The managing director and director of overseas marketing of Midea Group, China's largest air conditioner manufacturer, had concerns about the company's domestic and global competitive position. They felt the company needed to develop a strategy to defend its home market in the wake of more liberalized imports, and simultaneously, develop the resources and skills required to play in a global market where its cost advantages had been nullified because international players were also exporting from China. To do so, they needed to review the company's current international strategy and examine both branding and private label options.

Budget pressures were forcing Talbot University's supply department to reduce its costs. While the workload remained high, the department head wondered how to reorganize the department and the work processes so that the work could be done within a reduced budget. Working towards a solution, he needed to apply principles of organization design to improve the efficiency of the department and then develop an action plan for the required organizational changes.

The owner of a shop specializing in the creation and sale of Celtic art was faced with the challenge of finding a way to rejuvenate sales; customer traffic was declining due to the closing of a local market. He was determined to develop a strategy that would better insulate his business in the future. Limited resources meant that maximizing the returns on his efforts would be critical to the survival of the business. He had to examine his marketing strategy and product mix, consider his options and generate solutions to improve and secure his short-term and long-term profitability.

An investor planning changes to her investment portfolio, looked at Sleeman Breweries Limited (SBL) as a potential investment opportunity. The company had experienced strong growth, primarily through mergers and acquisitions, and had achieved success within the very competitive beer industry. She needed to evaluate the risks and opportunities of investing in SBL. Using qualitative and quantitative information she had to: size-up the current and future management direction of the company; analyse SBL's financial data using the calculation and interpretation of ratios as an analytic tool; and prepare a statement of changes in financial position.

A two-party, multiple-issue dollar-scoring negotiation exercise dealing with the formation and terms of an IT-industry joint venture. Subordinates have made some progress on several issues but have reached an impasse. Division heads will now attempt to reach a resolution.

A two-party, multiple-issue dollar-scoring negotiation exercise dealing with the formation and terms of an IT-industry joint venture. Subordinates have made some progress on several issues but have reached an impasse. Division heads will now attempt to reach a resolution.

In 2001, NBC entered into contract negotiations with Paramount Television Group to keep the hit show "Frasier" on the network. Paramount, the studio that produced the show, threatened to move "Frasier" to CBS, Paramount's sister network, if NBC did not agree to a substantially higher license fee than the one it was currently paying. This case follows Marc Graboff's (EVP of NBC West Coast) analysis of the situation.

Presents four views of U.S. macroeconomic developments in the late 1990s: an HBS professor, the Federal Reserve, the Clinton administration, and President George W. Bush. Develops the implications of the new economy--technological and organizational change--for business and discusses the important issues for the conduct of macroeconomic policy that these phenomena raise.

The day before Treece McDavitt was to leave RightNow!, an off-price women's fashion retailer, the 26-year-old computer wizard accessed HR's files and e-mailed employees' salaries to the entire staff. Now everyone knows what everyone else is making; they are either infuriated that they are making too little or embarrassed that they are making too much. Salary disparities are out there for everyone to see, and CEO Hank Adamson has to do something to smooth things over. Hank's trusted advisers talk extensively with the CEO about his options, ultimately coming down on two sides. Charlie Herald, vice president of human resources, takes a "You get a lemon, you make lemonade" approach: keep making the salaries public to ensure fairness and to push employees to higher performance, he advises. Meanwhile, CFO Harriet Duval sees the need for damage control: apologize, clean up the company's compensation system, and continue to keep--or at least try to keep--salaries private, she says. In R0105A and R0105Z, Victor Sim, Dennis Bakke, Ira Kay, and Bruce Tulgan offer their advice on the problem presented in this fictional case study.

In 1992, the Harlem Globetrotters were headed toward extinction, but Honeywell executive and former Globetrotter Mannie Jackson believed the brand still had value after 75 years in the public eye. He bought the organization in order to translate this widespread brand recognition into financial results. Jackson describes how he took over the Globetrotters in August 1993, intending to fold the team and replace it with an organization that would sell Globetrotters merchandise. But those plans changed when he met with the team for the first time and looked into the eyes of some of the great ones from the Globetrotters' past. Instead of shutting things down for good, Jackson started preaching to the squad about building a competitive team, about the team being well known for its contributions to charities, about the players working more with kids, and about rebuilding the quality of the organization. The players believed--and slowly but surely, audiences and arena managers did, too. By focusing on providing quality basketball, forging good business relationships, and insisting on accountability in the business, Jackson helped the Globetrotters dramatically increase revenue, profit, and attendance.

In today's technology-driven world, who has time to pick up a 400-page novel? Most executives don't--they have urgent e-mails to answer, training seminars to attend, meetings to lead, and trade publications to scan. But according to Harold Bloom, one of America's most influential scholars, they should make time in their hectic schedules to read great works. In a wide-ranging conversation with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, Bloom discusses the importance of literature: every individual--regardless of profession--needs to stretch his or her mind and reflect now and again on the human condition. "By reading great imaginative literature, you can prepare yourself for surprise and even get a kind of strength that welcomes and exploits the unexpected," he says. Because there are so many great works and there is so little time, Bloom presents a reading list for busy executives. Bloom believes the humanities have much to offer businesspeople: great books broaden their awareness and their range of sensibility, he says. But reading literature will not make businesspeople more moral, he cautions. Bloom also discusses other topics such as how to read well, the state of popular fiction, the role of irony, and the subject of change.

In this article, Bain consultants Orit Gadiesh and James Gilbert explore the concept of the strategic principle--a memorable and actionable phrase that distills a company's corporate strategy into its unique essence and communicates it across an organization. If it's devised and disseminated properly, a strategic principle can empower employees to seize business opportunities but also focus everyone in an organization--executives and line managers alike--on the same strategic objectives. The authors outline the three defining characteristics of a good strategic principle--it should force trade-offs between competing resource demands, it should serve as a test for the strategic soundness of a particular action, and it should set clear boundaries for employees to operate within even as it grants them freedom to experiment. They explain how managers can create a strategic principle, how they should test it, and when they should revisit it. The authors present real-world examples of how companies use their strategic principles. For instance, they describe how Southwest Airlines stopped flying to Denver after it measured the high costs of providing flight service in that part of the country against its strategic principle of offering customers short-haul air travel at fares competitive with the cost of automobile travel. This tool is increasingly useful in today's rapidly changing business environment, the authors conclude, and it is likely to become even more crucial to corporate success.

Many companies have become adept at the art of customer relationship management. They've collected mountains of data on preferences and behavior, divided buyers into ever-finer segments, and refined their products, services, and marketing pitches. But all too often those efforts are too narrow--they concentrate only on the points where the customer comes into contact with the company. Few businesses have bothered to look at what the author calls the customer scenario--the broad context in which customers select, buy, and use products and services. As a result, consultant Patricia Seybold maintains, they've routinely missed chances to deepen loyalty and expand sales. In this article, the author shows how effective three very different companies have been at using customer scenarios as the centerpiece of their marketing plans. Chip maker National Semiconductor looked beyond the purchasing agents that buy in bulk to find ways to make it easier for engineers to design National's components into their specifications for mobile telephones. By developing a customer scenario that describes how people actually shop for groceries, Tesco learned the importance of decentralizing its Web shopping site and how the extra costs of decentralization could be outweighed by the higher profit margins on-line customers generate. And Buzzsaw.com used customer scenarios as the basis for its entire business.

Conventional wisdom holds that a company's divisions should be given almost total autonomy--especially under conditions of uncertainty--because they are closer to emerging technologies, customers, and competitors than corporate headquarters could ever be. But research from Michael Raynor and Joseph Bower suggests that the corporate office should be more, not less, directive in turbulent markets. Rapid changes in an industry make it difficult to predict where and when synergies among divisions might emerge. With so many possibilities and such uncertainty, companies can't afford to sacrifice their ability to flexibly execute business strategy. Corporate headquarters must play an active role in defining the scope of division-level strategy, the authors say, so that divisions do not act in ways that undermine opportunities to collaborate in the future. Through an examination of four corporations--Sprint, WPP, Teradyne, and Viacom--the authors challenge traditional approaches to diversification in which a company's divisions are either related (they share resources and collaborate) or unrelated (they compete for resources and operate as stand-alone businesses). They argue that companies should adopt a dynamic approach to cooperation among divisions, enabling varying degrees of relatedness between divisions depending on strategic circumstances. The authors offer four tactics to help executives manage divisions dynamically.

What do ants and bees have to do with business? A great deal, it turns out. Individually, social insects are only minimally intelligent, and their work together is largely self-organized and unsupervised. Yet collectively they're capable of finding highly efficient solutions to difficult problems and can adapt automatically to changing environments. Over the past 20 years, the authors and other researchers have developed rigorous mathematical models to describe this phenomenon, which has been dubbed "swarm intelligence," and they are now applying them to business. Their research has already helped several companies develop more efficient ways to schedule factory equipment, divide tasks among workers, organize people, and even plot strategy. Emulating the way ants find the shortest path to a new food supply, for example, has led researchers at Hewlett-Packard to develop software programs that can find the most efficient way to route phone traffic over a telecommunications network. Southwest Airlines has used a similar model to efficiently route cargo. To allocate labor, honeybees appear to follow one simple but powerful rule--they seem to specialize in a particular activity unless they perceive an important need to perform another function. Using that model, researchers at Northwestern University have devised a system for painting trucks that can automatically adapt to changing conditions. In the future, the authors speculate, a company might structure its entire business using the principles of swarm intelligence. The result, they believe, would be the ultimate self-organizing enterprise--one that could adapt quickly and instinctively to fast-changing markets.

Few large companies have soared as high, sunk as low, and struggled as long as the 18-year-old networking software maker Novell. For years, the company dominated the market for local area networks, but by 1997, it had faltered due to misguided acquisitions, product missteps, and large unsold inventories. That's when Eric Schmidt arrived from Sun Microsystems to take over as Novell's third CEO. He turned the company around with a deft combination of cost reductions, divestitures, and new product rollouts, and by 1998, it was back in the black. Unfortunately, the good times didn't last, and like most technology companies, Novell is once again struggling with a slowdown in demand. But Schmidt is optimistic about returning Novell to good health, and his strategies suggest ways for other organizations to handle themselves during downturns. He counsels against being overly cautious during such times. His advice: keep new products coming out to sustain the interest of customers and the press, pay attention to your cash position, stay focused on your desired outcomes, and take heart from other industry leaders.

Managers fail to communicate effectively with Wall Street for all sorts of reasons. But neglecting the investment community--particularly the analysts whose opinions shape the market and whose recommendations often make or break a company's share price--can knock the most carefully conceived and brilliantly executed strategy off course. The companies that struggle the most with providing good information to analysts are those in rapidly evolving industries, where the gap between traditional performance metrics and economic realities is at its widest. In these industries, a company's strategy and the variables that govern its performance can change radically in a short time. What's more, the metrics used to report performance often fail to capture the drivers of value in today's information economy. According to Amy Hutton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, there are four basic rules for clear communications with Wall Street. First, make sure that your company's financial reporting reflects your strategy as closely as possible. Second, popularize the nonfinancial metrics that best predict--and flatter--the performance of your businesses. Third, appoint managers with recognized credibility to your strategic operations. Finally, cultivate the market experts who cover the industries in which you seek to compete. Hutton shows how AOL successfully followed these rules as it significantly changed its strategic direction and competitive arena.

Everyone knows that starting a business requires cash, and growing a business requires even more. But few people understand that a profitable company that tries to grow too fast can run out of cash even if its products are great successes. So a big challenge for managers of any growing concern is to strike the proper balance between consuming cash and generating it. Authors Neil Churchill and John Mullins offer a framework to help identify and manage the level of growth that a company's cash flow can support. They present a formula to calculate an organization's self-financeable growth (SFG) rate, taking into account three critical factors: a company's operating cash cycle--the amount of time the company's money is tied up in inventory and other current assets before customers pay for goods and services; the amount of cash needed to finance each dollar of sales; and the amount of cash generated by each dollar of sales. The authors offer a detailed hypothetical example that carefully considers these three factors; they then illustrate how a company can influence its SFG rate by carefully managing some combination of those factors.

The day before Treece McDavitt was to leave RightNow!, an off-price women's fashion retailer, the 26-year-old computer wizard accessed HR's files and e-mailed employees' salaries to the entire staff. Now everyone knows what everyone else is making; they are either infuriated that they are making too little or embarrassed that they are making too much. Salary disparities are out there for everyone to see, and CEO Hank Adamson has to do something to smooth things over. Hank's trusted advisers talk extensively with the CEO about his options, ultimately coming down on two sides. Charlie Herald, vice president of human resources, takes a "You get a lemon, you make lemonade" approach: keep making the salaries public to ensure fairness and to push employees to higher performance, he advises. Meanwhile, CFO Harriet Duval sees the need for damage control: apologize, clean up the company's compensation system, and continue to keep--or at least try to keep--salaries private, she says. In R0105A and R0105Z, Victor Sim, Dennis Bakke, Ira Kay, and Bruce Tulgan offer their advice on the problem presented in this fictional case study.

The day before Treece McDavitt was to leave RightNow!, an off-price women's fashion retailer, the 26-year-old computer wizard accessed HR's files and e-mailed employees' salaries to the entire staff. Now everyone knows what everyone else is making; they are either infuriated that they are making too little or embarrassed that they are making too much. Salary disparities are out there for everyone to see, and CEO Hank Adamson has to do something to smooth things over. Hank's trusted advisers talk extensively with the CEO about his options, ultimately coming down on two sides. Charlie Herald, vice president of human resources, takes a "You get a lemon, you make lemonade" approach: keep making the salaries public to ensure fairness and to push employees to higher performance, he advises. Meanwhile, CFO Harriet Duval sees the need for damage control: apologize, clean up the company's compensation system, and continue to keep--or at least try to keep--salaries private, she says. In R0105A and R0105Z, Victor Sim, Dennis Bakke, Ira Kay, and Bruce Tulgan offer their advice on the problem presented in this fictional case study.