Team-based exercise designed to illustrate the use of the Internet directly by executives. Requires going on the Internet to search for information required to construct a high-tech investment portfolio.
Confronted by a business proposal that is remarkably similar to a project recently financed by a sister office, venture capitalist Monique LeMieux ponders what she should do.
In mid-2000, United Technologies Corporation (UTC) was two years into a supplier development integration program. The major focus of this initiative was to strengthen relationships with "key" suppliers to fully leverage the supply chain. The qualities sought in the relationships included long-term commitments, confidential information sharing, cooperative continuous improvement efforts, and sharing risks and rewards. Both the nature of these relationships and the associated behaviors were new for UTC and represented a significant challenge. UTC believed it was making progress moving from supplier rationalization toward supplier integration. However, some UTC suppliers believed that they were not receiving any of the gains from these initiatives and viewed UTC as often focused only on cost cutting. UTC's Global Supply Management organization hoped to investigate individual supplier relationships and address supplier concerns. The objective was to assist high-potential suppliers so that they could improve their performance and, at the same time, align better with UTC's goals for a more productive and less costly set of reliable supply chain partners.
Introduces students to the wide variety of family business definitions in literature today. Also reviews prominent typologies of family business systems.
By the summer of 2001, Japan's economy had been generally stagnant for nearly 10 years--since the collapse of the bubble economy in 1990-91. The development strategy that drove the nation during earlier decades was fulfilled, and by 1989 Japan's GDP per capita exceeded that of the United States. Facing another downturn, Prime Minister Koizumi seemed ready politically to undertake real change. A rewritten version of an earlier case.
Paula Evans is in her second year as principal of the only high school in Cambridge, MA. Her mandate when she arrived was to redesign the high school so that long-standing inequities in academic achievement rates across race and socioeconomic class were removed. In her first year, she succeeded in obtaining approval for her proposed redesign and completing the physical and administrative restructuring of the high school. Now in her second year, the reforms in how teachers teach and how the school operates are fully under way. From early indications, she and her hand-picked leadership team are moving the school in the desired direction. But the school committee has just made a policy decision that Evans and her team believe will undo all of the redesign efforts that have been made thus far. Evans has threatened to resign and now ponders what she will tell her leadership team and the faculty the next day.
Performance measurement is an important part of supply chain management. Timely, accurate, and detailed performance monitoring can allow a company to detect problems early, diagnose causes of problems, and come up with interventions promptly. SeeCommerce provides an Internet-based solution so that companies in a supply chain can have visibility of performance measures throughout the supply chain. This case describes the value proposition that SeeCommerce creates through its solutions and how the Mopar Division of DaimlerChrysler was able to make use of the solutions to improve greatly the efficiency and customer service of service parts operations at DaimlerChrysler.
NASDAQ's mission "to facilitate capital formation" is threatened by the emergence of Electronic Communication Networks, which are not as heavily regulated by the SEC. This case reviews the development of NASDAQ and its evolution from a loose network of broker-dealers through to its proposed SuperMontage. SuperMontage is a centralized order book, where multiple parties can place orders (both buy and sell) for the stocks they wish to trade and where entire supply and demand curves can be displayed. To understand the context, students will learn about the structure of the capital markets and why it concerns regulators and investors.
The economics of the Internet are often tied to determining the value of a communications network. However, there are several different kinds of communications networks, each with their own method of valuation. These networks are named by the laws that describe their valuation: Sarnoff's, Metcalfe's, and Reed's. This note describes each network type and its method of valuation.
Fred Bocock was examining the performance of the Energy Hedge Fund and the Energy Portfolio, a hedge fund and a mutual fund respectively, that he manages. Bocock had become increasingly aware that absolute returns or relative returns (returns relative to a benchmark) may not adequately capture his performance and some measure of risk-adjusted performance was necessary. The Dynamis Energy Hedge Fund extends the discussion of performance evaluation into the hedge fund arena. (See "Zeus Asset Management," UV0084, for an examination of performance evaluation techniques in the mutual funds arena.) More broadly, the case engages students in discussions on what hedge funds are, what investment strategies they use, and who their investors are. Since the portfolio manager of Dynamis manages both an oil sector equity mutual fund and an oil sector hedge fund, the case allows for a comparison between a hedge fund and a mutual fund. Students should consider the pros and cons of evaluating the performance of the oil stock mutual fund against a number of oil sector stock indices as well as against a number of generic indices, such as the S&P 500 Index. The use of futures, options, shorts, and leverage by hedge funds makes it a lot more difficult to measure their performance. The case comes with a spreadsheet that contains data on the energy mutual fund, the Dynamis hedge fund, and several relevant indices.
Conventional pricing is being turned on its head. Deciding what prices to charge represents one of the more visible decision variables confronting managers. Prices send clear messages about customer value and company objectives. Yet, pricing has been one of the least emphasized strategic issues. Historically, managers have taken price for granted, thinking its main function was to cover costs and provide a target rate of return. Now, companies are adopting more sophisticated approaches. A strategic perspective on pricing includes price objectives, price strategy, price structure, price levels, and price promotions. E-commerce opens new opportunities for using differentiated pricing all the time, optimizing pricing by creating customer switching barriers, and differentiating by stage. Challenges to management include the development of technology that facilitates customer price searching and customers making rather than taking prices. An integrative framework for analysis combines the dimensions of strategic pricing with market-based versus cost-based, proactive versus reactive, risk-assumptive versus risk-aversive, and flexible versus standardized dimensions.
Louise Ito examines option-pricing data from the Wall Street Journal. She wants to make sure that she understands the basic principles behind option pricing and examines whether these prices are consistent with respect to the effects of strike price and maturity. She also computes the intrinsic and the time value for each of the options and compares their relative magnitudes with what theory suggests. This case is taught during the first day in a two-day sequence of teaching the fundamentals of option pricing (second-day case: Ito's Dilemma UVA-F-1283). The teaching note includes a teaching plan of how to effectively teach this case and includes several examples that highlight the determinants of option pricing.
This case introduces students to the concepts of option valuation and asks them to estimate option prices using the Black-Scholes pricing model. It illustrates the importance of volatility to option pricing and allows the introduction of the concept of implied volatility. The case is used most effectively in sequence with "Ito's Delight" (UVA-F-1333) to introduce option-pricing concepts. Different versions of this teaching plan have been successfully used for both MBA and executive-education audiences.
BootCamp4MBA.COM is an online educational Web site that helps students prepare for an MBA program or undergraduate degree. The president of Strategic Management Science, Incorporated, the owner of BootCamp4MBA.COM, struggles to improve the sales of BootCamp's online business school preparatory courses. A comprehensive marketing plan must be developed and implemented quickly, including appropriate pricing, product offerings and market communications necessary to advertise and sell products and services online.
Global Sources Limited is Asia's leading publisher of business-to-business (B2B) trade-related magazines. In the latter half of the 1990s, the Internet became a powerful force for change in the business world, leading to an explosion of Internet-related activities by both traditional bricks and mortar companies, as well as countless upstart dot.coms. The chairman and chief executive officer of Global Sources had foreseen the opportunities afforded by the Internet early on, and had made it an integral part of the company's strategy. Currently, the level of activity in the B2B portal space has evolved so quickly that a noticeable degree of confusion among suppliers, buyers and investors about the merits and drawbacks of these portals has arisen. Moreover, the sustainability of these ventures has been brought into question, which is causing a dramatic reversal of fortunes for many companies. The result is that there are strong signs that the industry will experience a significant consolidation. This has left Global Sources chairman with the key challenge of generating greater visibility among users and potential users of the companies services, as well as greater interest from the investment community in order to remain viable. The company must be able to educate and convey its value proposition to its users, as well as determine whether it should continue to remain an independent player, purchase a competitor, or enter into a strategic alliance.
This note provides a non-technical description of the Chinese legal system relevant to international business. It outlines the Chinese concept of law, the Chinese legal system, dispute resolution, the 1999 Unified Contract Law and the legal framework for foreign investment enterprises.