Over the long term the stock market responds rationally to the adoption of business strategies that change the level and quality of a company's future cash flows. The stock market usually processes available strategic information efficiently. It is at the business unit level that value is ultimately created or destroyed. To evaluate the performance of business units and the impact of strategic decisions on them, complement your own good judgment and creativity with the four steps described here.

In today's novel and rapidly changing business environment, managers constantly face new market realities and uncertainties. For more than a decade, forecasting techniques have theoretically helped them evaluate the varied factors they face. But much of the promise of these approaches has been unrealized. The forecaster's chart provides a method for evaluating techniques and for choosing a combination that yields the best results. The chart groups and profiles 20 common forecasting techniques and arrays them against 16 important evaluative dimensions.

Strategic planning is not on the way out, contrary to what many of its critics say. If properly used, it becomes strategic management, whereby strategic thinking is a pervasive aspect of running a business and a way of integrating all other control systems. To use strategic planning effectively, companies must prepare line managers for the key role they play in planning, define their business units properly, move beyond general goals, make detailed action plans, fit the plans of all units together at the corporate review stage, and integrate strategic planning with controls like budgeting, information, compensation, and organization.

New product development has become fast paced and competitive. Managers need to realize that the traditional, sequential approach to developing new products will not work in the new arena. Instead, they must adopt a more flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal.

The newly appointed project manager of a highway project in Southeast Asia has a variety of issues to contend with all at once. The project is fully described in Hazelton International. The Hazelton case can serve as a briefing and must be done before this one. This case provides the company schedule and infrastructure information. Decisions need to be made regarding the items in his in-basket. These items are described in An International Project Manager's Day (B) and An International Project Manager's Day (C).

A new project manager faces sixteen items in his in-basket when he reports for his first day of work with Hazelton International Limited. This case, along with An International Project Manager's Day (C), is a supplement to An International Project Manager's Day (A), and should be considered in conjunction with Hazelton International Limited.

A new project manager arrived on his first day of work to find an in-basket full of issues requiring his consideration. Hazelton International Limited, An International Project Manager's Day (A), and An International Project Manager's Day (B). Now, he finds additional items on which he must take action.

This case discusses the effect import taxes had on Harley-Davidson. Using statistics on "average unit value" of 790cc and larger imports, Harley determined that eh real value of imports had dropped by $883 between 1979 and 1982. As such, a tariff rate of 48% would be necessary to restore import values to their 1979 level. The case continues by documenting the process Harley Davidson underwent to propose and implement a tariff. Through Harley's process, Japanese cycle producers challenged Harley's case for a steep import. Japanese producers negotiated with Harley to find a solution that suits all parties. This case may be used to discuss demand elasticities, tariffs and regulations, and international business. It should be paired with HKS case This is HKS Case Number 780.0

This case is the sequel to HKS815, which discusses the effect import taxes had on Harley-Davidson. Using statistics on "average unit value" of 790cc and larger imports, Harley determined that eh real value of imports had dropped by $883 between 1979 and 1982. As such, a tariff rate of 48% would be necessary to restore import values to their 1979 level. The case continues by documenting the process Harley Davidson underwent to propose and implement a tariff. Through Harley's process, Japanese cycle producers challenged Harley's case for a steep import. Japanese producers negotiated with Harley to find a solution that suits all parties. This case may be used to discuss demand elasticities, tariffs and regulations, and international business. It should be paired with HKS816. This is HKS Case Number 780.1

On December 19, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz, stung the administration when he publically threatened to resign. This action was not based on a substantive disagreement over foreign policy. Instead, Shultz was demonstrating his strong opposition to an administration plan to require polygraph tests for all government officials with access to "highly classified information." Roughly 182,000 government employees were to be affected by this plan, including some 4,500 members of the State Department. From the outset, the Reagan administration had been strongly interested in crushing espionage activities within the U.S. Government due to several recent instances during which breeches in U.S. security occurred. This case provides several examples of times when security was breached and chronicles the Reagan Administration's plan to squash espionage. It then details the series of actions that followed as Congress debated the issue. HKS Case Number 681.0.

In 1986, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a private utility company serving most of northern and central California, was facing the loss of many of its biggest and best customers. The threat came not from conservation, general economic depression, or competing utilities; rather, customers were beginning to self-generate, or operate their own, small-scale power plants. PG&E estimated that industrial and commercial customers, responsible for 28 percent of sales, would soon find it cheaper to generate power on-site than to pay PG&E rates. The situation perplexed PG&E's regulators, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which perceived that industrial and commercial rates could be lowered only at the expense of residential customers or the utility's financial health. Moreover, the region's surplus of generating capacity suggested that new power plants would only make a bad situation worse. Indeed, the CPUC was also struggling with an excess supply of third-party generation, which utilities were required to buy under standard contracts set forth by the CPUC. The case is intended to illustrate issues concerning the regulation of a potential natural monopoly, with an emphasis on the understanding of marginal cost. While the case was designed to highlight the dilemmas of regulators, it can also be taught from the utility's perspective. HKS Case Number 713.0.

In many parts of California, water districts set prices so that agricultural users pay far less than residential users and far less than the true cost of water. While the adoption of a marginal cost pricing system would bring enormous efficiency gains, it would inevitably create losers as well as winners. To anticipate the problems of implementing such a pricing system in California, reformers need to anticipate which regions and which crops in California would be most affected.The case provides the information necessary to do a partial equilibrium incidence analysis, including data on the average factor share of water by crop, the average value created for each crop by marginal applications of water, the degree of interregion variation in the ratio of non-water inputs, and the role of each crop in the California and worldwide market. HKS Case Number 710.0

This case is designed to support a discussion of how to apply an economic evaluation of the appropriate level of control of an externality to a real problem with incomplete information of uncertain quality and high political stakes. It sketches the Reagan administration's stance on the issue, explains how regional interests have divided Congress on the desirability of acid rain control legislation, and presents the essential details of a House bill widely felt to have some credibility and political potential. Congressional estimates of the costs of attaining the several different levels of acid rain control possible under the House bill, by several different control methods, are presented and compared to administration estimates of the cost of acid rain damage to agriculture, forests, materials, and lakes. HKS Case Number 699.0

This note focuses on the decision rules and guidelines managers use in recognizing revenue and measuring income in the preparation of periodic financial statements. This note considers issues only partly considered by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Financial Accounting Standards Board in the United States.

A nephew in an Indian family business has prepared a consulting report advocating changes in organizational structure and practices. His North American MBA training has influenced both the content of his recommendations and the process of suggesting them. Both the content and the process violate norms of the Indian culture as well as those of the African culture in which the family business has flourished for 40 years. The problem is what to do given that his actions and report have stirred up deep feelings and conflicts within the family business.

Cantel Inc. had just been granted a license from the Canadian Department of Communications to provide a national air network for a new mass communications technology, cellular radio communications. In devising a marketing strategy, the management team questioned whether the company should be involved in the provision of a complete cellular package, including the promotion, sales, installation and maintenance of both cellular telephones and network subscriptions. In addition, they were considering alternative distribution channels for bringing cellular to potential end users, and pricing and promotional programs were not yet finalized.

This note focuses on the decision rules and guidelines managers use in recognizing revenue and measuring income in the preparation of periodic financial statements. This note considers issues only partly considered by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and the Financial Accounting Standards Board in the United States.

The director of the international division of a software company has to mediate and resolve a major impasse between one of his project managers and a visiting Chinese programming expert. The Chinese computer expert, a woman of strong views, appears to feel an injustice has been done and is withholding a crucial program which she has completed. The project manager will suffer a significant delay if the computer expert does not relinquish the program and potential sales at a trade show are at stake. (Two sequels to this case are available titled Canada-China Computer Crisis Case, case 9A86C013 and 9A87C016.)

A hotel's personnel director wonders if he should attempt to get even greater employee involvement after setting up Work Excellence Committees. The committees are comprised of union and management representatives at sectional, departmental and top management levels and they provided the coordinating mechanism for the hotel's many productivity activities. The positive end result was progress in labour-management relations.

A nephew in an Indian family business has prepared a consulting report advocating changes in organizational structure and practices. His North American MBA training has influenced both the content of his recommendations and the process of suggesting them. Both the content and the process violate norms of the Indian culture as well as those of the African culture in which the family business has flourished for 40 years. The problem is what to do given that his actions and report have stirred up deep feelings and conflicts within the family business.