In early 1992, Mr. Eu, managing director of Kanzen Tetsu Sdn. Bhd. (KTSB), a new Malaysian producer of stainless steel tubing, received a letter from KTSB's attorney in Washington, DC, informing him that the U.S. Specialty Tube Group had written to the U.S. president concerning stainless steel tubing imported into the United States from Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Malaysia at dumped prices that was causing injury to the U.S. industry. For the next year, Mr. Eu considered how he should respond to this threat, while at the same time increasing KTSB's exports to the United States so that KTSB could meet its sales and profit goals. In March 1993, Mr. Eu was informed that a formal antidumping action had been taken against imports of stainless steel tubing from Malaysia (and other countries). Mr. Eu is considering what he should do now, both to preserve KTSB's market in the United States and maintain alternative markets in other countries.
This note describes the links between inflation, exchange rates, and interest rates in an international setting. Students are introduced to the basic ideas, which are illustrated with data from four countries. The note emphasizes the managerial implications of these links and their relevance to forecasting exchange rates. It is useful as both background reading to supplement cases and as part of preparation for a lecture on the topic.
Companies that enjoy enduring success have a core purpose and core values that remain fixed while their strategies and practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. The rare ability to balance continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision. Vision provides guidance about what to preserve and what to change. A new prescriptive framework adds clarity and rigor to the vague and fuzzy vision concepts at large today. Managers who master a discovery process to identify core ideology can link their vision statements to the fundamental dynamic that motivates truly visionary companies--that is, the dynamic of preserving the core and stimulating progress.
What should managers working abroad do when they encounter business practices that seem unethical? Should they, in the spirit of cultural relativism, tell themselves to do in Rome as the Romans do? Or should they take an absolutist approach, using the ethical standards they use at home no matter where they are? Many business practices are neither black nor white but exist in a gray zone, a moral free space through which managers must navigate. Levi Strauss and Motorola have helped managers by treating company values as absolutes and insisting that suppliers and customers do the same. And, perhaps even more important, both companies have developed detailed codes of conduct that provide clear direction on ethical behavior but also leave room for managers to use the moral imagination that will allow them to resolve ethical tensions responsibly and creatively.
Thousands of businesses have reengineered work to focus employees on processes that clearly provide value to customers. They have done away with their functional silos and created process-complete departments, each able to perform all the cross-functional tasks required to meet customers' needs. Although many of those efforts have paid off in the form of lower costs, shorter cycle times, and greater customer satisfaction, many others have resulted in disappointment. What went wrong? In a study of U.S. electronics manufacturers, the authors found that process-complete departments had faster cycle times than functional departments only when their managers had used one or more of four ways to cultivate collective responsibility: structuring jobs with overlapping responsibilities, basing rewards on unit performance, laying out the work area so that people can see one another's work, and designing procedures so that employees with different jobs are better able to collaborate.
Product recalls can destroy brands and even companies. But according to the authors, if a company handles recalls strategically, it can decrease the negative impact and maybe even reap some benefits. The authors maintain that a strategic approach to recalls should address the implications of a recall for all relevant business functions and should deal with all stages of a recall, from readiness before the fact to product reintroduction after a recall has ended. The authors offer step-by-step guidelines on handling recalls effectively. With forethought and planning, the authors assert, unavoidable recalls can have long-term favorable outcomes.
Many companies today are searching for growth. But how and where should they look? Breaking compromises can be a powerful organizing principle. Even in the most mature businesses, compromise breakers have emerged from the pack to achieve breakaway growth--far outpacing the rest of their industry. Examples include Chrysler Corp., Contadina, CarMax, and the Charles Schwab Corp. Compromises are concessions customers are forced to make. Unlike trade-offs, which are the legitimate choices customers make between different product or service offerings, compromises are imposed. The authors propose a number of alternative approaches to finding the compromises hidden in any business.
Too often, the board of a nonprofit organization is little more than a collection of high-powered people engaged in low-level activities. But that can change, the authors say, if trustees are willing to discover and take on the new work of the board. When they perform the new work, a board's members can significantly advance the institution's mission and long-term welfare. The authors give many examples of boards that have successfully embraced the new work. The stakes are high: if boards demonstrate that they can change effectively, the professional staff at the institutions they serve just may follow suit.
Diversity efforts in the workplace have been undertaken with great goodwill, but, ironically, they often end up fueling tensions. They rarely spur the leaps in organizational effectiveness that are possible. Two paradigms for diversity are responsible, but a new third paradigm is showing it can address the problem. Leaders in third-paradigm companies are proactive about learning from diversity; they encourage people to make explicit use of cultural experience at work; they fight all forms of dominance and subordination, including those generated by one functional group acting superior to another; and they ensure that the inevitable tensions that come from a genuine effort to make way for diversity are acknowledged and resolved with sensitivity.
Many managers have grasped the power of individual lean techniques--such as just-in-time deliveries and kaizen, or continuous improvement--pioneered by Toyota and other Japanese companies. However, they have stumbled in trying to put them all together into a coherent business system. In an effort to show managers how they can create a powerful whole, the authors studied 50 lean companies in a variety of industries around the world. The companies included Toyota, Porsche, and Pratt & Whitney. On the basis of their study, the authors identified five critical steps that they believe will be useful to all managers interested in applying lean thinking. Lantech, a small manufacturer of stretch-wrapping machines in Louisville, Kentucky, provides an example of how a company can make the leap.
The Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies owns a petroleum platform, the Brent Spar, in the North Sea. The Brent Spar is an oil storage facility and tanker loading buoy. It came to the end of its useful life and was taken out of commission in September 1991. After a thorough study of the environmental impact of various disposal options, Shell concluded that deep water disposal was the safest strategy. The German arm of Greenpeace mounted an aggressive public campaign against this action, affecting public opinion to the point where Shell changed its disposal plans and opted for on-land dismantling.
The purpose of the case is to help students understand the complex nature of a visible and expensive organizational buying process. The goal is to help students appreciate the nature of the selling task, the complex interplay of different decision-making-unit members, and both the political and economic factors that often permeate such purchasing decisions. The A case (see also the B case, UVA-M-0471) documents the procurement-decision process used by Los Angeles to purchase light-rail cars for its subway system. The A case traces the bidding process and ends with the final award.
Set in 1994, this case concerns a subsidiary of Westmoreland Coal that is considering whether to proceed alone as the international partner and developer of a coal-fired electric power plant in Zhangze, China. The domestic partner, the government's electric power agency, has proposed a build-operate-transfer (BOT) project financing in which Westmoreland Energy (WEI) would receive returns over 20 years and then exit. The internal rate of return on the project appears to exceed the CEO's target rate, though the project developer, Dorothy Hampton, is concerned about a variety of risks and the appropriateness of the target hurdle rate. The tasks for the student are to evaluate the risks, estimate a target rate of return, exercise the valuation model (which is given in the case), and recommend any changes in the deal structure that can help WEI achieve its goals. The objectives of the case are to (1) exercise students' capabilities in analyzing a complex investment-financing transaction from the standpoints of various project participants (the key tasks are risk analysis and valuation), (2) illustrate the financial effects of debt leverage and equity leverage (the focus of attention is on the creation of value and its sources, risk shifting, and wealth transfers), and (3) assess the characteristics and challenges of project financings and development projects in emerging economies.
A basic premise of strategy is that superior profits occur when a corporation secures favorable positions in attractive industries, and pursues economies of scope across business units. This note draws on research that documents the importance of industry, positioning, and corporate-parent effects on profitability. The research shows differences in the influence of the effects for high and low performers, and differences for firms that are in the process of achieving and sustaining performance.
In 1995, Hewlett-Packard Home Products Division (HPD) has the assignment to make Hewlett-Packard the third major home PC player worldwide. With the U.S. launch imminent, the HPD team has to decide how to enter the European market.
This note, the first in a series on regression analysis, introduces the simple linear model (one X-variable), together with least squares, as a procedure for estimating the coefficients in the model. The standard error of estimate, adjusted R-square, and standard error of the coefficients are all introduced and explained. The presentation of formulas is kept to a minimum, and an illustrative example is used throughout the note. . This note, the first in a series on regression analysis, introduces the simple linear model (one X-variable), together with least squares, as a procedure for estimating the coefficients in the model. The standard error of estimate, adjusted R-square, and standard error of the coefficients are all introduced and explained. The presentation of formulas is kept to a minimum, and an illustrative example is used throughout the note.