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This case focuses on the growth of an innovative non-profit institution that motivates aboriginal children to attend school by harnessing their love of football.

Kinecta Federal Credit Union has the opportunity to purchase Nix Check Cashing as part of their "blue ocean" strategy to reach the financially underserved and increase credit union membership and deposits. But they face financial as well as reputational risk. Check cashing, payday lending and other alternative financial services are maligned in mainstream financial circles. This case asks students to evaluate both organizations, their respective industries, and the proposed $45 million deal and determine whether or not it makes sense for Kinecta to purchase Nix.

RiskMetrics Group, a risk and governance consultancy, had a great deal of influence on U.S. companies. This case examines the history and growth of the company, the governance services it offers, the extent of its impact on shareholders, the controversy surrounding its conflicts of interest, and the impact it has had on directors.

This note was created to supplement classroom discussion in the EC course "Managing the Financial Firm" and provides background for exploring issues general managers in financial firms face in considering appropriate capital levels.

A small manufacturer of gas grills is making final changes to its 2009 operating budget and considering several changes in pricing, advertising, and product availability. This short case addresses the topic of contribution analysis as an easy way to analyze profit planning issues such as adding or dropping a product or service; changing a price; adding or decreasing expected volumes; or preparing a profit budget. In this situation there are three products, each with different proportions of variable and fixed costs. The product with the highest profit/unit on a full cost basis has the lowest contribution/unit on a variable cost basis, and vice versa. Four different marketing plans are proposed before one is finally adopted as the plan for the year. At year end, the actual results can be compared to the budget and to a flex or adjusted budget based on the actual product volumes realized. The numbers are simple and the students can readily see the benefit of variable costing.

This simple model of marketing strategy can provide keys to creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Suitable for MBA and executive formats, this technical note demonstrates that individual marketing strategy concepts are interconnected, which renders the strategic process vulnerable to the political machinations of executives. Evolving customer needs and competitors' proactive efforts to steal market share require a dynamic marketing strategy.

Spreadsheet Supplement for case 210002.

James Musyoki, Lemmy Mutahi, and Ken Kariuki, all from East African Breweries Limited (EABL), a subsidiary of London-based Diageo, heard the disheartening news in the first week of December 2008. For the second time in six months, the Kenyan Finance Ministry had raised excise taxes on alcoholic beverages in an effort to plug the country's budget deficit; the bill was awaiting the President's signature. The price increase would put EABL's Allsops, Citizen, and President Beers out of the reach of their target markets, and Musyoki, Kariuki, and Mutahi hoped that the increase would not affect the excise-exempt Senator Keg lager - a lower-income brew which had created significant social and economic gains in Kenya since its launch in 2004. What would it take to save Senator Beer?

In 2005 Jane Bauer-Martin, a hedge fund manager, is considering what she should do with the fund's large investment in the publicly traded bonds of Delphi Corp., a financially troubled auto parts supplier. Delphi is General Motor's key auto parts supplier, and, like GM, it is burdened with large pension and other retiree liabilities that threaten to push it into bankruptcy. Bauer-Martin is considering using various credit derivatives (credit default swaps, credit-linked notes, credit default swap indices, total return swaps, etc.) to hedge her position in Delphi debt, or to speculate on future Delphi bond prices.

This case explores maximizing shareholder value as a goal in executive decision making. Over a period of nine years, three different Pfizer CEOs make critical decisions intended to increase shareholder value. But the results are disappointing. To allow students to examine these decisions, the case provides excerpts from four Chairman's letters to shareholders from Pfizer's annual reports, followed by a description of the circumstances behind each letter. In the 2000 annual report, then-CEO Bill Steere discusses Pfizer's rise to industry prominence with the acquisition of Warner-Lambert. In the 2003 report, new CEO Hank McKinnell discusses Pfizer's performance goals and its acquisition of Pharmacia, which gave it control of anti-arthritis drug Celebrex. In the 2005 report, McKinnell discusses his decision to keep Celebrex on the market despite health risks. In the 2006 report, new CEO Jeff Kindler barely mentions McKinnell's (controversial) early retirement and describes efforts to reform the company. The case closes in February 2009, just after Pfizer announces plans to acquire competitor Wyeth. Since 2000, Pfizer's tremendous growth in assets through acquisitions has not translated into significant growth in net income or share price. In closing, students are asked what Kindler should write in the letter to shareholders to open Pfizer's 2008 annual report.

This case invites students to evaluate, based on given materials, the causes, consequences, and potential resolutions of the financial crisis of 2007-2009. The premise of a business professor preparing a slide presentation dramatizes an analysis of the financial crisis. Reviewing his data, much of it in graph form, the professor ponders the central role of banks and the impact of risk management, leverage, and incentives. His main thesis is that the fundamental issue surrounding this crisis was the misjudgment of the risks taken, with the result that risk management failed to do its job of curtailing and managing risk as expected.

Middleby Corporation was a designer and manufacturer of commercial food processing and food service equipment for fast food as well as high-end restaurants. During the latter half of the 1990s, Middleby became increasingly unfocused as its number of product lines increased dramatically. Margins and sales slipped. At the same time, some of the company's high-profile product development initiatives ended in failure. Although Middleby's top management recognized some of these apparent warning signs, rather than take action, they seemed eager to blame the disappointing results solely on the company's overseas operations. This inaction caused Middleby's financial performance to deteriorate further, resulting in violations of its loan covenants. To finally correct the situation, Selim Bassoul was moved from his role as general manager of Middleby's Southbend plant up to chief operating officer for the entire corporation. Bassoul had taken the underperforming Southbend plant and turned it into a star performer, correcting and improving customer service, operations, and finances and establishing a clear strategic direction. Bassoul had to craft a turnaround plan for the entire company in the areas of strategy, operations, and finance. He cut the number of products substantially, fired some key customers after a customer profitability analysis, and focused product development on innovative products that saved Middleby's customers time and money. Following these changes and others, the company returned to profitability and Bassoul was named CEO. Bassoul then decided to present a major acquisition opportunity to the board of directors.

An iconic American brand must determine how to maximize net profit by increasing the sales of its highest-margin items in the face of constant retailer pushback including reduced shelf space and promotional support of those same products. This case is suitable for required MBA marketing courses as well as pricing and brand management electives at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. The analytics of the case assume that students can calculate both dollar and percentage margins.

Citigroup faced considerable distress in early 2009. In late 2008, the bank had accepted $45 billion in preferred equity from the United States government via the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Yet, the stock had continued to slide in early 2009. In late February, the company announced that it would convert as much as $50 billion of preferred stock into common stock, at $3.25 per share. The case asks students to evaluate the pricing of preferred stock relative to common stock at this time. As the case takes place during a period of considerable uncertainty in global capital markets, and conventional sources of arbitrage capital have been depleted, the apparent mispricing may not be as attractive as it initially seems. In the B and C cases, students must decide whether their view of the appropriate pricing changes, when the apparent mispricing worsens. A final additional teaching point relates to the formation of a synthetic short position using the options markets.

Continuation of the 'Tale of the Lynx' case series.

Vineland Research and Innovation Center, a not-for-profit organization looking to work with the Ontario local food industry, has requested two researchers to analyze the local food business landscape and propose a technology-driven solution that connects farmers in the Niagara region with buyers in Toronto. The case illustrates the challenges faced by each stakeholder in the local food supply chain, and allows students to analyze the farming and restaurant industries, assess the current Canadian market, and investigate technological advances that could enable improving the current local supply chain procurement and distribution model. This case allows students to identify competencies and gaps within the current environment, challenges facing the farming and restaurant communities, as well as opportunities to drive growth in a new market.

New Life Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association has been pursuing its social enterprise initiative since 1994 to create employment and training opportunities for former mental patients in Hong Kong. As of mid-2008, 18 social enterprises have been launched, including a supply chain of organic foods with a farm, two restaurants and five retail shops. Despite success in its social mission, the social enterprises are only partially self-sustaining. The management also faces the challenges of increasing business complexities, keen market competition and more stringent government regulations on food safety. The ability of New Life to tackle these issues is constrained by the fact that the majority of its management staff come from social work or other non-business backgrounds. To scale up its business and to achieve self-sustainability, it is imperative for the organization to revisit its management and human resources strategies, and find ways to improve the financial performance of its social enterprises.

This note emphasizes the idea that managers will often want to ask experts to express their opinions about important business risks using the precise language of probability. Examples are drawn from the 2008 financial crisis and involve value-at-risk financial reporting. The second half of this note explains how a manager might use a scoring rule to evaluate the quality of experts' probability forecasts. This note is intended to accompany an instructor's own real-time forecasting exercise where students forecast, at the beginning of a week, quantities and events that will be realized by the end of the week. The quantities and events may include stock prices, commodity prices, interest rates, exchange rates, bond ratings, political votes, movie box-office revenues, Nielsen television ratings, weather events, athletic event attendance, and so on.

The degree to which consumers have come to depend on easy, inexpensive credit is a far greater threat to the economy than most realize. To pay it off, the average U.S. consumer would have to hand over every penny of his take-home pay for 16 months. And in all that time he wouldn't be able to buy anything else--no clothes, food, coffee, nothing. Okay, so no one is going to do that. But what will people do? Individual decisions to cut back on consumption--or perhaps run up the credit cards to the max and then declare bankruptcy--will translate in the aggregate into tremendous volatility and risk for the companies customers buy (or suddenly stop buying) from. In fact, warn investment banker Jarvis and Wharton professor MacMillan, the profits and cash flows of nearly all U.S. companies are built directly or indirectly on consumer spending, and the connection is not always obvious. How many loyal supermarket customers are quietly opting to pay for their food with their credit cards rather than their debit cards? How many consumers will tap their home-equity lines of credit to pay for their next vacation? How many companies are unaware of their indirect connection to these debt-laden consumers through their distributors, retailers, and financial institutions? Those directly involved in the credit industry itself should be bracing for record numbers of bankruptcies. Those companies, like the auto dealers, that finance consumer purchases directly should be working flat out to reduce their dependence stream. And any company whose customers--or whose customers' customers--pay with credit need to be bolstering their reserves, now. The authors detail a tool that will let you measure the level of your company's exposure to consumer credit, analyze how sensitive your firm is to sudden changes in default rates, and determine what steps you can take to mitigate your risk. Managers that ignore the warning signs and leave their company vulnerable have only themselves to blame.

Argentine confectionery manufacturer, Arcor Group, seeks to implement an international strategy but in 2003, while recovering from the Argentine financial crisis, globalization plans are thwarted. Already Latin America's leading candy producer and an exporter to over 100 countries, Arcor analyzes how it can become truly global with production facilities and distribution networks in various regions, such as North America, Europe, and Asia. First, however, Arcor must stabilize its operations at home, where a devalued peso, economic uncertainty, and political instability still linger from the devastating financial crisis.