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Fu Chengyu is the fifth CEO to lead China National Offshore Oil Company - an SOE founded in 1982 to exploit Chinese offshore deposits. In 2010 he is trying to decide how to drive further growth in a company that has grown 556 times in less than 30 years, with profits grown 2600 times. He believes that the way CNOOC has been managed, a blend of market orientation and concern for employees and the nation has contributed importantly to the success. His challenge is to allocate resources among new areas to explore for petroleum and new sources of energy, and to develop managers with the capability of leading those businesses in the face of world class competitors. Both technical talent and the ability to integrate the efforts of non-Chinese leaders are involved.

Alejandro EIsztain, CEO of Cresud S.A., is faced with the difficult choice of whether to sell, develop or continue to hold the 151,000 hectares of remaining undeveloped farmland at the company's Los Pozos farm in Argentina. Developing the land will further expose Cresud to a variety of risks related to owning and operating farmland, but the potential financial rewards are potentially significant. As competition has increased and farmland values have skyrocketed in the last eight years, Cresud's overall corporate strategy has been to increasingly focus on development opportunities outside of the country - in areas such as Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia. Alejandro's looming decision on Los Pozos is in many ways, reflective of choices facing his company, in general.

Company pursues ways to reduce its debt to equity ratio by resorting to off balance sheet debt transactions.

MME is a farmer-owned cooperative that produces ethanol from corn. The cooperative has performed well in comparison to other producers but margins in the industry had declined as industry production levels neared market demand limits. MME farmers needed to decide whether to take advantage of their success and expand through acquisitions, whether they should sell the plant, or whether they should continue current operations. MME must consider ongoing regulatory changes that impacted the industry, the possible impact of imported ethanol, the power of the petroleum industry which bought its product, and ongoing uncertainty about corn and ethanol price swings.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Social Media Group had to develop a social media campaign for ING Direct Canada, an online retail bank. The CEO had successfully developed social media campaigns for other businesses in the past but ING wanted the CEO to measure the success of the campaign. With little information available on how to determine the success of such strategies, the CEO set out to design one of Canada's first measurable social media campaigns.

This note is meant to provide students access to some of the world's greatest speeches. It contains excerpts that span over 2,000 years of history, from Pericles' Funeral Oration to Stephen Lewis's Aids in Africa speech. An introduction by the author explains why future business leaders need to study such speeches.

The chief financial officer of Granite Apparel is trying to determine which of the three fundraising options is optimal for Granite Apparel to finance a projected rapid growth strategy. The three options are an initial public offering of equity, a privately placed debt issue and a private placement of preferred shares.

The case provides students with (1) an understanding of the essence of long-term financial health; (2) familiarity with the calculation and meaning of various financial ratios; and (3) an understanding of the influence of a company's operating and competitive characteristics on its investment in various type assets, on the profitability of these investments, and on the financial structure of its balance sheet. The case also allows a discussion of (1) the incomplete and lagging nature of financial measures; (2) the influence of financial measures on behavior; and (3) the reality that financial analysis often results in better, more focused questions to be asked of management, not conclusive answers.

For too long, boards have relied on rules of thumb and conventional wisdom when picking CEOs. New research offers some surprising insights that will better guide succession strategy.

Everyone loves a scrappy underdog-and brands can profit from this positioning.

The days when companies could rely on a poison pill and antitakeover statutes to fend off hostile bidders are long gone.

Though we'd like to think that it always pays to be honest, new research from Harvard proves that it doesn't necessarily. A new study that compared viewers' reactions to a candidate's answers to questions in a debate reveals that when the candidate dodged a question eloquently, people liked and trusted him nearly as much as when he gave a direct response. What's more, they preferred artful dodges to honest but less articulate answers. That finding presents an interesting quandary for any leader who has to field difficult questions.

The relationship between value creation and job creation is more tenuous now than it has been for a century. Revenues report that the economy is doing well, but unemployment numbers remain high. Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School, contends that this fundamental change is a symptom of a deeper structural issue.

Companies that can offer a scarce and coveted good or service that others cannot, will win. Goods and services that are scarce are those that are difficult to conceive, to make, and perhaps at first even to sell. The default for most organizations is to do easy work, such as running a factory, opening a big-box store, making and shipping a product. That used to be the way to grow an organization, but no longer. The only way to avoid the race to the bottom is to create something difficult and valuable, something that people will pay more for. Examples of difficult work include creating things that are tangibly or conceptually beautiful, finding an elegant solution to a problem, and connecting with and leading people.

Michelle Obama has an astonishing effect on the stock prices of the companies whose clothes she wears.

Any seasoned executive knows that information technology (IT) projects have a high failure rate. Large IT projects can become the business equivalent of what astrophysicists know as black holes, absorbing large quantities of matter and energy. Resources get sucked in, but little or nothing ever emerges. Of course, projects do not become black holes overnight. They get there one day at a time through a process known as escalating commitment to a failing course of action. Without executive intervention, these projects almost inevitably turn into black holes. This article sheds light on the insidious process through which projects that devour resources, yet fail to produce business value, are created and gradually evolve into black holes. It presents a framework that explains the creation of black hole projects as a sequence of three phases: drifting, treating symptoms, and rationalizing continuation. The framework is illustrated through two cases: EuroBank and California DMV. The article then presents recommendations to prevent escalating projects from becoming black holes and provides a means for detecting problems at an early stage.

The current discipline of project management is based on the model of the project life cycle or phased stage-gate approach to executing projects. This implies a clear definition of mission and system are given at the outset (to reduce uncertainty), and subsequent execution in phases with decision gates. It contrasts with the approach applied in the seminal projects that are credited with establishing the foundation of the discipline in the 1940s and 1950s. Those projects started out with missions that were beyond the currently possible; any solutions had to emerge over time. They succeeded by a combination of parallel trials (from which the best would then be selected) and trial-and-error iteration (allowing for the modification of solutions pursued over a period of time). Although the success of these approaches was well documented and explained by scientific study in the 1950s, today they seem to fly in the face of accepted professional standards, making managers uncomfortable when they are encountered. The project management discipline has been relegated to an "order taker niche"-the engineering execution of moderately novel projects with a clear mission. As a result, it has been prevented from taking center stage in the crucial strategic change initiatives facing many organizations today. The discipline of project management should be broadened in order to create greater value for organizations whose portfolios include novel and uncertain projects.

Behavioral biases can result in suboptimal acquisition decisions-with the potential for errors exacerbated in consolidating industries, where consolidators design serial acquisition strategies and fight escalating takeover battles for platform companies that may determine their future competitive position. To guide objective managerial judgment, and to rationally anticipate the irrational behavior of rival bidders or financial markets, this article proposes a modified option-game toolkit for serial acquisition strategy. It brings together insights from both strategy and finance, which quantify acquisition strategies, thus allowing executives to make rational intuitive decisions under uncertainty.

How do managers respond when confronted with the demands of activist stakeholders over whom they exercise no direct control? What strategies do managers adopt, and why? Which of these are most effective-and under what conditions? Increasingly, businesses today face difficult challenges in response to changing public expectations and newly emergent techniques of stakeholder influence. New communications technologies enable activists concerned about business behavior to mobilize supporters around the world in real time. Many firms conduct their work on a global stage, where damage to reputation in one location can quickly reverberate around the world. This article develops a typology of managerial strategies to respond to complex disputes with activist stakeholders. It argues that management strategies fall into four categories: wage a fight, withdraw, wait, or work it out. Which strategy is chosen is likely to vary according to: the firm's dependence on stakeholders for critical resources, the firm's power in the particular situation, and the urgency of the contested issue. Managers' effectiveness is, in large part, a function of their ability to assess these three conditions correctly.

Although firms from emerging markets are becoming significant global players, our knowledge about how these latecomers catch up with existing multinational firms remains limited. This article summarizes the patterns of internationalization strategies pursued by firms from these markets. These leading emerging markets firms can be best understood in terms of their levels of R&D intensity and marketing intensity and represent four types of firms: multinational challengers; global exporters and importers; OEM/ODM technology leaders and followers; and regional exporters and importers. Based on these analyses, this article develops a set of propositions that summarize the internationalization strategies of these firms.