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This article explores the rise to quality leadership by Japanese automakers, the decline in U.S. automakers' quality reputation, and whether poor quality still contributes to the U.S. automaker's competitive woes. Perception plays a key role in quality competition but not necessarily in ways that we commonly think. The ways in which information about quality performance is displayed plays an important role in customer perception. Quality should not be seen as a stand-alone asset but rather it must be understood in the context of other assets, including a firm's brand equity. It is quality's relationship to brand equity that helps explain the current quandary of U.S. automakers, and this relationship holds lessons for other industries.

This article provides an in-depth look at a value-based channel management model at Cisco Systems for managing the Value-Add Reseller (VAR) channel. In March 2001, Cisco initiated a change from a volume-based channel management model, which had been driving out partner value, to a value-based model that tied channel rewards to specific channel value-add activities. Critical components of this new model include: identifying opportunities for channel value-add; architecting channel programs to enable channel value-add; tying financial rewards to value-add channel activities including a "holdback system"; and exercising significant discipline to manage field pressures for volume-based rewards and diluting certification requirements. It demonstrates that VARs can serve as a significant sales channel, profitably selling complex solutions to satisfied customers under a value added channel management framework. They can also uncover demand opportunities that are incremental to the pull marketing of even a strong brand like Cisco. However, companies need to exercise significant discipline to avoid mixing volume-based rewards with a value-based framework.

Few early enterprise systems (ESs) implementations lived up to expectations. How can companies meet or exceed their expectations for enterprise systems? Far from providing a quick fix, the potential of ESs is better achieved through a slow and diligent learning process. This approach emphasizes the need for organizations to focus less on the technical and temporal aspects of ES projects and rather to view them as forming part of a long journey led by users. New social networks emerge as a result of the problems and opportunities based around learning, building, and sharing users' experiences. This article develops a new model for successfully mastering enterprise systems, which is labeled "the long conversation." The application of this model has important implications for practitioners involved in the implementation of an ES.

Most consumers don't understand how interest rates work and can't make sound decisions about borrowing. So wouldn't employees be better served by company programs that ventured beyond retirement planning and helped them stop pouring money into credit card fees and payments?

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, talks with renowned autism and genomics researcher Stephen Scherer about how to tackle a big, messy problem.

New research indicates that leaders who crack the whip in stressful situations don't get good results.

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Key topics include designing teams, managing teams, managing conflict, group dynamics, project management, product development, interdepartmental relations, and organizational change. MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new medical system for monitoring intensive-care patients. MediSys has invested heavily in IntensCare, which is eagerly awaited by the market. The product development team, representing several functional areas of the company, has been working on the product for six months but is now running into significant problems with the product design, the schedule, and their own group dynamics. Recently, pressure increased when they learned that two more powerful competitors had begun work on their own products for this market. Several team members are concerned about meeting the team's targets. Struggling especially hard to overcome the various problems is the marketing manager who has profit-and-loss responsibility for IntensCare.

Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, smiled as he reflected on the success of Qualcomm's code division multiple access (CDMA) technology. By the summer of 2009, CDMA was the basis for all third generation technologies available for cellular transmissions. However, while Qualcomm seemed poised for growth, Jacobs wondered how successful the company's contributions to new generation technologies would be and if they should aggressively develop their new service offerings into profitable business units.

Tengion is a young biotech company that is at the frontier of regenerative medicine; a nascent field that seeks to promote the creation of new cells and tissue to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. In late 2008 Tengion management faces a difficult dilemma. In light of the financial crises, the company needs to manage cash burn by prioritizing its R&D efforts. CEO Nichtberger needs to recommend to the board which of two promising new medical treatments to keep developing while placing the other on hold. In comparing the two options, a host of factors need to be considered-- these range from assessing the regulatory challenges, manufacturing challenges, marketing challenges (in particular pricing), and partnering challenges. Each of the treatments would target a unique patient population, that differ in both size and composition. Tengion must also consider how quickly it might expect to bring each of the two treatments to market. The decision could have significant long-term implications for the company's ultimate survival and success.

Fiserv, a pioneer in electronic payments, would like to increase the number of consumers who receive bills electronically. Currently, adoption is relatively low. To help guide their efforts, Fiserv managers have done extensive customer research and have segmented the market based on customer perceptions of e-billing. Students must recommend which segments to target and why. To support their recommendations, students must calculate the likely financial costs and benefits of adoption, estimate the likely returns for targeting different segments, and make targeting and positioning recommendations based on these calculations. Because Fiserv's direct customers are billers (such as utilities and credit card companies) and its end users are individual consumers, the case allows a focus on both B2B and B2C issues.

Stone Group Corp., one of the largest electronics manufacturers and distributors in China, practices transfer pricing, an allocation process that assigns costs, sales revenue and gross profits to each of its five divisions. When a customer approaches the company with an order and requests a recommendation for a multimeter model, the general manager of the Instruments Division is asked to quote a transfer price for the multimeters. He must decide whether to sell some of his stock to another Stone division (losing the sales revenue, but perhaps gaining the gross profit needed to meet the division's monthly profit quota) or to keep the product in stock for possible sales (and greater revenue and profit) during the company's fourth quarter.

How is music marketed in the digital era? Nettwerk Music Group built on its foundation as a social, grassroots marketer of music and artists, and emerged as a leader in the Internet-enabled social media environment. For most of the past decade Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride let fans consume music on their own terms. He encouraged file-sharing, the remixing of his artists' songs and videos, and an environment in which "the audience is the record company." In the digital marketplace compact discs mattered much less, said McBride. "Digital assets" were the currency, in the form of ad, television, movie, and videogame song placement, ringtones, mixes, and community-created content. But new artist-label contracts were needed if digital assets were going to flow freely. Moving away from the infrastructure of the music business also meant having to do without the financial, logistical, and promotional power of the major labels. To provide an alternative to the muscle of the major labels, the company is launching a venture capital project called "Polyphonic."

The investment committee of Grove Street Advisors, a pioneer in the provision of customized private equity funds-of-funds for pension fund clients, must decide how to respond to the market opportunities and challenges presented by the turmoil of 2008 and 2009. How can they shift their strategy to fill new market niches, or should they stay with their successful approach thus far, even though the market is getting crowded? The case also presents background about the roles of intermediaries in private equity.

Less than a month after the close of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, managers at the two firms realized that plans for combining their asset servicing businesses - and realizing the $180 million of annual cost savings that they had promised Wall Street - were fraught with risk. Senior executives must evaluate the seriousness of the risks and identify alternative ways of integrating the two firms, while safeguarding the technologies that process and clear a substantial fraction of the world's financial transactions. [Continues with "B" and "C" cases.]

[Continuation of "A" case.] Less than a month after the close of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, managers at the two firms realized that plans for combining their asset servicing businesses - and realizing the $180 million of annual cost savings that they had promised Wall Street - were fraught with risk. Senior executives must evaluate the seriousness of the risks and identify alternative ways of integrating the two firms, while safeguarding the technologies that process and clear a substantial fraction of the world's financial transactions. [Continues with "C" case.]

[Continuation of "A" and "B" cases.] Less than a month after the close of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, managers at the two firms realized that plans for combining their asset servicing businesses - and realizing the $180 million of annual cost savings that they had promised Wall Street - were fraught with risk. Senior executives must evaluate the seriousness of the risks and identify alternative ways of integrating the two firms, while safeguarding the technologies that process and clear a substantial fraction of the world's financial transactions.

In October 2008, the senior vice-president for product and business development at IA Clarington (IAC), a life and health insurance company, was preparing for a meeting with the president of IAC. The topic of discussion would be IAC's Target Click Fund, a mutual fund with an options-based guarantee structure targeted towards investors who were looking for growth along with capital preservation. The vice-president had been asked to render his opinion of whether he thought that the fund's scheduled rebalancing date should be accelerated in order to take advantage of a historic decline in global equity markets. The vice-president had to consider several pieces of information in making his recommendation, including that fact that his main competitors would be quick to take advantage of any misguided recommendation. He wondered if the markets had truly hit bottom, and how/if he could time the rebalancing to the lowest point. Also, the investment philosophy behind IAC and click funds encouraged investors to remain invested during turbulent times: what would changing the rebalancing date indicate to those investors?

The head of Patient Escort Services for Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) had to determine the best approach to improve efficiency of the hospital's porter system. Porters represented a vital part of various hospital processes, facilitating timely flow of patients, equipment and materials throughout the hospital. Recently, VGH had experienced incidents in which the capacity of the porters was insufficient to meet the demands of the hospital and, despite best-efforts at scheduling, these problems remained. The head of Patient Escort Services spent several weeks collecting data to determine where the problems existed, and wondered if his data could provide answers to some critical questions: How well did the current porter schedule meet daily demand? What is the optimum number of porters? The head of Patient Escort Services had one week to submit his report to VGH's board of directors.

The newly appointed chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology (department) at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry was thinking about how she would approach the next five year in her new role. The chair thought about two of the important issues she would face: building a cohesive department and nurturing a high performance culture. She became chair at a time when direction was needed. The department had formed in June 2002 as a result of the merger between the Department of Physiology and the small Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology. While the merger had gone well, the chair still sensed that some faculty members in Pharmacology felt as if their department had been taker over by Physiology. At present, it was sometimes difficult to assess performance between faculty members due to differences in workload composition and a lack of documentation. The current thinking was that the department had to move towards adopting best practices in their processes. The chair wanted to look at the issue from a broader perspective. She wondered how the issue could be best framed and what a potential solution might look like.