Sanford C. Bernstein, a premier sell-side research firm, is expanding globally, and has recently opened an office in Hong Kong. Global Director of Research Robert van Brugge must consider how best to organize the firm's research department to enhance cross-sector and cross-geography collaboration among the senior research analysts in order to adapt to the challenging realities of global expansion in the financial services industry.
Toni Sacconaghi, a senior sell-side equity research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, covering U.S. IT hardware companies, thinks about the challenges and opportunities presented by the firm's new office in Hong Kong. Sacconaghi was previously the only analyst covering IT hardware companies for Bernstein. However, the firm has recently hired an analyst to cover Asian IT hardware companies in Hong Kong. Sacconaghi thinks about the best way to work collaboratively with the new Asian analyst.
Robin Bienenstock, a senior sell-side equity research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, considers how to build her research franchise given the changing nature of the industry and the firm. A collaborative research paper called "Computer in Your Pocket" was recently published by four of her colleagues, but she was not consulted or asked to contribute. As clients call Bienenstock asking for her response to the investment conclusions in the paper, Bienenstock wonders 1) how she should respond to the report and 2) how she can increase her collaborative work in the future. As she continues to grow her franchise in terms of both the number of companies under coverage and team members, she wonders how she can best organize her team in order to leverage herself effectively.
Henry Phipps, Jr. made his fortune in the steel industry alongside one of America's most celebrated entrepreneurs - Andrew Carnegie. His wealth was administered in the form of trusts, which he hoped would provide a stream of income for his family and their descendants into the future. Phipps had a clear vision for the intergenerational disposition of his assets, which required both an efficient organizational structure for the wealth to be administered and leadership on the part of family members to keep his original vision intact. Despite undergoing several significant legal and leadership changes, the trusts survived relatively intact and continued to achieve their express goal of preserving the capital Phipps created and providing income for Phipps family members.
The case discusses the story of the IOI Group, one of the largest palm oil players in Malaysia, which has seen rapid growth in the past two decades. Family-controlled since 1982, the IOI Group's main businesses initially were property and palm plantations. As a relative latecomer in the palm oil industry, it grew both organically and through acquisitions, and, in 2010, had sales of about US$4.3 billion and employed 30,000 people. Over the years, the IOI Group moved away from producing crude palm oil (CPO), a key commodity, and pursued a strategy of vertical integration by moving into downstream activities such as food ingredients manufacturing and oleochemicals. This transformed IOI from a Malaysian plantation company to a global ingredients manufacturer, making IOI a good example of a so-called "emerging market multinational." The case takes the point of view of the second generation family leader who is currently in charge of the downstream businesses, and discusses three challenges he faces in IOI's transformation process: 1) the issue of optimizing and integrating the global value chain; 2) the most suitable way to coordinate a multinational company with substantial global sales and operations; and 3) adaptation to changing needs of global customers. All this is supported by extensive information on the changing dynamics in the palm oil industry, where emerging market players are moving up the value chain, snapping up manufacturing assets from global fast-moving consumer goods companies, such as Unilever, while the latter increasingly focus on branded goods and seek to exit the lower margin and capital intensive manufacturing of ingredients. Students are asked to analyze the changing industry dynamics and provide recommendations given the goal to make IOI a leading palm oil player.
SELCO India is a Bangalore-based social enterprise that makes solar lighting technology accessible to the economically impoverished people of India. SELCO was founded in 1995 by H. Harish Hande. Since his graduate student days, Harish firmly believed in the potential of solar energy for improving productivity of rural households. This case describes the evolution of SELCO as an organization and the various challenges that Harish and SELCO had to face before they could build a viable business model of providing solar light to the poor. Two critical success factors of SELCO's business model have been its ability to customize its products to address specific needs of the poor and to arrange finance for its customers. To date, SELCO has sold solar lighting to 120,000 rural homes and several other institutions, such as clinics, seminaries, and schools in the Indian state of Karnataka. Employing about 170 people, SELCO services these households from 25 service centers scattered all across rural Karnataka. Although SELCO has been able to establish a sustainable business model that realizes Harish's vision of bringing a low-cost energy solution to the economically impoverished, its challenge today is to create greater impact by scaling its business and creating an organization that sustains its success beyond the tenure of its founding members.
Since the formation of Netflix and Zipcar, many companies founded on the sharing model have flourished into well-established businesses. In this article, the authors have organized the thousands of examples of collaborative consumption into three general types of systems.
The Wikimedia Foundation has developed an approach to strategy formulation that can help firms align their activities with the interests of their communities.
After analyzing more than 15 years' worth of investment data, the authors have found one way that information gets around and improves investing performance: through alumni networks.
Do ads that break into your television programs annoy you? Surprising new research by the Haas School's Leif Nelson reveals that commercials may actually make your viewing experience more enjoyable. In recent studies he conducted, subjects rated programs with ads much higher than programs without them. The phenomenon at work here is adaptation: The longer an experience lasts, the more people get used to it, and the less they enjoy it. But if that experience is interrupted (for instance, with a commercial), people's initial feelings of pleasure are retriggered.
Get ready: In the near future, companies will be held accountable not just for financial performance but for their societal impact up and down the value chain-the supplies they use and where they came from; what customers do with their purchase and whether it improves their lives; and the costs and benefits to communities touched along the way.
When asked to design the job of a pirate captain in the 17th century, MBA students and executives lump together two areas of responsibility: star tasks-strategic work such as target identification, command during battle, and negotiating alliances to form fleets-and guardian tasks, which are operational work such as allocating arms, punishing indiscipline, and distributing loot. But candidates who can do both kinds of work well are rare, because star tasks require risk taking and entrepreneurship, whereas guardian tasks require conscientiousness and systematic effort. Pirates made the captain responsible for the former and elected a quartermaster general to perform the latter.
This map demonstrates how 12 major cities' workdays overlap - and shows that the American workday is a terrible time to try to get the rest of the world on the phone.
YES BANK, founded in 2003 and highly successful, has consistently been profitable meeting the Indian government's Priority Sector Lending (PSL) requirements, unlike virtually all other private sector banks, which view PSL activity as a necessary but loss-making part of their portfolio. To do this, YES BANK created a distinct Development Banking practice, under the purview of the Corporate Finance division. But now, the Development Banking team is contemplating going to the Board to take the concept one step further: pro-actively investing in PSL-qualifying activities not as a matter of regulatory compliance but as business. Should the bank devote significant financial and human resources into an ambitious Financial Inclusion Program to serve previously unbanked rural populations through a rapid expansion of its branch network and the use of nonbank business correspondents? In addition, should the bank commit part of its scarce capital to Tatva Capital, a private equity venture focused on renewable energy, clean technology, waste management, water & sanitation, food & agribusiness, affordable housing, healthcare, education & livelihood creation? Is the Board ready to incorporate development banking into the mainstream of the bank, or will this turn out to be a major error in judgment?
This case was awarded first place in the INFORMS 2011 case competition. A seasoned Internet retailing entrepreneur considers starting a national floral delivery service to compete with the major U.S. players. Decisions include whether to open a production facility in a single city and begin to deliver there? Which strategy should he use to decide-a premium or a discounted strategy? Ideal for MBA and undergraduate students in decision analysis modules or courses, this case offers an optional student spreadsheet useful for considering different strategies and calculating the resulting net present value of the opportunity. A B case with a spreadsheet is also available.
In 2010, First Solar was the global leader in photovoltaic (PV) modules and looked to dominate the market going forward. The company's strong market position was largely predicated on its proprietary Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) cell technology, which had allowed First Solar to achieve the lowest cost in the industry. Despite its success to date, the company faced significant challenges in 2010. Declining subsidies in major markets in the EU, increased competition from well-heeled Chinese manufacturers, and the risk of disruption from higher efficiency technologies all threatened to undermine the progress that First Solar had made. The case provides a backdrop for analysis of how significant changes in the external market environment alter the relative importance of a company's distinctive competencies and require the development of new competencies. Specifically, the declining growth in subsidy markets requires First Solar to seek new sustainable markets in which PV solar is viable in the absence of subsidies. Success in these markets requires development of new skills not necessary for pure-play module manufacturing. In addition, the case explores key elements of technology leadership and mitigation of disruptive forces as the industry leader. Furthermore, the case examines the rationale for vertical integration within the solar industry and confronts the question of business definition. Management at First Solar must consider whether the company is simply in the module business in 2010 or whether its development and EPC capabilities have made it a more general energy company. The case also details the company's financial strategy, highlighting the intimate linkages with the overall corporate strategy. Finally, the company's corporate culture and management control systems are examined for their effectiveness at aligning the organization amidst significant external change.
From the moment Mulcahy stepped into her job as CEO, in 2001, the Xerox board began discussing who would succeed her. Looking back on the long process of grooming and choosing her successor, she acknowledges the wisdom of having started that conversation a lot earlier than might feel comfortable. It allowed ample time to give the four candidates developmental responsibilities and visibility with the board. Meanwhile, Mulcahy sent honest signals to them about what the possibilities were if they didn't get the job, in an effort to keep their talent within the company. She felt that pitting them against one another in a classic "horse race" would be dysfunctional for Xerox. In July 2009 Ursula Burns succeeded Mulcahy, in the first woman-to-woman CEO handoff among Fortune 500 companies-and became the first African American woman to lead a large U.S. company. The board's confidence in her had been well established long before, and the final transition was accomplished without drama.
Do investments in your employees actually affect workforce performance? Who are your top performers? How can you empower and motivate other employees to excel? Leading edge companies such as Google, Best Buy, P&G, and Sysco use sophisticated data-collection technology and analysis to answer these questions, leveraging a range of analytics to improve the way they attract and retain talent, connect their employee data to business performance, differentiate themselves from competitors, and more. The authors present the six key ways in which companies track, analyze, and use data about their people-ranging from a simple baseline of metrics to monitor the organization's overall health to custom modeling for predicting future head count depending on various "what if" scenarios. They go on to show that companies that compete on talent analytics manage data and technology at an enterprise level, support what analytical leaders do, choose realistic targets for analysis, and hire analysts with strong interpersonal skills as well as broad expertise.
With the best of intentions, companies up and down supply chains experiment with isolated efforts to improve sustainability-only to encounter a long string of unanticipated consequences, often in the form of financial, social, or environmental costs. That's partly because most firms respond in a piecemeal way to pressure from customers, shareholders, boards, employees, governments, and NGOs. For instance, they demand that suppliers change their materials to environmentally friendly ones or move manufacturing closer to end markets to reduce emissions from transportation. And they tweak their own operations by using compact fluorescent lamps, recycling more of their materials, and so on. Lee's research shows that it's much more effective to take a holistic approach to sustainability and make broader structural changes, as shirt manufacturer Esquel, steelmaker Posco, and others have done. Such changes can include reinventing processes, developing new kinds of relationships with business partners, and even collaborating with competitors to achieve scale. Stakeholders increasingly hold corporations accountable for supply chain partners' actions, as we've learned from widely publicized recalls of tainted pet food and lead-laden toys. Clearly, sustainability is a competitive concern. The core managers overseeing your supply chain must own and tackle it as aggressively as they do cost, quality, speed, and dependability.