The case traces the entry of Volkswagen (VW) in India at a time when India will play a key role in fulfilling VW's global ambitions. The case describes the consumer research conducted by VW to identify consumer insights which pave the way for designing products to meet local needs and aspirations. The case describes VW's segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy for India against the background of its global brand values. The case traces the launch strategy of each of the models - Passat, Jetta, Touareg, Phaeton, Beetle, Polo and Vento. The case invites students to review the marketing and communication strategy of VW to enable it to fulfill its vision of being among the top three brands in India by 2018. The vision is challenging, particularly because VW is a very late entrant in the Indian market. The rich data in the case enables full-blown discussion on whether VW is differentiating itself enough in the competitive market place; or is it giving a compelling reason to the consumer to buy its brands.
Providing affordable housing to a rapidly increasing low income group population in Urban-Semi Rural India remains one of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities faced by the Housing Finance Sector. Several new housing finance companies such as Shubham Housing Finance have pioneered a "small ticket" loan product to address the market gap. They recognize that these customers are not "high-risk" as perceived by conventional financiers, but "unknown risk". To assess this "unknown risk", they rely on detailed, field-based verification rather than on formal financial documentation. The primary objective of this case is to analyze the past data from these field level interactions and the eventual credit evaluation decision to determine the factors which result in a favorable decision. The application scoring model is expected to deliver a competitive edge to Shubham's operations by enabling faster decisions earlier in the assessment phase, targeting applicants more likely to pass through to the credit worthy status, standardize applicant evaluation across the nation and enable Shubham to offer competitive products. The objective of the case is to predict the probability of loan sanction using the socio-economic attributes of prospective loan applicants by employing techniques such as chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) and binomial logistic regression.
Shree Cement Limited (SCL) is a unique company that has combined traditional Indian management practices and innovative initiatives based on emerging trends in contemporary management. SCL has always practised a ''people first'' policy that was informed by the ethos of a joint family and community, which is so integral to Indian society. By 2012, SCL was experiencing heady business growth and the top management was very keen to ''cement'' the culture of employee happiness and meaningfulness at the core of its human resource practices to avoid any people-related issues becoming a bottle-neck in the journey of growth. It hired Ernst and Young to conduct and employee perception survey which showed very high levels of engagement but also some areas of concern. Based on an analysis of the responses, and further focus group discussions, 18 improvement projects were initiated under the leadership of senior managers and volunteers from among the employees. Mahendra Singhi, Executive Director (ED) and Vikas Rai Bhatnagar, Chief People and Wellness Officer (CPWO) were examining the recommendations of the improvement project teams. They had to be careful to ensure that they took a holistic look at the implications of all the recommendations and implement an integrative set of initiatives that re-enforced each other's positive effects rather than proceed with a potpourri of recommendations that could potentially undermine each other's influences and worsen rather than improve the existing organizational climate.
Central Parking Services (CPS) with headquarters located in Bangalore, India provided parking solutions at various malls, office buildings, airports, residential apartments, hospitals and so on throughout India. In 2013, Poornima, Director of new initiatives at CPS, wanted the company to take a strategic direction toward using analytics to strengthen its operational decisions. The company was growing exponentially and with that came the challenge of managing the high pressure of growing demand, clients' expectations as well as driving end-customer satisfaction. The company was struggling with operational issues such as demand supply gap and waiting time at the entry and exit gates of parking lot. Pricing and manpower planning are two important decisions CPS has to make to ensure profitability of the company.
COFCO was China's sole legitimate window for agricultural foreign trade before 1987. The reform of China's foreign trade system beginning in 1987 cost COFCO its monopoly position. Subsequently, the SOE giant capitalized on its foreign trade expertise to strategically move upstream in the food industrial chain. Additionally, COFCO made investments in unrelated areas. These unrelated diversification activities were stopped by the new Chairman Ning Gaoning, appointed in 2004. He cared greatly about the innate logic for future mergers and acquisitions. The company, under his leadership, focused on its weaknesses and strengths, to identify a focused overall strategy. He brought the "whole industry chain" concept to COFCO with three clear goals in mind: 1) to shape "farmland to table" food processing to assure customers of safe, high-quality food, 2) to unite COFCO's segmented business units, and enable them to gain competitive edge over local companies 3) to increase the company's strength to compete with global food companies. The case depicts COFCO's historical transformations, identifies its mergers and acquisitions since 2005 and shows its financing history. Information is provided about several domestic and overseas competitors to illustrate COFCO's role in a larger China environment. It is not only a market player but also a main force in China's pillar industry and the only domestic food company that can rival global food companies in China's domestic market.
The partners of Saito Solar, a privately owned photovoltaic (PV) solar panel manufacturer in Japan, received an unsolicited proposal from an investment bank about their interests in selling the firm. The firm had experienced steady sales decline in recent years, due mainly to intense competition from low-cost solar panel manufacturers from China. However, in 2012, the solar industry in Japan received new signs of life. The threat of radiation from the nuclear plant explosions due to a deadly earthquake in 2011 had prompted Japan to look for alternative energy. On July 1, 2012, the Japanese government implemented a new feed-in-tariff of 42Â¥/kWh (about US$0.53/kWh) for solar energy. This tariff was almost twice as large of that in Germany and three times of that in China. This incentive was predicted to produce solar energy that would rank Japan as one of the largest in the world in solar capacity. The partners of Saito Solar were excited about the investment bank's solicitation and wanted to find out how much the firm was worth. The cash flow projections incorporating the positive outlook of the Japanese solar industry were provided. The partners discussed valuation using discounted cash flow (DCF) approach, so it is a perfect case to introduce beginner finance students the proper and common way to value a firm using DCF.
In June 2013, Elan's shareholders (Elan Corporation, NYSE: ELN) were faced with a difficult choice. Elan's management had four proposals on the table, management's attempt to defend itself against a hostile takeover from Royalty Pharma. Royalty Pharma was a private company, a private equity-owned collector of biotech and pharmaceutical royalties. If shareholders voted in favor of any of the four initiatives, it would likely kill Royalty Pharma's offer-and its guaranteed returns. That would allow Elan to stay independent, and remain under the control of a management team generally considered as underperforming.
The 5-year transformation at Guardian Life Insurance provides significant insights for organizations aspiring to enhance their IT-business alignment. Alignment is more than just organizational structure, there is no silver bullet; it requires effective governance, partnership, communications, value analytics, technical services, and people. Like most companies around the globe, Guardian recognized the importance of moving to a collaborative IT-business alignment relationship; IT-business alignment was a persistent pervasive problem that needed to be improved. In 2005, Guardian viewed IT as an ineffective expensive cost of supporting the business. Was improving the IT-business relationship as difficult as drawing 'a line' in the sand? Today, IT is enabling and driving demonstrable strategic business value. The approach that transpired this turnaround at Guardian will provide students and organizations with a clear understanding and set of lessons learned that can be applied to enhance IT-business harmony. More importantly, it will help organizations recognize the important role that IT and business leadership must play as they collaborate to address the important considerations necessary to attain a mature relationship. To demonstrate this transformation, the past and the current IT-business alignment maturity of Guardian has been benchmarked and analyzed to reveal the steps taken to enhance the impact that IT is having on the company. Were these initiatives all that are necessary to enhance the IT-business relationship? What are the important next steps to improve the relationship?
Gary Burnison had a lot of faith in Korn/Ferry's brand when he became a significant investor, back in 2001. The company was suffering in the aftermath of the dot-com bust, but he believed he could help--so he came on board as chief financial officer and worked with the rest of the executive team to lead a turnaround. A major portion of the problem was Korn/Ferry's near-total reliance on executive recruiting fees for its revenue. Burnison's ambition was to move the company into other aspects of talent management. He saw the growth of LinkedIn as an opportunity as well as a threat: It gave the firm an additional channel for gathering rich and individualized data on professionals. Korn/Ferry's close C-suite relationships, strong financial position, and that powerful brand aligned the company for success. And clients have embraced the firm's metamorphosis: One has increased its spending from $300,000 a year to $6 million; another's annual billing has gone from $700,000 to $10 million.
Attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills--emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault. If leaders are to direct the attention of their employees toward strategy and innovation, they must first learn to focus their own attention, in three broad ways: on themselves, on others, and on the wider world. Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves one rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders one clueless, and a failure to focus outward may cause one to be blindsided. The good news is that practically every form of focus can be strengthened. The author of "Emotional Intelligence," "Social Intelligence," and many other books on the power of cultivating awareness here explains why focus is crucial to great leadership. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.
Those who study "data smart" companies believe that we've already lived through two eras in the use of analytics--we might think of them as "before big data" and "after big data"--and are entering a third. It represents a far-reaching resolve to apply powerful data gathering and analysis not just to a company's operations but also to its customer services and products. This strategic change in focus means a new role for analytics. Companies will need to recognize a host of related challenges and respond with new capabilities, positions, and priorities. Requirements will include: multiple types of data, often combined; a new set of management options; faster technologies and methods of analysis; embedded analytics; data discovery; cross-disciplinary data teams; chief analytics officers; prescriptive analytics; analytics on an industrial scale; and new ways of deciding and managing. These new capabilities can't be developed using old models for how analytics supported the business. The big data model was a huge step forward, but it will not provide advantage for much longer. Companies must once again fundamentally rethink how the analysis of data can create value for themselves and their customers.
High-performing knowledge workers often question whether managers actually contribute much, especially in a technical environment. Until recently, that was the case at Google, a company filled with self-starters who viewed management as more destructive than beneficial and as a distraction from "real work." But when Google's people analytics team examined the value of managers, applying the same rigorous research methods the company uses in its operations, it proved the skeptics wrong. Mining data from employee surveys, performance reviews, and double-blind interviews, the team verified that managers indeed had a positive impact. It also pinpointed exactly how, identifying the eight key behaviors of great Google managers. In this article, Harvard Business School professor Garvin describes how Google has incorporated the detailed findings from the research into highly specific, concrete guidelines; classes; and feedback reports that help managers hone their essential skills. Because these tools were built from the ground up, using the staff's own input, they've been embraced by Google employees. Managers say that they've found their training to be invaluable, and managers' ratings from direct reports have steadily risen across the company.
Fifty years after the expression "garbage in, garbage out" was coined, we still struggle with data quality. Studies show that knowledge workers waste a significant amount of time looking for data, identifying and correcting errors, and seeking confirmatory sources for data they do not trust. When data are unreliable, managers quickly lose faith in them and fall back on their intuition to make decisions, steer their companies, and implement strategy. They're also much more apt to reject important, counterintuitive implications that emerge from big data analyses. The good news is that improving data quality is often not as hard as you might think, the author asserts. The solution is not better technology: It's better communication between the creators of data and the data users; a focus on getting the process right going forward rather than on cleaning up existing bad data; and, above all, the shifting of responsibility for data quality away from IT folks, who don't own the business processes that create the data, and into the hands of managers, who are highly invested in getting the data right.
Why do companies have so little to show for their investments in big data? The biggest reason is that they aren't doing a good job using the data they already have. They don't know how to manage the information embedded in their operating systems, analyze it in ways that enhance their understanding, and then make changes in response to new evidence and insights. The few companies that have adopted evidence-based decision making ensure that all decision makers have performance data at their fingertips every day. They also follow four practices: (1) Agree on a single source of truth. Using performance data from just one source yields a more accurate view of costs and profitability. (2) Use scorecards. Perhaps the best way to teach people how to use data to create business benefits is to provide them with data about their own performance. (3) Explicitly manage business rules. Little data can have a big effect on performance when managers use the data to assess and improve the business rules that govern their operations. (4) Use coaching to improve performance. Adopting evidence-based decision making is a big cultural shift. Employees need help learning how to base their decisions on data instead of on instinct. Fortunately, companies that make the shift don't usually go back, and they improve their operations in ways that rivals can't easily replicate.
For decades, businesses have sought competitive advantage in "upstream" activities related to making new products--building bigger factories, finding cheaper raw materials, improving efficiency, and so on. But those easily copied sources of advantage are being irreversibly eroded, and advantage increasingly lies "downstream"--in the marketplace. Today the strategic question that drives business is not "What else can we make?" but "What else can we do for our customers?" This new center of gravity demands a rethink of long-standing strategy principles: First, the sources and locus of competitive advantage now lie outside the firm, and advantage is accumulative--rather than eroding over time as competitors catch up, it grows with experience and knowledge. Second, it's no longer about having the better product but about how you position yourself in the market and which companies you choose to compete against. Third, the pace of change in markets is now driven by shifts in customers' purchase criteria rather than by improvements in products or technology.
Conglomerates once dominated the U.S. business world. But by the 1980s, they'd been laid low by poor performance, inspiring the belief that focused corporations created more shareholder value. Today conglomerates are largely considered dinosaurs--except, that is, in emerging markets, where diversified business groups, comprising numerous unrelated enterprises, are flourishing. The authors, who studied Indian business groups for five years, believe that the key to these organizations' success is their structure. Unlike corporate divisions, a group's affiliate companies are legally independent. That allows them to raise capital, set strategies, and create incentives more effectively. Affiliates don't report directly to the leaders of the business group but are overseen by the group center, a management layer in the group chairperson's office. It coordinates the identity work that unites and inspires affiliates' employees, and helps affiliates spot and seize opportunities, share resources and talent, and collaborate on strategic activities. Business groups using this model are not only profitable; they also outperform other companies in their markets.
Companies in developing countries are often so focused on chasing growth that they fail to invest in improving their innovation, operations, and brand management. So despite enormous reach and revenues in the billions, they're unprepared when demand growth slows and competition from increasingly savvy developed-world multinationals intensifies. The once high-flying Chinese automakers BYD and Chery have landed hard. In contrast, another automaker, Great Wall, and the appliance maker Haier have won early competitive advantage. In their efforts to compete, emerging-market companies should consider four stages: (1) Seize the moment and invest in the basics, such as payroll, finance, factory operations, and employee management. (2) Build strength by learning (through licensing or contract manufacturing, for example) from established companies. (3) Scale and consolidate, keeping product lines and markets relatively narrow. (4) Move up and out, with a strong portfolio of brands, innovation capabilities, advanced technology, marketing, and sales.
When a new work group forms, people often make snap judgments about who is qualified to lead. If the players don't already know one another, they tend to afford status to teammates on the basis of factors such as age, gender, race, attractiveness, and rank. These are characteristics beyond your control, but they don't necessarily predetermine the influence you can have on a group. Anyone, the authors say, can achieve higher status and more influence by getting in the right mind-set before engaging with new teammates. There are three psychological states that can increase the optimism, confidence, and proactive behavior that people associate with leaders: promotion focus (defined as a focus on goals and positive outcomes), happiness, and a feeling of power. And all it takes to help you enter one of these states is a simple five-minute exercise before starting a group task: Write about your ambitions or a time when you felt happy or powerful. The authors report that study subjects who did exactly that were more likely than others to speak up, steer decision making, and be viewed by their teammates as leaders--both in initial group meetings and in follow-up meetings two days later.