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Supplement for case E436A

Many Chinese firms have struggled in the United States. Renewable energy is a fledgling, high-risk market. Can Goldwind USA, a leading producer of wind turbines, overcome the odds? The case examines the many strategic choices Goldwind faced as it established its first major overseas subsidiary in Chicago: building a local team around a U.S. CEO; bridging cross-cultural differences among management; overcoming regulatory hurdles; sourcing from local suppliers; and facilitating turbine sales through innovative deal structures.

On June 30, 2011, Research in Motion (RIM) co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, unexpectedly found themselves facing serious public scrutiny, not from competitors, market analysts or consumers, but from one of their own senior executives. In an attempt to have their voice heard, an anonymous senior level RIM employee addressed an open letter to both Balsillie and Lazaridis, however the letter was sent to the online technology news provider Boy Genius Report (BGR). Upon BGR verifying the identity of the source RIM employee, the full contents of the letter were featured in an online BGR article, which quickly spread into mainstream media. The contents of the detailed open letter, provided various candid criticism of RIM leadership, product development and employee culture. In addition, the employee also offered personal insight and outlined specific actions necessary for RIM to improve and expressed their desire to see the company regain its once dominant position as an industry leader. In a year during which RIM already faced pressures from a dwindling market share, failed product attempts and a sinking stock price, Balsillie and Lazaridis needed to figure out how to respond to the claims of the letter publically, but more importantly how to communicate to RIM employees internally.

Shelby Givens, a new MBA, is the general manager of Westlake Lanes, a near-bankrupt bowling alley that her grandfather founded decades earlier. Givens has been given one year to turn a profit; if the goal is not met Westlake will close. During the first few days on the job, Givens learns that the business is in worse shape financially than she - or the board - thought. She also finds that Westlake's employees exhibit minimal productivity. Givens tackles these two issues, creatively uncovering ways to reduce costs while building morale. After nine months, the business has its first profitable month in over two years. Yet Givens is worried it is too little, too late and begins to sketch a bolder long-term strategy based on pursuing one of two alternative new markets. Students are invited to consider whether the board should accept her potentially transformative proposal, maintain existing operations, or liquidate to pay off pressing loan responsibilities. The case includes a quantitative assignment for students.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 4431.

This case considers Apple's entry into the Indian tablet PC market. In spite of stiff competition in the market for tablets, Apple's iPad had invariably become the market leader in many countries across the world. This case offers students a unique opportunity to understand the reality and the results of entering a new market and losing the coveted "market leader" position in India.

Industries like restaurants and retail, which are populated by low-wage workers, have found it hard to increase employee productivity. New technology and methods are allowing them to increase their profits by shifting more work to their best workers.

Although a participative management style usually works best, new research finds an important exception: Low-status managers, who get better ratings and results when they take charge, set the course, and tell subordinates what to do.

Conventional wisdom holds that manufacturers and retailers see little benefit from unused coupons, but new research shows that unredeemed coupons serve as advertisements to consumers. In an experiment with eight retailers, the authors analyzed campaigns involving more than 500,000 targeted coupons for items representing more than 300 brands, mailed out over a 16-month period. They found that consumers who received but did not redeem coupons still typically increased their purchases in the associated stores. If businesses realized how powerful this increased awareness could be, they would take as much care with coupons as they do with other marketing materials, striving to delight customers, not simply to close a deal.

Need an energy boost at work? Taking a short break won't revitalize you--unless you use it to do something job related and positive.

Leadership missteps are proliferating--perhaps because of the cognitive limitations of individuals. One antidote is multiple perspectives. Another is better information gathering. Gradually we are learning to tap the superior judgment of organizations.

What if the United States set out to be the world's leading exporter of education? Direct revenue from tuition would be only one of the benefits, because when foreign students return home to become entrepreneurs, they rely on the networks and tools they acquired in the U.S.--and they expand their home economies, creating demand for U.S. exports.

Three researchers set up a website to get ratings of almost 44,000 tweets. What they learned can help you make your messages on Twitter more useful and more appealing.

In mid-2005, Leo Piccioli took over as Officenet Staples (ON) General Manager knowing full well that his key challenge lay in driving ON to reach Staples' profitability requirements. He was aware that one of the reasons for ON's low profitability rested with the company's sales force. Because ON's original competitive advantage had faded and sales reps were free to set the prices, reps often granted significant discounts to their customers to win the business. Typically, 40 percent of the items in a purchase order were priced below their regular prices. In a highly competitive market and with an increasingly commoditized offering, Piccioli needed to revise the company's pricing policy. Should ON change the pricing delegation practices that were so deeply embedded in its organizational culture? If so, what kind of pricing policy should ON pursue to improve its profitability while keeping its sales reps motivated? With an industry that primarily used price (rather than non-price) competition, what could ON's management do? This case is also available in Portuguese and Spanish

Singapore and many other developed countries around the world face a dilemma where fewer young people are getting married and having children. After vigorously discouraging citizens from having too many children in the 1960s and 1970s, the Singapore government observed that the total fertility rate fell rapidly in the early 1980s. The government then responded with a variety of economic and education incentives for mothers and social matchmaking services for singles. However, they were unable to prevent birth rates from falling below replacement levels. Lim Soon Hock, chairman of the National Family Planning Council since 2006, and his committee then decides that youth should be the target audience for the 2011 campaign initiatives. They approach a class at the Singapore Management University with a brief to come up with new ideas targeted at persuading the youth to start thinking about family as an important aim in life.

Plank's $1 billion company probably started on a college football field, where his sweat-soaked T-shirts drove the future CEO crazy. After graduation he found a fabric that would wick away moisture and stay light, so he produced a bunch of prototypes. Beginning with an impressive network of former teammates who had gone on to the pros, Plank gradually spread the word about his product. Soon he was outfitting entire teams. But within a couple of years, star players were asking to be paid to wear Under Armour. That meant Plank had to make some tough decisions. Only a few athletes are instantly recognizable--could the right personality make up for that? Was a number-one draft pick worth millions of dollars before he'd even dribbled a ball in the NBA? What's more, star athletes have everybody in the world coming after them. Could Plank break through the crowd and demonstrate that his company was a good fit? He managed to win endorsements from Barry Bonds, Tom Brady, Brandon Jennings, and many others.

Full-time, permanent jobs with large organizations are quite possibly an artifact of a particular moment in economic history--about 60 or 70 years ago. For elite executives and professionals, such jobs are now in many cases far less attractive than independent, project-based work, say the authors, who are "supertemps" themselves. Independent professionals are making inroads in law, consulting, and even management roles, sometimes earning more than they did in their previous positions while escaping 80-hour weeks, endless internal meetings, and corporate politics. And they're achieving a gratifying work/life balance. Corporations are learning how best to tap the supertemps' skills; organizations may soon come to look less like pyramids and more like jigsaw puzzles. Intermediary firms that broker independent talent are growing rapidly. But social biases against temporary work persist. And--especially in the U.S.--the health care and tax systems are unfriendly to project workers. Rising numbers of highly paid independents will be motivated to overcome those obstacles: Health coverage could become portable; tax rules could be rewritten. The result would be not just more-rewarding careers but a more innovative economy.

For many companies, innovation is a sprawling collection of initiatives, energetic but uncoordinated, and managed with vacillating strategies. For steady, above-average returns, firms need a balanced innovation portfolio and the ability to approach it as an integrated whole. Having studied companies in the industrial, technology, and consumer goods sectors, the authors found a striking pattern: Outperforming firms typically allocate about 70% of their innovation resources to core offerings, 20% to adjacent efforts, and 10% to transformational initiatives. As it happens, returns from innovation investments tend to follow an inverse ratio, with 70% coming from the transformational realm. The ideal balance will differ from industry to industry and company to company, but one thing is constant: Companies must execute at all three levels of ambition and manage total innovation deliberately and closely. In particular, they must develop the unique capacities needed for transformational innovation. This means finding the talent required for breakthrough efforts and ensuring enough separation from the core business; creating an appropriate (and often very different) funding structure; departing from a pipeline management approach; and using noneconomic and internal metrics to assess early efforts. Companies that learn how to manage for total innovation can fully harness innovation's energy and make it a reliable driver of growth.

How does a company know what kind of return it's getting from R&D? Is it better at R&D than the competition? How much should it be spending and what can it do to improve the effectiveness of those investments? Existing measures of R&D effectiveness don't answer any of those questions. In this article Anne Marie Knott, a professor at Washington University's Olin School of Management, presents a new metric for R&D productivity: RQ, short for research quotient. It allows managers not only to estimate the effectiveness of R&D investment relative to the competition but also to see how changes in R&D expenditure affect the bottom line and, most important, a company's market value. According to her research, if the top 20 firms traded on U.S. exchanges had increased their 2010 R&D investment using the RQ method, the collective increase in market cap would have been a whopping $1 trillion. The longer-run benefits are potentially even greater because the measure allows companies to more closely link changes in R&D strategy, practices, and processes to profitability and value. This is a story that has played out before: Thirty years ago, W. Edwards Deming's quality metrics inspired the TQM movement, which revolutionized the way companies manufacture. RQ can do the same for R&D, the author believes--and the payoff will be even greater.

Many companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with product development. The process of designing products is profoundly different from the process of making them, and the failure of executives to appreciate the differences leads to several fallacies that actually hurt product-development efforts. In this article, the authors, an HBS professor and a consultant, expose these misperceptions and others. They look at six dangerous myths: 1) High utilization of resources will make the department more efficient; 2) Processing work in large batches will be more economical; 3) Teams need to faithfully follow their development plan, minimizing any deviations from it; 4) The sooner a project is started, the sooner it will be finished; 5) The more features a product has, the better customers will like it; and 6) Projects will be more successful if teams "get them right the first time." The authors explain the negative effects these "principles" have when applied to product development, offer practical guidelines on overcoming them, and walk readers through a visual tool that will help them keep projects on track.