In April 2006, SAP AG CEO Henning Kagermann faces several critical decisions. Over the past two years, Kagermann has put in place a bold growth strategy for the company--one that aims to transform the business software applications giant into a pioneer in the emerging Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology field, a leader in the small- to mid-size enterprise market segment, and a relevant solution provider for a broader population of business software users. Concurrent with the formulation of this strategy, Kagermann has instituted many internal changes and initiatives designed to make SAP into a more agile, efficient, and globally aligned organization. In several cases, these changes to organizational design, leadership, management processes, culture, and values directly challenge what many consider to be the foundational principles of this highly traditional, 30+year-old German company. Kagermann's plan and changes are not met with universal enthusiasm by employees or customers. Approximately one year after his public announcement of SAP's new growth strategy, Kagermann must now assess the situation and decide how to proceed. He has made repeated statements to the market that by 2010 SAP would be a company transformed, and even publicized specific quantitative goals that would substantiate such a transformation. However, in the meantime, a new development has occurred. Resurgent demand for SAP's legacy software applications is driving record revenues and profits and pushing SAP's stock price to new heights. As a result, Kagermann must answer several key questions. How can he determine whether the current pace of execution regarding the new growth strategy is right? How should he sequence the rollout of internal changes still required to support the corporate transformation? And given the industry environment and the resurgent growth of SAP's legacy business, how should he balance resource allocation between short- and long-term opportunities?
After over four centuries in business, the Beretta family's gun making enterprise stands at an important threshold. The family and its hometown have provided the cultural and philosophical underpinnings that have seen the company through good times and bad. Now, the firm must address a more insidious challenge. How to continue to grow and adapt to new market and competitive situations while retaining the core that brought the company to where it is today. The role of corporate culture is juxtaposed with stability in the face of change, dedication to craftsmanship and the latest technology, close-knit family bonds and an ardor for individualism. The exercise of seemingly contradictory business concepts and approaches is examined.
After nearly 100 years as a mid-size regional law firm, Duane Morris entered a period of spectacular growth led by CEO Sheldon Bonovitz. Originally founded by Quakers, the firm had a distinct organizational culture featuring a number of unique or unusual business practices: a transparent and flexible compensation system, practice-group integration across multiple offices, ancillary businesses, early adoption of financial reporting software, and consensus-based decision making. The firm was proud of its corporate culture and sought to maintain it as it grew, bringing in only people who would fit the culture, in small groups. In 2005, the firm completed its first merger, taking over a 64-person San Francisco firm. Growth was necessary to remain competitive, but could Duane Morris maintain its unique culture while bringing on large numbers of new attorneys?
Su Yee Goh, a director in a Singapore office, considers a proposal by a pregnant female executive for an alternative work arrangement so that she could both continue to work and spend more time with her family. Goh wants to keep the executive at Shapiro Global, but is afraid an alternative role would be disruptive to the marketing team and could create dissension among the other employees.
Reviews the purposes and ingredients in the governance (or steering) of a family business system. Explores at a high level the governance of the family business, its owners, and the family. Focuses on how these governance structures, processes, plans, and agreements interact.
Shareholders of Unocal, a mid-sized American oil and gas firm, had watched the value of their stock rise ever since rumors of a takeover surfaced early in 2005. Trading in the low US$40s at the beginning of the year, competing firms outbid each other, taking Unocal's per share price above US$60 by mid-summer. International oil companies, flush with cash due to high oil prices and facing low reserve replacement rates, increasingly sought to acquire strategic assets. Unocal's significant natural gas reserves in Asia, combined with its expertise in deep water drilling, made it a particularly attractive target for CNOOC, China's state-controlled offshore oil company. Though CNOOC trumped earlier offers with a US$67 per share, all-cash deal, valued at US$18.5 billion, the firm encountered stiff opposition from Washington and Wall Street.
This technical note discusses the practice of angel investing, particularly its meaning and suitability to emerging markets. Adapted from a chapter in An Executive Briefing on Angel Investing in Latin America (Batten Institute), this note focuses on business in Latin America, but the discussion and the relationships discussed are relevant and perfectly suitable to discussions of early-stage finance and entrepreneurship in all emerging economies. Additionally, the note explores the role of angel investors and venture capitalists on entrepreneurial activity and economic development.
In 2006, a nascent market for music-enabled mobile phones was emerging to challenge Apple Computer's dominant position in the digital music industry. Through its iPod line of portable digital music devices and its iTunes Music Store, Apple controlled more than half of the market for both music player hardware and online music sales. But the evolving ability to merge those devices with mobile phones, and to deliver music to mobile handsets (via streaming, side-loading content from a PC or downloading it wirelessly over the air), created a potentially market-changing opportunity for players in several industries. Examines the key players, including Apple; the major wireless service carriers, such as Cingular, Sprint-Nextel, and Verizon Wireless; technology and service vendors, such as RealNetworks and Microsoft; and mobile virtual network operators, such as Virgin Mobile. Covers the origins of the mobile music business, projections on its potential size, its technological building blocks (such as file formats, digital rights management systems, wireless network infrastructure, and handset capacity), and the key dynamics--music delivery method, pricing, mobile-PC integration--that characterize mobile music business models.
Toyota is one the most successful car companies in the world. The company set the ambitious growth goal of a 15% share of the global markets by 2010 (up from 11% in 2005). For this, the European market is becoming of strategic importance. The case outlines Toyota's global strategy before focusing on the European market in particular. Sales in Europe increased by over 50% between 2000 and 2005. In the process, Toyota's European manufacturing capacities more than tripled to over 600,000 units over the same period. Although Toyota was on the growth path, the launch of the Aygo posed many challenges. The segment was very price-sensitive and production cost had to be tightly controlled. Toyota decided to enter a joint venture with PSA, the maker of Peugeot/ Citroën. The case shows how cost reduction was the overriding principle and explains how both companies worked together. But selling a car with 93% parts commonality also posed many challenges on the marketing side: Toyota wanted to target younger customers in order to lower the average age of customers. Toyota had no experience in this segment and hence had to go new ways. The case takes readers through the various steps Toyota took in order to promote the Aygo. Learning objectives: Toyota is a latecomer to the European minicar segment. The case analyzes how Toyota changed the business system in order to deal with the various intricacies of this segment. On the manufacturing side, Toyota entered a joint venture with Peugeot/Citroën and built a new plant in the Czech Republic. The cars rolling off this assembly line had a parts commonality of 93%. But the innovations did not stop at the factory gate. Toyota invested in a massive Internet presence, meeting potential customers at locations of their preference and sponsorship of concerts etc. The case is a good platform for discussing Toyota's changes to the existing business system, both upstream and downstream.
The management of McDonald's Argentina faces a communications crisis: A controversial TV program urges consumers to stop visiting McDonald's stores and refrain from eating McPollo (McChicken) burgers following an official announcement that potentially harmful bacteria had been found in these chicken products. Although the McDonald's management believes that the information is probably unfounded, it is 100% committed to doing the right thing. This case looks at how companies may find themselves victims of unexpected events. In the name of a political cause or for "convenient personal" reasons, smart but unscrupulous customers may challenge leading corporations and the trust that other consumers had put in their hands. Corporate damage can be significant. Consequently, communicating effectively in times of crisis is absolutely key. The objective is to learn best practices for crisis management, how companies can prepare themselves to limit the potential damage, how to act and react and what are the "dos and don'ts" when facing this kind of situation.
Examines the extent of and challenges facing female entrepreneurs in developing countries. There are higher rates of female entrepreneurship in developing countries than developed countries, but necessity is often the main driver in lower income countries. Explores the challenges facing women arising from societal inequality, including lack of educational provision, and difficulties in securing funding.
Greater job mobility among engineers and scientists has caused the extended social networks of inventors to become increasingly connected. As a result, invention increasingly occurs within small worlds (or social networks) that straddle firm boundaries. Small worlds provide both strategic opportunity and potential threat; while they can increase creativity within a firm, they also aid in the diffusion of creative knowledge to other firms through personnel and knowledge transfer. Firms that operate within small worlds, such as Silicon Valley, long ago learned to manage invention in an environment of rampant knowledge spillovers across firm boundaries. Now, however, all firms need to learn how to manage innovation in a small world environment. offers advice about how to do so.
Explores the challenge of merging brands successfully following corporate mergers. It develops a framework for corporate and product branding strategies, as well as for creating the appropriate brand identity among the merged firm's target consumers. A critical key to successful brand mergers is to align the architecture of the merged brand portfolio to brand strategy and identity.
The advent of superior connectivity and integration technologies is paving the way for flexible electronic partnering options. Such flexibility is essential if a company wants to attract a large number of partners (with varying connectivity needs and preferences) to its supply chain network. This article conceptualizes 12 electronic partnering options. It then discusses the various types of sensemaking and conversion challenges that companies encounter in developing this critical electronic business (e-business) capability and proposes a multi-pronged approach to effectively deal with them. This approach involves four distinct but synergistic campaigns of digitization--strategic congruency, organizational design, technology infrastructure, and relational campaigns. The utility of this approach is illustrated by examples of successful business-to-business (B2B) digitization initiatives.
Logistics services and their providers are helping intermediaries add value to Internet supply chains in ways that are not always immediately obvious. Thus, it is not surprising that there is confusion among academics and practitioners about how best to extract value from such services and providers. Reports the results of a study of the role and value of logistics services and their providers. Reveals that Internet sellers establish relationships with logistics service providers in order to extract value from the providers' network of logistical resources and better fill their customers' orders. Internet sellers establish these relationships to lower the costs they would incur if they attempted to carry out the logistics services internally. They also seek such providers in order to access strong networks that bundle many complementary logistics services among Internet sellers, their customers, and their vendors.
Customers have proven to be a precious source of new solutions in various product categories and, by becoming directly involved in the innovation process, they can help companies better anticipate market changes. The Web can greatly simplify these activities by making it easier to manage systematic interactions with a select group of customers at a low cost. However, empirical evidence regarding the actual diffusion of Web-based tools supporting collaborative innovation remains weak. After reviewing the past findings on Web-based tools for customer integration, this article presents an exploratory analysis of over 200 brand and corporate sites. It highlights the tools that firms mainly use and identifies some relevant industrial and firm specificities.
In December 2004, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) adopted a new standard of accounting for employee stock options (ESOs). This standard, entitled Statement of Financial Accounting Standards 123R, requires that ESOs be valued at the date of grant and expensed over the vesting period of the options. The signatories to this position paper strongly oppose this revision to GAAP because they believe that the expensing of ESOs is improper accounting that will result in the serious impairment of the financial statements of companies that are users of broad-based option plans. The case against expensing ESOs can be summed up in six simple statements: an ESO is a "gain-sharing instrument" in which shareholders agree to share their gains (stock appreciation), if any, with employees; a gain-sharing instrument, by its nature, has no accounting cost unless and until there is a gain to be shared; the cost of a gain-sharing instrument must be located on the books of the party that reaps the gain--in the case of an ESO the gain is reaped by shareholders and not by the enterprise; the cost of the ESO, therefore, is borne by the shareholders; this cost to shareholders (which, not coincidentally, exactly equals the employee's post-tax profit) is already properly accounted for under the treasury stock method of accounting (described in FAS 128, entitled "Earnings per Share") as a transfer of value from shareholders to employee option holders; and neither the grant nor the vesting of an ESO meets the standard accounting definition of an expense. These six statements lead to the conclusion that an ESO, while it may have an economic cost to shareholders, is not an expense of the entity that grants it.
The Festival by the Sea (FBTS) has been successful by all accounts except financially. As the General Manager reviews the recent performance of the festival, she also noted several challenges lied ahead. The events industry needs better educated professionals, ethical issues need to be addressed, temporary employees and volunteers need to be successfully hired and retained, and sponsors need to be attracted in order to cover the costs of the New Brunswick festival. The General Manager must determine how to ensure the viability of the FBTS.