By 2014, Tencent Holdings Limited, headquartered in Shenzhen, China, had become one of the most innovative companies in Asia. It had created several leading Internet platforms to form China's largest Internet community. WeChat (or Weixin, as known to Chinese users) was one of the company's most popular mobile platforms, having grown to 200 million active users in the first two years after its launch in 2013. Shortly thereafter, WeChat rolled out a payment platform that sought to capitalize on its customer base across China. However, its president was concerned about how to expand WeChat Payment in the country's emerging mobile payment industry. Where was the next major opportunity? Tencent had to be highly creative in navigating the world's largest economy.
This technical note is a meta-analysis of some of the issues involving the management of virtual teams. Managing people who are geographically dispersed across time, space, and organizational boundaries requires team leaders who are able to communicate effectively and navigate interpersonal relationships. This requires an understanding of team dynamics, how to create a virtual team culture, and what works best when managing from a distance. The successful virtual tam leader knows what it takes to create and sustain high-performing teams, whether people are working in separate, remote locations or in the same corporate workplace.
When Dalian Wanda Group of China announced its plan to acquire the AMC Entertainment theatrical exhibition chain in the United States, many people in the U.S were mystified. Unlike China where theatrical exhibition was experiencing rapid growth, the U.S. market was viewed as mature, and rapidly changing technology was giving consumers a widening range of choices for movie viewing. AMC was owned by a group of private equity firms, and their pessimistic view of the industry influenced their strategies and investment decisions. AMC's management team had yet a different view on the prospects of the industry. Thus three present or potential stakeholders, all looking at the same data, had distinctly different views of future prospects. How could this be? The (B) case looks at AMC's performance in the year after the acquisition.
At the end of 2011, Fernando Lelo de Larrea (MBA 2004) and Federico Antoni (MBA 2004) decided to resign from their CEO positions in their respective mid-sized companies and start fundraising for their first early stage investment fund: Seed Innovation Trust 1. Given their lack of track record in venture capital, they decided to create a micro fund, the smallest, yet most institutional, venture capital fund possible consistent with their investment thesis. Founded in 2012, ALLVP raised the first institutional seed capital fund in Mexico to invest in innovative service-oriented, new companies. The investment thesis focused on service industries such as healthcare, financial services, and consumer internet that were experiencing high growth due to demographic and macro-economic trends, favorable non-market forces, the growing middle class and the availability of new technologies. Given the underdeveloped entrepreneurial ecosystem in Mexico, the founders established, along with the fund management vehicles, a Seed Accelerator Program, called Venture Institute that would feed the fund with high quality startups. This dual model proved key to creating a high value first portfolio and positioning ALLVP in the Mexican entrepreneurial ecosystem. Two years and twelve portfolio companies later, ALLVP raised a second, $40 million dollar (USD) fund focused on Series A and B rounds in Latin America. Given ALLVP's success, a new proactive public policy from Mexico's new government was launched and helped the seed capital industry grow from ALLVP as the first and only institutional fund in 2012 to more than a dozen funds in 2014.
By the late nineteenth century scale and managerial hierarchies had extended to several major industrial sectors of the U.S. economy. Although the precise mechanisms often varied, this process mainly involved horizontal integration, some form of legal or administrative centralization followed by vertical integration. Standard Oil represents the canonical example of this development. Standard Oil's history is also fully intertwined with the life and career of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), one of the most remarkable individuals to define the landscape of American business. Rockefeller's estimated $1.4 billion net worth in 1937 was equivalent to 1.5% of U.S. GDP. According to this metric he was (and still is) the richest individual in American business and economic history.
Muñoz Group, which supplied supermarket chains and food distribution chains around the world with fruit, flowers, juice and ice cream, was at a strategic crossroads in 2014. CEO Alvaro Muñoz had to choose the best way to achieve profit goals and provide his company with a sustainable competitive advantage. The company had already developed innovative citrus, grape and flower breeding units in efforts to keep its product pipeline on the cutting edge. The company also worked to integrate vertically-to own or control every viable piece of the supply chain-in an effort to manage the flower and produce businesses from plant to retailer. The company's stronghold was its UK and European markets, but it had expanded into North America and also eyed new opportunities in Asia. Muñoz had to decide where to focus his efforts against a backdrop of margin squeezes in the food business, competition for product from the developing world, ever more stringent quality, sustainability, and environmental standards from clients, and perennial hiring challenges.
This Note introduces the Module on Responsibilities to Customers taught in Leadership and Corporate Accountability, a required course in the Harvard Business School MBA program. The Note outlines the asymmetries inherent in the company-customer relationship and positions the economic, legal and ethical responsibilities of companies to their customers as ways of addressing these asymmetries.
Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao Zedong, Communist China's first leader, had left behind in 1978. The growth of markets had made China much wealthier, but also generated many social problems, including inequality, corruption, and social protests. This case discusses China's political and economic development in the 20th century to situate Xi's-and China's-contemporary challenges.
Multinational, multi-brand hotel corporations serve almost all segments of the market. They own hotels and work with other hotel owners through leases, management contracts and franchise agreements. In the hotel business it is widespread to receive contracts for management, but many well-known players use franchising agreements during their global expansion. In 2011, Hyatt Hotels Corporation has announced that its select-service brands are expanding internationally. Among other issues, the leadership of the corporation now needs to find answers for several questions: What modes of entry should be used in brand internationalization? How should new internationalization opportunities be pursued for the lower-category Hyatt Place while maintaining the company’s premium brand?
The Caribbean Information and Credit Rating Services (CariCRIS) cases depict the strategic dynamics of setting up a first-of-its-kind international venture by an Indian credit rating agency in an emerging market. The cases trace the institutional and market development challenges in the evolution of this international joint venture (IJV) in a multi-country setting in the Caribbean and the strategic dilemmas faced by the expatriate chief executive officer (CEO) in setting up the new venture by leveraging home-country experience. Case (A) focuses on the unfolding events and the business environment that define the strategic context for the IJV’s formation and up to a point in time when the management is poised to make critical market entry-related decisions. Also see case (B) 9B14M084.
This is a supplement to case (A) 9B14M082.<br><br>The CariCRIS cases depict the strategic dynamics and market entry challenges of setting up a first-of-its-kind venture by an Indian credit rating agency in a multi-country setting in the Caribbean. While Case (A) focuses on pre-market launch strategic dilemmas, Case (B) traces the continuing obstacles to the firm’s market development subsequent to its launch and the critical issues that confront the management team at a juncture when a change of leadership is imminent. The cases also seek to highlight legitimacy issues that could confront a start-up with dominant emerging-market credentials in entering another emerging, but geographically and culturally distant market.
In 2011, Sherry Hunt was a vice president and chief underwriter at CitiMortgage headquarters in the United States. For years she had been witnessing fraud, as the company bought billions of dollars in mortgage loans from external lenders that did not meet Citi credit policy and sold them to government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This resulted in Citi selling to GSEs such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pools of loans that were considerably defective and thus likely to default. Citi had also approved hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of defective mortgage files for U.S. Federal Housing Administration insurance. After reporting the mortgage defects in regular reports, notifying and working closely with her direct supervisor (who was subsequently asked to leave Citi after alerting the chairman of the board to these issues) to stop the purchase of defective loans, leaving anonymous tips on the FBI's and the Department of Housing and Urban Development's websites, and receiving threats from two of her superiors who demanded that she change the results of her quality control unit's reports, the shy and conflict-avoidant Hunt had to decide who she should tell about the fraud, and how. The case gives students the opportunity to recommend how Hunt should proceed based on their analysis of the stakeholders involved. To aid instructors, the case includes Kellogg-produced videos of Hunt-the only on-camera interviews she has ever given-explaining what happened after she reported the fraud to Citi HR and, later, the U.S. Department of Justice. Within the case, students are also briefly exposed to legislation and bodies pertinent to whistle-blowing in the United States, including the Dodd-Frank Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the SEC Office of the Whistleblower.
In January 2010, Benedict Clarke, general partner of a small real estate private equity venture, faced difficulty with one of his properties. When purchased in early 2007, Tulaberry Plaza was a thriving retail shopping center outside Orlando, Florida. The financial crisis and severe economic downturn forced Tulaberry's anchor tenant into bankruptcy and weakened the other tenants in the plaza. Clarke now faces pressures placed on him by his limited partners, who were shown rosy projections of the returns they would receive, and by his lender, who is presently taking most of the property's cash flow to satisfy required debt service. Clarke must devise a plan that presents the most logical and profitable way forward, while also justifying his actions to elicit the necessary support from the others involved in the transaction. The case asks students to make decisions from the perspective of Clarke, giving them an appreciation not only of the details of strategic decision-making in real estate leasing, but also of the interplay between lenders and equity partners when managing a commercial property in distress.
Microfinance is introduced into China in the 1990s. It had went through 3 phases since the beginning, namely the pilot phase when all Microfinance practices are sponsored by charity funds based on projects, the promotion phase when the government subsidized some regular financial organization and encouraged them to conduct Microfinance businesses, and the rapid development phase of commercial Microfinance companies when private capital is encouraged to enter Microfinance industry by a series of policies released by the government. CFPA Microfinance is the largest charity Microfinance Company concentrated on providing Microfinance services in the rural areas in China. It grew with the Microfinance industry in China, and experienced transformation from a charity-fund -relied NGO to a company that maintains sustainable development. Up till the end of November 2014, it covers 16 provinces, 140 counties, with 230,000 clients, and the balance of loans is 1,800,000,000 RMB. Farmers' Self-reliance Branch of CFPA Microfinance in Shangyi County was started in 2008, with a local condition of bad climate, small market capacity, and single-product economy. Soon after its opening, it had found the "Grameen-modeled" group-loan product promoted by the headquarters does not suit the local condition; it actively transferred to the individual-loan product model, and meanwhile provided value-added services. Finally, it maintained a unique place in the fierce competition in the local area, and kept zero default rate and zero overdue rate since its opening. However, in recent years, as private capital is encouraged to enter the Micro-finance industry, Shangyi branch is facing new challenges, meanwhile, the branch manager had found difficulties in complying with the rigid loan process for risk control enforced by the headquarter and meeting the local clients' needs. He believes this problem would even threaten the branch's business in the long run, and he needs a solution.
Joe Smith, senior director of merchandise management at Beautiful Bags (BB), was about to place a large order for the upcoming winter season. He had to decide how many pieces he should order of each product. But another big question whether BB should source the product from its domestic manufacturing facility, its Chinese suppliers, or some combination of the two given the timing needs, labor costs, minimum order requirements, and BB's expanding product assortment?
The managing director, founder and promoter of Manjushree Technopak Limited, based in Bangalore, India, had exploited various market opportunities to establish his third venture, which over 20 years had become the largest manufacturer of polyethylene terephthalate bottles and preforms in Southeast Asia. His brother and sons had also joined the company, which was listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and were now co-directors under his leadership. By 2013, the company was ready to expand to meet the growing demand for plastic containers in the food, beverage, health care and pharmaceutical industries and to counter its competition. It needed to convey a clear vision to all its stakeholders. Growth also meant the need for clarity in leadership roles and a sound internal governance structure. The managing director had three choices: 1) continue the status quo with himself as head of the company; 2) step aside and allow his professionally qualified sons to step up to the company leadership; or, 3) hire a professional from the corporate world as a new chief executive officer.
Kellogg’s is exploring the possibility of launching gluten-free Corn Flakes in India. The company must examine the gluten-free market in India and explore strategies for entering this market. Kellogg’s must assess its competitors in India’s growing breakfast cereal market, where a growing economy and increasing health awareness is pushing Indian consumers to look for healthier options. Questions remain whether Kellogg’s should enter the promising gluten-free segment to take advantage of this potential opportunity in India, consumers’ evolving preferences and the current industry trends.
In July 2001, the newly elected president of the board of directors at Dovercourt Recreation Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, faces a dilemma. The facility’s executive director has suggested that in light of a poor performance review, his only option might be to resign. He is revered by his staff and the community for his passionate advocacy of outreach to disadvantaged and marginalized populations and has a successful track record in running the organization and popularizing its programs throughout the city. However, he is under great stress because his informal management style does not fit well with the board’s need for specific monthly accounting. The new president was recruited to improve unproductive board meetings, but he has quickly realized the root issue is the escalating tension between the executive director and the board. Confident that he can use his consulting background to deliver a solution to the conflict that threatens to undermine the centre’s strong reputation, he needs a plan and must act on it decisively and immediately.