The CEO of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc. needed to give sales and profits a serious boost; despite the company's excellent brand equity, it was losing market share and struggling to make a profit. The company's product was on store shelves in all U.S. states, but efforts to enter foreign markets had only been haphazard with non-U.S. sales accounting for just three per cent of total sales. The CEO needed to focus serious attention on entering the world's second largest ice cream market, Japan. An objective of Ben & Jerry's was to use the excess manufacturing capacity it had in the U.S., and it found that exporting ice cream from Vermont to Japan was feasible from a logistics and cost perspective. The company identified two leading partnering options. One was to give a Japanese convenience store chain exclusive rights to the product for a limited time. The other was to give long-term rights for all sales of the product in Japan to a Japanese-American who would build the brand. For the company to enter Japan in time for the upcoming summer season, it would have to be through one of these two partnering arrangements.
The chief financial officer and acting chief executive officer of PixStream Incorporated, a high-tech video networking solutions company, was contemplating how going public in the next couple of years might affect his decisions and choices relating to the company's accounting practices for research and development expenditures. He needed to determine if he should continue expensing all research and development costs or if he should capitalize and amortize some or all of the costs over the period of time the company is expected to benefit from the research and development efforts. There were many practical business reasons for keeping development costs off the balance sheet, but he wanted to ensure that PixStream would get its proper valuation when the time came for the company to go public. He wanted to approach his analysis from a proper accounting perspective and from a practical business perspective, to make sure that all angles were covered. Once he has decided on his course of action, he must determine the ramifications of his decision and the actions that he will have to take as a result.
The CEO of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc. needed to give sales and profits a serious boost; despite the company's excellent brand equity, it was losing market share and struggling to make a profit. The company's product was on store shelves in all U.S. states, but efforts to enter foreign markets had only been haphazard with non-U.S. sales accounting for just three per cent of total sales. The CEO needed to focus serious attention on entering the world's second largest ice cream market, Japan. An objective of Ben & Jerry's was to use the excess manufacturing capacity it had in the U.S., and it found that exporting ice cream from Vermont to Japan was feasible from a logistics and cost perspective. The company identified two leading partnering options. One was to give a Japanese convenience store chain exclusive rights to the product for a limited time. The other was to give long-term rights for all sales of the product in Japan to a Japanese-American who would build the brand. For the company to enter Japan in time for the upcoming summer season, it would have to be through one of these two partnering arrangements.
Chronicles M. Douglas Ivester's 26-month term as chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Co., and how he navigated the company through a series of what some considered "small crises."
Describes Douglas Daft's first quarter as chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Co. Highlights actions taken to resolve issues that arose under M. Douglas Ivester's 26-month term.
Two young and inexperienced MBAs buy a virtually bankrupt company. They design a decentralized control system organized around profit centers. As a case in control systems, there is ample detail for a discussion of design issues, control of independent profit centers, and details about decentralized control. A rewritten version of an earlier case.
Arbitration proceedings have been initiated between Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen. The case details developments during 1999 and 2000, as the arbitration nears a decision.
Describes TixToGo, a Silicon Valley start-up company that offers online solutions to individuals and organizations that want to offer activities and/or collect registration fees for events over the Internet. A serial entrepreneur and his partner started the company in San Francisco in 1997. While the business model seems quite attractive, TixToGo has had difficulty gaining momentum. The founders have therefore decided to hire Lu Cordova, a manager and entrepreneur with considerable start-up experience as CEO. Her first day on the job is May 18, 1999. TixToGo is also her first job as CEO of a company she did not start. The company has $12,000 in the bank. The monthly burn rate is $30,000. Lu needs to act quickly.
Introduces students to the basics of principal-agency theory as it applies to supply chains. Operational problems in supply chains can often be traced to incentive issues. Students and managers lack frameworks to analyze incentive problems in supply chains. This note offers such a framework.
Describes the sixth and final module of the Harvard Business School MBA second-year elective course Legal Aspects of Management. This module deals with the way firms should approach business risks in order to avoid legal liability and how firms can use contracts to allocate risk.
Some of the senior managers at Ameritrade, an Internet brokerage firm, are selling their holdings in the firm. Why are the managers selling, how will it affect shareholders, and what should the CEO do about it? The CEO is concerned that the market will interpret managerial sales as a signal that the managers believe the firm to be overvalued. He also wonders whether the sales might interfere with the firm's plan to raise funds in the capital markets. Finally, he thinks that, at a minimum, such sales undermine a carefully thought-out compensation plan that pays managers with stock options to align managers' incentive with those of the shareholders.
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.