Explores the phenomenon of IT-enabled services (ITES) exports from developing countries. Reviews the business and technical drivers of this phenomenon, describes major segments of the industry, discusses key challenges facing these firms, and profiles seven ITES firms.
Reviews the issues managers face when attempting to value projects abroad. These include dealing with multiple currencies, adjusting for country and industry risk, and considering expropriation and devaluation risk.
In late 1999, India's second largest tea company, Tata Tea, is faced with a highly competitive home market that is about to become more so as impending deregulation takes effect. The company is thus contemplating internationalisation. Tata Tea is grappling with the decision of how to internationalise. It can choose to build its own international brand or, take the opportunity of buying Tetley Tea, the world¿s second largest tea brand, which has recently been put up for sale. Should Tata Tea build its own brand or buy Tetley. If the decision is to buy, how much should they offer?
Chip Rae, director of recruiting at SG Cowen, must decide which recruits to keep after the final interview process for new outside associate hires. Along with team captains assigned to each school, he reviews the criteria used to make hiring decisions. Their new strategy is to look beyond the top 10 core business schools for the best of class in the top 25, avoiding people in the middle of their class. After some initial resistance, senior managers eventually see the wisdom of the new strategy.
Sa Sa Cosmetics has had spectacular success as a low-price retailer of branded cosmetics. But recently, growth has slackened. What are the causes? This case describes recent strategic initiatives and provides market research data to aid the students in diagnosis.
This case is ideal for analyzing the currency, liquidity, operating interest-rate, and other types of risk that a bank faces, especially a bank in emerging markets as it was hit during the Asian crisis of 1997. The students can also learn and apply the KMV model to estimate bankruptcy risk.
This case frames a common business situation in which the protagonist (in this case a commercial lender who has made a mistake which might cost him his job) is faced with making a decision for which no outcome is desirable.
This case frames a common business situation in which the protagonist (in this case a commercial lender who has made a mistake which might cost him his job) is faced with making a decision for which no outcome is desirable.
Founded in 1984, Dell Corp. has achieved phenomenal growth, and by 2000 had topped $25 billion in sales and over $2 billion in net income. In the 4th quarter of 2000, however, the PC industry's average 30-year growth rate crashed to a negative 10%. Dell must make difficult decisions on how to sustain its profitability in light of its broad product portfolio--PCs, workstations, and servers on storage products for a broad cross section of customers in the United States and worldwide. Should it stay the course or fundamentally change strategy?
In its first two years as a direct-response retail bank in Canada, ING Bank of Canada attracted more than 160,000 customers and assets of $1.6 million. Several other direct banks have entered the marketplace with similar services, and the management team needs to consider the company's next strategic move. The team must decide whether to recommend an alliance that would place ING automated banking machines in Canadian Tire stores nationwide.
Jack and Bruce Aspen must decide how they want to grow their commercial real estate finance company during a time of tremendous change in the industry.
Consumer auto insurance is a price-sensitive industry in which customers rarely pay a premium to a provider even for additional service features. Progressive spends more on additional service features than its competitors do; consumers don't pay extra for these features, yet the company makes money on a product its competitors often do not. Central to Progressive's success is its ability (a) to turn operational savings into value-added service and (b) to capitalize on its unique competencies through clever service design. Progressive is considering a national rollout of Autograph, a pay-as-you-go insurance service offering that recently completed a successful pilot in Texas.
This case analyzes incentive strategy from the perspective of a company's board of directors and owners. The focus is the role that executive compensation and ownership structure (the composition of, and financial structure between, a company's owners) play in motivating value-creating behavior.
This exercise helps students evaluate their negotiating style on traditional measures of creating versus claiming, and empathy and assertiveness. In just a few minutes, they can see where their natural style lies on a matrix.
Discusses the complete transformation and turnover in every division of Garanti Bank. Describes the multiple change projects managed and cross-cultural issues confronted during the 1990s and the organizational challenge of transforming Garanti Bank into one of Turkey's premier financial institutions.
In early 2002, world attention turned to the upcoming election in the southern Africa nation of Zimbabwe. Once viewed as a model of relative prosperity and potential, as well as democracy in sub-Saharan black Africa, the nation faced political violence, an AIDS epidemic, and food and fuel shortages, under the rule of long-time president Robert Mugabe, the one-time revolutionary leader in what was once white-ruled Rhodesia. This case focuses on the political strategy and campaign of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), an opposition party led by former labor leader Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC faced the daunting challenge of waging a peaceful and successful campaign notwithstanding what were widely viewed around the world as increasingly anti-democratic steps taken by Mugabe-including land seizures of white-owned farms and potential vote-rigging. Tsvangirai must balance a desire for victory with concern for his personal safety, concern for stability in Zimbabwe, and the long-term prospects for the MDC and democracy in Zimbabwe. HKS Case Number 1655.0
Surveying contented customers just once can increase profitability over the course of a year, surprising new research finds. That may be tempting news to marketers, but beware: Surveying unhappy customers could have the opposite effect.