At the end of the year's third quarter, the sales team at a generic-pharmaceutical company has achieved just 91 per cent of its sales target, and growth is less than what was anticipated. The general manager of sales needs to decide whether he can revise the sales targets for the last quarter of the year without compromising growth. He also needs to address the impact of launching a new product when the sales team is striving to achieve its budgets and devise strategies the sales team can use to achieve their sales targets during a selling downturn.

This note provides an overview of the Indian mutual fund industry and compares it with other financial markets globally. Also considered are the evolution of the mutual fund industry in India and the place of mutual funds in an Indian household's typical investment portfolio. The note covers various other aspects of India’s mutual fund industry, such as the size of the industry, its main products, the major players, recent changes to mutual fund regulations and taxation.

The generation born in China in the 1980s has become an important force in the country’s labour market. Members of this generation were the first to grow up in a market economy with daily access to the Internet, and are considered to have different work values than past generations. Also, most were born and raised in single-child families and generally demonstrate more individualistic behaviours and less willingness to follow the norms of previous generations. This case describes the promotion story of Zhu Dandan, a member of the 1980s generation, and illustrates the different work values, behaviours and management style of her generation, as well as the challenges of managing it.

本個案探討策略與外部環境及內部條件之配合，從環境面說明地工合成材料產業之產品特性及公共工程市場之利害關係人，探討個案公司如何管理利害關係人，公司面對此產業環境所採取的策略，並探討其累積的資源能力等競爭優勢。

Philips NV, a multinational organization based in the Netherlands, is facing strategic dilemmas. The company has been in the middle of a transformation involving a shift in focus from lighting and health care products towards consumer products and services when a financial meltdown, triggered by a crisis in the U.S. housing market, leads to a credit crunch in financial markets. Countries that have traditionally sustained the demand for Philips merchandise — e.g., the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France — have been witnessing a decline in key indicators of economic growth. Philips’s revenues and margins are under pressure. Remedial actions are required to ensure that the company is on track to reach its own growth targets. The case deals with two dilemmas: How should Philips deal with the credit crunch in the short term? How should Philips come out of it as a robust company in the long term?

Vossloh AG is preparing for its annual December conference with investors and analysts. The company, whose core business has always been the railway engineering sector, had to issue two consecutive profit warnings in 2011, which sent its stock back to levels last seen only in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2009–10. The company’s primary task is to find the right arguments to satisfy the conference participants and regain their trust. Vossloh’s business units, relevant business environments, and problems such as stock developments and the threat of hostile takeover are discussed. One of the basic issues is whether Vossloh should focus on the still very important home countries in Europe and further strengthen its attempts to increase its share in niche markets or focus more on emerging markets in Asia, South America and eastern Europe.

Samsung Electronics' ambition to go beyond a household brand to become a premium life-style brand through its range of smartphones offers insights into the concept of dynamic capabilities, which drives the management team to stay on course to achieve predictable results. The case illustrates the growth trajectory of a company which has reached a point where growth sustainability becomes a question at the heart of its strategic management.

Ontela, a technology start-up company, has introduced an innovative service called PicDeck that improves the mobile imaging experience for wireless subscribers. Ontela sells PicDeck to wireless carriers, who in turn private-label the service to their subscribers. Ontela must decide which customer segments it should target for the service and how to create a positioning strategy and a marketing communication plan to promote it. It must also consider the value proposition of the PicDeck service for wireless carriers (its direct customers), who need to be convinced that the service will lead to higher monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) and/or increased subscriber loyalty. Part A of the case provides qualitative information on customer personae that represent different customer segments. Students are asked to develop a targeting and positioning strategy based on this qualitative information. Part B provides quantitative data on customer preferences that can be used to identify response-based customer segments, as well as demographic and media habits information that can be used to profile the segments. Students are asked to revise their recommendations based on the additional quantitative data.

The presence in Puerto Rico of U.S. drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS, as well as megastores like Walmart, Costco, and Kmart led to the closure of around 30 percent of locally owned community-based pharmacies between 2005 and 2011. To address competition from U.S. chains, owner-pharmacists pursued collective action, including organizing buying groups and, in 2009, the Alliance of Community-Based Pharmacy Owners. One of the two purposes of the Alliance was to educate consumers on how "patriotic" and beneficial it was for them to buy at community-based pharmacies instead of U.S. chains. The other was to help Alliance members (pharmacists) improve the skills needed to manage their businesses and confront outsiders. By December 2011, however, the Alliance was barely surviving due to the lack of sufficient members. A new strategic roadmap for the Alliance was needed if it was to become the organization its founders planned.

MRW is a courier firm based in Barcelona (Spain). In 2010, it was consolidating internationalization of its business. It is against this background that the case raises a highly sensitive, emotional issue: What to do about Sonia, a recently-hired manager (still in her probationary period) who suddenly reveals that she is pregnant. Moreover, her pregnancy is a high-risk one, likely requiring an early medical leave. The new manager's post involves setting up Information Technology (IT) systems, which are vital to the firm's business, internationalization and invoicing. 'The case explores two standpoints: (1) a company weathering the economic crisis, in which it is contrary to the firm's 'belt-tightening' measures to hire a replacement for an employee on leave; (2) the company's track record in the CSR field including its promotion of opportunities for women. The case aims to create a dilemma for students. Some will defend Sonia's right to a maternity leave and to continue working in MRW, especially in the light of her trials and tribulations with fertility treatment and the fact that the pregnancy is a risky one. Others will defend the company's interests, arguing that the situation in the firm is critical and that MRW's internationalization is vital for the company's business development. The latter group will focus on Sonia's role in launching the internationalization project. The question of what to do about Sonia's pregnancy is a critical one for both the Technology Department and for Sonia. Dealing with it requires great care.

In February 2005, Jesús Cepeda, Director of Grupo Santander's Management Control Area, reviews a Chilean pilot test of a new management information system, MIS America. Grupo Santander, a global financial institution, had grown rapidly through acquisitions in recent years, giving rise to a great need for reliable, timely information to help Santander managers compare performance across globally distributed units and make better strategic and operational decisions. Top executives had an urgent need for both consolidated and precisely disaggregated information.The pilot test in Chile had suffered numerous delays. Cepeda had to decide what to do next regarding MIS America. The original plan had specified that following the Chile pilot, the new system would be rolled out throughout Latin America, but Cepeda was not sure if he was ready to authorize the rollout. This case study highlights the information systems challenges associated with rapid growth via acquisition. The case also examines questions of centralized versus decentralized control in a corporate MIS that addresses different needs in different Latin American countries, while responding to Grupo Santander's own needs at the corporate level. The challenges presented by this large and complex project are applicable to many IT projects in other industries and geographic settings.

"PCDA" is the Spanish acronym for Pastillas Contra el Dolor Ajeno (Pills for Other People's Pain).The case outlines the methods employed by the Spanish branch of Médecins sans Frontières, hereafter MSF (Doctors Without Borders) to develop a physical product that could be used to raise funds for the organization's social initiatives. The case focus is set in mid-March 2011, a few weeks after Juan Ramón Axta's appointment as the new head of the PCDA project at a time when sales were plummeting. The PCDA was successfully launched in November 2010. This cutting edge idea and the campaign created to publicize it received wide media coverage. The PCDA was initially very successful with consumers. The initiative was seen as a unique innovation in Spain and around the world. During the first 20 days that followed the product launch, 1.5 million packets were sold. After three months, sales reached 3 million packets. Pharmacies complained of constant stock outs. The sales of the PCDAs surpassed all previous forecasts. Based on this initial success, MSF ordered an extra 3 million packets. However, at the end of February sales dropped by 400,000 packets (i.e., a 50% decline from the previous month). At that pace MSF feared sales in March would not exceed 100,000 packets. This sharp drop in sales created significant uncertainty about the campaign's future. Atxa had to decide whether MSF should continue with the project or cancel it. He wondered whether he should put an end to it and learn from the experience. He had only recently been placed in charge of it, so he felt compelled not to choose this option. However, what was the best thing to do?

In late spring 2009, Osvaldo Martínez, Finance Manager at Autopistas del Centro, a private company operating a toll road bypass in Madrid, was analysing with growing concern the financial impact of reduced traffic on its toll road. In 2008, overall freeway traffic in Spain fell by 12%, and the trend did not suggest any improvement in 2009. Mr. Martínez believed the situation to be basically unsustainable. The company's lenders wanted to renegotiate costs and deadlines, due to the increase in risk of the project. Due to the drop in revenues and operating earnings, the project would need an additional two million euros and the current shareholders refused to agree to all the refinancing of the project coming out of their pockets. Operational and financial improvements would be needed in order for the project to be viable and offer at least a minimal return. The case describes the progress of a project finance operation from its beginnings in 2004, and the situation of the project in 2009 in the face of a crisis and consequent failure to meet the initially expected cash flows. The case offers an excellent opportunity to discuss what to do when a Project Finance fails, analysing the alternative ways of ensuring the project's viability and profitability.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Recent technology advances in mobile computing and augmented reality are blurring the boundaries between traditional and Internet retailing, enabling retailers to interact with consumers through multiple touch points and expose them to a rich blend of offline sensory information and online content. In the past, brick-and-mortar retail stores were unique in allowing consumers to touch and feel merchandise and provide instant gratification; Internet retailers, meantime, tried to woo shoppers with wide product selection, low prices and content such as product reviews and ratings. But as the retailing industry evolves toward a seamless "omnichannel retailing"experience, the distinctions between physical and online will vanish, the authors suggest, turning the world into a showroom without walls. This will push retailers and their supply-chain partners in other industries to rethink their competitive strategies The growing prevalence of location-based applications on mobile devices is a critical enabler. Mobile technology is well on its way to changing consumer behavior and expectations, the authors argue. By giving consumers more accurate information about product availability in local stores, retailers can draw people into stores who might otherwise have only looked for products online. The enhanced search capability is especially helpful with niche products, which are not always available in local stores. The availability of product price and availability information, the ability of consumers to shop online and pick up products in local stores, and the aggregation of offline information and online content have combined to make the retailing landscape increasingly competitive. Retailers used to rely on barriers such as geography and customer ignorance to advance their positions in traditional markets. However, technology is removing these barriers.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Just as sports teams have increasingly relied on rigorous quantitative analyses, so have many businesses. In particular, a growing number of service organizations have been investigating the use of a sophisticated linear programming technique called DEA, or data envelopment analysis. (In this article, the authors use the term "balanced benchmarking"to denote DEA.) The technique enables companies to benchmark and locate best practices that are not visible through other commonly used management methodologies. Today, balanced benchmarking can be used by anyone with Microsoft Excel, but it was not always so easy. When it was first introduced in the 1980s, balanced benchmarking was an academic tool for measuring and managing relative efficiency of peer organizations. Balanced benchmarking simultaneously considers the multiple resources used to generate multiple services, along with the quality of the services provided. It also provides managers with a sophisticated mechanism to assess the performance of different service providers -comparing, for example, the London and Tokyo offices of a global advertising agency -by going well beyond crude metrics and ratios such as profitability and account billings per employee. A company can identify its least efficient offices or business units, and it can assess the magnitude of the inefficiency and investigate potential paths for improvement. Moreover, executives can study the top-performing units, identify the best practices and transfer that valuable knowledge throughout the organization. Lastly, balanced benchmarking enables companies to test their assumptions, particularly before implementing initiatives that might inadvertently be counterproductive.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In today's fast-paced business world, leaders know that their organization's success is tightly linked to its ability to change again and again. Yet many change initiatives fail. One reason, the authors say, is that leaders often underestimate the impact of the politics and emotions of change. The authors suggest a five-step process for leading a major change initiative: Step 1: Map the political landscape. Map the key external and internal, formal and informal stakeholders who will be affected by the change. Step 2: Identify the key influencers within each stakeholder group. Once the key stakeholder groups are mapped, leaders should identify the key influencers within each group. Key influencers are those individuals who might be able to marshal resources, enroll others, build legitimacy and momentum, and provide ideas crucial to driving the change. Step 3: Assess influencers'receptiveness to change. People have different levels of receptiveness to a given change. Both supporters and skeptics must be engaged. Step 4: Mobilize influential sponsors and promoters. Sponsors have access to financial and human resources. Promoters, on the other hand, can be extremely useful in igniting the enthusiasm that can draw fence-sitters into the process and propel change forward. Step 5: Engage influential positive and negative skeptics. Skeptics can either make a change process more effective or turn a minor hurdle into a major roadblock. Positive skeptics may offer important perspectives and insights about the vulnerabilities of proposed changes. Influential negative skeptics are also important to work with.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Social technologies are becoming more important to business, according to a survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte. However, the adoption of social technologies often means changing the way people work, and that means executives need to invest time and effort in explaining the purpose and value of using the new tools, as well as providing the necessary financial and organizational supports to sustain these work flow changes over time. The authors'research is based on two surveys conducted in 2011 and 2012, as well as dozens of interviews with executives and social business thought leaders. The 2012 survey had more than 2,500 respondents from 25 industries and 99 countries. According to its findings, 52% of managers say their companies are at an early stage of developing social capabilities. For these managers, the top barriers to using social business are a lack of strategy, no business case and a lack of management understanding. The authors explain the importance of three types of senior leadership support for initiatives that rely on social technologies: (1) support for these initiatives over time, not just when they are launched, (2) executives'own use of social technologies as a signal of their importance, and (3) a pragmatic attitude about what to measure and when to measure results from these initiatives. As marketers capitalize on social tools, the relationship between CMOs and CIOs can change, and some organizations are hiring chief digital officers, the authors note. They observe that successful social business initiatives can produce changes in the way executives work together.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In industries where innovation is highly distributed, companies often attempt to gain market advantages by coordinating their product introductions with those of other companies in hopes of generating increased sales and customer satisfaction. Synchronization can take a number of forms, and the implementation costs vary widely. Moreover, keeping part of a company's operations synchronized with those of another can present substantial challenges involving control. The challenges are magnified when capturing the benefits of synchrony depends on many other players in the industry network. Understanding what it takes to coordinate critical activities across industry networks can be extremely helpful, particularly in technology-intensive industries, where innovation is distributed and companies are strategically interdependent. Sony and Microsoft, leading manufacturers of video game consoles, for example, often try to coordinate product releases with game manufacturers such as Electronic Arts. The network of relationships among companies within an industry plays a key role in producing synchronization. Such relationships can range from intense collaborations to arm's-length alliances involving less interaction. Enterprises synchronize their product development work in three different ways: by planning the synchrony proactively with a few other partner organizations; by reacting to signals by other companies; or by combining these two approaches to create a hybrid approach. In industries that produce highly complex products, industry leaders can overcome the weaknesses of planned and reactive synchronization by blending the two approaches. This involves proactively engaging with the company or companies they absolutely must coordinate with and "signaling"their intentions to a selected group of other companies in hopes that the broader network of companies will respond.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. At some point in their careers, most executives -even the most talented -will face a power deficit. Regardless of their titles and nominal responsibilities, they will confront situations in which they have insufficient influence and authority to get their job done effectively. Fortunately, two strategies can almost always help the sidelined executive capture more clout and build an enduring power base. A variety of situations can lead a manager into a power deficit. Demographics (race, ethnicity, gender or age) can contribute to the power-deficient executive's predicament, as can inexperience, poor reputation, personality, background, training or outlook. It can happen to people with high potential. It can even happen to executives who are already high performers. Typically, an executive winds up with a power deficit because he or she lacks one or more of the following power sources: legitimacy, critical resources or networks. The high level of interaction between these three sources of power means that a shortage in one can easily produce shortages in the other two. The authors argue that, generally, executives who have a power deficit can solve the problem in one of two ways: they must either play the game more effectively or change the game by, for instance, reshaping their role in the organization. The authors offer examples and recommendations and provide a short questionnaire to help managers identify potential power deficits. The good news is that the odds of success are good. The authors report that in their coaching work with 179 executives who wrestled with power deficits, only four failed to improve the situation.