Provides an overview of cause-related marketing (CRM), including recent trends. Uses various examples to discuss the potential benefits of CRM as well as potential pitfalls.
Designed to familiarize students with the consolidation of highly fragmented labor-dependent service industries, offering insights into service firm growth and the ways services can, and cannot, increase their efficiency and effectiveness. Two frameworks are presented illustrating the sources of benefits and disadvantages of size in consolidations and the important decisions managers must make in designing and executing a consolidation strategy. Intended to give managers insights into the consolidation phenomenon, illustrating the problems plaguing large, labor-dependent service consolidations. These problems explain why so few labor-dependent service consolidations have been successful. A rewritten version of an earlier note.
Only in the waning years of the 20th century did international financial markets begin to enjoy the freedom from government regulation that they had experienced before the first world war. By 2002, international capital markets had grown to be enormous--$1.2 trillion flowed around the globe per day. The massive size of the market presented policy makers with a serious challenge as they were forced to grapple with the costs and benefits of such mobile capital. This note briefly relates the modern history of capital controls and summarizes scholarship on the advantages and disadvantages of international financial market regulation.
Summarizes world markets for oil and natural gas from 1980-2001. Examines the rise of OPEC, two oil shocks, Gulf War efforts, and recent pricing issues facing Saudi Arabia.
Explains the financial operations of retail banking, highlighting profitability challenges facing the industry. For U.S. banks, it is quite common for more than half of the customer base to be unprofitable and to have relatively few customers make up the vast majority of profits. Attempts to explain how retail banks generate revenue and incur costs while serving their customer base.
This case examines the decisions of John Lynch, president and CEO of Knoll Furniture, to go public in early 1997. Knoll went private in an LBO in 1996 and Warburg Pincus, the LBO sponsor, wants Lynch to take Knoll public. Lynch needs to weigh the positive and negative issues of a public offering.
Details a thinly disguised situation facing a recent Harvard MBA graduate who was forced by a prospective employer to place a dollar value on a grant of stock options. There are two objectives: 1) Serves as an introduction to option valuation, in which students have an opportunity to use market data to value an option in a realistic setting. 2) The setting permits a broader discussion of the wisdom of option-based incentive plans and the popular misconceptions of the value of option grants based on a widespread misunderstanding of how options work and how they are valued.
Companies often undermine their intellectual capital through faulty or incomplete patent filings. A little-known device called the "continuation patent" can retroactively change a patent's language and keep competitors from exploiting patent loopholes.
Conventional wisdom says that layoffs are a necessary evil during economic downturns, but new research shows that shareholders tend to punish companies that invoke layoffs solely to cut costs.
U.S. businesses face many dangers in the global marketplace these days, from threats of political violence to shifting investment risks in emerging markets. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the former chair of the National Commission on Terrorism, discusses ways to mitigate these threats.
Many commodities sellers resort to price cuts to attract customers; they fail to realize that their customers will pay premium prices for the right deals. The secret lies in reducing customers' risks.
The director of development at a large law firm and two other members of a selection committee will be interviewing three candidates for an articling position at the firm. The director must decide what questions to ask of the three law students applying, keeping in mind what questions she could not ask of the candidates. Through role play, students are given the opportunity to develop interview questions and interview the candidates.
Over the last seven years, the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies has tracked a large sample of high-technology start-ups in California's Silicon Valley. The project has examined how the founders of those enterprises approached key organizational and human resources challenges in the early days of building their companies and how it affected the evolution and performance of their ventures. This article summarizes the main findings of this research program. It describes five distinctive HR "blueprints" that high-tech founders embraced in launching their new firms. Those initial blueprints have had important impacts on a wide range of organizational outcomes, including growth in administrative overhead, labor turnover, and bottom-line performance. Moreover, companies that changed their HR blueprints have paid a heavy price in terms of higher turnover and diminished organizational performance. The results suggest that organization-building and high-commitment HR management "pay" and that changes in HR models are extremely destabilizing, even in the turbulent "built to flip" environment of Silicon Valley.
Although popular brands and unique capabilities help sustain a company's competitive advantage, they cannot be built by imitation. Managers have been able to develop sustainable capabilities not by emulating others, but by using their organizational designs and processes to identify, build on, and leverage their "asymmetries"--their evolving unique experiences, contacts, or assets. Such asymmetries may occur even in the simplest organizations. Unfortunately, they frequently are concealed, of little apparent use, and unconnected to value creation. Thus, they require new strategy making and organizational approaches for their discovery, development, and application. Based on lessons from a two-year study of a diverse sample of companies, this article shows how managers can grow capabilities that sustain competitive advantage by constantly identifying and growing asymmetries, embedding and empowering them within an organizational design, and shaping market focus to exploit them.
In the wake of corporate acquisitions, mergers, and spin-offs, considerable senior management attention has been devoted to corporate identity and its communication to key stakeholder groups. This article provides a framework to help management achieve a clearer understanding and better management of their corporation's identities. Many firms operate with a belief in a single monolithic corporate identity. Our research leads to a different view: Organizations have multiple identities. We delineate five kinds of identity within a framework termed the AC2ID TestTM (ACCID), namely, the actual, communicated, conceived, ideal, and desired identities. These reflect respectively: the current, distinct attributes of the organization; what the organization communicates about itself; the perceptions of the corporation by stakeholders; the optimum positioning for the organization; and the corporate vision from the perspective of the CEO or management board. Not only should management understand its multiple identities, it also should be alert to critical misalignments among them, as these can seriously weaken a company.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is premised on the belief that developing a relationship with customers is the best way to gain their loyalty. It is argued that loyal customers are more profitable than nonloyal customers. Recently, academic researchers have questioned some of the key premises that are used to support CRM in general and relationship marketing and customer loyalty programs in particular. This article critically examines the assumptions that underpin CRM and presents the results of research that is skeptical of its value. CRM should be adopted only after a careful appraisal of its cost effectiveness.
Today's supply chain managers have been bombarded with a wide variety of the so-called leading-edge supply chain strategies. New terminologies and initiatives are being developed constantly. However, not all of these initiatives or strategies are appropriate for all firms. Companies need first to understand the uncertainties facing the demand and supply of its products and then try to match these uncertainties with the right supply chain strategies. Based on an analysis of the uncertainties of supply and demand facing the firm, this article develops a framework that can assist managers in developing the right supply chain strategy for their products.
William Drayton founded Ashoka in 1980 to use a venture capital model to support social entrepreneurs, namely, practical visionaries who are committed to social change. The primary objective of Ashoka is to identify social entrepreneurs around the globe, who then receive Ashoka Fellowships that provide both financial and professional support. To be chosen, each prospective fellow goes through a rigorous search and selection process. Fellows receive a living stipend (typically for 3 years) and they join the Global Fellowship--a worldwide network of social entrepreneurs. Since 1982, over 1,100 Ashoka Fellows have been selected in 41 countries. Ashoka Fellows work in 6 areas: learning/education, environment, health, human rights, civic participation, and economic development.