Quintiles Transnational Holdings Inc., the largest global provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services, grew its revenue at a CAGR of 7.3% and EBITDA at 13.9% between 2008 and 2012. The case is set in December 2012-April 2013, when the majority of the firm was owned by founder Dennis Gillings and four private equity firms (Bain Capital, TPG Capital, 3i Capital and Temasek Life Sciences) after it was taken private in a management-led buyout in 2003 and a subsequent buyout in 2008. Five years after the second buyout, the private equity firm owners were looking to monetize their positions and considered different strategic alternatives: M&A sale to strategic or financial buyers, IPO, or capital restructuring through special dividends. Students will step into the role of an associate at the lead investment bank working with Quintiles. They must consider the case information and determine an IPO strategy, process, potential conflicts, and valuation.

In 2005, Victorinox, the original producer of the Swiss Army Knife, acquired Wenger, including the fragrance label "Swiss Army Fragrance." The acquisition of Wenger allowed Victorinox to become the only producer of the famous Swiss Army Knife as well as the key player in Swiss Army watches. Victorinox's head of marketing was asked to design a business strategy that would successfully allow the company to enter the fragrance industry. How should Victorinox diversify into the fragrance business? Should it aim to transfer its existing brand attributes to fragrance products? Or should it adopt a strategy that would include the use of another brand to market the perfumes? The head of marketing had to present a plan to the CEO of Victorinox on how best to brand and position the product, and how to compete in the fragrance industry.

Sidhi was a cooperative society aimed at rehabilitating destitute tribal women living in one of the poorest states in India. Most of these women were illiterate or had only primary education. A professionally educated non-tribal social entrepreneur has helped these women to set up cottage industries and earn a decent living. Because of her own health concerns, this social entrepreneur needs to resign. Her successor needs to be a woman who can arrange for funding, coordinate the funding and training, and liaise with both the government authorities and the vendors. The challenge is to either identify such a leader among the illiterate women or to recruit an outsider, who will understand Sidhi's needs and be accepted by the Sidhi membership.

An entrepreneur has a venture idea that he believes can be successful. After his family's farm was sold to a company, the entrepreneur was contacted by the new owners and asked for help finding farmers to rent the land. This request formed the seed of his idea that a website could be used to link farmers with landowners for the purpose of land rental. Following an invitation to submit an application to a local business pitch competition, the entrepreneur faces many questions about what steps he should take to launch the business, specifically what he should do, how he should do it and when and why he should take these actions. The entrepreneur is also challenged to act entrepreneurial in the face of uncertainty.

This case provides financial statement data for nine companies from nine different industries from Standard & Poor's Capital IQ Net Advantage financial database. Using knowledge of the industries' financial characteristics and financial ratios, the case asks students to match each of the nine financial statement data sets to an appropriate industry. The case provides common-sized income statements (all items scaled by revenues), common-size balance sheets (all items scaled by total assets), and selected financial ratios for the nine companies. All data were averaged over three years 2011-2013 to remove the influence of one-time items and outliers.

The financial manager at the medical devices start-up Health Haven had to develop a revenue forecast that was aggressive enough to meet required performance targets, but realistic enough to be honest and achievable given a reduced budget. Hunt wanted to "lead from the middle" of his organization by providing an acceptable performance forecast on which Haven could deliver. This case is supported by a teaching note for instructors which contains links to supplemental video for students.

The financial manager at the medical devices start-up Health Haven had to work fast to break down communication barriers and gain advice from stakeholders. He needed to provide a comprehensive budget plan that met the majority of stakeholders' requests. Top of mind was taking steps to rebuild the trust he knew that almost all the stakeholders had lost.

In late 2005, Risk Control Strategies, a canine training security company in Islamabad, Pakistan was formed. To ensure that the company was a class apart in security provision, the company founder designed an induction procedure based on employee referrals followed by a thorough two-month training program that encompassed both pure theory and practical dog-handling sessions. The extensive training increased employees' market value, and they often left for higher salaries in other companies, without considering the added compensations Risk Control Strategies offered, such as medical benefits, free accommodation and basic health and education coverage for their families. The hiring process also contributed to the turnover; many of the friends and relatives who were given references by current employees came from villages and often returned to help their families with harvests. The founder needed to address the problem of employee retention before considering the future expansion of the company.

In late 2005, Risk Control Strategies, a canine training security company in Islamabad, Pakistan was formed. To ensure that the company was a class apart in security provision, the company founder designed an induction procedure based on employee referrals followed by a thorough two-month training program that encompassed both pure theory and practical dog-handling sessions. The extensive training increased employees’ market value, and they often left for higher salaries in other companies, without considering the added compensations Risk Control Strategies offered, such as medical benefits, free accommodation and basic health and education coverage for their families. The hiring process also contributed to the turnover; many of the friends and relatives who were given references by current employees came from villages and often returned to help their families with harvests. The founder needed to address the problem of employee retention before considering the future expansion of the company.

Lawrence Coburn and Pankaj Prasad, co-founders of the event solution startup DoubleDutch, have to make a significant decision about their young company's sales function. DoubleDutch's key product was a mobile application (app) and event management platform that customers could use to better engage and connect with their event participants (e.g. attendees at a conference, employees at a quarterly sales meeting), and also to obtain detailed information from these participants to deliver a better future experience, understand how the event was received, and receive large amounts of valuable data. The company was growing quickly and rapidly adding new customers, but Coburn and Prasad wanted to make sure that in the drive to add new customers, existing clients whose contracts were expiring were not "slipping through the cracks" when it came time to renew. But who within the company should be responsible for renewals? Sales? The customer success team that helped customers develop and deploy the product? Or an entirely new team dedicated solely to renewals?

Napalm is one of the most destructive weapons ever to be invented. Yet, at its original inception it was nothing more than a technical challenge, and it was never intended to be used in indiscriminate antipersonnel warfare. The pathway of its development by a Harvard research scientist to its use in flamethrowers by U.S. ground troops in World War Two, and as an incendiary device during the Vietnam War (1959-75) was unanticipated. Many of the early technical challenges associated with Napalm were solved by experimentation under the guidance of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), created to coordinate scientific research into the problems of modern warfare. Because the government needed private contractors to manufacture Napalm, it turned to several companies with experience in chemicals manufacturing. One in particular - The Dow Chemical Company - bore the brunt of the moral opprobrium association with the production of Napalm.

The leadership team of Atlantis Paradise Island, under new ownership, decided that better alignment of the core values with the vision and mission statement would create a more compelling and consistent organizational narrative that would redouble employee commitment to Atlantis' ultimate success. They hoped that rethinking the core values would help them unleash the full transformative potential of their vision and mission.

This article investigates the role of Facebook in the establishment of relationships between brands and their fans, extending the link between relationship marketing and online consumer behavior. We explore what drives a user to connect with a brand profile on Facebook, to participate and interact with the community, and to share content published by brands on their own personal walls. To understand this relationship, we employed both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. The qualitative study was based on in-depth interviews of online marketing specialists and on a focus group comprised of Facebook users who were brand followers. The quantitative study was based on a structured questionnaire, which gathered responses from 650 Facebook brand followers. Results show that while Facebook users are willing to connect to brands on Facebook, they do not seem to interact or to frequently share brand content themselves. As a consequence, brands must strategize to establish a relationship with their brand profile fans.

Changes in consumer behavior require firms to rethink their marketing strategies in the digital domain. Currently, a significant portion of the associated research is focused more on the customer than on the firm. To redress this shortcoming, this study adopts the perspective of the firm to facilitate an understanding of digital marketing and social media usage as well as its benefits and inhibitors. The second generation of Internet-based applications enhances marketing efforts by allowing firms to implement innovative forms of communication and co-create content with their customers. Based on a survey of marketing managers, this article shows that firms face internal and external pressures to adopt a digital presence in social media platforms. Firms' digital marketing engagement can be categorized according to perceived benefits and digital marketing usage. To improve digital marketing engagement, marketers must focus on relationship-based interactions with their customers. This article demonstrates how some firms are already accomplishing just that.

Companies' escalating investment in social media--in particular, in Facebook--has become reality. However, most firms still do not see social networks as a vehicle for cultivating and winning customer loyalty, but rather as a resource for creating brand awareness. In this article, we offer a different view. By examining fans and non-fans of the Zara brand on Facebook, we discovered that Facebook enhances the relations that increase loyalty via trust, customer satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment. Our results revealed that these relations are stronger for fans of the brand than for non-fans, and suggest that customer satisfaction is the strongest determinant of loyalty. This indicates a new opportunity for marketing managers to achieve customer loyalty: Facebook.

The social media space has become a common place for communication, networking, and content sharing. Many companies seek marketing and business opportunities via these platforms. However, the link between resources generated from these sites and business performance remains largely unexploited. Both managers and financial advisors can profit from the lessons learned in this study. We conceptualize four channels by which social media impacts financial, operational, and corporate social performance: social capital, customers' revealed preferences, social marketing, and social corporate networking. An empirical test of our framework shows that 'followers' and 'likes' positively influence a firm's share value, but only after a critical mass of followers is attained. Our estimates suggest that Twitter is a more powerful tool to enhance business performance than Facebook.

Businesses have traditionally operated under a brick-and-mortar strategy, paying little attention to the electronic retail channel. Now, though, increasing competitive pressures and Web technologies as an information source necessitate that managers adopt an integrated click-and-mortar strategy. With differing levels of success, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have invested in their own websites to promote their online presence. However, the recent power of information intermediaries makes it difficult for companies to attract consumers solely through their own webpages. As a result, companies are being forced to adapt their online strategies to increase customer attraction; a proper use of backlinks and infomediaries can accomplish this at relatively low cost. This article traces the emergence of infomediaries and backlinks and the mechanics of their operation, offering managers and practitioners guidance regarding how best to improve the impact of their online visibility.

Although it is well accepted that corporate communication has a direct impact on corporate reputation, little is known about the link between firms' social media communication strategies and the formation of firms' reputations in an online environment. This article contributes to this body of knowledge by studying the impact of social media communication strategies on firms' reputations. The setting for our study is the hotel industry. The results offer insights regarding the challenges of developing online communication strategies that affect corporate reputation.

This empirical research explores how 16 global corporations from four different industry sectors--retail, technology equipment, food/beverage/tobacco, and consumer goods--use social media platforms and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to communicate about sustainability. Facebook, Twitter, CEO letters from annual reports and CSR/sustainability reports, and other company documentation are examined to compare the content and scope of these firms' corporate communication. The sample is divided into two subsamples (Green and Not Green firms) using Newsweek's Greenest Company 2012 rankings, and compared for differential use of social media and corporate reports. Results show that communication varies across firm and industry regarding types of sustainability initiatives reported, metrics employed, and communication media utilized, and that Green firms are more active than Not Green firms both in addressing sustainability and in general social media activity. Implications are discussed herein and recommendations are presented for companies seeking to better understand the effective use of social media and sustainability communication.

In this installment of Accounting Matters, we examine potential consequences of the Financial Accounting Standards Board's Proposed Accounting Standards Updates for Leases. In the context of a previous accounting change (FIN 48), we investigate how these changes will affect firms' accounting choices, investment decisions, debt covenant requirements, and analysis of other key financial data. Changes in accounting standards may have significant indirect economic effect on companies as they can trigger debt covenant violations, restrict access to capital, and distort key financial information used by investors and lenders. New accounting standards may also directly affect the calculation of employee bonuses and incentives that utilize EBITDA or operating income as benchmarks. We include recommendations for managers and identify specific debt covenant components that may limit the negative consequences of the proposed change to lease accounting.