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The owners of the Novotel Suvarnabhumi Airport Hotel planned a grand 4+ star hotel in a prime location, just a five-minute walk from the airport terminal. It would feature 612 guest rooms, multiple food and beverage outlets, meeting facilities and the largest ballroom in eastern Bangkok. The property was co-owned by three Thai government corporations and was set to open on 1 October 2006. Bangkok hotel operator Universal Hospitality Group and French hotel and leisure company The Accor Group submitted a joint bid for the management contract when it was opened for tender in September 2004. In February 2005, the hotel's owners awarded the management contract to the Accor-Universal management group. This was after the hotel's design had been finalized and construction had begun. The management consequently felt they had no meaningful input in the development process. Furthermore, the hotel had been built on a turnkey basis. Hence, when the management group assumed responsibility for the hotel in April 2006, they discovered many operational challenges stemming from what they felt was a misalignment of the hotel's development, construction and operation. The management group spent the first few months grappling with those challenges and seeking solutions.

Examines the life, career, and leadership style of John Meredith, the group managing director of Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH). Meredith established the company in 1972 based on his vision for more efficient global trade. Under his leadership, the company grew to become the world's largest container port operator. HPH grew from owning and managing a single container port to owning and managing 45 container ports by May 2007. Also looks at the importance of leadership at all levels of organizations. When a company grows quickly and sets up operations around the world, it must constantly train new leaders. However, HPH had difficulty finding and training enough leaders who were willing to lead the company's new port operations in far-off destinations. Reviews HPH's actions thus far and asks what other measures may be appropriate in the future.

This technical note focuses on risk management in a project-based organization. Risk management is discussed at the organizational and project levels. Three components of risk management are mentioned: risk assessment, risk management plan, and risk monitoring. Recent thinking in risk management has gone beyond financial risk management and incorporates enterprise risk management (ERM). Finally, the technical note links risk management to strategy, and notes the importance that the implementation of both has on the performance of the firm.

Explores the process and inputs behind financial and operational forecasting in the Electronic Specialty Materials unit at Air Products and Chemicals, a global chemical company. The protagonist, John Goldberg, grapples with how to better integrate the two forecasting processes, while also trying to prepare for unexpected urgent orders and natural disasters.

In July 2004, a then 17-year-old Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon, arguably the most prestigious tennis tournament in the world. Max Eisenbud, Sharapova's agent at International Management Group (IMG), knew the championship would lead to a flood of new opportunities. What would be the best approach to the management and marketing of a champion like Maria Sharapova? Which of the various endorsement offers would be worthwhile to pursue? And how could Eisenbud best leverage the resources available to him at IMG? Allows for an in-depth examination of marketing issues and, more specifically, sports endorsement opportunities in the context of a world-class athlete. (As of 2006, Sharapova is one of the world's most recognized sports figures, and its highest compensated female athlete.) Provides unique insights into the world of "team Sharapova," consisting of Sharapova and her advisors at IMG, a leading sports, media, and entertainment agency. Contains rich data on the way in which IMG structures its sales process, and can serve to illustrate best practices and key trade-offs in sports or entertainment marketing initiatives.

Set in 2007, examines the role of the Area Instruction Officer (AIO) in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Focuses on the leadership skills and behavior needed to successfully manage a portfolio of schools with varying capacities, needs, and challenges. Also describes the role of the district and what its current development and support systems include for AIOs. Several schools and principals are profiled in order to delve deeply into "a day in the life" of an AIO.

In July 2002, a legal watchdog group, Judicial Watch, announced that it was suing Halliburton Company for overstating revenues during the period 1998 to 2001. The group's contention was that Halliburton used fraudulent accounting practices to boost revenues and hide a deteriorating financial position from investors. Specifically, the lawsuit centered around the way the company recognized claims recoveries on long-term construction projects. Prior to 1998, the company's policy was to book cost overrun expenses as soon as they occurred, but not to book claims recoveries as revenue until the repayment amount was agreed to with the client. In 1998, the company changed policies to begin estimating future recoveries and recognizing them in the same period that overrun expenses were realized. The company, which had been suffering from a recent slowdown in business and large litigation losses from asbestos lawsuits, claimed that its accounting practices were permitted under generally accepted accounting principals (GAAP). Judicial Watch, however, claimed the accounting policy inflated revenues over the four-year period by as much as $534 million. This case focuses on the accounting issues and disclosure policy of the company during the 1998 to 2001 period. Readers of the case are asked to assess whether the company's policies and decisions were appropriate in the relevant areas of accounting and disclosure.

Provides a set of easy, step-by-step guides for some analytical techniques that are useful in the analysis of cases discussed in the course "Competing and Winning Through Customer Information"(CWCI). The instructions that follow use datasets from three of the cases in this course: Slots, Tables, and All That Jazz: Managing Customer Profitability at the MGM Grand Hotel; MercadoLibre.com; and Bancaja: Developing Customer Intelligence (A). These datasets are available upon request from the author.

While wine tourism in the United States was booming, the majority of consumers who tasted a Cabernet Sauvignon in one of Napa Valley's tasting rooms were not permitted to ship the wine directly to their home. In 2002, direct-to-consumer shipping was either banned or overly cumbersome in 37 states. W. Reed Foster, president of the Coalition for Free Trade, was determined to remove these obstacles. Would he be able to free the grapes?

During a discussion, a physician once pointed to the name on his lab jacket and said, "MD-makes decisions!" One of the greatest challenges we face in cultivating leadership competence is being centered and skillful in the midst of difficult and upsetting situations, or during times of crisis. Each of the three vignettes in this case offers an opportunity to practice decision-making in challenging situations. The material helps students focus on decision-making. What guides effective decision-making? The vignettes present situations that can be used to describe common approaches to decision-making and explore problems or challenges with traditional decision-making.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 607140.

Evaluates the role that the quarterly conference calls play in a company's overall communications strategy with investors. In particular, students are asked to assess what additional information they can learn from the conference call that they would not otherwise learn in reading quarterly earnings results and financial statements.

This case considers how one project-based organization overcame deterrents to strategic risk management and enabled an effective risk management process to be diffused through its projects, without significantly upsetting the autonomy of its projects. Students will explore both the deterrents to strategic risk management and the components of effective risk management.

"Hey that was my idea!" How often have your students had that exact thought? Were they on a team when they felt most able to identify with that statement? This case is about a recent MBA graduate who faces challenges within her consulting team on her first post-graduation job. She is frustrated with one teammate in particular who she believes practices self-interest politics-he takes her ideas. The case allows for a healthy discussion on team dynamics and strategies to help students when the team mix is wrong. The case may also be used to discuss issues regarding women in business.

This case study discusses two related aspects that are becoming increasingly important in today's software development practice: re-engineering of a monolithic system into a component-based system (the focus of this case) and globally distributed work. Component-based (software) development (CBD) involves (i) the development of software components and (ii) the building of software systems through the integration of pre-existing software components (developed in-house or procured from the component market). For companies involved in software development, CBD offers agility in design by basing software development on methodologies that support the recombination of reusable components, being an approach that rapidly expands product variation and sustains the build-up of product families. It also promises significant improvements in software development through shorter time-to-market and reduced development costs. However, being an innovative approach to software development that emerged in the mid-1990s, the adoption of CBD requires companies to re-engineer existing software systems (products) or to develop new systems from scratch using component technologies and to deal with additional challenges associated with the management of CBD. LeCroy Corporation was one of the early adopters of CBD that decided to adopt CBD to gain competitive advantage in its markets. The case describes an actual situation at LeCroy Corporation, involving several decisions, challenges and opportunities faced by the managers of a globally distributed software development team over a period of time when they re-engineered a monolithic system into a component-based system.

A successful Canadian jewelry manufacturer and distributor contemplates entering the U.S. market and how best to do it. Students are required to: 1) identify costs relevant to the decision and categorize them as either investments, fixed costs or variable costs; 2) calculate unit contribution, contribution-margin ratio and weighted-average-contribution-margin rates; 3) perform a breakeven analysis and interpret its meaning using relevant parameters; 4) project profitability of a chosen distribution strategy; and 5) perform sensitivity analysis with respect to the expected sales level. Students are required to understand and analyse the opportunities and risks associated with entering a new geographic market and combine their qualitative and quantitative analysis when deciding which distribution strategy to pursue.

A strong services brand is built and sustained primarily by customers' interactions with the provider. A services branding model depicts the dynamics of brand creation. From the interrelationships among the presented brand, external communications, and customers' experiences emerge brand awareness, meaning, and ultimately, equity. Illustrates the services branding model by showing how one organization has created, extended, and protected a powerful brand through an unwavering commitment to the well being of its customers. Managers outside of healthcare can benefit from three branding lessons embedded in the Mayo Clinic story: (1) attend to organizational values; (2) play defense, not just offense; and (3) turn customers into marketers.

Search engines are key to the operation of the World Wide Web. This centrality, however, presents challenges: search engine providers face the problem of revenue generation when users expect free content, whilst advertisers need to attract the interest of searchers. The innovation that effectively addresses these challenges is the use of text advertisements based upon search topic, known as paid search. The method entails advertisers competing for top listing position through bidding in ongoing auctions and then paying when users click on their advertisements, making paid search a flexible and accountable form of advertising. Since its introduction in 1998, paid search has become the dominant form of online advertising and led to Google's $140 billion market capitalization in 2006. Analyzes the emergence of paid search and the mechanics of its operation, and offers managers guidance on its effective usage.

Saving the rain forest from yet another palm oil plantation would certainly garner a company favorable attention from environmentalists, but how would its shareholders react? Shows that by strategically practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR), a company can 'do well by doing good'; in other words, it can make a profit and make the world a better place at the same time. CSR is regarded as voluntary corporate commitment to exceed the explicit and implicit obligations imposed on a company by society's expectations of conventional corporate behavior. Hence, CSR is a way of promoting beneficial social trends in order to enhance society's basic order, which we define as consisting of obligations that cover both the legal framework and social conventions. Due to globalization, companies are now less constrained by society's basic order than they have been in the past. Because different countries have different laws and standards, there are more ways to get away with less than ideal behavior in the quest for greater profits. Nearly everyone agrees that this is not a good thing, but what can be done? Offers an understanding of CSR that could be the answer and contends that practicing CSR is not altruistic do-gooding, but rather a way for both companies and society to prosper. This is especially true when CSR is conceived as a long-range plan of action.

The Packet Design case looks at successful serial entrepreneur Judy Estrin and her efforts to build a technology incubator immediately before the Internet bubble burst. The incubator's failure caused Estrin to look anew at the key drivers of success in any business. By her own definition, a leader must have vision and passion for a company and product. Further, building a business for the long run, not for sale, is a critical component to Estrin's recipe for a venture success.