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GI has developed a revolutionary video pill for imaging the small bowel in the gastro-intestinal tract. The development has required the integration of wide variety of technologies. GI founder and CEO Gabriel Meron must determine GI's marketing strategy and prioritize GI's initial target markets: either the United States, Europe, or Japan, or any combination. He is also faced with the immediate decision if to make offers to U.S. and European regional managers. Cash resources are scarce, and GI hopes to raise additional capital soon.

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Montague has developed a major innovation that creates a new sub-category in the bicycle industry: a full-sized, high-quality bicycle that folds. In contrast to existing small-wheeled folding bicycles that are portable, but with inferior performance characteristics, the Montague folding bicycle has the look, feel, and performance of a standard bicycle. However, while the firm has experienced notable success since its founding, it has yet to achieve widespread adoption of its innovation. What should the firm do to increase penetration? How can Montague overcome the reputation of folding bicycles as inferior performers and convince consumers, dealers, and others of its bicycle's quality? How can the firm get consumers to even notice the innovation when the bicycle looks just like a regular bicycle? In other words, how can Montague balance the need to look like a regular bicycle in order to achieve legitimacy with the need to signal value by looking different? What market segment should Montague be targeting - customers looking specifically for a folding bicycle, or consumers interested in a full-sized bicycle but for whom the folding feature might add value? Finally, should Montague license its technology to one of the leading mainstream bicycle manufacturers in order to increase adoption, vs. continuing to go it alone in the product market?

The case follows the professional and personal lives of John and Andrea Rice, illustrating the challenge of "juggling" the multiple aspects of life (career, family, community, self) in the pursuit of a personal vision of success. Particular attention is paid to the role of entrepreneurship. The case is set in mid 2007. John Rice, founder and CEO of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, is passionate about the nonprofit's commitment to minority leadership development, and access to opportunity. But he also is excited about launching a new for-profit venture, CareerCore, with his wife. He must decide what role to play in each of the organizations going forward.

This case addresses the issues of leadership and change management in the process of transforming an industry through an innovative public-private partnership approach to policy making. In 2005, the Governor of Arizona issued an Executive Order to create a roadmap for the state to achieve statewide electronic health data exchange between various entities in the health care delivery system. The Roadmap development project, a key initiative for Arizona, was led primarily by the State CIO. Being one of the first States to develop a statewide Roadmap, Arizona was being recognized as a national leader in the area of healthcare IT. While CIO and his team had successfully initiated a large-scale transformation within the state, they were now faced with the challenge of transforming the blueprint into reality. This case documents the process of creating this Roadmap and the issues that need to be addressed to achieve a true and lasting transformation in the healthcare arena.

Describes the governance issues facing the Board of Governors of the American Red Cross. After a series of issues--FDA consent decree on its blood operations; the response to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina--the Red Cross board was under pressure to fix its governance from the public, the media, and from Congress. Describes the Red Cross governance structure and practices in place and the process used to examine them.

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On June 17, 2007, Real Madrid sealed its first Spanish league championship under new president Ramon Calderon, ending an unprecedented title drought. Real Madrid had seen a significant growth in revenues and now was the world's biggest soccer club and among the largest and most profitable sports franchises globally. Although Calderon signed several new stars in his first year, he also rejuvenated the team by acquiring the promising youngsters, thereby moving away from what had been dubbed the "Galacticos Strategy" introduced by former president Florentino Perez. Would the move away form this strategy bring continued successes on the field? And how would it impact real Madrid's business performance?

The announcement of merger or acquisition conveys new information to the capital markets. This note describes how the stock prices of a Buyer and Target behave after the announcement of a deal. First, for an all-stock deal that is certain to go through, the note defines accouchement effects and describes the fundamental arbitrage relationship between Target and Buyer stock prices. It shows how post-announcement prices may be used to infer the market's estimate of synergies. It then explains how the betas of the two companies change post-announcement and the arbitrage relationship between prices in a cash-and-stock deal. Finally, it defines event risk and explains how it affects the prices of the Buyer and the Target.

This teaching case discusses the decisions facing GlobShop, a global travel-retail company, in its efforts to offshore a significant portion of its information technology (IT) work. In response to the business challenges that arose due to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the company decided to outsource many of its IT activities to an Indian vendor. This case traces the key decisions made by the CIO and the challenges that were encountered during the planning and execution of the company's offshore sourcing strategy. These decisions pertain to the choice of tasks to be offshored, decisions about the vendor and the nature of sourcing arrangement, managing the vendor relationship and change management issues induced by offshoring. As GlobShop nears the completion of its 3-year agreement with the offshore vendor, the CIO is faced with decisions regarding continuing offshore outsourcing, extending the contract and related implications for the future of IT organization at GlobShop.

This teaching case discusses the challenges being faced by the technology managers at Indian Railways (IR) in the current scenario of a resurgent national economy coupled with increasing customer expectations. In the face of growing competition from road and low-cost airlines, to retain its customers, IR has responded by changing its business rules. The Railway Ministry expects a rapid response from Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) to incorporate all these changes in the passenger reservation system (PRS). The old PRS, which is time-tested and reliable, and has been serving the customers' needs for nearly two decades, is now proving to be relatively inflexible to match the rapidly changing business requirements. Although the current scenario of a constant need to change the programming logic of PRS has been making maintenance tougher for CRIS officials, they have realized that PRS is a time-tested, proven, and reliable technology. Though they would be happy to replace the old PRS with a new state-of-art system that would provide them greater maintenance flexibility, the repercussions associated with possible failure of the new system are far too serious. The case exhibits the current dilemma being faced by the head of CRIS, the umbrella agency for information technology (IT) implementation in IR: whether IR should continue using the old PRS technology with its inherent shortcomings, or should it take the risk and go in for a wholesale replacement with a new state-of-art technology which would provide greater maintenance flexibility?

This case study describes how the Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the Infocomm Development Authority, as lead agencies, jointly initiated and managed the implementation of a one-stop business licensing portal called OBLS (Online Business Licensing Service - https://licenses.business.gov.sg/) in the Singapore public sector. While mandate from the top for this strategic cross-agency project was strong, there were many hurdles in the form of people, process and technology that had to be overcome. The case study highlights these issues and challenges, and illustrates how they were successfully overcome for delivering cross-agency integrated e-Service for new business license application.

This case examines issues in the assessment and adoption of Internet technologies in a federal US government context, and describes in detail a pilot project to determine the feasibility of adopting an application service provider solution to support procurement by multiple federal agencies using a variety of different legacy transaction systems. The pilot test of the Internet Payment Platform (IPP) by the eMoney group of the United States Treasury's Financial Management Service involved three federal agencies and subsets of their suppliers. Participants saw many benefits from their use of the IPP, but agreed that for full-scale operation it needed to be modified to better fit the government procurement context. The project manager is weighing the pros and cons of conducting another pilot test using the same commercial software as before, or obtaining and customizing a new commercial package, or building a new system from scratch.

This case describes the implementation and subsequent failure of an innovative system installed in the bars of Alvalade XXI, the recently built football stadium in Lisbon, Portugal. Casa XXI, the company running the bars, had entrusted the project to an IT supplier who had limited experience with large systems. During the inauguration, the system failed spectacularly creating a chaotic situation. The fiasco meant not only a financial loss, but also a blow to the reputation of the company. The management blamed the supplier for the failure. The supplier, however, claimed that the problem was not technical but organizational, that is, poor planning of operations. Subsequent tests were inconclusive and failed to restore trust. At the end of the case, the CEO is considering the possibility to switch to an alternative supplier. He also wonders what they could have done to manage the project and the associated risks more effectively. The case highlights risk and project management issues in large systems implementations. The discussion can be structured around cost/benefit analysis, risk assessment, and project management. Relevant dimensions include: company operations, project scope, degree of innovation, technology used, system architecture, supplier selection, and project organization. In addition, the case raises governance questions: Who is responsible for the project? Even if the project is outsourced, how should the roles and responsibilities be apportioned between the company and the IT supplier(s)? What mechanisms should be used to plan and execute IT projects, and control their risks?

Venerable Detroit automaker Atida Motors has a new call center in Bangalore that the company hopes will raise its reputation for customer service. But it doesn't appear to be doing so yet. Complaints about the Andromeda XL--the hip new model Atida hopes will capture the imagination of Wall Street--are flooding the call center. Call backlogs are building, and letters of complaint are piling up. One loyal Atida customer is so upset about getting the brush-off that he's not only talking to a lawyer but threatening to go on YouTube and take his case to the court of public opinion. In the Internet age, does Atida need a new way to deal with unhappy customers? Tom Farmer, the creator of the unintentionally viral PowerPoint presentation "Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel," says that Atida needs to stop defining customer service solely as a response to bad news and nip problems in the bud by making online dialogue intrinsic to the brand experience. Nate Bennett, of Georgia Tech, and Chris Martin, of Centenary College, observe that Atida has violated its customers' sense of fairness within three dimensions--distributive, procedural, and interactional--thus increasing their desire for revenge. Lexus Vice President for Customer Service Nancy Fein thinks Atida isn't even in the ballpark when it comes to world-class customer service. She offers as an example a Lexus rep who drove 80 miles to deliver $1,000 to a stranded Lexus owner whose purse had been stolen. Barak Libai, of Tel Aviv University and MIT's Sloan School, suggests that Atida invest in a CRM system so that it can determine which customers have enough purchasing and referral value to be given the red carpet treatment and which should be gently let go.

Unless you're a hermit, you can't avoid relationships. And your professional career certainly won't go anywhere if you don't know how to build strong, positive connections. Leaders need to connect deeply with followers if they hope to engage and inspire them. Despite the importance of interpersonal dynamics in the workplace, solid research on the topic is only now beginning to emerge--and psychologist John M. Gottman, executive director of the Relationship Research Institute, is leading the way. His research shows that how we behave at work is closely related to how we behave at home. Few people understand personal relationships better than Gottman, who has studied thousands of married couples for the past 35 years. He and his colleagues use video cameras, heart monitors, and other biofeedback equipment to measure what goes on when couples experience moments of either conflict or closeness. By mathematically analyzing the data, Gottman has provided hard scientific evidence for what makes good relationships. In this interview with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, Gottman emphasizes that successful couples look for ways to accentuate the positive: They try to say yes as often as possible. Even thriving relationships, however, still have room for conflict. Individuals embrace it as a way to work through essential personality differences. Gottman also points out that good relationships aren't about clear communication--they're about small moments of attachment and intimacy. Still, he warns, too much of a good thing can be a menace in the workplace, where simple friendships can spill over into emotional affairs.

A well told story's power to captivate and inspire people has been recognized for thousands of years. Peter Guber is in the business of creating compelling stories: He has headed several entertainment companies--including Sony Pictures, PolyGram, and Columbia Pictures--and produced Rain Man, Batman, and The Color Purple, among many other movies. In this article, he offers a method for effectively exercising that power. For a story to enrapture its listeners, says Guber, it must be true to the teller, embodying his or her deepest values and conveying them with candor; true to the audience, delivering on the promise that it will be worth people's time by acknowledging listeners' needs and involving them in the narrative; true to the moment, appropriately matching the context--whether it's an address to 2,000 customers or a chat with a colleague over drinks--yet flexible enough to allow for improvisation; and true to the mission, conveying the teller's passion for the worthy endeavor that the story illustrates and enlisting support for it. In this article, Guber's advice--distilled not only from his years in the entertainment industry but also from an intense discussion over dinner one evening with storytelling experts from various walks of life--is illustrated with numerous examples of effective storytelling from business and elsewhere. Perhaps the most startling is a colorful anecdote about how Guber's own impromptu use of storytelling, while standing on the deck of a ship in Havana harbor, won Fidel Castro's grudging support for a film project.

China and India are burying the hatchet after four-plus decades of hostility. A few companies from both nations have been quick to gain competitive advantages by viewing the two as symbiotic. If Western corporations fail to do the same, they will lose their competitive edge--and not just in China and India but globally. The trouble is, most companies and consultants refuse to believe that the planet's most populous nations can mend fences. Not only do the neighbors annoy each other with their foreign policies, but they're also vying to dominate Asia. Moreover, the world's fastest-growing economies are archrivals for raw materials, technologies, capital, and overseas markets. Still, China and India are learning to cooperate, for three reasons. First, these ancient civilizations may have been at odds since 1962, but for 2,000 years before that, they enjoyed close economic, cultural, and religious ties. Second, neighbors trade more than non-neighbors do, research suggests. Third, China and India have evolved in very different ways since their economies opened up, reducing the competitiveness between them and enhancing the complementarities. Some companies have already developed strategies that make use of both countries' capabilities. India's Mahindra & Mahindra developed a tractor domestically but manufactures it in China. China's Huawei has recruited 1,500 engineers in India to develop software for its telecommunications products. Even the countries' state-owned oil companies, including Sinopec and ONGC, have teamed up to hunt for oil together. Multinational companies usually find that tapping synergies across countries is difficult. At least two American corporations, GE and Microsoft, have effectively combined their China and India strategies, allowing them to stay ahead of global rivals.

Companies often begin their search for great ideas either by encouraging wild, outside-the-box thinking or by conducting quantitative analysis of existing market and financial data and customer opinions. Those approaches can produce middling ideas at best, say Coyne, founder of an executive-counseling firm in Atlanta, and Clifford and Dye, strategy experts at McKinsey. The problem with the first method is that few people are very good at unstructured, abstract brainstorming. The problems with the second are that databases are usually compiled to describe current--not future--offerings, and customers rarely can tell you whether they need or want a product if they've never seen it. The secret to getting your organization to regularly generate lots of good ideas, and occasionally some great ones, is deceptively simple: First, create new boxes for people to think within so that they don't get lost in the cosmos and they have a basis for offering ideas and knowing whether they're making progress in the brainstorming session. Second, redesign ideation processes to remove obstacles that interfere with the flow of ideas--such as most people's aversion to speaking in groups larger than ten. This article offers a tested approach that poses concrete questions. For example, what do Rollerblades, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, and Spider-Man movies have in common? The answer: Each is something that adults loved as children and that was reproduced in an expensive form for grown-ups. Asking brainstorming participants to ponder how their childhood passions could be recast as adult offerings might generate some fabulous ideas for new products or services.

Countless studies, workshops, and books have focused on leaders--the charismatic ones, the retiring ones, even the crooked ones. Virtually no literature exists about followers, however, and the little that can be found tends to depict subordinates as an amorphous group or explain their behavior in the context of leaders' development. Some works even fail to sufficiently distinguish among varying types of followers--barely registering the fact that those who tag along mindlessly are a breed apart from those who are deeply devoted and consciously, actively involved. These distinctions have critical implications for the way leaders should lead and managers should manage, according to Kellerman, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Additionally, today's followers are influenced by a range of cultural and technological changes that have affected what they want and how they view and communicate with their ostensible leaders. In this article, Kellerman explores the evolving dynamic between leaders and subordinates and offers a typology that managers can use to determine and appreciate how their followers are different from one another. Using the level of engagement with a leader or group as a defining factor, the author segments followers into five types: Isolates are completely detached, they passively support the status quo with their inaction. Bystanders are free riders who are somewhat detached, depending on their self-interests. Participants are engaged enough to invest some of their own time and money to make an impact. Activists are very much engaged, heavily invested in people and process, and eager to demonstrate their support or opposition. And diehards are so engaged they're willing to go down with the ship--or throw the captain overboard.