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Develop its own branded line, or continue as an original design manufacturer (ODM)? Tung Lung Metal Industries Co. Ltd. is a Taiwanese maker of door lock hardware that is faced with the question of whether to continue to focus on its ODM business or start placing more emphasis on its own brand development and growth in global markets. The case explores the bumpy history of the company and raises questions around the downstream consequences of global outsourcing strategies.

This case examines the April 2007 decision of British music company EMI to suspend its annual dividend as the company struggled to respond to the effect of digital audio distribution on its core business. The EMI case is intended to serve as an engaging introduction to corporate financial policy and themes in managing the right side of the balance sheet. The case contrasts EMI's storied success with artists such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, and Norah Jones with its recent inability to succeed in financial markets. In light of takeover threats and restructuring costs, EMI's CFO Martin Stewart must recommend EMI's dividend policy.

This case examines the question of financial leverage at California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) in July 2007. With a highly profitable business and an aversion to debt, CPK management is considering a debt-financed stock buyback program. The case is intended to provide an introduction to the Modigliani and Miller capital structure irrelevance propositions and the concept of debt tax shields. With the background of a pizza company, the case provides an engaging context to discuss the "pizza graphs" that are commonly used in corporate finance curriculum to illustrate the wealth effects of capital structure decisions.

Spreadsheet for case UV1203

The case describes Pfizer's efforts to build and run an innovation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the center goes through different periods of leadership and strategic models, its relationship with the corporation and other research sites is explored. The case study describes in detail the challenges of building an innovation center within a large corporation, including organization, incentives, and scientific issues.

World financial assets are growing faster than the world economy. Confronting that and other modern realities of global finance requires more than regulatory reform: It calls for deeper thinking about new private and public international players and markets.

After 180 years of competitive rowing, the Cambridge University Boat Club has a tried-and-true method for assembling teams: It tests different athletes in different combinations to identify not just the best rowers, but the best groupings of them. Try taking a page from that playbook as you put together your next high-performance business team.

If you're afraid to involve your company in the carbon-credit market, the prospect of delaying your participation should scare you more. The authors' guide to the basics about carbon assets will assuage your fears by arming you with facts.

The chairman and founder of Bright Horizons Family Solutions heeded the wisdom of visionary real estate developer James Rouse: Make your passions central to your life. By doing that, she has created a highly successful company with employees who are driven by its mission to give children the best possible start in life.

When outsourcing the design of a platform-based product, avoid three common perils: misaligned objectives, unanticipated rivalry between design partners, and poor version control. If you don't elude these dangers, your planned cost savings-and even your entire platform-could be in jeopardy.

This Danish entrepreneur shares widely applicable lessons from his experience managing employees with autism. More than two-thirds of workers at his software-testing firm, Specialisterne, have the condition and are thriving in their jobs.

Most companies underutilize their data assets, but sometimes they figure out how to leverage them to satisfy marketplace demands. The author outlines nine ways to create new value from your data.

Football is indeed the quintessential model for modern-day talent-Dependant business. Football managers have always needed to solve the foremost people management dilemma of how to most effectively manage talent. However, talent alone is not enough. In an early example from English football in the 1930s, in the words of Arsenal's Herbert Chapman, the manager's task is to use that talent to "organize victory." Countless examples can be cited from the history of the game of football where clubs and national teams fielding line-ups of what was considered to be the best and, therefore, the most expensively paid talent in the game at that time failed to live up to expectations. In contrast, other examples from football can be cited where a team of medium-quality, average-costing talent has consistently outperformed more-illustrious rivals. In most cases, the difference can be attributed to the lack or presence of an effective manager.

The focus on intellectual capital and other 'intangible' assets that has emerged in recent years is opening up a series of questions with profound implications for business leaders, policy makers, accounting professionals and economists. Mastering value creation in the knowledge economy demands an appreciation for the pivotal role of intangible capital and a thorough understanding of network dynamics. Around the world, people are engaged in a struggle to reframe business and economics in an environment of global interdependency, environmental concerns and larger societal responsibility. Analyzing a value network involves addressing three basic sets of questions, she says, which can allow an organization to come to terms with how intangible assets are set into motion within unique configurations of roles, relationships, interactions and resources in value conversion networks.

The authors show that the evaluation of financial statements and the subsequent judgment of whether or not to invest in a company is fraught with emotions, heuristics and physiological responses. They describe three particular aspects of financial statements that have been proven to affect the reader's view of a firm, and show that the judgment of whether or not to invest in a firm is far from the cold-and-calculated process that it has always been imagined (and taught) to be.

In this interview, Rotman Capital Markets Institute Director Paul Halpern discusses the state of Canadian capital markets, the current challenges they face, and what to expect as we move forward. Along the way he touches on dual-class shares, the 'rules-based approach' vs. the principles-based approach, and areas where Canada can attempt to build competitive advantage versus other small global capital markets.

A positive reputation is arguably the most valuable 'intangible asset' that a firm can possess. The authors describe how reputations form within different stakeholder categories and why individual stakeholders within a group may not have identical attitudes toward a firm, despite the fact that they have the same kinds of interests in it. They describe four important categories of 'signals' that firms need to consider in order to enhance their reputation, including categorical cues; individuated information processing; credibility; and reputational stickiness.

In this article, the authors -- both of McKinsey & Company -- propose a bold idea: that organizations everywhere should completely redesign their internal financial performance measurements for the digital age. The time has come, they argue, for organizations to take measure of the real engines of wealth creation in the 21st century: the knowledge, relationships, reputations and other 'intangibles' created by talented people. Companies create wealth by converting these raw intangibles into the institutional skills, patents, brands, software, customer bases, intellectual capital and networks that increase profits per employee and returns on invested capital. The authors show how intangibles are true 'capital' in the sense that they produce real cash returns, and how a firm can get started in changing its systems to reflect the realities of modern wealth creation. The article is an excerpt from the authors' book, Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth from Talent in the 21st Century Organization (McGraw-Hill, 2007).

From giant pension funds to small retail investors, capital has increasingly lost its patience with talent, whether it be CEOs, fund managers, lawyers, investment bankers, athletes or actors. The fact is, capital is no longer the undisputed 'scarce resource' of the economy, and accordingly, its power over talent will continue to dramatically wane. Talent, meanwhile, is busy 'flexing its muscles' in a wide variety of industries, demanding huge paybacks. The author describes four tactics that talent can use to benefit from this scenario, and while It will not be a pleasant time for capital in the near term, he describes four defenses that capital can use to protect itself from greedy talent.

Since the mid-1990s, management-metaphor boutique Serendipity Associates (SA) has been offering clients sizzling similes and snappy sound bites. But the head of SA, Barton Brady, gets word that someone is now poaching in his territory. It's the low-rent operation Tropes R Us, which has started offshoring production to Ireland and will soon flood the market with high-quality, low-cost metaphors. Does this move confirm Brady's fear that the U.S. is losing its competitive edge in right-brain work? Four experts comment on this fictional case study in R0809A and R0809Z. Daniel H. Pink, an author and consultant, says SA should move to higher ground--to find new ways to differentiate itself on the basis of right-brain capabilities that will be difficult to offshore. Doing this, he writes, requires an education system that nurtures creativity. John Chuang, CEO of talent consulting firm Aquent, writes that Brady could rally U.S. citizens to protest the country's current immigration policy, which makes it difficult for companies to import top talent. Brady should also broaden the definition of SA's business. Richard Phelps, a human resource executive at PricewaterhouseCoopers, argues that contrary to the prevailing view of many in the West, workers in emerging economies are equal to the demands of creative work. SA should assemble the best right brains on the planet and either hire them or contract with them to represent the SA brand. Charlie Wrench, the CEO of brand and design consulting firm Landor Associates, advises Brady not to worry about his country--which Wrench believes will continue to attract a disproportionate share of the world's creative talent--but about his multinational clients, who need service providers to display a powerful combination of right-brain and left-brain skills.