Green retailing, generally viewed as the incorporation of environmental protection measures into retail operations, has become a common phenomenon. Despite an increasing interest among practitioners, there is a lack of understanding about what green retailing is and what the success factors are for its implementation. This article examines the practices of leading green retailers, shedding light on the different coordinator roles of retailers between suppliers and customers in greening their value chains. It identifies three broad dimensions of green retailing-internal-improvement, external-coordination, and supportive-development-and notes the critical capabilities required for firms to achieve success. It also presents a strategy loop with practical steps to help retailing executives incorporate green practices.
Identifying the right business model for addressing global customers and formalizing that model into a global customer management program is a key challenge for any firm with global aspirations. The key to success is embedding the program firmly within the firm's corporate strategy. Simply leveraging domestic or regional account management into such a program will not deliver the desired results. This article presents a framework for successfully introducing a global customer management program, describing key challenges companies face at each stage of the process. It also identifies specific strategies and key principles to help firms transition to becoming truly customer-centric on a global basis.
Remanufactured products do not always cannibalize new product sales. To minimize cannibalization and create additional profits, managers need to understand how consumers value remanufactured products. This is not a static decision and should be re-evaluated over the entire product life cycle. While managers have a responsibility to maximize profits for the firm, this is not necessarily equivalent to maximizing new product sales. A portfolio that includes remanufactured products can enable firms to reach additional market segments and help block competition from new low-end products or third-party remanufacturers.
This article refines virtual co-creation from a social exchange theory perspective. It looks into who participates in virtual new product development activities, why they do so, and what they expect from their participation. A study of consumers from 10 different virtual co-creation projects provides insights into what, how, and with whom consumers want to interact when engaging in virtual co-creation projects. It shows that consumers' co-creation expectations differ along various dimensions such as the preferred interaction partner, the intensity and extent of participation, and the consumers' motivations. This analysis identifies several types of participation motives-monetary reward, recognition, challenge, intrinsic interest, and curiosity-that help explain different consumer expectations. Participants also vary in their personal characteristics and expectations towards virtual co-creation. The article also offers practical recommendations for designing a rewarding virtual co-creation platform.
Holdup, the danger that a party other than the one investing will capture some of the return from an investment, plays an important role in business decision making about firms' organizational and investment strategies. Oliver Williamson was among the first to identify the importance of holdup and investigate its consequences. Much of our understanding of holdup in strategy and in other areas of scholarship can be traced back to his contributions.
Oliver Williamson has made fundamental contributions to antitrust economics, going back to 1966 when he was Special Economic Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the U.S. Department of Justice. Williamson was ahead of his time. In the intervening years, antitrust law has followed in the direction charted by Williamson.
What is the significance of Oliver Williamson's Nobel prize? This short article is an attempt to answer this question succinctly. First, he demonstrated when it is more efficient for a firm to make a component in-house rather than outsource it to another firm. Second, his work was path breaking because economic research at the time was largely fixated on market transactions and treated firms as black boxes of production. Williamson's work made economic scholars realize the need to analyze governance and incentives within and between firms in order to better understand how efficiency can be maintained in a capitalist society. Third, his original insights and the research area he pioneered-transaction costs economics-offer clear guidance for business strategy and public policy.
Although unknown to most CEOs, at least until his recent recognition by the Nobel Economics Prize Committee, Oliver Williamson has had a large impact on management theory and practice. There are many organization and strategy questions where his research is highly relevant. Williamson has spent much of his career trying to understand how things ought to be organized to promote efficiency, minimize manageable contractual risk, and achieve profitability. He developed transaction cost economics as a framework to assist managers in making critical strategic decisions.
In July 2006, Barracuda became the largest investor in Tarco International. In a meeting with management, Barracuda's managing director advised that strong measures needed to be taken to improve operating performance. If management failed, Barracuda would force a sale of the company. In response, the board of Tarco hired FD, a leading financial communications consultancy specializing in strategic investor relations. The board asked FD to compile extensive research on the Tarco's shareholder base, investor perception of the company and management performance, predictive voting on potential proxy proposals, and tactics used by Barracuda in previous activist engagements. Armed with this data, the board had to decide what steps to take, if any, to keep Barracuda at bay and ensure that Tarco retained the support of its investors
This case is a follow up to CG20A, and explains the actions taken by Tarco in response to threat from activist investor Barracuda. The case explains how the company relied on an analysis of its shareholder base and predictive proxy voting to inform its decision.
Should an international company operating in a violent nation pay a paramilitary group to keep its employees from harm? Executives at Chiquita Brands' Banadex subsidiary in Colombia faced a dilemma in 1997. Carlos Castano, the leader of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, a paramilitary group, was demanding payment in return for not harming Banadex's employees or operations. The executives must weigh the various options including, among others, making the payments or shutting down operations. This case examines the history of Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company) in Colombia (and other South American countries), its interaction with the country's political and social structure, and the difficulties of doing business in one of the world's most violent countries.
The book A Primer on Corporate Governance was written by Cornelis A. DeKluyver, Dean of the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon, and published by Business Expert Press. The book discusses corporate governance from both a macro- and micro-perspective. Historical data and examples including the recent scandals that have torn the fabric of capitalism pave a pathway to the principal challenges facing today's boards, and how to successfully manage them. The epilogue looks at the future and deals with subjects that are just beginning to appear on corporate agendas. It analyzes the emerging global convergence of governance systems, requirements, and practices; it looks at the prospects of further U.S. governance reform; and it discusses the changing relationship between business and society and its likely impact in the boardroom.
HubSpot, a web marketing startup is under pressure from VCs to rapidly acquire new customers and to maintain a low level of customer churn. In the case, students explore the drivers of customer churn and uncover opportunities to increase customer retention across the customer selection, selling, and training processes. Students assess a metric, CHI (Customer Happiness Index) which HubSpot uses to predict which customers will churn, and suggest alternatives to improve the firm's predictions. Students develop programs to reduce churn post-hoc and then reengineer the company's marketing, selling, and customer relationship management processes to manage churn proactively through market segmentation and targeting, product design, and customer interactions.
Models to monetizing news in the digital landscape which is real-time, searchable, sharable, multi-sourced, anytime, any screen were emerging in 2010. Could content creators get people to pay for what they watched, read, listened to, and shared online? Were news aggregators riding on the backs of the new content generators? Or were they providing a new stream of audience directly to new sites which needed to create innovative models to monetize their content? As more delivery models were on the horizon (location-based breaking headlines via cell phones) and more content production unhinged from a commercial entity (images captured and uploaded from personal cell phone cameras), the news industry landscape became freewheeling and individualistic. The straight line model of content generator, distributor to reader was gone.
The Congressional Oversight Panel wants to value the warrants issued to the government in connection with the TARP investments of 2008, in order to increase the transparency of options repurchases. The case describes the methodology used to value the warrants. Students have the opportunity to value warrants issued by 10 of the largest banks and to evaluate whether the Black-Scholes model can be used to value these very long-lived 10 options. Can be used to teach basic option valuation using Black-Scholes, but also raise dynamic hedging issues of interest to advanced students.
The Congressional Oversight Panel wants to value the warrants issued to the government in connection with the TARP investments of 2008, in order to increase the transparency of options repurchases. The case describes the methodology used to value the warrants. This case follows "The Congressional Oversight Panel's Valuation of the TARP Warrants (A)"; it describes the findings of the Panel's TARP Warrants Report and public and Congressional reactions.
This Excel model is used to analyze the deals made in The Real Property Negotiation Game, which simulates the experience negotiating the sale, purchase, or financing of a property.
In November, 2008, BCI Inc. (BCE) appeared to be on track to meet a December 2008 deadline to complete a $52-billion privatization deal. A consortium had previously submitted a winning leveraged buyout (LBO) bid that was estimated to add an estimated $32 billion in debt to the company. Mere days before the deal's "termination date," BCE executives were stunned to hear that KPMG auditors advised the deal was in jeopardy of collapse - based on a clause that normally merited little attention. The auditors noted that, on the basis of preliminary assessment, the company had not passed a required "solvency test" which compared the estimated value of BCE's assets and liabilities in the event that BCE needed to liquidate. BCE executives had little time to determine if the deal could still be saved and if so, how? Conversely, if the deal could not be completed, what would the organization's next steps be?