This exercise asks students to use consolidated balance sheets and statements of stockholders' equity for ConAgra Foods, Inc., to help them answer three questions pertaining to the issuance of stock shares, stock repurchasing, and cash dividends.
redBus has enjoyed tremendous success in the structurally unattractive, fragmented, and non-transparent market for private bus travel bookings by introducing a technology platform to bridge the supply-demand gap in real-time. This technology platform connects the bus operators, travel agents, and bus travelers in a seamless and transparent manner. redBus is considered an industry transformation change agent that has altered the dynamics of the bus travel booking industry by using a disruptive business model to eliminate the pain points of the bus operators and travelers and to provide greater convenience and efficiency. This case examines the evolution of the company's business model and considers redBus's next growth step. Should it expand beyond the Indian market to receptive Western and Asian markets, diversify its portfolio of service offerings to include air travel, hotels, and tour packages, or simply continue to focus on what it does best?
On April 5, 2012, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, dramatically changing the landscape for many companies raising capital. One of the most interesting sections of the Act is Title III, the CROWDFUND Act, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to sell limited amounts of equity in their companies to a large number of investors via social networks and various Internet platforms. Prior to the CROWDFUND Act, selling equity interests in companies via crowdfunding was for all practical purposes illegal under United States securities laws. The Act attempts to exempt crowdfunding from expensive registration requirements and allow crowdfunding websites to avoid the classification of broker, which would impose substantial registration costs on such sites. Through the CROWDFUND Act, equity-based crowdfunding has the potential to open funding opportunities to countless underfunded entrepreneurs and small businesses. In addition, it can provide investors with new ways to diversify their portfolios. However, the benefits of crowdfunding do not come without substantial risks. Given the combination of unsophisticated investors, inherently risky businesses, and the zeitgeist that changed regulations quickly, crowdfunding must be approached with caution.
Increasingly, service innovation is a source of competitive differentiation for product-dominant companies such as manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. However, the relative intangibility of services has led to uncertainty concerning how to apply product innovation expertise to the services space. We argue that meaningful service innovation by a product-dominant company must begin with the recognition that services are solutions to customer needs. As such, the primary goal of a product-dominant company seeking service innovation should not be to innovate service. Rather, it should be to help customers get a specific job done better or to help them get more jobs done. To this end, we offer three approaches for companies seeking new service innovation based on how customers define value.
Drawing from the literature on self-presentation, leader-member exchange (LMX), and developmental networks, we attempt to explain how employees might react to a Facebook 'friend' request from their supervisor and why they might react that way. We then examine blog comments to determine how individuals feel about such requests and determine whether their comments support any of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. We conclude with suggestions for how Facebook can be used in the workplace.
Firms must allocate some minimum amount of value to stakeholders in order to retain access to the resources they provide. Stakeholder theory suggests managers optimize firm-level performance by allocating more than this minimum amount. However, how much is too much? This article addresses the misleading notion that more is always better when it comes to the treatment of stakeholders and, in doing so, provides needed refinement of the boundary of stakeholder theory's predictions. The upside for managers is guidance in distinguishing between the types of value-allocating behaviors that will lead to greater value creation in their firms and actions that are likely to reduce value overall.
Even in these financially challenging times, business performance always comes down to a firm's competitive advantages. Subsequently, how can companies sustain a long-run competitive advantage, especially in the face of increasing competition? Apart from the pat answer that innovation is critical to organizational survival, we argue that it is the innovation process and how companies manage it that forms the foundation of a resilient organization. Our research finds that organizational innovation processes take three main forms: reactive, proactive, and anticipatory innovators. It is from anticipatory innovators that resilient organizations emerge. Here, resilient organizations not only anticipate the needs of buyers but do so by creating an innovation orientation within the firm's culture. This culture-based focus goes beyond any specific innovation; it directs leaders to create an organizational culture that is receptive to innovative ideas and to the changes they produce. Here, the competitive advantage is not so much innovation per se but the organization's ability to continuously create competitive advantages based on innovations.
Transformational leadership has emerged as one of the most important approaches for understanding and influencing employee effectiveness. Inherent in this approach is the belief that transformational leaders inspire employees to greater levels of motivation and performance. Recent evidence has shown that this effect is accomplished by managing the meaning of work for employees, yet it is often unclear exactly how leaders may influence perceptions of work for their employees. Consequently, in this article, we present behavioral and verbal cues leaders may use to enact positive change in their employees.
This article aims to scrutinize an emerging and prominent type of work team in organizations: the spontaneous virtual team (SVT). Despite the promising benefits an SVT can provide, it is confronted with great challenges throughout its lifecycle. In this article, we first highlight the unique structure and characteristics of SVTs as compared to other conventional types of work teams. Furthermore, we decompose the lifecycle of an SVT into three stages. We then use interview data among SVT managers and participants across several industries to analyze the challenges, corresponding solutions, and the role of information and communication technologies in each of the three stages. Understanding the emerging SVTs will be of salient value to professionals and corporate executives who are interested in finding effective technology-enabled means and work patterns to improve organizational work performance. The current work can also serve as a basis for future academic research on exploring the SVT phenomenon.
Over the past 20 years, a convergence has occurred regarding the importance of building relationships with valuable customers as the cornerstone of service strategy. Customer satisfaction and delight have been associated with supporting the retention and growth of important relationships. More recently, firms have adopted penalties and fees as a central means of growing revenue. This has caused friction with the programs targeted at improving customer relations, and increased defections and spurred government regulation. In this article, we collect and analyze data to identify the aspects of penalties that generate customer dissatisfaction and negative emotional and behavioral responses. We offer guidelines for the implementation of penalties that balance the goals of revenue generation and customer loyalty. These include: preventing unintentional failures, managing the perceived magnitude of penalties, effectively educating customers on the offer, ensuring that penalties are clear and transparent, linking penalty decisions to responsibility for the transgression, taking into account narrowly missing avoiding a penalty, and consideration of the customer relationship and employee empowerment.
Recent trends in advertising and social media (e.g., facial/body recognition technologies) will change how people need to think about their digital representations and privacy, as well as how managers can use these technologies to interact with customers. The term avatar is usually associated with a video game character or a pictorial representation on a social network, and among other components of the definition of the concept is the notion that users control the avatar's appearance and actions. Facial recognition and video analytic technologies being applied in public digital signage displays and on social networks like Facebook capture and create an embodied biometric database that is essentially an avatar-like profile that will be used for marketing products and supporting consumer applications. In this article we discuss the nature of these new marketing avatars, which we call mavatars, and offer a framework for understanding where and how these embodied profiles are and will be used. We also discuss and speculate how these representations and the applications they spawn will evolve; where they will be used; and the ramifications of these embodied representations for consumers, managers, and society at large.
redBus has enjoyed tremendous success in the structurally unattractive, fragmented, and non-transparent market for private bus travel bookings by introducing a technology platform to bridge the supply-demand gap in real-time. This technology platform connects the bus operators, travel agents, and bus travelers in a seamless and transparent manner. redBus is considered an industry transformation change agent that has altered the dynamics of the bus travel booking industry by using a disruptive business model to eliminate the pain points of the bus operators and travelers and provide greater convenience and efficiency. This case examines the evolution of the company’s business model and considers redBus’s next growth step. Should it expand beyond the Indian market to receptive Western and Asian markets, diversify its portfolio of service offerings to include air travel, hotels, and tour packages, or simply continue to focus on what it does best?
A privately managed school in Raipur, India, is faced with concerns from parents regarding long commutes faced regularly by students. The school has grown from a modest 89 students and 12 faculty members in 1993 to more than 2,700 students. Today, student commutes range from a few steps to several kilometres on school buses of varied capacities. While the transportation manager has been making adjustments to bus routes and capacity at the beginning of each term, the issue has become too large for one person to manage. In response, management decides to hire a consulting firm specializing in supply chain modeling to find a solution that would reduce not only students’ travel times but also fuel consumption and greenhouse gases emitted by the buses, thereby reducing the school’s carbon footprint.
The associate project manager for the Indian branch of SAP Labs, a multinational enterprise that provides software and software-related services, has been meeting with his manager to discuss ways to estimate staff requirements across shifts for the company’s provisioning team. The team works three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and services multiple types of requests in the form of tasks, which have one of seven priorities assigned to them. Service level agreements with customers require that the initial reaction time of the team meet specific requirements, which differ across priorities. Employing service agents involves costs for the organization. The project managers must identify a shift schedule that minimizes the number of staff used in a service setting while meeting the service level agreement expectations.
In 2004, Boston's preeminent homeless shelter, Pine Street Inn, faced the prospect of steadily dwindling funds for shelter services over the next few years. This stark reality-combined with persistent frustrations at finding permanent homes for homeless clients-persuaded Pine Street's director and board to regroup, gather data, and rethink Pine Street's organizational strategy. The Harvard Kennedy School has designed two cases that look at this juncture in Pine Street's history-this one, intended for an introductory statistics class and a second case, intended for a strategic management class. Each case is designed to stand on its own. It is also possible to use the cases in sequence-the statistics case followed by the management case. There is some overlap in the content of the two written cases, as the description of Pine Street's history and organizational identity is included in both. This case, designed to introduce the concept of statistical "outliers," consists of two parts: • Five-page written case introduces the Pine Street Inn, provides a brief description of its origins, history, and mission, in the context of a burgeoning homelessness population between its founding in 1969 and 2004, when the case dilemma is set. The key point is to understand the strong historical commitment of Pine Street (1) to turn no one away (making it the place of last resort for many of the "hardest core" homeless in Boston) and (2) to provide a respectful, non-judgmental, and non-conditional welcome to all. • Data from the length of stay study, presented in spreadsheet form. Students are challenged to interpret the length of stay data, in the context of Pine Street's history and organizational identity, and to consider whether it suggests a new path forward. Case number 1988.0
In 2004, Boston's preeminent homeless shelter, Pine Street Inn, faced the prospect of steadily dwindling funds for shelter services over the next few years.This stark reality-combined with persistent frustrations at finding permanent homes for homeless clients-persuaded Pine Street's director and board to regroup, gather data, and rethink Pine Street's organizational strategy. The Harvard Kennedy School has designed two cases that look at this juncture in Pine Street's history-this one, intended for a strategic management class, and another case, intended for an introductory statistics class. This case, designed to teach about the important role of organizational culture when changing an organization's mission, begins by introducing Pine Street's history and organizational identity as a place of last resort for many of the "hardest core" homeless in Boston. The case goes on to describe how, in 2004, faced with dwindling funding, Pine Street's director and board decided to commission a study that analyzed how long each incoming homeless client stayed at its shelters over a two-year period. The striking results: a small number of homeless people were "chronic" shelter-stayers, while the vast majority came and went in 10 days or fewer. About 20 per-cent stayed between 10 days and 20 weeks. Over the course of five years, these data, combined with Downie's frustrations at finding housing alternatives for shelter guests, lead Pine Street's director and board chair to propose a controversial new strategy: to shift from an organization that primarily provides the homeless with shelter beds and services to one that primarily provides permanent supportive housing to a subset of the homeless population-the chronically homeless-while providing a smaller pool of shelter beds to short-term stayers and a combination of shelter beds and transitional services to medium-term stayers. The case ends by posing board and staff concerns about the proposal. Case number 1989.0
The associate project manager for the Indian branch of SAP Labs, a multinational enterprise that provides software and software-related services, has been meeting with his manager to discuss ways to estimate staff requirements across shifts for the company's provisioning team. The team works three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and services multiple types of requests in the form of tasks, which have one of seven priorities assigned to them. Service level agreements with customers require that the initial reaction time of the team meet specific requirements, which differ across priorities. Employing service agents involves costs for the organization. The project managers must identify a shift schedule that minimizes the number of staff used in a service setting while meeting the service level agreement expectations.
A privately managed school in Raipur, India, is faced with concerns from parents regarding long commutes face regularly by students. The school has grown from a modest 89 students and 12 faculty members in 1993 to more than 2,700 students. Today, student commutes range from a few steps to several kilometres on school buses of varied capacities. While the transportation manager has been making adjustments to bus routes and capacity at the beginning of each term, the issue has become too large for one person to manage. In response, management decides to hire a consulting firm specializing in supply chain modeling to find a solution that would reduce not only students' travel times but also fuel consumption and greenhouse gases emitted by the buses, thereby reducing the school's carbon footprint.
This case describes the strategy adopted by Cisco India to develop the Advanced Services Router 901 ('ASR 901'). It is part of a larger strategy by Cisco headquarters to understand what could be built in the developing markets for the developing markets, as opposed to products conceived with only developed markets as the focus. Within a time frame of a few months, a team forms to develop the ASR 901 completely from scratch - from conception to launch - in Bangalore, India. It then goes on to win several awards, and interestingly, orders begin streaming in from not just the developing economies, as had been expected, but also from top tier customers in the developed markets. ASR 901 is undoubtedly a milestone in Cisco India's indigenous innovation initiatives. Can the lessons learnt while progressing through the several stages of product development be applied to similar new initiatives?