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A partner in the public sector operations strategy practice of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) must prepare for a briefing for United States Air Force (USAF) senior leadership proposing ways for the USAF to recognize significant cost savings and continuous process improvements in its Financial Services offices (FSO). Presently, each of the approximately 100 USAF bases around the world has its own local FSO that provides pay and travel processing and customer support. Similar processes are performed at each location. Staffing and quality assurance are managed locally, and legacy systems have been modified over time in response to local preferences. The IBM team has collected a vast amount of base-level process data and conducted focus groups with USAF financial management leadership, FSO personnel, and FSO customers; the partner's team must analyze the Current State and deliver a comprehensive set of cost savings' recommendations to maintain the current level of services proficiency.

After working together on a university business plan, two entrepreneurs had worked for three years to develop their venture: Shutout Solutions Inc. Their startup venture was established in response to an issue familiar to most hockey players: notoriously smelly equipment. While their familiarity with hockey equipment helped them identify a specific problem, subsequent research had revealed a much broader issue: the need to clean products that were made of micro-fibre. Utilizing a technology that addressed the micro-fibre odour issue, they believed they had a five year opportunity window to develop and profit from the business before it was imitated or superseded. As the considered their options, they realized that they may have to choose to focus their resources on a single product line rather than continue to develop their current portfolio of a detergent, a body wash and a spray. They also questioned whether they were using the right channel - gyms and sporting goods stores - to reach their customers. The opportunity to pursue bulk institutional sales was also intriguing, though it would require a different sales, pricing and distribution strategy. And they also considered how they might respond to an offer to sell the company in its current form.

In the three years since Bishop and Button purchased Verengo in a leveraged buyout (LBO), the company had gone through dramatic changes. Initially a residential windows and insulation firm, after the economic recession of 2008 the company switched gears and began offering solar installations to local residential customers. Aided by favorable regulatory changes and a consumer financing partnership, Verengo's solar business took off and became the company's primary focus. By the end of 2010, Verengo had grown to $27 million in revenue and was the largest solar integrator in Southern California. In December 2010, Verengo raised $9.7 million in growth equity funding and was considering its options for future growth. Eager to expand to markets outside of Southern California, Bishop and Button knew that they had to carefully assess the firm's many opportunities and tightly manage its growth.

McKesson, a large, diversified drug distribution and health care IT company, is considering development of new business offerings to help private practice physicians remain independent. The company, with $122 billion in 2010 revenues, just made its first foray into health care services with the acquisition of U.S. Oncology, an integrated cancer care company, whose expertise it could leverage in offerings catered to other physician specialties. With a vast portfolio of products and services serving a wide spectrum of health care stakeholders, McKesson appears uniquely positioned to understand and capitalize on the needs of health care businesses. With the recent passage of health care reform adding to the pressures already squeezing the health care industry-including new payment models requiring significant coordination and IT capabilities-independent physicians are migrating in droves to large health care organizations, abandoning the private practice model. McKesson could potentially provide them with an alternative. McKesson is an exceedingly large company with somewhat autonomous business units, making the prospect of collaborating to create a "cross-disciplinary" offering for independent practices difficult. Moreover, doing so would potentially extend McKesson into the clinical health services (and potentially risk-sharing) business, the strategic merits of which can be debated. Given the uncertainty surrounding the physician practice environment, the ideal shape of a solution to help these customers remains unclear, and competitors with a different product mix could be better positioned than McKesson to provide it. Finally, it could be too late altogether to reverse the trends eroding the private practice model.

No abstract available.

Process and information technology changes in organizations are not always voluntary and motivated by strategic goals. Instead, they may be imposed on organizations by regulatory bodies and certifying agencies. This teaching case focuses on one company's multi-year journey of making process and information technology changes so as to comply with a new set of regulations known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Even though SOX compliance work focuses on designing, implementing, and testing internal controls, these controls are nothing but activities designed to ensure that processes implicated in the production of financial information are completed correctly and that the financial representations they generate are reliable. Thus, despite its emphasis on internal controls, accounting and auditing, this teaching case provides students with insights into compliance-related process improvement and system integration in general.

While Fjord Motor Company (a fictitious company) has been successful in fleet sales, winning almost 70 of its 4,000 bids each year, the company has become concerned about inconsistent and inaccurate bidding. Worried that its fleet sales staff hasn't maximized profits on its Coronet Elizabeth, the model favored by police departments and corporate fleets, Fjord hires a consultant to examine its pricing data. In this case students are asked to develop pricing strategies by creating a two-parameter logistic model and to consider how additional factors, such as the size of an order, affects pricing.

Spreadsheet supplement for case CU330.

The Ameritor family of mutual funds was nicknamed the "Dead Man Funds" because of its terrible performance and the assumption that those who kept their money in the funds had no choice, that is, they were dead. Established in the 1950s, the funds boasted $200 million in assets under management by 1970. But those numbers quickly dropped to practically nothing by the late 1980s. In 1989, Morningstar Inc. told investors, "We urge you to cut your losses and get out." Expense ratios skyrocketed as high 40 percent per annum, numerous lawsuits were filed by the SEC, and turnover rates hit 400 percent in some years. By 2010, the mutual funds had either been liquidated or went out of business. The case examines the demise of the funds, highlighting the initial outflow of funds as well as the investors who chose not to remove their capital.

The case describes the early commitment of a European pharmaceutical company, Novo Nordisk, to integrated reporting. Novo Nordisk is one of the pioneers of integrated reporting and it emerged out of its commitment to a "Triple Bottom Line approach to managing the company." The case describes the company's "Blueprint for Change Programme" designed to facilitate stakeholder engagement and communicate how the company delivered value to business and society. The case also provides an investor perspective on the company's integrated reporting efforts and its plans for how to improve it in the future.

As Mr. Li Chunrong visited the new assembly line for the Dongfeng Passenger Vehicle Company in Wuhan, China, he contemplated the position his business unit found itself in: a latecomer. As a state-owned enterprise Dongfeng had entered into numerous joint ventures to produce automobiles under foreign brands, but its foray into selling vehicles under its own brand had only started recently, and now the unit faced a crowded market filled with fierce competition. As he walked back to the office, he reflected on the time it was taking to establish the Dongfeng brand. Would his business unit grow strong enough in their five province geographic focus before other hungry competitors looking for growth piled into these market areas? Or should they go more aggressively to attack the coastal areas with its new 2000 cc model to be launched in late 2011?

Spreadsheet supplement for case UV0353.

Traditional metrics like satisfaction and Net Promoter scores correlate poorly with what matters most: share of wallet. Managers need to think about how they rank versus their competitors and apply a new formula, the Wallet Allocation Rule, to predict and improve their share of wallet.

Top management teams in highly dynamic businesses perform better when they accept, even relish, interruptions and do multiple tasks at once.

Standardizing parts in a product line, a practice known as commonality, is not the sure-fire path to profits that many companies think. Here's how to better exploit the synergies and extract the profits available from commonality.

New research from Wharton reveals that competitors who are slightly behind at halftime win more often than those who are slightly ahead. People who are slightly behind, the study shows, increase their effort much more than people who are ahead, in a tie, or trailing badly-and that suggests companies ought to rethink the ways they motivate performance.

The best way to counter the effects of a horrible boss is to cultivate a strong network of colleagues.

If people want to fix health care in the U.S., they need to set aside the prevailing myths that the system is broken or just needs to become more competitive and "businesslike." Instead, they should focus on spreading the adoption of good, effective management practices that are already in use.

It's the ultimate bottom-of-the-pyramid challenge: How do you create a well-designed, safe, and affordable house for the world's poorest people? When Vijay Govindarajan and Christian Sarkar posed that question in an HBR.org blog post in August 2010, they offered their own simple sketch of a possible solution-and wondered if a version could be mass-produced for $300. Since then the $300 house has become a full-fledged movement, with a growing list of advisers, a website (300house.com), and corporate sponsors. In June 2011 the group announced the winner of its first design contest, sponsored by Ingersoll Rand. Here is the first-place entry, as voted on by members of the online community at jovoto.com.

The liberalization of markets, the rising disposable income, the exposure to western lifestyles, and the need for the new generation to establish an identity for itself are some of the reasons for the growth of the luxury watch category in India. The market for luxury watches was estimated to be 3% of watch retail, and was growing at almost 20% annually, which was more than twice the growth rate of the entire market. Heritage, glamour and technology were a combination of factors that were associated with luxury watch brands universally.While there were several global watch brands being marketed in India at various price points, the challenge for a leading Indian company Titan Industries that had made rapid strides in the watch market over the last two decades was to successfully introduce a luxury watch brand. Manoj Chakravarti, Senior Advisor, Titan Industries reflected about his 28 years in the watch industry both in India and abroad, and contemplated about Xylys, Titan's premium watch brand, and its foray into the Indian market. He had formulated several aspects of marketing mix strategies in the past to face diverse kinds of challenges. Xylys was a premium watch brand launched by Titan a few years ago; the brand was aimed at creating a unique perception among consumers. There were several interesting possibilities for Chakravarti to consider. Would a conventional positioning approach be sufficient? Was it necessary to obtain some insights regarding the application of the uniqueness aspect to the self-perception of consumers? How were such aspects of uniqueness related to other established brands? How important was the "Swiss-made" label? Did the buyers and prospective buyers of premium watches hold any specific stereotypical images of such watches? How does the self-concept of consumers matter to luxury watch brands? The case delves into behavioral concepts that are important from the viewpoint of brand perception of luxury brands.