Lucent Technologies' New Ventures Group has created innovative ways to commercialize Bell Labs research. The success of this approach now forces the group to evaluate whether to stay inside Bell Labs or become an external venture capitalist group.
Alibris is an Internet-era company providing search and fulfillment services for hard-to-find (rare, used, and out-of-print) books. At the time of the case, the company had made decisions to change its revenue model, to become involved in the fulfillment process for each book it sells by establishing a cross-dock facility, and to purchase Oracle's Internet commerce software. However, the implementation of this software has been very difficult, delaying the launch of the new fulfillment business and costing large amounts of money at a time when cash is scarce. The company's leaders, who are not IT professionals, must decide whether to continue with Oracle or begin anew with another product.
Takes place more than two years after the (A) case. Alibris has weathered the storms and has built a popular, growing business. As the Christmas season of 2000 approaches, the company is confronted with two IT projects that both seem urgent and important. The first is an effort to replace the software tool used by book dealers and others to upload their listing to the Alibris database. The current tool is error prone and does not provide rich information about each book uploaded. This lack of rich information makes useful searches of the Alibris database difficult. The second project involves ensuring the integrity of the database itself. Recent evidence suggests that records are not being uploaded, updated, and deleted as they should be in all cases, with adverse effects for customers. Alibris must decide which of the two projects to pursue immediately. There are not enough resources to do both.
Plum Creek Timber Co. decides to go ahead with negotiations for a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) on its Pacific Northwest properties. HCP represents a new form of public-private-sector collaboration and innovation to improve upon command-and-control environmental policy solution. Throughout the negotiation process, the company must manage several factors: identifying which native fish species to include beyond the bull trout, matching "best science" standards with cost-efficient conservation commitments, minimizing the regulatory burden while enhancing species protection, and fostering support and avoiding conflict with a range of interested stakeholders, from environmental activists to forest products executives.
Assistant Professor Sam Benson was about to end the class session portion of his course with only student projects remaining. Then, he received a phone call from a student, George McHenry, who had missed 11 of 20 sessions. McHenry wanted to know what he needed to do to salvage his standing in the section so that he would be given a category-III grade and not a category-IV grade and avoid review by the Academic Performance Committee (perhaps jeopardizing his chances for graduation). In his first year of teaching, Benson didn't know how to handle the situation and received conflicting advice from senior faculty colleagues. Teaching purpose: Presents an actual situation and challenges the reader to arrive at an appropriate solution. The reader will have to consider short-term and long-term consequences of the decision that is chosen, with careful consideration concerning the reader's own philosophy about the division of responsibility in the learning process and the role of punitive measures to motivate and punish.
eCircle, a German Internet-based group communications company, was founded in 1999 with a half-dozen employees and a few hundred thousand users on its new C2C platform. By early 2001, the cofounders had built eCircle's technology platform, had acquired 4.5 million users and 90 employees, and had raised two rounds of financing. It appeared that the company had overcome the initial challenges of a start-up--it had cash, advertising customers for its C2C business, and two customers for its new B2B business. However, despite their early success, the cofounders faced a number of challenges. Could they leverage a relatively successful C2C group communications platform into other profitable business lines, especially B2B offerings? Could they fend off new competition within Europe and the United States? And could they manage their cash flows to survive the financing market slump? The tight economic environment and the struggles and failures of numerous Internet start-ups in early 2001 made growth strategy more of a challenge for eCircle. Its margin for error in such an environment was smaller than when the company first started.
WaveRider Communications, Inc. was a Toronto-based company with a mission to become the leader in global wireless technology by developing, selling and supporting products that enabled wireless Internet service providers. It recently launched market its Last Mile Solution, offering Internet service providers the opportunity to provide wireless Internet access at broadband speeds in the unlicensed 2.4 gigahertz spectrum. The wireless Internet access industry was relatively untapped and WaveRider's vice-president of marketing wondered whether the company, as it started its growth phase, should seek an alliance with a competing technology company. To determine the feasibility of this idea, he needed to classify the competition, review the customer barriers and evaluate which technology was the best fit.
When it comes to making business decisions, being overconfident about your choices can actually be more harmful than just guessing. Here's how managers can calibrate their confidence levels--and avoid being too sure in the wrong situations.
Few companies can pinpoint just how much they're spending on procurement. Here's a matrix that gives companies a systematic way to identify and organize the full costs of their relationships with their suppliers.
Guidant's Ginger Graham argues that senior executives are actually better prepared than most lobbyists to inform and educate members of Congress about the issues that will affect their businesses.
In a roundtable discussion, top executives from Southwest Airlines reveal that relationships with the company's unions and frontline supervisors may actually be more important to its success than the operational focus for which it is so well known.
In big organizations, traditions and territoriality often keep people in different product groups from working together. Siemens may have found an answer to this problem: managers need to feel they have "permission" to collaborate across divisions.
The case describes AOL Latin America, a joint venture with Venezuela's Cisneros Group. It highlights the challenges faced by AOL, a leading brand, into entering emerging markets. AOL was a latecomer in Latin American Internet and had a difficult debut in Brazil after a challenging Initial Public Offering.
This case describes the development and use of a neutral B-to-B marketplace (mondus.com), set up for small- and medium-sized enterprises. It analyses how mondus matches buyers and sellers through the request-for-proposals model. The case also describes the international expansion of mondus and the entrepreneurial leadership of its founders, and highlights the benefits and drawbacks for the e-marketplace players.
Only a few weeks ago, Greg McNally, the CEO of software start-up DataClear, had called an off-site in Montana to celebrate his company's success in racking up $5 million in sales from its first product, ClearCloud--a powerful data analysis package. But that was before his talented and successful head of sales, Susan Moskowski, gave him the news about VisiDat, a British start-up that was testing a data analysis package of its own that was only weeks away from launch. "We need to agree on a strategy for dealing with this kind of competition," Susan had told Greg. "If they start out as a global player, and we stay hunkered down in the U.S., they'll kill us." Because of that news, Greg had changed the agenda of the off-site, instead having Susan present the options for taking DataClear global. The meeting had taken place two weeks ago, at which point the consensus had been to establish a European presence and probably one in Japan. The only question seemed to be whether to do it from scratch or to form partnerships with local players. Did DataClear really need to go global? Should it instead expand into different domestic markets? Should it do both at once? Could the company afford to? In R0106A and R0106Z, four commentators offer their advice in this fictional case study.
In 1994, the consumer products company Alberto-Culver North America faced flattened sales and the most difficult competitive environment of its history. President Carol Bernick knew that overcoming these challenges would require a certain kind of corporate culture--but it wasn't the culture the company had. She changed that by focusing on four areas. First, Bernick made culture visible and elevated it to priority status, often by highlighting desired values and behaviors that already existed in pockets of the company. Second, Bernick and her executive team created the role of growth development leader (GDL). Each mentors about a dozen people. Her frequent meetings with GDLs make them effective agents of change upward and downward. Third, the company uses an employee survey to identify areas for improvement and to provide 360-degree feedback to GDLs and top management. And fourth, successes are celebrated constantly--through stock awards for the best GDLs, Business Builders Awards for great innovators, and many other, less formal means. Since 1994, the company has cut employee turnover in half, seen sales grow 83%, and watched pretax profits rise 336%--indicators of how cultural change is driving business results.