Ever since ex-Ben and Jerry's CEO Perry Odak took over as CEO of Wild Oats in 2001, he has been trying to turn the company around. After some apparent false starts, profits now seem to be on the rise in 2005 and 2006. Has he finally done it?

It is 1988 and David Glass has just taken over as CEO from the legendary Sam Walton at Wal-Mart. Meanwhile, Joe Antonini has just taken the CEO position at Wal-Mart's arch rival, Kmart. Although Wal-Mart is still well behind Kmart, it appears to be in great shape and is catching up fast. Glass seems committed to continuing with "business as usual." Is this enough? What might Kmart do to stop him?

Tom Pedersen, newly appointed chief learning officer (CLO) of Shinsei Bank in Japan, pondered how he could facilitate development of an integrated culture and transformation of the organization. Shinsei Bank had not developed longstanding tradition or a strong corporate culture. The bank, which was made up of professionals with extremely diverse backgrounds, had to develop an integrated organizational culture. Pedersen had just administered a new performance evaluation program for 17 senior executives. This was the first time that they had been measured against competencies aligned with the corporate vision and values revised in late 2005. He thought the evaluation program was critical for permeating the vision and values throughout the bank and was eager to roll out the program to a larger number of employees next year. Pedersen wondered how he should improve the performance evaluation, and if this was the right process to influence the culture of the bank? He also wondered what other measures might be effective to get employees with diverse backgrounds to work together. How could he create a learning organization at Shinsei Bank?

BP's IR director has begun a program to use information regarding external views of BP and the industry as part of the firm's planning and operational activities. This information is generated as a portion of their award winning investor relations program, and had previously been used only to enhance communications. Allows a discussion of the relative merit of more formally including this information in BP's planning and operations. Also provides "best practices" insights into IR.

A successful company, recognized worldwide for exquisite design of consumer electronics products, strives to better integrate software design into its traditional physical product design processes to meet the demands of a post-iPod world. Details the Bang & Olufsen "design driven innovation" process, that works very differently than many companies' product development processes, but allows this company to produce very high profit margin products that retain their margins for a very long time in an industry in which products come and go very quickly. The case helps students understand processes and practices that support the creation of highly differentiated products. It also deals with issues of change in an already successful context, and of managing highly creative staff who are vital to a company's business model.

In late 2004, Hilmi Panigoro, CEO of the publicly traded Indonesian oil company Medco Energi Internasional, is striving to regain majority control of the company his brother Arifin founded in 1980. The Asian financial crisis of 1999 led to a major restructuring that left the Panigoros with a 34.1% equity stake in Medco. Two other large shareholders are now looking to sell their combined stake of 50.9% and have selected Temasek, the Singapore government's investment arm, as their preferred bidder. The Panigoros have a right of first refusal, but only a four-month window to raise the capital needed to head off Temasek's bid. The Panigoro brothers are considering a two-stage plan: a leveraged buyout (LBO) to be followed by a secondary equity offering at a share price high enough to enable them to repay the loan and maintain majority control of their company. As attractive as the plan seems, they worry about the high cost of the loan and the risk of the offering failing. In January 2005, with no time left to consider alternative financing plans, the Panigoro brothers have to decide whether to go ahead with the plan or lose control of Medco to Temasek.

The Khemka family of India--founders, managers, and majority owners of Russia-based SUN Brewing--faces a difficult decision in 1998. Following the ruble's massive devaluation in August 1998, the stock price of SUN brewing, which is publicly listed on the Luxemburg exchange, has declined by over 90%. Only two months earlier they had planned a $200 million to $400 million equity and debt offering on the New York Stock Exchange to finance major investments in the face of increased competition from international beer companies in the Russian market. However, the ruble devaluation and the deep financial crisis that has ensued has led to the cancellation of the proposed CYSE listings--and to a $40 million bridge loan that now needs to be repaid. The family is debating the merits of two main alternatives: To bring in a major global beer company as a strategic partner at this difficult time or to stay on as controlling owners, inject millions of dollars into the company from other parts of the family business group, and weather the storm until better terms can be expected from any outside provider.

Predictions made by large groups often turn out to be right, but sometimes they're dead wrong. Here's when not to trust the majority.

By approaching HIV infection among Russian and Botswanan miners as a financial problem, a Deloitte consultant and a mine executive created programs that improved employees' health and reduced the costs to the mines.

Dan Williams, known for his work on mobile phones when he was at Motorola, talks about evolution in design.

Procurement has increasingly become central to companies' strategies--and even drives innovation.

Companies are buying millions of dollars' worth of renewable energy credits (RECs) to offset the carbon produced by the electricity they use. But RECs have little effect on the environment, the author says.

According to surveys conducted in 1965, 1985, and 2005, attitudes about executive women have improved, but not as much as men think.

Predicting entertainment mega-hits is a risky proposition. Instead, marketers can adopt five strategies to exploit consumers' social influence as it emerges.

HR departments should be held responsible for their companies' performance, not just for programs that provide services and support to staff.

Fleet Management is the second largest spending in the humanitarian sector, preceded by staffing. Aware of the fact and concerned for the increased need for efficiency, a group of humanitarian professionals manage to raise awareness in their community and bring to the discussion table the members of the different organizations concerned. The turnout is unexpected, the willingness to improve is high, yet the challenge remains how to bring about change in a sector that is so fragemented, without control or command, and where fleet management has long been viewed as the job of those people "with grease under their nails".

Companies strive to create fiercely loyal, profitable customers, but the authors shows that this can only be achieved by rethinking the existing logic about customer loyalty; integrating your loyalty efforts with product-offering development, marketing, and sales; and close collaboration between the strategy and design functions of an organization. Cultivating loyalty requires ambition and risk-taking, but will ultimately provide your company with valuable and sustained relationships. Included is a four-step process for defining the appropriate levers, design interventions, and organizational strategy for creating fiercely loyal customers.

Despite engaging with other people on a regular basis, individuals vary significantly in their willingness to trust. For some, trusting intentions are central to their conceptions of their social selves; while for others, the social world takes second place to their individually-motivated concerns. Despite these differences, extrinsic motivations (i.e., the tangible benefits that result from trusting) provide strong motivations to establish mutual trust and/or mutually-trusting reciprocal actions. The authors present the Motivated Attributions Model, with explains the conditions under which acts of trust are most likely. One immediate implication of their Model is for individuals in potentially-trusting relationships to seriously consider the effects of their motivations, their dependencies, their need to see themselves positively, and their inability to fully understand their counterparts' perceptions.

Blind reliance on customer loyalty as a universal goal will put you out of business, warn the authors. Any loyalty initiative needs to begin with an understanding of the profitability of individual customers. Their investigation revealed more than 50 commonly-held beliefs about customer loyalty that turned out to be oversimplifications, exaggerations or just plain lies. The difficult truth is that the links between customer loyalty and business profitability are far more complex than we have been led to believe. The authors provide the top ten key misunderstandings surrounding this widely-coveted phenomenon and provide advice for firms to counter each.

The ability to place workers into jobs with which they identify is central to what makes organizations work. The authors discuss the limits of monetary incentives and the power of an identity-enhanced economic model to encourage a new view of a variety of management policies, organizational behaviors, and employment policies. They argue that identity is the next step in the evolution of the economic modeling of organizations, and show that the simplest representation of an organization is equated to its physical capital: a more sophisticated view adds the specific human capital of employees to the description of the firm. Insofar as the firm can profitably motivate its employees through such attachments, these investments should be considered a part of the capital of the organization, its motivational capital.