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When ISS, a large shareholder advisory group, recommended a "no" vote on Jeff Immelt's award of 2 million stock options in April 2011, GE's compensation committee had to decide whether to rescind or amend the award or ignore the ISS recommendation. Was Immelt's 2010 pay in line with his performance? How would shareholders vote on the advisory "say on pay" ballot question at GE's annual meeting in April?

In 2010, Foxconn Technology Group, the largest and fastest growing multinational company in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, came under public scrutiny after a string of employee suicides reached the international press. Although the company was Taiwanese, it operated primarily in mainland China, becoming one of China's biggest exporters. It had 800,000 employees, over 400,000 of whom lived at Longhua Science and Technology Park in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. It was this Science and Technology Park - essentially a company town - which brought Foxconn under international scrutiny in 2010 after 14 employees committed suicide there and three others attempted to do so. The (A) case describes the challenges that Foxconn faced after the suicides took place at its plants. Institutional features of the labor market structure of China are presented. The response of Foxconn's management is described and the associated implications for Foxconn's stock price are discussed.

Nashton Partners was a search fund founded by two HBS MBA's that raised $500,000 to finance a search for a company that they could purchase and then run for the next five to ten years. The case examines the search fund structure, the two-year search, and two potential acquisitions.

Notwithstanding the professed intention of a party to an MOU, a "preliminary" agreement can have binding effect. This note explores the circumstances under which MOUs may give rise to binding and enforceable agreements.

This case deals with the challenges faced at L'Oseraie, a nursing home located in the north-east of France. The director of L'Oseraie was faced with a number of issues and questions: - How to improve the employee motivation and engagement further as the absenteeism episode seemed to have added fuel to the fire? - How to find the time to implement a real strategy at the nursing home, as tackling too many day-to-day issues was time-consuming? - How to create a real service-oriented approach among the employees? - In order to address the issue of lack of healthcare staff in France, would it be possible to source talent abroad (from new EU members in Eastern Europe, or from the French-speaking countries of North Africa, for instance)? - What suggestions could be put forward before the new general manager for implementation in order to overcome the various challenges facing the organization and to completely turn around its functioning and performance?

Role play #2 (Robert Woo) for product 9B11C024.

Role play #3 (Pauline Zhu) for product 9B11C024.

Role play #4 (Steven Leung) for product 9B11C024.

Role play #5 (James Beringer) for product 9B11C024.

At the start of 2010, major global iron ore producer Vale must choose which of three currencies in which to issue new bonds. While generally a good time for firms to issue debt, market conditions varied across countries and currencies. Students must calculate a hedged cost of funds for each currency and must explore the conditions that give rise to differences in those costs.

Jason Sterling sat on his hedge fund's Stamford, Connecticut, trading floor on January 28, 2011, scouring the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg websites for any news coming out of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. He knew that the emerging sovereign debt crisis in Europe would be a primary topic of discussion among the world leaders and bankers who had convened at the summit, and he was hoping to find some new information that he could trade on before the close of trading for the week. Sterling's fund traded primarily in sovereign debt, and he needed to figure out if European leaders would be able to come up with a viable solution to the crisis or whether the debt crisis would lead to the default of several European nations. At the forefront of the crisis was Greece, which faced ballooning deficits, rising interest payments, and the prospect of having to default on or restructure its outstanding debt. Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were the other euro zone countries that faced growing fiscal problems and were the focus of sovereign debt investors. Sterling knew that if a solution was not found in the coming weeks, the sovereign debt markets could be thrown into turmoil.

This case concerns an executive who must estimate the demand for Kodak Express outlets in various developing countries based on socioeconomic and demographic data about the countries. The case requires students to think about how to transform data on a national scale (GDP per capita, population, income distribution) into a form that is meaningful for a managerial decision -- the number of outlets that could be supported by a country's market demographics. In this instance, doing so can be accomplished effectively through modeling on a spreadsheet.<br><br>The purposes of the case are to show the relation between national statistics and company decisions and to give students training in conceptualizing a problem and modeling the analysis on a spreadsheet. The analyst is required to estimate the potential market demand for Kodak Express.

The case examines how Samsung has grown to become one of the world's leading global companies. It presents a detailed description of Samsung's "Top priority to the People' philosophy, and its strong cultural values; both of which have been instrumental in ensuring its continued success in the past few decades. Since 1982, Samsung Human Resource Development Center (SHRDC) has played a critical role in supporting Samsung's corporate strategy of achieving global competitiveness, through programs that focus upon maintaining Samsung values and developing a cadre of effective next generation leaders. New Employee Orientation (NEO), an intensive four-week in-house program for all Samsung employees, is one example of an SHRD program that helps provide a strong foundation of Samsung's unique culture among the new employees. Most importantly, NEO aligns employees across Samsung affiliates to its strategic direction, thereby fostering a stronger "Single Samsung" culture.<br><br>In recent years, however, NEO has been faced with new challenges. First, Samsung's pool of new employees has become more diverse, with the recruitment of more experienced and foreign (non-Korean) employees who are being targeted in addition to the fresh college graduates whom Samsung has always relied upon. Second, Samsung has become aware of stark value differences between the older employees, who are obedient and easily follow rules, and the younger 'digital native' employees, who are more individualistic and prefer egalitarian and open policies. Managers at SHRD are concerned that the "Single Samsung" spirit, which forms the core of Samsung culture, is being threatened from within.<br><br>Students must address issues related to the need for maintaining a unified organizational culture among diverse groups of employees whose values conflict with each others, and propose ways for Samsung to effectively employ and utilize all of its employees.

This role-play case involves a series of sessions in which the student (and each member of his or her team) will play the role of Benjamin Cheung, the vice president of HCM Asia Private Limited, a financial services firm based in Hong Kong. Cheung has an open-door policy where any manager can drop by to see him, on their own initiative, to ask for ideas, guidance, or a decision on an issue. He has only six minutes to see each manager in this informal coaching session since he has to leave for another important meeting at head office. Cheung knows the key details of each manager's background and development needs, but does not know in advance what the manager's specific concerns are. It will be necessary for Cheung to explore the manager's concerns through active listening, asking questions, and summarizing. Each of the manager roles is typical of those you might meet in an Asian organization, such as a highly skilled, technically focused leader who defaults to top-down management, an associate who lacks self-confidence and avoids confrontation at all cost, an ambitious associate who wants an international assignment but struggles with his current workload, and a detail-oriented leader who focuses on processes while losing sight of the big picture.

Role play #1 (Chen Jia Wei) for product 9B11C024.

In this case a consultant to pension funds ponders the unique opportunities and risks she faces as she considers adding real estate to the fund's portfolio for the first time. While the fund already owns REITs, its trustees believe that direct real estate investment could offer protection against the threat of inflation. But the category of real estate includes a wide range of distinct subclasses, including office, retail, industrial, hotel, and rental apartments. In analyzing the situation, students must determine which of these sectors provides the best hedge against inflation, and the risks and returns of the asset class as a whole.

Spreadsheet supplement to case CU156.

Web analytic tools provide companies with a wealth of information about the behavior of visitors to their websites. Quality Alloys, a small business-to-business supplier, has hired an advisor to analyze the value of its website through traditional metrics, as well as the associated financial measures of sales, profits, and amount of merchandize sold. In this case, students recommend how Quality Alloys should market its business to improve sales and assess the value of the company's recent promotional efforts.

Web analytic tools provide companies with a wealth of information about the behavior of visitors to their websites. Quality Alloys, a small business-to-business supplier, has hired an advisor to analyze the value of its website through traditional metrics, as well as the associated financial measures of sales, profits, and amount of merchandize sold. In this case, students recommend how Quality Alloys should market its business to improve sales and assess the value of the company's recent promotional efforts.

"This trial is going to take longer." Those were words that Michael Kaschke, CEO of Carl Zeiss AG, was not surprised to hear as he nurtured the intraoperative radiotherapy business inside his company's microsurgery unit. But he also didn't expect it to take 13 years to get to the end of an all-important clinical trial that was a critical enabler to the granting of reimbursement codes. The technology was clearly disruptive to him, but as the business confronted the challenges of improving the standard of care for women with breast cancer, he couldn't help but wonder if the greater opportunity was in vastly underserved emerging markets. But for 13 years he had been telling the team the importance of focus, and as the advanced markets of Germany, the UK, and the US started to hit high growth rates, was he now telling them something different? Was this a focus question or a strategic sequencing question?