It is very difficult to be an effective leader if you don't know who you are and what you want. People in leadership positions are expected to clarify things for others--purpose, vision, values, strategy, and goals. This technical note describes several fundamentals of an effective organizational and work group charter including the important elements of a personal charter. Once leaders have a clear vision for themselves, they are prepared to make better career, lifestyle, and professional decisions.
The spate of corporate misdeeds revealed to the American public in 2001 to 2002 prompted corrective action in many quarters of the U.S. economy. The note summarizes some of the steps taken by lawmakers, regulators, law-enforcement officials, companies, investors, professional associations, and educators to restore public trust in U.S. capital markets and the U.S. system of corporate governance.
Describes the evolution and passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 from the perspective of the senior counsel on capital markets for the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services.
The president of Wheels Group and the founder and major shareholder of the company are evaluating alternatives for doubling the company's revenues over the next five years. They must decide between two competing growth strategies: an asset-based growth strategy and a nonasset-based growth one. Complicating the decision is the fact that approximately 75% of the company's revenues are currently derived from nonasset-based activity. Students can explore issues associated with developing, evaluating, and implementing business strategy within the third-party logistics industry.
In March 2002, Singapore Airlines (SIA), recognized internationally for quality, profitability, and management, was facing difficult operating conditions. Dr. Cheong Choong Kong, deputy chairman and CEO, considered how he and his management committee would respond to the forces of globalization, regulatory adjustment, and the impact of terrorist attacks in America on the airline and the industry. Their challenge: to position the airline for continued growth in a globalizing industry while maintaining the airline's loss-free record. The airline's continuing challenges would stretch SIA's people far beyond the demands of its previous history. Was the company's strategy right for the more turbulent times ahead, and was the organization durable and flexible enough to ensure its success?
An overview of issues relating to and factors affecting the concept of balance between work and personal life including the history of work-life balance and employer/employee perspectives.
On August 14, 2003, an electricity blackout cascaded throughout the northeastern United States and Canada. Describes the structure, technology, and economics of the electric utility industry and how gradual deregulation beginning in the 1970s placed unprecedented, and unintended, stress on the transmission grid. Discusses the government's role in trying to mitigate congestion along transmission lines and facilitate improved planning and operational coordination through the establishment of independent system operators and regional transmission organizations. Also describes the recent financial performance of the electricity industry, the potential costs of modernizing the U.S. transmission infrastructure, and the role of political contributions in shaping regulation.
As the leading content delivery network, Akamai helps Internet companies deliver Web site content to end users with fewer delays and lower costs. Describes the strategic management challenges facing Akamai in early 2004. The company is poised to offer its next generation of services for enterprise customers, which will allow them to run Internet-enabled applications ("Web services")--on demand, with minimal capital investment--from Akamai's network of 15,000 servers located in ISP facilities at the Internet's "edge"--close to end users. Many large enterprise software companies have developed proprietary platforms for creating and managing Web services. Akamai must decide which of these software companies would be attractive partners and whether it can and should remain uncommitted to a platform as it helps customers deploy Web services. A rewritten version of an earlier case.
This technical note examines types of organizational crisis and five phases through which nearly all crises pass. Students are encouraged to move from a mindset that manages crisis to one that generates crisis leadership. Between corporate fraud, scandals, ethical dilemmas, mismanagement, national disasters, and workplace violence, organizational crises have become all too common in recent years. The corporation's reputation with stakeholders, financial well-being, and survival are all at stake. While the actual crisis situation itself is troublesome for the firm (e.g., faulty product leading to a product recall), often the real potential damage to an organization's reputation results from the (mis)/management of the crisis issue.
This case series (see also the B [UV3535], C [UV3536], D [UV3537], E [UV3538], F [UV3546], and G [UV4339] cases) focuses students on the boom-and-bust behaviors in the Northern Forest sawmill industry. Stakeholders, from landowners to sawmill owners to government officials to environmentalists, all want to make sure that the overall demand for saw logs, as driven by sawmill capacity, does not exceed the rate at which the trees are growing. They do not want sawmill demand to "overshoot" the productive capacity of the forest resource, a classic problem in renewable-resource economies that the region had experienced approximately a century earlier. Students are called upon to use system-thinking skills (analysis of reference modes of behaviors, causal-loop mapping, and stock-flow mapping) in creating their causal hypotheses of the underlying system structure. Students are asked to design system-structure policies to help sustain both the industry and the natural resources of the region.
How do you deal with overly aggressive or excessively passive people? When should you push and when should you hang back? Should you ever show your anger, or is it wise to keep it inside or express it differently? The answers to these questions can mean the difference between derailing your career in management and going all the way to the top. If you learn what appropriately assertive behavior is and then practice ways of expressing yourself (when the occasion calls for it), your level of assertiveness will match the situation. This technical note examines interactions that fall on a continuum of assertiveness, from abusive to overly passive.
This case examines NBC's decision to bid on Major League Baseball's contract. The issues relate to the cost of the contract and whether it helps NBC meet both its profit targets and strategic goals. The case includes a pricing model to help the student determine whether to bid or not.
This note provides detailed guidance for analyzing a complex business problem using the systems thinking tools: reference behavior patterns, systems archetypes, causal-loop diagrams, and stock-flow maps. The step by step guidance helps a systems thinker create a clear, organized presentation for a client or professional modeler. Successfully communicating one's views and hypotheses and making relevant, supported recommendations are an outgrowth of using the writing process to support a systems analysis.
In the summer of 2002, the International Rivers Network (IRN), an environmental NGO located in Berkeley, California, was engaged in what appeared to be the last hours of a three year campaign to stop a $582 million dam and hydropower project at Bujagali Falls in Uganda. The final piece of the financing puzzle was about to be put in place as the World Bank was set to approve a $250 million loan guarantee for the project. Although the project would have some adverse environmental and social impacts, IRN contended that the power deal between the government of Uganda and AES was the real problem. As IRN saw it, the cost of the project was too high and Ugandans would bear most of the risk, which would add to the country's debt burden. However, without the power purchase agreement, which remained undisclosed despite requests for it to be made public, IRN had little economic data on the project to bolster its argument. Still, there were compelling reasons, such as economic development and poverty alleviation, for the Ugandan government to go ahead with the deal it had with AES, the project sponsor. AES, with its social mission and reputation for delivering low-cost energy to the world, seemed like the ideal sponsor.
Tom Bird and Ken Saxon are two young MBAs who buy a company after graduation. Chronicles their efforts as they grow the company from $600,000 in sales to $5 million. The two confront the issue of hiring succession management.
What do international stocks contribute to the portfolio of a U.S. investor? How do currencies interact with stock price movements in determining the benefits of international diversification? This case helps students compare the risks and returns of foreign stock markets with each other and with the U.S. market and to examine the risks and returns of international diversification. Students must calculate returns, adjust for currencies, derive correlations, and map efficient frontiers based on raw data. To obtain executable spreadsheets (courseware), please contact our customer service department at [email protected].
Shurgard, a U.S.-based firm that rents storage facilities to consumers and small businesses, is considering financing options for rapid expansion of its European operations. Five years after entering Europe, Shurgard Europe has opened 17 facilities in Belgium, France, and Sweden. Along the way, Shurgard has encountered skepticism from both European consumers and investors about the unfamiliar self-storage concept and internal debates on how much to adapt the U.S. business model to European lifestyles. Wall Street analysts also do not value the impact that the European expansion could have on Shurgard's U.S. performance as a publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). As an alternative, to finance this expansion, Shurgard received a proposed deal from a consortium of banks and other investors where they would provide private equity financing spaced over the next few years plus a line of credit. In return, the investors would receive a large share of Shurgard's equity and control of its board, which could force a public offering in less than two years. The decision focuses on whether Shurgard Europe should accept the conditions and valuation of the proposed deal or seek another deal at a later point in time. Students must assess whether the self-storage business model can deliver the growth rate in Europe that the company has promised his potential investors. Involves calculating some basic estimates of the company's value from financial exhibits (enterprise value using a pEBITDA multiple). Main focus is to assess this as an entrepreneurial venture. Students do not need to be familiar with REITs.
Richard Breeden proposed corporate governance reforms for MCI. Breeden is a former chairman of the SEC who was a court-appointed "corporate monitor" for the troubled company (formerly WorldCom). The company must adhere to the proposals unless excused by a court order.
Samsung's global marketing director is assessing how to build the global brand reputation of the company further and upgrade the company's worldwide brand image. To show how to build a global brand.