Advantage Food & Beverage (AF&B), a sales and service vending machine company, has added an Avanti kiosk division and hired a sales representative to devote all their time to selling the kiosk service to businesses within a specific geographic market. In the first year of the kiosk operation, AF&B hired and fired three sales representatives while acquiring seven Avanti customers. A management review uncovered issues with the selling process and the lack of presentations to prospective customers. AF&B’s owner pondered the relationship between the personal selling process and AF&B’s current compensation approach for sales representatives. How could AF&B’s compensation approach be changed to meet senior management’s new emphasis on presentations, and how would the various options impact AF&B’s profit and loss statement?
When a well-known mass media corporation revises the image of a beloved and non-traditional movie character in a way that conforms to a physical stereotype, the female members of the viewing audience express their disapproval on a widespread scale. In the wake of the backlash, the company has a decision to make: Should it stick with the revised image, which has been deliberately redesigned to support an upcoming media campaign, or should it revert to the original image in order to appease the viewing public? The case presents both sides of the dilemma, revealing the psychological and commercial implications of using one image versus the other.
In the Competition Simulator Exercise, students explore through trial and error some important economic foundations of competitive strategy and managerial economics. In particular, the simulator let students explore horizontal differentiation with and without price setting, strategic complements and substitutes and their implications for commitment and for first-mover advantage, the effect of the number of competitors on the competitiveness of a market, capacity limitations and judo economics, natural monopoly and the effect of market size, technology choice as entry deterrence, endogenous economies of scale, and capacity limitation in commodity markets.
After years of vigorous denials, on January 14, 2013 Lance Armstrong admitted in a television interview with Oprah Winfrey that he "doped" in each of his record seven consecutive Tour de France victories, confirming the findings a few months earlier by the US Anti-Doping Agency that he had orchestrated "a massive team doping scheme, more extensive than any previously revealed in professional sports history." Until that moment with Oprah, Armstrong had consistently and strenuously denied using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), blood transfusions, or other artificial enhancers to compete in the grueling, three-week race throughout France. He verbally thrashed, bullied and threatened legal action against riders, journalists, race officials, and anyone else who had suggested he had cheated. This case explores Armstrong's leadership of a corrupt culture, the extensive nature of the cheating scandal among elite athletes, the decisions taken by other riders to both support Armstrong and his scheme and ultimately to admit to cheating, and the costs borne by those associated with Armstrong. It allows for discussion of the responsibilities that leaders have to followers, and that followers have to themselves and to others.
This case is about Sabina, one of the leaders in the Thai lingerie market, and its proactive adaptation to changes in its business environment over two decades. The firm first took advantage of the depreciation of the Thai baht in the late 1990s to ramp up its export business and become a trusted OEM supplier to major European and US brands. The OEM business accounted for 60% of the firm's turnover by 2006. Bunchai Punturaumporn was appointed the firm's managing director in 2007. The Thai baht had started to appreciate, so the firm de-emphasized the OEM business and built a successful Thai branded business. This required innovating in the marketing area, broadening distribution, achieving excellence in production, and adapting the firm's organization structure over time. In 2012, the OEM business accounted for only 9% of sales. Sabina also coped successfully with other challenges, including rising labor costs in Thailand, and cheap imports from China. Bunchai was preparing the company in 2013 to go regional and take advantage of the opportunities arising from the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015. Learning objectives: Show how SMEs can successfully adapt to drastic changes in their business environment through proactive shifts in their strategy and organization.
After spending two years evaluating China as a potential market for expansion, in 2012, Scott Malkin, Chief Executive of Value Retail, identifies a highly desireable site in Suzhou. Now Malkin must decide if it is the right opportunity to open a village in China.
Tim Curran, CEO of Sample6, a start-up biotechnology company developing a novel food safety diagnostics platform, must decide how to partner with food industry players. How can he best convince leaders in this mature industry to adopt a new technology and improve food safety? Additionally, he faces a number of questions related to product development, marketing, regulatory compliance, and dynamic industry trends. This case provides an overview of food safety in the United States, and focuses on the strategic goal of transforming food safety from a "necessary evil" to a brand-enhancing differentiator.
This case centers around Qualcomm shareholders' 2012 Say-on-Pay vote and the dispute between the Institutional Shareholder Services and management regarding the appropriateness of the CEO's compensation plan. Was ISS right that Qualcomm CEO's pay was inflated and justified by benchmarking to aspirational peers? Or was management correct that its CEO's pay is warranted by Qualcomm's recent firm performance?
A retired Swiss banker has decided to bring primary healthcare to Africa by using a cooperative business model that brings together complementary firms. The model has proven successful in the United Arab Emirates, Zambia and Ghana. He now faces the decision of whether to expand into new African countries, and if so, which countries to enter, how to select partners and how to recruit country managers. The case also illustrates the challenges and misconceptions of doing business in Africa.
The managing director of a small- to medium-sized electrical firm faces a major challenge: he realizes that the firm he founded has grown so significantly that information management has become very difficult. For solving issues of data integrity, redundancy, incompleteness and backup, he obtains quotations for implementation of enterprise resource planning from different vendors. Meanwhile, he discusses the issue of implementing the new system with his management team, who respond in different tones, leaving him confused. He also has to ensure that the initiative does not put strain on the firm’s finances. He ponders various options such as whether to adopt enterprise resource planning on premise or on cloud and whether to go with the safe but costly option of engaging a well-established firm or to risk dealing with a start-up.
This case revolves around the experiences of an MBA student at an Indian business school. The student is dynamic, capable and intent on high achievement, but his pursuit of recognition eventually hampers his and his team’s learning and performance. The case is based on an event that happens within a course on organizational behaviour where the student makes a major mistake in his analysis of a case due to his need to demonstrate his competence and validate himself. This hurts his and his team’s performance on an assigned task. After the event, the student and his team members reflect on the events that led to this mistake. They also take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation - Behavior (FIRO-B) assessments to determine their personality preferences and interpersonal needs that might have influenced the team’s functioning.
A leading consumer packaged goods company manufacturing and marketing personal care products in India is examining ways of reaching its goal of 30 per cent growth in revenues per annum year after year. It has two options. It could concentrate on organic growth in the domestic market where, in spite of some categories having reached maturity, the overall demand for its products is forecast to grow consistently up to 2025. Alternatively, it could continue the inorganic path of acquiring companies globally; this appears, so far, to be the quickest route to building scale, but the long-term prospects are not certain. Case A deals with the dilemma about the fundamental growth strategy of whether to stick to the home market or go global. Case B, 9B13M058, examines the way forward with the framework of growth that the company has developed during the interim period. The company's managing director is testing this strategic framework in light of evaluating an acquisition target in Africa that has just surfaced.
A retiring professor must establish a comprehensive financial plan that enables him and his wife to achieve their target lifestyle. In preparing this plan, they devise a budget and a travel agenda and then determine whether they can achieve these outlays and, if so, what risks are involved and how they might manage these risks. They must consider the optimal mix of debt and equity, domestic and foreign currencies, and short- and long-term debt issues.
In 2008, about the time when the Yunus Model of microfinancing was under attack in its home country of Bangladesh, the Yunan Model was begun in rural China. The original model suffered from inefficiencies, high interest rates and allegations of improprieties against the founder, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. By contrast, the Yunan Model relied on social capital and mechanism design theory to enlist the rural population, financial institutions and government in a cooperative effort to increase the financial stability and entrepreneurship level of one of the poorest areas of the country. Could "microfinance with Chinese characteristics" offer a plan to reduce poverty across China?
The owner of a scenic flying tour operation reviews the financial details of his company's fixed assets for the purpose of completing the necessary accounting transactions for the fiscal year.
MediaMath is a demand-side platform that provides a single interface from which online media buyers can buy display media advertising from multiple advertising exchanges. The company's chief executive officer is contemplating the strategic direction of his new business after its first full year of operation. Specifically, he needs to determine which clients he should most actively pursue and how that decision will affect the strategic direction of the business.
This case describes the introduction of the Apple iPhone, including subsequent price reductions and market share goals. The case includes publicly available data on iPhone production costs, channel margins, and marketing costs. It concludes with the July 2008 introduction of the second-generation 3G iPhone.
Tencent's business development has been nothing short of spectacular given its less-than-two decades of company history. From a handful of tech-oriented entrepreneurs to a Hong Kong-listed company of over 20,000 staff, Tencent's development model was heavily challenged when it launched the e-commerce business in 2006. This case study exemplifies the concept of business models as tools to manage change rather than paradigms for adaptation and imitation.