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In late September 2009, nine months after he took office, President Barack Obama appointed Shelley Metzenbaum to the position of associate director for performance and personnel management at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Metzenbaum's charge was to lead government-wide efforts to improve the performance of federal agencies: in short, to make government work better. To improve performance and public confidence in government, the Obama administration wanted agencies to set ambitious goals focused on improving outcomes. Metzenbaum was the administration's choice for advancing this agenda. Metzenbaum realized she had many options from which to choose, but few resources with which to carry out her charge: she had a tiny staff, strained budget and very little direct influence over the agencies tasked with improving their performance. This case focuses on the challenge facing Metzenbaum as she contemplates each of her choices in her approach to indirect management. Case number 1980.0

The note describes what integration for tax purpose is, what its objective is and how the Canadian income tax achieves it. The note starts with the concept of perfect integration and then evaluates the assumptions underlying it. This is followed by a consideration of the actual extent of integration to determine when incorporation is advantageous and when it results in a real tax cost.

Sarah McIvor, CA, a junior partner with Price Waterhouse Coopers, has been selected to conduct a financial review of Gemini Electronics Ltd. Gemini is an "up-start" American electronics company who recently went public and now wants to expand its business to rival the major Korean and Japanese producers. Before the company finalizes any expansion plans, Dr. Wang, the founder, feels it is prudent to conduct an independent evaluation of Gemini's financial condition.

The CEO received the draft 2008 financial statements for Strong Tie, a manufacturer of structural connectors used in the building industry. He began to question the company's performance when he compared them to previous years. How were profits holding up given the intense price competition in the industry? Were attempts to lower costs through more automation paying off? Where the current problems in the U.S. housing market going to continue to reduce demand for connectors? How would lenders react to this poor performance? Was the company's financing in danger? After discussing the matter extensively with Strong Tie's CFO, it was decided that an outside consultant should be hired to provide an independent analysis of the company's recent performance and to provide suggestions for future action.

Since its founding in 1980, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public had supported the work of over 3,000 of the world's most visionary social entrepreneurs; men and women who, in Ashoka founder Bill Drayton's words, are tireless pioneers of "system-changing solutions that advance the world's most urgent social problems." Through these efforts, Ashoka was also widely credited with building the larger field of social entrepreneurship. And yet, just at the moment when Ashoka's dynamism had propelled social entrepreneurship into the mainstream, Drayton and his colleagues embraced an even more expansive view of social change. According to this new vision, everyone in society, not only the most path-breaking social entrepreneurs, could and should be "changemakers" (the EACH vision). Drayton believed that this shift was such a "fundamental change, that it affects everything;" the revolution went far beyond Ashoka, to include not only the basic architecture of organizations -a move from walled hierarchies to teams of teams- but also the generative sources of knowledge and information which could be open sourced and widely shared. This case traces the evolution of Ashoka's mission and vision for social change, and the programmatic and organizational changes required to accommodate the EACH worldview.

In 2009, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the organization tasked with building a Mass Transit System for India's capital city Delhi, witnessed the biggest crisis in its history. A bridge under construction collapsed killing six people and injuring 15 more. Despite its history of meeting deadlines and working with allocated costs, the Corporation came under a lot of public censure. There was immense pressure on the Corporation to suspend its engineers and fire the construction contractor. On the other hand, it had to meet the deadline of operationalizing the second phase of the Metro Network by October 2010 in time for the XIXth Commonwealth Games. The case focuses on the challenges that the Managing Director Dr. E. Sreedharan faced as the crisis unfolded. It examines the Corporation's unique structure and management ethic that had so far enabled it to function within timeline and costs.

With China shifting toward a consumer-led growth model, non-bank lending has a critical role to play, but how easy is it to do business in this sector? What are the promises and pitfalls of the industry, and how well is Zane Wang, the case protagonist, navigating them?

Introduction to Supply Chain Management, published by Business Expert Press in February 2013, is a ten-chapter book written by Edmund Prater, Professor of Operations and Logistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. Developed for students of supply chain management, executives seeking a primer, and practitioners, the text offers an overview of SCM and provides a framework for subsequent, more detailed study. The book reviews the evolution of SCM concepts and discusses trends in global markets and strategic competitiveness. It focuses on the major issues involved in managing a competitive supply chain including forecasting, inventory management, distribution, dealing with uncertainty, reverse logistics, and customer service. In Chapter 5, the authors introduce inventory management and its implications for the organization. Tools and techniques used in inventory management, including the Economic Order Quantity Model (EOQ), and the factors directly impacting inventory - cost, order size, forecasting, capacity planning, and production scheduling - are explored. Inventory management practices and trends in inventory control are discussed. The chapter concludes with an example highlighting how to perform an EOQ analysis.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems introduce changes on a larger scale than most other systems. They link various components of the organization and modify its structure by deploying standardized processes and data models, which can lead to higher efficiency and significant cost savings. This case shows the adjustment dynamic between an ERP system and the other components of the organization. The project is a very large one, involving an investment of several hundred million dollars. The results are impressive. Bombardier implemented new processes through the use of the system, changed the roles of its employees, created a different way of looking at the organization and its activities and established new value indicators that helped crystallize the new behaviours.

Appirio, a Cloud Computing services and consulting business, is experiencing explosive growth buoyed by its successful strategic partnerships with Google and Salesforce.com. The company practices what it preaches -- choosing to keep all of its systems in the cloud. Appirio's senior leadership team is convinced that building its venture on the cloud offers extreme competitive advantages in terms of agility, ability to scale and employee empowerment to drive rapid innovation. Will Appirio ascend to rocket heights or are the skies darkening with challenges that will hurt a cloud pure-play such as Appirio? What lessons, if any, are there for other entrepreneurs hoping to turn their IT systems into an entrepreneurial growth engine?

The subject of the case is a socially-responsible hedge fund. The options valued are written on two firms AstraZeneca plc and Medco Health Solutions, Inc. with documented and recognized social responsibility practices.

Taboos are a universal feature of social systems. Even the most avowedly open-minded organizations place tacit constraints on what can be said and even thought. Business leaders ignore these constraints at their peril. This article examines the role of the sacred, profane, and taboo in society, and links these phenomena to the psychology of moral outrage. In public debates, taboos are rarely as absolute as first assumed and can often be reframed as tragic choices. Leaders must performa delicate balancing act if they are to prevent taboos from blinding managers to either threats or opportunities. On the one hand, leaders who let their intellectual curiosity get the better of them risk paying a steep career price. On the other, leaders who bury their heads in the sand risk even worse consequences. Navigating this dilemma brings into sharp tension the policy prescriptions of advocates of authentic leadership (who see honesty as a trump virtue) and proponents of Realpolitik (who see organizational hypocrisy and obfuscation as unfortunate but unavoidable tactics necessary in an imperfect world.)

While there is widespread support for the notion that organizations with better reputations outperform their rivals, there is uncertainty about how to create such a reputation, especially among the managers responsible for this task. For example, organizations often give money to worthy causes or create social responsibility programs in the hope that this will appeal to their stakeholders. When approaches such as these are only loosely coupled to the strategy of the organization they appear to be "bolted on" rather than "built in." Thus, they are likely to foster a reputation that is less consistent with the principal actions of the organization and less credible. They are also easy for competitors to imitate. Because of this, a reputation grounded in the strategy of the organization has a better chance of providing a sustainable competitive advantage. This article presents a normative framework that illustrates a strategy-led approach to reputation building.

The only way to achieve real growth is to develop offerings so innovative that they create new categories or subcategories making competitors irrelevant because they lack a "must have" feature or benefit. The alternative, engaging in "my brand is better than your brand" brand preference competition, virtually never works because of market inertia. This article, based in part on hundreds of case studies, shows how to identify the "must haves" and discusses barriers to competitors such as going beyond functional benefits, finding shared interests with customers, ongoing innovation, superior execution, scaling the concept, becoming an exemplar, and branding the innovation.

This article, based on work with dozens of Business-to-Business firms, extracts general principles of brand architecture design based on specific examples, and then tests these principles by applying them more broadly to a wide sample of brand architectures. B2B brand architecture is a function of two key dimensions: the organizational structure, in particular, the extent to which a firm is centralized or decentralized (in terms of its product range, sales, and marketing); and the extent to which the firm's market offerings are standardized versus customized. This framework and the axiom of risk alleviation through the sales process together capture the principal elements of B2B brand architecture design.

As the role of the CIO continues to evolve, the determinants of CIO success remain elusive. Numerous articles and books have been written offering solutions to this problem. Is it placement in the organization's reporting structure, a combination of technical and managerial skills, or something more unique? This article identifies the most important role-specific CIO career success factors based on an examination of the careers of fourteen highly successful CIOs selected by a committee of globally respected peers.

Powerful technological, regulatory, and economic forces compel the senior executives of multinational corporations (MNCs) to repeatedly re-evaluate and reconfigure value chains in the search for ongoing competitive advantage. However, releasing assets from existing activities and redeploying them to new opportunities is a challenging and poorly understood task. In particular, the standard strategic management concepts of use- and firm- flexibility overlook the crucial international dimension of location. Utilizing examples from GM, Qantas, and a mining MNC, this article argues that strategic flexibility should be consciously measured along all three dimensions. By using the decision tool set out in this article, MNC executives can map their worldwide footprint of strategic roadblocks and opportunities to expand into new markets, divest redundant businesses, and build flexibility to adapt to future challenges.

In a search for Schumpeterian solutions, the Obama Administration has made venture capital a cornerstone of its Clean Technology policy, adopting a strategy of providing large loan guarantees to a few venture capital-financed firms. This article argues that three key conditions are necessary for venture capital to successfully open new economic spaces and then it applies them to assess the viability of venture capital investment in clean technology. The article concludes that large loan guarantees are unlikely to be effective. Other government policies such as SBIR grants, university R&D support, certain (de)regulatory actions, large-scale demonstration projects, and/or procurement decisions can better encourage both incremental and Schumpeterian innovation without distorting the turbulent dynamics of newmarket creation. This analysis can also be applied to other sector- and market-specific innovation policies.

A consortium of private equity firms (KKR and Silver Lake Partners) is in the process of acquiring the semi-conductor division of Agilent. To prepare for the signing of the acquisition agreement and the subsequent transfer of ownership, the deal team is revisiting their investment thesis with respect to upsides and risks. Please visit the dedicated case website http://cases.insead.edu/chips-on-the-side/ (copy and paste the url into a browser).