The Federal Republic of Nigeria was the most populous country in Africa. According to a July 2009 estimate, it was also the world's 8th largest nation. With land area roughly twice the size of California, Nigeria was rich in natural resources, especially oil. However, the country seemed to have mineral wealth in equal measure to its economic, social, and political troubles. For decades, the country had grappled with tumultuous military rule, religious and ethnic unrest, as well as a highly unequal allocation of resources. Nevertheless, recent reforms and developments in key sectors had boosted economic growth and spurred a sense of optimism for the country's future. The question was whether or not Nigeria could sustain this momentum, overcome its key challenges, and create a business environment that would allow it to compete on an international level. This paper provides a brief history of Nigeria and explores its current position in the global economy.

EU Design is an increasingly important trim supplier for various companies in the apparel and fashion industry in both New York and Hong Kong. Since its establishment in 1999, the company has grown gradually, attracting more customers and employing more staff. By 2009, however, further growth has been obstructed by an informal management style, an inappropriate organizational structure and a simple incentive system that is suitable only for a small company. The situation has been worsened by the global financial crisis. With falling margins, there is a need for expanding the customer base and for staff to become more sales-oriented. With limited funds, EU Design's owner needs to decide how to transform the company and which management control systems to implement first.

Innovation is the key to success in the history of Honda Motor Group (Honda). In July 2007, Guangzhou Honda's Research and Development Co. Ltd. (GHRD) was established. It was the first multinational auto company to develop a R&D facilities with the technological capabilities to produce a completely new car from the ground up. While Honda Motor in Japan would provide technological support, the core technologies would be owned solely by Guangzhou Honda. This arrangement differed from the traditional R&D management in Honda, which, despite the existence of R&D centers around the globe, used to retain its core technologies at its R&D center in Japan. This case shows the motives, new opportunities and challenges behind business model innovation.

This case consists primarily of excerpts from term sheets and prospectuses for six securities offerings made by US companies during 2009-2010, just after the financial crisis and recession of 2008-09. There are three issues of senior unsecured notes, one floating rate note, one equity offering, and one convertible note. The issuers are Microsoft, Coca Cola Enterprises, Norfolk Southern, IBM, Ford Motor, and Cephalon.

Greenbriar Growth Partners (GGP), a venture capital firm, has been an investor in Microsurgery Devices (MSD) for four-plus years, and has come into conflict with the company's founder. Should the Board's Nominating Committee re-nominate the VC investor, and should the board go along with the VC's push for a stock buy-back in the midst of the financial crisis, and so soon after the company's IPO?

The CEO of Ganeden Biotech, a small firm with several viable probiotic products but limited resources, must decide what markets to invest in and what intellectual property strategies will best serve its immediate and longer term business interests.

TopCoder's crowdsourcing-based business model, in which software is developed through online tournaments, is presented. The case highlights how TopCoder has created a unique two-sided innovation platform consisting of a global community of over 225,000 developers who compete to write software modules for its over 40 clients. Provides details of a unique innovation platform where complex software is developed through ongoing online competitions. By outlining the company's evolution, the challenges of building a community and refining a web-based competition platform are illustrated. Experiences and perspectives from TopCoder community members and clients help show what it means to work from within or in cooperation with an online community. In the case, the use of distributed innovation and its potential merits as a corporate problem solving mechanism is discussed. Issues related to TopCoder's scalability, profitability, and growth are also explored.

The case focuses on how Pratham, a non-governmental organization, provided quality education to underprivileged children in India by collaborating with the government. It focuses on the problem Madhav Chavan, the founder, is trying to solve, the contributing factors that have caused this problem not to be solved till now, Madhav's theory of change, questions about whether these activities (inputs) will affect the outputs and have an impact, what will it take and how will we know if Pratham is successful, and recommendations about what Madhav should do next.

In order to protect its operation from 2007 onwards, Dragonair needed to replace a spare engine that was deemed beyond economic repair back in late 2002. Three options were available to address this need. First, Dragonair could purchase the engine outright, which would require it to place an order with the manufacturer 12 months in advance and pay an upfront deposit. Second, the airline could choose a sale-and-leaseback transaction with a leasing company whereby it would sell the engine it purchased to the leasing company and then lease it back from the leasing company for an agreed period. Third, the airline could lease a new engine directly from a leasing company, in which case the leasing arrangement would be the same as the sale-and-leaseback transaction.

In early 2006, a taskforce at the Hong Kong Dragon Airlines ("Dragonair") was formed to evaluate alternative ways to replace a spare engine. The potential options were to either purchase the engine outright or to lease the engine via a direct lease or a sale-and-leaseback arrangement. However, to assess and compare the attractiveness of each option, the taskforce must first determine an appropriate discount rate to use.

Netflix was among a small group of Silicon Valley companies to emerge from the technology bubble of the late 1990s a clear winner in terms of growth, market share, and profitability. That Netflix was able not only to prevail over this competition but also to thrive was largely attributable to the culture of freedom and responsibility inculcated by founder Reed Hastings. To foster this culture, the company adopted a series of unique employment practices that were meant to attract, retain, and motivate the type of employee that Netflix valued. Among these practices was a compensation system with several unconventional features. Whereas most companies provided compensation packages with a predetermined mix of cash and equity-based awards, Netflix turned the model on its head and allowed employees to request their own mix. Management was interested in finding out whether this practice supported or detracted from the company's main objectives for its employees.

Probabilities are a tricky business: people tend to overestimate when they should underestimate, and vice versa. Author Michael B. Metzger takes a closer look at probabilities and provides insight to the reader on the subject.

Recent corporate scandals highlight that an exclusive focus on financial performance, to the exclusion of broader stakeholder-related performance criteria, can be detrimental to overall firm value creation. Among the ways to enhance leaders' focus on stakeholder value creation is the development and executive championing of an effective code of ethics. Such "Ethics Code Commitment" (ECC)-which incorporates characteristics of the code and behaviors by top management-affects a broad number of organizational stakeholders, yielding value for them, thus increasing their psychological and/or financial commitment to the organization while strengthening the firm's corporate culture. This article develops a model highlighting the various benefits of ECC to key stakeholders and the subsequent effects on an organization's culture and competitiveness. In particular, we focus on the need to include community leaders and key employees in the ethics code development process; the importance of moving away from a purely legalistic document to one that inspires stakeholders; the importance of linking ethics to strategy; and managerial approaches that can enhance the effectiveness of the code of ethics through ethics-related dialog. When developed and implemented correctly, ECC can prove to be an important source of competitive advantage via the effects it has on relationships between the firm and key stakeholders.

While recent recalls and scares have focused greatly on Chinese manufactured toys and foodstuffs, the issue of product safety extends to a wide variety of Chinese-produced goods. The supply chain in China is characterized by cost pressures and quality fade, multiple levels of outsourcing often involving small producers, a large number of counterfeit goods, Chinese cleverness at evading detection, and poor product safety surveillance by both the Chinese and U.S. governments. While some of these characteristics are present in other developing economies, few countries-save China-face all of these issues. To best counteract these forces, companies which outsource goods from China need a well-defined strategy to improve product safety. This strategy should encompass the practices of developing an organizational unit responsible for product safety, securing greater control over raw material sourcing in China, using extreme care in choosing Chinese subcontractors, conducting continuous product testing by multiple parties, being especially vigilant for counterfeits, and improving product traceability. Toward the end of ensuring items which meet quality standards, product safety auditing allows firms to assess their management of product safety of Chinese-made goods.

The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term "Social Media" exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.

"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."

With stock markets in major decline, Rudy Wong, an investment adviser for a wealth management firm had to decide how best to reassure each of his clients in upcoming meetings: by communicating logical arguments based on his portfolio management expertise and analysis, or by managing emotions and attempting to re-establish his clients' faith in the markets. He also needed to re-examine the investment strategy he had developed for each client and recommend that they either "stay the course" with current strategies or make changes. The case allows for a rich discussion of the role of investment advisors, the importance of asset allocation, active versus passive management, investment goal setting, the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, and application of behavioral finance issues such as biases, reliance on heuristics, and framing.

This note explains the considerations involved in determining a firm's vertical, horizontal, and geographic scope. It is organized into five sections: An introduction that presents important questions related to strategy formulation that managers face after mapping their firm's value chain; a second section that provides a brief introduction to Transactions Cost Economics, a framework that helps explain firm governance and scope decisions; a third section that links TCE considerations to decisions about a firm's vertical and horizontal scope; a fourth section that explores the issue of where to locate activities; and a fifth section that concludes. This case is included in Module 1 of the course Business Thought & Action.

This note is an adaptation for classroom use of Chapter 2 of "The Services Shift" by R.E. Kennedy (2009). It introduces students to Michael Porter's 1985 value chain approach to strategically analyzing firms, which says that a firm is a system of interconnected activities with both physical and information linkages. It takes students through the basic steps of analyzing a firm's value chain, explaining that to truly understand how a firm can create and capture value, it is important to explore how activities within the firm are organized and coordinated. The note concludes with some general insights to take away from the value chain framework. To apply this framework to specific companies, this note can be taught in conjunction with "Note on Exploring the Value Chain of Branded Fashion Goods", which profiles Gap Inc. and Deckers Outdoor Corp., and gives students a context in which to use the value chain framework. This case is included in Module 1 of the course Business Thought.

With stock markets in major decline, Rudy Wong, an investment advisor for a wealth management firm had to decide how best to reassure each of his clients in upcoming meetings: by communicating logical arguments based on his portfolio management expertise and analysis, or by managing emotions and attempting to re-establish his clients' faith in the markets. He also needed to re-examine the investment strategy he had developed for each client and recommend that they either stay the course with current strategies or make changes. The case allows for a rich discussion of the role of investment advisors, the importance of asset allocation, active versus passive management, investment goal setting, the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, and application of behavioral finance issues such as biases, reliance on heuristics, and framing.