Presents the strategic dilemmas faced by a foreign venture capital (VC) firm with over one decade of making cross-border investments in Asia--with particular emphasis in China. Set in the 2006-07 time frame as the investment environment in China is triggered by an accelerated inflow of capital, raises the question of how WI Harper should best leverage its regional expertise before raising its next fund. Other dilemmas faced by the firm include: re-evaluating its approach to cross-border investments, retaining its investment principles, and dealing with the growing pains of evolving from an informally managed regional fund to a blue-chip, institution-backed global fund. Most importantly, uses WI Harper's Chinese presence to illustrate the effects of a heated investment environment on an incumbent VC firm, allowing for a balanced discussion about its strategic alternatives given an increasingly global investment environment.
The chief executive officer and the marketing director of Saku Olletehase AS of Estonia must decide on the company's product portfolio plan. Saku enjoyed market leadership in Estonia with its brand Saku Originaal; however, the strength in market share has weakened in recent years due to increasing competition and greater marketing acumen from other domestic producers. While domestic beer sales have fallen, the company has experienced increases in other product lines such as alcoholic long drinks, cider and non-alcoholic beverages, which compliment its existing agreement to sell Pepsi and 7Up. For the last three years, the company has had the exclusive right to resell three well-known international beer brands (Guinness, Kilkenny and Carlsberg) in Estonia. With so many options and finite marketing resources, the company needs to decide where to focus its effort.
Shanghai Jahwa is the largest domestically owned Chinese manufacturer of cosmetics and personal care products. In recent years, it has been part of a booming market with growth rates of 35 per cent per year. This spectacular growth rate has attracted and been fuelled by the entry of major multinationals, including Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Shiseido, Kao, and others. The marketing challenge for Shanghai Jahwa is to carve out viable and defensible positions in the marketplace, in the face of competition from some of the most powerful global players in the industry. The case illustrates management issues with respect to extending a very successful brand of Chinese eau-de-toilette named into the shower cream product category. Unilever already has a strong and established shower cream on the market under its well-known Lux brand. In addition, other international players are entering in the market. The case calls for the development of a brand strategy, taking into consideration market position, brand extension, and competitive issues. A follow-up case (9A98A024) is available.
Shanghai Jahwa is the largest domestically-owned Chinese manufacturer of cosmetics and personal care products. The (A) case, 9A98A023, illustrates management issues with respect to extending a very successful brand of Chinese eau-de-toilette named into the shower cream product category. This case provides an update of the market; specifically, the new competitive situation faced by Jahwa in the shower cream market in 1996.
South African Breweries (SAB) was the only profitable international brewer in the crowded and hyper-competitive beer market in China. SAB's keen understanding of emerging market environments allowed it to develop a unique strategy for the Chinese market. This resulted in large market shares in each of the provinces in which it was present. However, SAB and its joint venture partner, China Resources Enterprise, only served five per cent of China's immense population. The managing director was faced with decisions: how to expand to other markets where SAB's approach would be replicated, how SAB could expand its successful business model to new markets, and what would happen when it ran head-to-head with a global giant or a well-positioned local competitor.
Describes Lazard's situation in 2001, and supplies context for the subsequent negotiation between its Chairman and his hand-picked successor. In 2001 Lazard, the last of the great investment houses to remain both private and in the control of its founding family, is in a state of decline. Infighting throughout the 1990s led to a defection of talent that left many wondering if Lazard could compete with the diversified financial behemoths of the 21st Century. It also left Chairman Michel David-Weill looking for a successor. David-Weill believes he has found one in M&A star Bruce Wasserstein: going into their negotiation, what should Wasserstein's strategy be?
Trans Global Corporation is a multinational company facing a complex set of inter-related problems including: international financial reporting standards, impact of a country's EU status, functional currency decisions, currency translation methods, exchange rates and impact of using derivatives to hedge currency changes.
Bert Twaalfhoven (70; HBS '54) is faced with two offers to acquire the manufacturing holding company he had built up over 40 years. Despite the attractive price, which would net Twaalfhoven and his family $70 million, he is reluctant to sell the company because his original vision was to create a family-owned conglomerate which would last for generations. Of his eight children, two are appropriate successors, but neither shows much interest in following in their father's footsteps.
In October 2006, Comcast executives had entered negotiations with broadcast networks to broaden the selection of free network content distributed via its video-on-demand (VOD) service. The major broadcast networks, however, were unsure of the effect it would have on regular "linear" viewership of programs airing every evening at their scheduled times, and feared that if television audiences migrated to VOD, their revenues from selling advertising time would decrease. How could Burke and Roberts convince the networks to team up with Comcast and distribute their content via On Demand free of charge? Or was it time for Comcast to rethink its push for "free" content, and craft a different business model?
Describes the history of clinical computing at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and the development, since the 1996 merger to form the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, of an information system designed to support the delivery of patient care. The hospitals' CIO, John Halamka, MD, has overseen the development of an information system that places physicians at its center. Describes the design and function of five major components of the system: the On-Line Medical Record, ePrescribing, Physician Order Entry, the Emergency Department "dashboard," and the Performance Manager. Provides students with an opportunity to identify key design principles for health care information systems, and to discuss the unique implementation challenges that the health care delivery setting raises for CIOs and CEOs.
The president of a metal products manufacturer and distributor is informed that the company controller is having an affair with another employee who is married to the general manager of production. The president is in the process of selling the company and wonders what affect the affair, if true, will have. Three short supplementary cases are also available: 907C21, 907C22 and 907C23.
Clearwater Seafoods (Clearwater) is a seafood company located on the east coast of Canada. It is an income trust with operations around the world. As a result of the increasing value of the Canadian dollar relative to other currencies around the world, Clearwater has recently ceased paying its distributions. The case considers the decision faced by the chief financial officer to determine the strategy the firm should take to enable it to reinstate its distributions. This involves the choice between different financial and operational means to hedge the foreign exchange risk which brought the firm into its current situation.
This case examines the structure of corporate goverance in three economies: Germany, Japan and the United States. It presents the structure and background on the composition of Corporate Boards of Directors. The case sets up a discussion of how corporate governance impacts on managerial decisions.
Can a company diminish employees' mistrust and distress when downsizing? Is there such a thing as an "effective" workforce reduction process? In this disguised, yet actual case, Peter Morris, manager of Coastal Power Corpus Christi Plant (Bayland) in Texas, tells his team leaders that they had to cut their workforce 10%. Throughout the (A) case a close approximation of how the dialogue went in that meeting offers several ideas for the reduction that include: length of service, experience, outsourcing, covering the plant with a single electrician, and reducing one person from each operating unit. The case includes data for students to use to generate their own assessment of who should go and who should stay. At the end of the (A) case, Morris shared his plan and asked team leaders to generate a ranking sheet of skills they value, rate employees, and build a consensus among them on where plant workers should be placed on the list. In the (B) case the assessment tool is revealed and all plant workers are ranked to identify the bottom performing employees. They are fired. Then the (B) case adds a new twist when two weeks later, Morris stood in front of the remaining employees to hear their reactions. As he explains how criteria was developed, Morris committed to a plant wide process using the same criteria for everyone remaining employed at the plant-including team leaders. We learn in the (C) case that the second "all-hands" round of rankings was consistent with the team leader's rankings.
In 2004, energy drink company Red Bull considered purchasing the Jaguar Formula One (F1) racing team from Ford Motor Company. F1 was the pinnacle of international auto racing, and Red Bull had previously sponsored F1 teams and drivers. At the time, Red Bull was expanding globally and F1 was one of the top global sports. However, F1 was not popular in the United States. To raise the sport's visibility in the U.S., Red Bull had also developed a program to find and groom outstanding young American drivers, who hopefully would eventually drive Red Bull cars. Describes Red Bull's growth and high profitability as of 2004 as well as the extensive use of sports to promote its brand, the state of F1 racing, the company's involvement in the sport prior to 2004, and considerations in choosing sponsorship or team ownership to promote Red Bull.
As the CEO of Hathaway Jones, an American luxury apparel retailer, Fred Westen has spent the past four years struggling to revamp his company's stodgy image and boost flagging sales. He's just announced an ambitious plan to elbow in on China's fast-growing luxury goods market when he gets a call from an old prep school friend. Fred agrees to meet his friend's daughter, Mimi Brewster, to see whether she might be able to head up the company's flagship store in Shanghai. Fred is impressed by Mimi's CV, and the interview goes off without a hitch, but a routine Google search turns up information about her that could affect the company's performance in China. News stories and photos reveal that when Mimi was fresh out of college, she'd participated in nonviolent but vocal demonstrations--including one in front of China's San Francisco consulate--against the World Trade Organization. As the vice president of HR urges caution, Fred ponders hiring practices in the digital age. He knows that nothing is secret anymore--especially among younger people, who brazenly post the most intimate details of their lives for the world to see. If he hires Mimi, and her past conduct becomes widely known, his company's expansion overseas could be set back. But rising stars like Mimi don't walk in the door every day. Should Fred hire her despite her online history? Commenting on this fictional case study in R0706A and R0706Z are John G. Palfrey, Jr., a professor and the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; Jeffrey A. Joerres, the CEO of Manpower; danah m. boyd, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and a corporate adviser; and Michael Fertik, the CEO of ReputationDefender.
The Internet goose has laid countless golden eggs, along with a growing number of rotten ones. But it's the rotten ones that now tempt commercial, governmental, and consumer interests to threaten the Internet's uniquely creative power. The expediently selected, almost accidentally generative properties of the Internet--its technical openness, ease of access and mastery, and adaptability--have combined, especially when coupled with those of the PC, to produce an unsurpassed environment for innovative experimentation. Those same properties, however, also make the Internet hospitable to various forms of wickedness: hacking, porn, spam, fraud, theft, predation, and attacks on the network itself. As these undesirable phenomena proliferate, business, government, and many users find common cause for locking down Internet and PC architecture in the interests of security and order. PC and Internet security vulnerabilities are a legitimate menace. However, the most likely reactions--if they are not forestalled--will be at least as unfortunate as the security problems themselves. Consider the growing profusion of "tethered appliances"--devices whose functions cannot readily be altered by their owners (think TiVo). Such appliances take Internet innovations and wrap them up in a neat, easy-to-use package, which is good--but only if the Internet and PC can remain sufficiently in the center of the digital ecosystem to produce the next round of innovations and to generate competition. People buy these devices for their convenience or functionality and may appreciate the fact that they are safe to use (they limit the damage users can do through ignorance or carelessness). But the risk is that users, by migrating to such appliances, will unwittingly trade away the future benefits of generativity--a loss that will go unappreciated even as innovation tapers off.