Determining what employees want from their jobs has long been important to employers who wish to motivate them. This note explains the concepts of work values, organizational culture, and person-organization fit. Students will complete a personal values profile and an organizational culture profile to allow assessment of person-organization fit.
The Nokia case provides an opportunity to explore financial policy in a situation of broad strategic change. In recent years, Nokia, the world's leading producer of mobile phones, had seen its market share and profits eroded by rival products such as Apple's iPhone and phones featuring Google's Android operating system. In February 2011, Stephen Elop, the recently appointed president and CEO of Nokia, announced a broad strategic plan and partnership with Microsoft to correct the company's course and improve its competitive position. Analysts regard the next two years as a period of great uncertainty for the company. The CFO of Nokia must reassess the firm's financial policy in light of the plan and consider its effects on the potential need for external funds, and the appropriate mix and cost of the debt or equity financing that might be used to raise those funds. Nokia, like many technology companies, often carried high cash balances to preserve financial flexibility, but in 2008 and 2009 in response to the global financial crisis it had drawn down cash to historically low levels and experienced several downgrades of its debt by major credit rating agencies. Students must evaluate the tradeoffs between maintaining cash reserves and the need for external funds and work through the implications of financing the projected need for external funds with debt or equity.
The marketing mix that a manager may deploy can affect the sales of a product and can be categorized under the traditional four Ps of marketing (product, price, promotion, and placement). But the perennial question managers face concerns the combination of these different marketing mix variables that will give them maximized sales, highest share, lowest inventory, or maximized margins. Quite often, these questions are answered by historical data: for example, past sales or market share for different levels of expenditures on these marketing mix variables. In this note, we consider the design of models that allow managers to obtain robust price and advertising elasticity estimates.
Pfeifer's Fine Olive Oil was formulated and positioned to serve as a heart-healthy, but slightly more expensive substitute for butter and margarine in cooking. With a narrow target market and growing product offerings and market potential, it was particularly important for Pfeifer's Fine Olive Oil to get the most for its limited advertising budget. The range of possible media for advertising its line of products was daunting. Would a media planning model (optimizer) that required executive judgments on several key inputs be helpful?
Volatility can emerge in any working group, particularly in a flat hierarchy with no established leader; add diversity and exhaustion to the mix, and a group is vulnerable to buckling under the pressure of its own goals. This fictional account of a contentious learning team at a business school dramatizes both the words and thoughts of the participants as frictions lead them to consider disbanding. It provides a means of discussing the nature of leadership among peers and in particular the critical but easily overlooked role of personal energy management--mental, physical, and emotional; even when the strengths of diversity are leveraged proactively, interpersonal interaction still requires a significant reservoir of positive energy, whereas its depletion can sabotage even the best of intentions.
The Darden School mailroom and the activities of its manager are analyzed using process mapping and waste identification tools. The note illustrates how one can observe and analyze a process for which opportunities to create process maps, evaluate waste and savings potential, and create stakeholder buy-in for improvements are identified. Lean tools discussed include process flowcharts, SIPOC, seven waste analyses, and stakeholder engagement. Students who undertake their own process mapping projects should complete a report similar to what was created for the Darden School mailroom.
This technical note, based on the more comprehensive note, "Eliciting and Evaluating Expert Forecasts" (UVA-QA-0734), provides a streamlined presentation of Brier and log scores as tools for assessing forecasting records among a pool of experts. The note is designed to be used in conjunction with a forecasting exercise.
This note explains the concept of work values, organizational culture and person-organization fit. Readers complete a personal values profile and an organizational culture profile to allow assessment of person-organization fit.
When ISS, a large shareholder advisory group, recommended a "no" vote on Jeff Immelt's award of 2 million stock options in April 2011, GE's compensation committee had to decide whether to rescind or amend the award or ignore the ISS recommendation. Was Immelt's 2010 pay in line with his performance? How would shareholders vote on the advisory "say on pay" ballot question at GE's annual meeting in April?
In 2010, Foxconn Technology Group, the largest and fastest growing multinational company in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, came under public scrutiny after a string of employee suicides reached the international press. Although the company was Taiwanese, it operated primarily in mainland China, becoming one of China's biggest exporters. It had 800,000 employees, over 400,000 of whom lived at Longhua Science and Technology Park in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. It was this Science and Technology Park - essentially a company town - which brought Foxconn under international scrutiny in 2010 after 14 employees committed suicide there and three others attempted to do so. The (A) case describes the challenges that Foxconn faced after the suicides took place at its plants. Institutional features of the labor market structure of China are presented. The response of Foxconn's management is described and the associated implications for Foxconn's stock price are discussed.
Nashton Partners was a search fund founded by two HBS MBA's that raised $500,000 to finance a search for a company that they could purchase and then run for the next five to ten years. The case examines the search fund structure, the two-year search, and two potential acquisitions.
Notwithstanding the professed intention of a party to an MOU, a "preliminary" agreement can have binding effect. This note explores the circumstances under which MOUs may give rise to binding and enforceable agreements.
This case deals with the challenges faced at L'Oseraie, a nursing home located in the north-east of France. The director of L'Oseraie was faced with a number of issues and questions: - How to improve the employee motivation and engagement further as the absenteeism episode seemed to have added fuel to the fire? - How to find the time to implement a real strategy at the nursing home, as tackling too many day-to-day issues was time-consuming? - How to create a real service-oriented approach among the employees? - In order to address the issue of lack of healthcare staff in France, would it be possible to source talent abroad (from new EU members in Eastern Europe, or from the French-speaking countries of North Africa, for instance)? - What suggestions could be put forward before the new general manager for implementation in order to overcome the various challenges facing the organization and to completely turn around its functioning and performance?
Jason Sterling sat on his hedge fund's Stamford, Connecticut, trading floor on January 28, 2011, scouring the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg websites for any news coming out of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He knew that the emerging sovereign debt crisis in Europe would be a primary topic of discussion among the world leaders and bankers who had convened at the summit, and he was hoping to find some new information that he could trade on before the close of trading for the week. Sterling's fund traded primarily in sovereign debt, and he needed to figure out if European leaders would be able to come up with a viable solution to the crisis or whether the debt crisis would lead to the default of several European nations. At the forefront of the crisis was Greece, which faced ballooning deficits, rising interest payments, and the prospect of having to default on or restructure its outstanding debt. Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were the other euro zone countries that faced growing fiscal problems and were the focus of sovereign debt investors. Sterling knew that if a solution was not found in the coming weeks, the sovereign debt markets could be thrown into turmoil.