that the gang had to alter its entrepreneurial mien if he was to deliver on the organization's promise to its rank and file. Although the Black Kings had a monopoly over crack cocaine in the community, this was a faltering economic sector.

So as leader of a gang in Chicago, how would you diversify your money-making activities beyond the softening crack cocaine market and provide benefits to your workforce? What parallels can you draw to the experiences of large corporations like GM or Walmart?

Source: Venkatesh, Sudhir. Off the Books. Harvard University Press, 2006.