In March 2008, the vice-president of governance, architecture, and corporate and diversified businesses for Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) felt confident that the Business Intelligence (BI) system that had been scheduled to be implemented in 2005 was now ready for implementation. The right people and processes were now in place. With the right people involved at different levels in the organization and several process-related initiatives, CTC's annual report announced that several technology projects would be implemented this year.
At the start of August 2008, Dell Inc. (Dell) seems to be at a critical juncture. Michael Dell's return a year and a half ago has brought significant change to the company, including a focus on growing market segments, a shift in the company's distribution strategy, and an emphasis on design in Dell's product lineup. Despite these changes, Dell's stock price has lost value since Michael's return. A portfolio manager is trying to assess if Michael Dell's return to the helm of Dell Inc. and the company's shift in distribution strategy will turn around the company's stock price. To support his analysis, the portfolio manager has asked his team to assemble comparative financial data on Dell and its key competitors. The portfolio manager wants to know if he should buy, hold or sell Dell's shares. There are three teaching objectives for this case: assess financial performance using financial statements and financial ratios; identify cash flow and profit drivers; and identify the determinants of value and stock price.
The Blue Ocean Strategy Implementation Scenario Case offers a set of interactive group scenarios which are designed to deepen the participants' understanding of blue ocean strategy implementation principles. Using the four scenarios participants work in teams as they learn to apply key concepts of tipping point leadership and fair process. The four settings (health insurance, manufacturing, government, and banking) show how blue ocean strategy implementation principles apply at different organizational levels to overcome the four key implementation hurdles (cognitive, resource, motivational and political).
The Blue Ocean Strategy Implementation Self-Diagnostic is comprised of a series of probing questions that offer executive participants a practical tool for assessing the level of organizational hurdles that exist in their organization and the effectiveness of past and future strategies to overcome them. The diagnostic is divided into sections addressing the four key organizational hurdles (cognitive, resource, motivational, political) and one section on fair process.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are best friends who enjoy pulling pranks together and talking about electronics. After several small collaborations, Jobs pitches Wozniak on starting a company together to sell computers based on Wozniak's design for a personal computer. Wozniak faces decisions about whether to quit the job he loves at Hewlett-Packard to join Apple Computer, how to define his role within Apple, whether to take on Jobs as his co-founder, whether to accept a third co-founder proposed by Jobs, and how to split equity with his co-founders. Early on, they add an outside investor who changes the company's trajectory and who brings in a new chief executive. Later, tensions rise between the two founders as their strategic visions diverge and as the company grows. Wozniak has now learned some disturbing news about his co-founder and has to decide whether that news will affect his continuing collaboration with Jobs.
Digital advertising is growing nearly four times as fast as advertising overall; alternative channels cost less than traditional ones; and management increasingly insists on proof of ROI. These converging forces spell the end for television advertising.
Forward-looking companies are using virtual venues to mimic reality, helping employees and business partners collaborate and learn. Their increasingly user-friendly and graphically sophisticated platforms may become the next-generation means of communication.
Every year in the United States billions of philanthropic dollars go to more than 1.5 million nonprofits--some of which use the money inefficiently. But the tools exist to create prediction markets that could guide donors toward the highest social return on investment.
The president and CEO of Travelocity remembers how her father built his environmental-engineering start-up into a business with 300 employees, in part through a striking degree of care for and interest in them as individuals. Peluso has 5,000 employees - and a global organization - but she's learned to scale up her father's techniques.
China's recent transformation is characterized by gradual institutionalization, and Russia's by what looks like rapid deinstitutionalization. The Chinese tend to think concretely, whereas the Russians lean toward abstractions. Understanding differences like these can help Westerners gain entry into each country's networks.
The founder and CEO of BzzAgent, a word-of mouth media company, believes strongly in radical corporate transparency. In practice that can mean frank self-examination in his blogs, publicly posting his company's sales presentations, and rotating an executive office space among employees at every level.
"Trade dress" is the legal term for a nonfunctional design feature, such as the cowhide pattern on Gateway's computer boxes. Many companies don't know its value or assume that they could sue imitators. Here's a simple experiment to acquire the data needed for protection.
This case discusses the concepts of broadband and its adoption in developing and developed countries around the world, specifically in Indonesia. The telecom sector in Indonesia had under-developed infrastructure, and been dominated by two monopolies, PT Telkom and PT Indosat ("Indosat"), for many decades until September 2000, when the government opened up the sector to competition. The market has subsequently become highly competitive. This case highlights the strategies proposed by Indosat to succeed in this market, with broadband penetration being identified as one of the primary revenue-generating and growth areas for 2008. As is the case with most developing countries where the fixed-line infrastructure is minimal, the plan is for broadband technology to evolve through wireless platforms. This case can be used to understand Indosat's proposed strategy to promote broadband, particularly wireless broadband, in Indonesia. It can also be used to discuss the general issues that emerge in providing telecom services in a developing country, particularly where a formerly government-owned monopoly player faces an increasingly competitive market. The case provides students an opportunity to discuss the best way to implement the company's proposed strategy, given its competitive advantages and the constraints imposed by the external political, regulatory and economic environments.
The case opens with XGen Technologies, a software-led IT solutions provider, being placed in a situation of having to grapple with the issues of linear growth, similar to most of the contemporary ITES companies. XGen's traditional ''linear'' business model now had Partha Sen, the CEO, seeking out new profit opportunities. The company's headcount had touched a whopping 40,000 and managing such a large setup was becoming a severe challenge. Besides, in the emerging war for talent, sourcing and retaining quality talent was another problem. An export-driven software services company, XGen earned substantial revenues in dollars, and the appreciation of the rupee by close to 15% coupled with rising salaries had impacted its profit margins in the current fiscal. All these factors, and the fact that XGen was a listed company, put immense pressure on Partha to adopt an innovative business model to ward off pressure on bottom lines, ensure sustainability of the business in the long run. Most Indian ITES companies had been clocking impressive growth, yet there were concerns about the future, particularly with regard to the burden and difficulties that were expected in manpower intensive business models that inextricably had to struggle with ever-escalating costs as well as increasing complexity in managing its humongous operations. The focus of the case then shifts to the various strategies that software companies have been adopting in order to achieve greater non-linearity in their business. In particular, the case concentrates on Zyme Solutions, Inc., a fully outsourced hosted data service provider to the high-tech vertical market, which has built a non-linear business from the ground up, without the legacy of the linear business models to contend with. The second half of the case describes in detail how Zyme Solutions has gone about constructing an innovative non-linear business model for its business.
Ruffin CEO Bill Bronson is on a mission. Counterfeits of his company's adventure gear and clothing are on the rise, and Bronson is hell-bent on stopping them. He has hired top-notch investigators to track down the criminals, invested in technology that will help distinguish his products from look-alikes, and pushed online vendors to stop selling fakes. All of that has cost a lot of money, however, and the problem seems to be getting worse. How far should Bronson take his campaign? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0810A and R0810Z. Giorgio Brandazza, a professor at SDA Bocconi School of Management, fought a similar battle as an executive at Calvin Klein. He advises Ruffin to mitigate the effects of copycats by building up the strength of its brand. For one thing, the company should increase its retail presence in countries where it is plagued by fakes. Single-brand stores will allow Ruffin to guarantee customers they're getting authentic goods, showcase its products in distinctive ways, and build strong relationships with consumers. J. Merrick "Rick" Taggart, president of Victorinox Swiss Army in North America, recommends zeroing in on the worst counterfeiting offenders. A resource Ruffin should take advantage of, he says, is customs and border patrol officers; if the company frequently communicates with them about ports of entry and consignee and consignor data, these officials can more easily sniff out illegal activity. The foundation for any good defense against counterfeiters, says Candace S. Cummings, general counsel of VF Corporation, is instituting tight controls over the company's supply chain and distribution process. That means, among other things, choosing manufacturing partners carefully and having strict contracts with distribution partners that, for example, prohibit products from going anywhere but outlets the company trusts.
After Kaufman became a CEO, he was struck by how perfunctory the board was in its feedback on his performance. The chair of the compensation committee would pop by his office following the year-end board meeting, congratulate him on the company's making its numbers, and then hand him an envelope containing the details of his comp package before walking out the door. The entire exchange would last no more than 10 minutes. That sort of review was a big contrast from the intense evaluations Kaufman received as a senior executive--assessments based on input from many sources and on multiple dimensions of his performance. As chief executive, all of sudden his total worth was summed up in just three or four financial measures. Although CEOs should have autonomy, reducing performance management to only financial measures makes little sense. All the financial incentives in the world won't transform CEOs into better decision makers. And bad decisions can bring companies down. Boards have an obligation to shareholders to ensure that companies are led well, and the sooner they can spot problems with leaders' performance, the better. With that in mind, Kaufman encouraged Arrow Electronics, where he was CEO for 14 years, to adopt a formal process that obliged independent directors to talk to executives and observe operations firsthand. Directors considered CEO performance in five key areas: leadership, strategy, people management, operating metrics, and relationships with external constituencies. As a result, they picked up on problems Kaufman might not have noticed, provided counsel that made him a stronger leader--and avoided disasters along the way.
Many internet superstars owe much of their success to the active and passive contributions made by countless people from outside their organizations. Think, most obviously, of Facebook profiles, eBay goods, YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, and, less obviously, of the aggregated buying behavior underlying Amazon recommendations and the donated use of personal-computer resources underpinning Skype's internet-based phone network. Cook, the founder of Intuit (maker of financial software products such as Quicken and TurboTax), challenges traditional companies to tap this emerging source of value by actively creating what he calls user contribution systems. The user can be a customer, employee, sales prospect - or someone with no previous connection to the company at all. The contribution can be actively offered work, expertise, or information, as well as passive or even unknowing contributions, such as behavioral data that are gathered automatically as a by-product of a transaction or an activity. The system is the method, usually internet based, by which contributions are aggregated and made useful to others. Such a system creates value for a business as a consequence of the value it delivers to customers. In this article, Cook describes the personal journey that led him to see the tremendous value in user contributions. He creates a taxonomy of the systems that can capture user contributions and shows the variety of ways in which companies from Honda to Procter & Gamble to Hyatt Hotels are leveraging them. And, drawing on his successes and failures in trying to put them to work at Intuit, he offers advice on how business leaders can catalyze action to create user contribution systems in their own organizations.
In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taught as part of the formal education required of their members. Through these codes, professional institutions forge an implicit social contract with society: Trust us to control and exercise jurisdiction over an important occupational category, and, in return, we will ensure that the members of our profession are worthy of your trust - that they will not only be competent to perform the tasks entrusted to them, but that they will also conduct themselves with high standards and great integrity. The authors believe that enforcing educational standards and a code of ethics is unlikely to choke entrepreneurial creativity. Indeed, if the field of medicine is any indication, a code may even stimulate creativity. The main challenge in writing a code lies in reaching a broad consensus on the aims and social purpose of management. There are two deeply divided schools of thought. One school argues that management's aim should simply be to maximize shareholder wealth; the other argues that management's purpose is to balance the claims of all the firm's stakeholders. Any code will have to steer a middle course in order to accommodate both the value-creating impetus of the shareholder value concept and the accountability inherent in the stakeholder approach.
Redefining the terms of competition for a market sector, an industry, or an entire global ecosystem is a tall order. It means attracting thousands of participants, galvanizing their efforts, and retaining their commitment for the long haul. Hagel, Brown, and Davison, of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, provide a blueprint for this daunting task of shaping strategy as technology-driven infrastructures constantly change. The authors discuss three elements that, no matter the industry, are vital in shaping strategy. A shaping view, or rallying cry to potential participants, clarifies the market opportunity, makes sense of fundamental forces, identifies rewards, and highlights the shared nature of risk. Bill Gates, of course, succeeded with his view of desktop computing, and more recently Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff has held out a new model for delivering enterprise software. A shaping platform, like that of Google's AdSense, clearly defines standards and practices that help organize and support the activities of many participants, enabling them to do more with less. Specific shaping acts and assets convince participants that the shaper has the muscle to pull off its initiatives, as Facebook has done by showcasing its relationship with Microsoft. The three elements together allow a shaper to quickly mobilize a critical mass of participants and, thereby, unleash powerful network effects that can yield big rewards during periods of rapid change. Almost any company will benefit from an attempt to shape strategy, say the authors, but they recognize that not every business is ultimately a shaper. By participating in other firms' shaping strategies, they show, a company can still find plenty of opportunities to create value.