Genius? That is not what they were calling Bill Belichick in Cleveland. Why? Four losing seasons in five years. Fans hurled trash and insults. The media resented him. Ownership abandoned him. Players quit on him. Very different from the three Super Bowls in five years Belichick would win with the New England Patriots a few years later. Different players? Different ownership? Different management styles? Different strategies? Different coach? Find out. What happened when the Browns hired a man who began studying football strategy at the age of six? A man with a degree in economics who almost became an MBA candidate before accepting a job in football that paid $25 a week. A man who was long recognized as one of the best assistant coaches in the NFL. Learn how Belichick managed the players, the coaches, the owner, the media, etc.
While Circuit City struggles, Best Buy has overtaken it to become the premier consumer electronics retailer in the United States. What has driven its success? How can it be sustained?
Successful college basketball coach Bob Knight was fired from his long-time role as basketball coach at Indiana University and hired in the same role at Texas Tech. Considers these events in the context of his long career and provides a context for discussing various styles of power, influence, and persuasion in his leadership role as coach and educator.
Successful college basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski faces the decision whether to accept a lucrative offer to coach a professional basketball team or continue to coach at Duke University. Provides a context for discussing various styles of power, influence, and persuasion in the context of his coaching career.
Tokyo Disneyland was started as a result of a licensing agreement between Walt Disney (WD) of the United States and Oriental Land Corp. (OL) of Japan. The agreement states that WD will receive a license fee of 7% of sales in exchange for providing OL with managerial and technological know-how and assuming small risks in the venture. When WD proposed a second project with OL, OL's senior executives wanted to find a way to make WD a risk-taking partner through investment in the business as a precondition to venturing into the new project. To prepare for the negotiations, OL's executives needed calculations of the project's net present value as seen from WD's standpoint--both in terms of the existing licensing method and one in which WD would share appropriate risks.
When India regained its independence in 1947, the country's political, social, and economic fate was in its own hands for the first time in almost 90 years. The country embarked on a journey to establish a democracy and representative government, define a plan for economic development, and build a society within which its large, diverse, and fragmented population could prosper. More than five decades later, however, opinions differed as to whether or not India had realized the greater triumphs and achievements which Nehru anticipated. With 17% of the world's population, India generated only 2% of global GDP. Per capita income was less than $3,000 per year, with 25% of the country's one billion people living below the poverty line. India needed to sustain double-digit annual GDP growth, but realized only 6.9% growth for fiscal 2004/2005. Yet, the country had become the world's 12th largest economy (and the 3rd largest in Asia behind Japan and China). India had made significant progress toward establishing a competitive position in the global economy. Its services sector had demonstrated the country's capacity to be a pioneer. Would India capitalize on this success by addressing obstacles to growth?
Grupo Martica commissions a computer security expert to conduct an audit of its systems, network, and processes. This audit reveals that Martica is quite vulnerable, and the company's de facto CIO must decide what steps to take to improve security. He wonders how complex, tightly coupled systems like computers can ever be made secure and robust.
Explores the contextual elements of Major League Baseball and presents data to allow for an analytic examination of alleged market inefficiencies within the sport.
Lewis Driscoll faces a number of challenging property, plant, and equipment issues. If he purchases a new crane, what ancillary costs should be capitalized? What depreciation method should he choose? How should he account for disposal options for the old forklifts? Not only will his decisions affect current and future profitability, but they may also impact others' bonuses based on company performance.
Engine Services, Inc., is a world-class jet-engine overhaul center. An about-to-be-published quarterly report supports the perception that the overhaul facility is providing too much value relative to contractual guarantees. The root of the problem may be the "two standard deviations rule," which is being used to provide a cushion above the guarantee. Lower targets increase the chances of costly rework but save on the costs of initial work.
This note describes the more common methods of calculating Price Premiums (also known as Relative Prices). Students will explore Reservations Prices and % Good Value, the concepts that form the foundation of price-quantity schedules, as well as Price Elasticity, a frequently used index of how responsive the market is to changes in price. The note stresses that understanding demand functions and Price Elasticity is key to the calculation of optimal prices and uses the familiar concept of Prisoner's Dilemma and addresses price tailoring.
Mukesh Ambani, the CEO of India's largest business house, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), was contemplating a major decision that could significantly affect the future of his company as well as the telecommunications landscape in India. By 2002, GSM (Global System for Mobile) cellular roaming services, based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technology, had become the de facto standard in India. Seeking to find an alternative to GSM, Ambani's telecom team had developed an innovative solution for providing inexpensive roaming cellular services to customers on a nationwide basis using CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology. The required infrastructure for CDMA, which was significantly less costly than that of GSM, was already in place. As an early mover with a competitively priced CDMA offering, Ambani was confident he could capture a large percentage of the market. Reliance had permission from the Indian government to provide local CDMA coverage, yet there was nothing in the law that explicitly prohibited the company from rolling out these services on a more widespread basis to subscribers across the country.
Provides a brief historical overview of dual class share companies in the United States, focusing on the New York Stock Exchange's evolving position on dual class structures since the 1920s, the impact of hostile takeovers on their use since the 1980s, and recent perspectives on their utility and appropriateness. Concludes with a brief discussion of the role of dual class structures in recent debates over Europe's takeover laws.
Provides a brief overview of the employment-at-will doctrine, an important concept unique to the U.S. legal system and business landscape. Briefly surveys the history and development of this doctrine and certain limitations and exceptions to it, as well as some of the distinguishing features of the employment termination process in the United States relative to other countries.
Highlights critical gaps between research and practice in the field of strategic human resources management. Also, aims to debunk some myths and preconceptions that general managers bring to their HR decisions. Before class, participants fill out a true-or-false questionnaire for subsequent class discussion.
Kemps is making a strategy shift: from being focused on fulfilling customer requests to becoming the best cost dairy producer in the industry. Its existing manufacturing cost system, however, fails to capture the costs associated with handling special flavors, small production orders, and complex delivery and order processing options. The company introduces a new system--time-driven, activity-based costing--that captures the full complexity of its operations and gives managers new insights into the profitability of orders, products, and customers. The time equations feature simply and accurately represents the cost impact of all possible options from a particular production order. Managers use the information to enhance process efficiencies, negotiate new terms with customers, and attempt to win new business. The company now faces some crucial decisions about how to forge new relationships with key customers.
Leitax, a young digital camera manufacturer selling its cameras mainly through retailers, experienced poor matching of inventory availability with demand for new and existing products in 2002. Describes the implementation and details of a consensus forecasting approach, a crucial part of a demand and supply planning redesign that was introduced to address the problem. The forecasting approach is a cross-functional one involving the sales, operations, and finance functions. Describes the results of the introduction, including planning challenges the company continued to face.