The director of the Paediatric Orthopaedic Clinic (the Clinic) at the Children's Hospital of Western Ontario has a better understanding of the process flow and bottlenecks at the Clinic and also has ideas for some possible solutions. The director can turn her thoughts to addressing a recurring issue raised by the hospital's management - how the Clinic's performance should be measured. The director pondered the mission of the hospital, which was to improve access to patient care and patient safety while sustaining the hospital's ability to deliver patient care into the future. She knew the Clinic was also committed to this mission, and she was prepared to evaluate the performance of the Clinic against this mission. Once again, the monthly executive meeting was looming, and the director wanted to be in a position to present a framework for her clinic's performance evaluation. This case is suitable for introducing the concept of performance measurement in a non-profit setting as well as the pitfalls associated with collecting the information. This is a follow-up case to Paediatric Orthopaedic Clinic at the Children's Hospital of Western Ontario (A), product # 9B08D001.
BCE Inc. (BCE), one of Canada's leading telecommunications companies, had struggled under its weak stock price performance and low valuation relative to its comparable peers, and faced increasing pressure from its largest shareholder, the powerful Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (Teachers'). On March 29, 2007, it was reported that private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts (KKR) had held informal meetings with BCE executives in the hopes of launching a friendly takeover bid for the company. This essentially put BCE "in play" with the leadership team confirming, on April 17, 2007, that it would be reviewing its strategic alternatives, which included discussions with various Canadian-led consortiums to explore the possibility of a privatization. As the deadline to the bid date drew closer, four contending bidding consortiums emerged, including three consortiums of financial buyers and one strategic buyer. The case provides a good opportunity to discuss private equity investments as well as valuation in a mergers and acquisition context. This case is a follow-up to Ivey case "BCE Inc.: Facing the Future," product # 909N15.
The director of the Paediatric Orthopaedic Clinic (the Clinic) at the Children's Hospital of Western Ontario has a better understanding of the process flow and bottlenecks at the Clinic and also has ideas for some possible solutions. The director can turn her thoughts to addressing a recurring issue raised by the hospital's management - how the Clinic's performance should be measured. The director pondered the mission of the hospital, which was to improve access to patient care and patient safety while sustaining the hospital's ability to deliver patient care into the future. She knew the Clinic was also committed to this mission, and she was prepared to evaluate the performance of the Clinic against this mission. Once again, the monthly executive meeting was looming, and the director wanted to be in a position to present a framework for her clinic's performance evaluation. This case is suitable for introducing the concept of performance measurement in a non-profit setting as well as the pitfalls associated with collecting the information. This is a follow-up case to Paediatric Orthopaedic Clinic at the Children's Hospital of Western Ontario (A), product # 908D01.
"The Ford Fiesta Movement was a social media campaign run by Ford in the U.S. during 2009 to generate buzz for the upcoming launch of the 2011 Fiesta sub-compact car. This case examines the campaign's performance and asks what marketers should do thereafter to convert interested consumers into buyers. "
The case focuses on the risks and rewards of early-stage investing in a successful emerging market consumer start-up (i.e. non-tech), from seed funding in 2004 to raising expansion capital in 2019. We observe the founder of Sula Vineyards, a winemaker from the Nasik Valley in India, as he makes decisions about external fundraising. Case (A) takes the seed investor perspective. It follows Deepak Shahdadpuri, who stays invested in Sula for 13 years, gradually reducing his equity stake along the way. Cases (B) and (C) follow the company as it raises successively larger rounds of funding to fuel its growth and international expansion. As the Sula brand and CEO Rajeev Samant become increasingly well-known, the company attracts the attention of diverse investors ranging from European family offices, Asian institutional investors, venture capital and growth equity, and sovereign wealth funds. Given its emerging market setting, the case can be used to explore investment risks from political and regulatory uncertainty, and currency risk for US$-based institutional investors.
With the recent announcement from the Chinese government that the country's healthcare system was going to undergo reform, Jiamei Dental Chairman Liu Jia wondered what that meant for his 15 year-old dental clinic business. Founded in 1993, Jiamei Dental Medical Management Group ("Jiamei") rode the wave of China's rapid economic development and had become China's largest private dental chain with 84 clinics in Beijing and seven other major cities. But China was changing fast, and Liu acknowledged that Jiamei's ongoing expansion depended on many factors beyond its control, notwithstanding government reform, Jiamei was also faced with pressures from its private equity general partners. The year 2009 was shaping up to be a pivotal one for Jiamei. It had planned to open dozens more clinics during the year. At the same time, Liu was facing stiff competition from regional and international private dental clinic competitors, high-end private hospitals, and now possibly the government. These factors offered new complexities into the expansion plans of this entrepreneurial firm.
This case examines how CEMEX adapted its flagship corporate social responsibility (CSR) program (Patrimonio Hoy) to the specific socio-economic realities of Puerto Rico - Fundacion Arte en Concreto (the Foundation). The Foundation was a partnership between a number of entities in the private, public and not for profit sector. For CEMEX, the main partner and founder, Arte en Concreto provided a way to promote concrete as an art form while contributing to the economic and social development of Puerto Rico. The goal of the Foundation was to rehabilitate prisoners through vocational training. The case also examines a number of external factors that affected the Foundation in 2008-09, such as global and local economic recessions, a slowdown in the construction sector, destabilizing effects for a public-private partnership of a new political party in government, and a general distrust of CEMEX's environmental record. The staff at the board of directors needed to develop a strategy that could guarantee the future of the Foundation.
By mid-2009 Colombian President Alvaro Uribe had ended decades of virtual civil war and strengthened the business climate, but he faced tough economic challenges. Though he had instituted prominent market reforms and brought inflation down sharply, Colombia seemed stuck in a middle ground, industrially behind Brazil or Chile but ahead of poorer Latin American countries. Traditional exports--coal, coffee, oil--still comprised more than half the total, while manufactured exports comprised only a fifth. Public investment in transport and other infrastructure--a perpetual obstacle to growth in mountainous Colombia--remained too low. A major ambition of Uribe or his possible like-minded successor was to secure U.S. Congressional approval of a free trade agreement signed in 2006. But would it really help Colombia diversify its economy? Colombia already had access to the U.S. market but still had a relatively closed economy compared with neighbors such as Mexico or Chile.
GUIDES is an easily remembered framework that can help the business leader and student to confidently and quickly identify, organize, and interpret a country's key economic indicators. Alternatively, it can help them to evaluate third-party analyses and to compare such analyses across countries. In either case, this framework provides a structured way to complete and communicate analysis of a country's economic data.
In response to the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve greatly expanded the scale and scope of its activities. Though lauded by many experts for its actions, the Fed and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, faced harsh criticism from some public commentators and members of Congress. This document summarizes that criticism and Chairman Bernanke's responses to it, highlighting the tension between congressional oversight of the Fed and the Fed's independence from political influence.
DR Corporation is a manufacturer of major appliances. The Traffic Manager is facing a decision of selecting a carrier for the inbound movement of motors. The primary case decisions are 1) what factors are critical to the decision, 2) how to calculate the tradeoffs among transportation costs, inventory costs, and order costs, and 3) how the company's managers should coordinate to make the decision. Acts as a very effective introduction to total supply chain cost calculations, and problems of internal coordination for supply chain decision making. Coupled with ChemBright, DR Corporation is a particularly effective way to introduce Supply Chain Management.
In January 2010, Google threatened in a public statement to stop censoring its search results on its google.cn website, as required by Chinese authorities. Should Google exit China? Or attempt a compromise with the Chinese government?
Cricket Real Estate Advisors needs to decide if they should invest in a proposed joint venture development with Buddy Holly & Associates. Holly is a successful northern Virginia office developer who plans to develop two buildings containing 232,750 rentable square feet. Students need to evaluate the deal's structure and financial arrangements, recommend changes and decide whether to proceed with the deal.
Jan Gronski, managing director of the Cisco China Research and Development Center (CRDC), and Ivo Raznjevic, engineering director, set out to establish a new R&D facility in Shanghai, China. This case focuses on the building of a culture through human-resource practices while describing such steps as securing an appropriate building, assembling a workforce, seeking appropriate projects, developing managers, building teams, evaluating performance, protecting intellectual property, and managing growth. The case presents specific challenges that arise regarding talent management: How does a manager overcome dramatic cultural differences within a diverse workgroup? Should a local female employee be promoted from a test engineer to a development manager? How should Raznjevic help his newest manager through his first encounter with Cisco's ranking system? What action, if any, should Raznjevic take regarding a senior engineer who sent out a controversial e-mail? This material highlights organizational culture and offers an opportunity for students to learn to recognize and manage difference. The case could be taught near the end of a term to serve as a review of organizational behavior at a graduate level or in an executive education program focusing on issues of team-building, growing managers from within, and related talent-management issues in a global context.
This technical note introduces the concepts and terms entrepreneurial innovators use in addressing sustainability. It explores the evolution of such terms as sustainable development, environmental justice, earth systems engineering, sustainable science, the Natural Step framework, industrial ecology, and bio-mimicry. It also explores how paradigms are created and replaced.
This case illustrates the challenges associated with matching staffing levels with variable workload in retail stores and highlights how decisions related to staffing and scheduling affect operational performance and the quality of labor at the stores. The case describes the tasks (both in-store logistics and customer service tasks) that are carried out by store employees at one Dillard's department store and presents nine weeks of traffic data at an hourly level collected by IBM. Additional data on labor hours and number of customer transactions allow students to examine the relationship between staffing levels and conversion rate. Given the large variation in customer traffic over time and the relationship between staffing levels and conversion rates, how should Dillard's manage staffing levels?
Large-scale societal issues increasingly appear on the agenda of business leaders, including poverty, health, education, business-government relations, and the degradation of the environment. These problems are not entirely new, but the forces of globalization and the economic crisis have made them more visible and increase their urgency. They share several characteristics that signal the need for new kinds of societal leadership and academic scholarship. From the perspective of leadership, one common characteristic of these global problems is that they include both technical and political components. The political context surrounding any problem must be understood and managed, and a variety of institutions across sectors must be mobilized before technical solutions can be applied. Along similar lines, technical knowledge of solutions alone is not enough to scale successful demonstration projects that address these complex problems. That step involves resources and skills centered on forging appropriate systemic connections to effectively distribute solutions. Thus, these challenges cannot be dealt with by one profession or institution acting alone; indeed, effective action most often occurs at the intersections of professional and institutional fields. Holistic solutions, however, can be difficult to implement because of the complex interactions (or failures to interact) among many participants who deal with just one piece of an issue. Finally, solutions to these problems require concurrent actions at several system levels and/or among many stakeholders. This means that social capital as well as financial capital is required to forge relationships, influence opinion leaders and gatekeepers, and ensure cultural appropriateness.
This case describes the development and international expansion of Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company. The company was founded in 1969, and developed products using environmentally sustainable practices, and that were distributed using a direct sales model. The company was highly successful in the Brazil, despite the challenging Brazilian economy. Natura had successfully entered the Mexican and French markets. In 2008, it considered entering the U.S. market. The case describes the company's growth, its principles of environmental and social responsibility, its culture and organization, and its international expansion to 2008. It describes the U.S. market, and the challenges and opportunities that Natura would face if it tried to expand into the U.S.
A recession in the U.S. economy began at the end of 2007. Concerns deepened as an epic financial crisis shattered business and consumer confidence. By the fall of 2008, the United States was in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s, and major financial institutions were on the verge of bankruptcy. The financial crisis and recession spread around the world. Many saw a risk that the global financial system might collapse, perhaps precipitating a repetition of the lengthy economic devastation of the 1930s depression. Governments reacted by creating huge stimulus packages that greatly increased national deficits and debts, and by loosening monetary policies with interest rates close to zero and huge expansions of the money supply. In their efforts to save the financial system, governments also offered bail-out packages to banks, including loans, guarantees and equity. By the fall of 2009, the crisis had stabilized, and the appearance of green shoots gave promise of recovery. By 2010, it was possible to put the financial crisis in perspective, and to raise questions about the causes and consequences. Of particular concern was whether new regulations might be needed to prevent a recurrence, and whether some of the tighter regulations should be international in scope. A related concern was whether such regulations should be applied to non-bank financial institutions as well as banks. Governments were also trying to determine how to exit the unique fiscal and monetary positions that now seemed to put their economies at risk of ongoing deficits and future inflation.