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Companies spend enormous amounts of energy and capital creating value for customers, but less regard is given to capturing the value they have created. Segmentation based on buying behavior uncovers a tremendous differential in willingness to pay for subjective product attributes such as convenience, status, and quality. Purchase decisions are made through an assessment of a myriad of factors, balancing perceptions of value components against price in a subtle, complex, and often subconscious decision matrix. Customer-centric pricing requires the simultaneous and continuous assessment of product attributes, customer perceptions, and the circumstances of time and place by listening to customers' actions. It is a means of assuring that companies assess the value they create for customers and extract that value from the marketplace.

Coaching is a frequently cited, but less often effectively implemented, developmental tool for enhancing managerial performance at all levels. Identifies and explores the practices junior managers consider to be most critical for senior managers to employ when implementing coaching as a performance improvement practice. The research engaged 45 focus groups consisting of 225 middle managers from over 20 different U.S. organizations to explore the issue of managerial coaching and its implications for organizations and individual managers.

Culturally attuned and emotionally sensitive global leaders need to be developed: leaders who can respond to the particular foreign environments of different countries and different interpersonal work situations. Two emerging constructs are especially relevant to the development of successful global leaders: cultural and emotional intelligences. When considered under the traditional view of intelligence as measured by IQ, cultural and emotional intelligences provide a framework for better understanding cross-cultural leadership and help clarify possible adaptations to leadership development programs of multinational firms. Posits that emotional intelligence, analytical intelligence, and leadership behaviors are moderated by cultural intelligence in the formation of global leadership success.

As the field of employee branding has begun to unfold, more and more executives have become interested in how this process can help them achieve a competitive advantage for their organizations. Explains how employee branding works and how it can be utilized to position the organization in the minds of customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Presents a contextual analysis of its use as a source of sustainable competitive advantage at Southwest Airlines. Also, identifies key success factors.

Bausch & Lomb (B&L) was in a crisis situation when Ron Zarrella took the helm in late November 2001. Following the departure of the COO in 2000 and the CEO earlier in 2001, Bausch & Lomb had undergone six quarters of restructuring and had laid off 10% of its workforce. A company known for cutting-edge innovation and the ability to evolve to stay relevant to customer needs, B&L had become a company in turmoil. Revenue had been flat for the past several quarters, with margins slowly eroding due to lack of disciplined cost management. The company carried excess overhead from duplicate departments that remained as a result of two large acquisitions made in 1997. A patent infringement lawsuit against B&L's key contact lens product threatened the future revenue stream and B&L's stock had already dropped more than 50%. It was in this environment that the Americas sales region had begun a major reorganization. Zarrella felt that he had no choice but to be cautiously optimistic. The 'Stronger as One: One vision, One goal, One team' reorganization had been underway for several months, merging the region's four sales forces into one. Even though lackluster financial performance indicated the need for change, Zarrella wondered whether 'Stronger as One' would return B&L to its rightful position in the market, or whether such a large reorganization would create more problems than it solved.

Explores the concept of economic value added (EVA) and its practical applications as a management control system for performance measurement and incentive compensation. Explains how EVA is measured and explores some of the adjustments to financial statements that are required to measure EVA. Provides a fully worked example of a firm's measurement of its EVA, both before and after adjustments to its financial statements. Describes several types of EVA bonus schemes and discusses both the benefits and limitations of EVA.

In June 2002, a managing director of an "active investor" hedge fund is considering the possible gains from increasing the debt capitalization of The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company. Wrigley has been conservatively financed, and at the date of the case, carries no debt. The tasks for the student are to: • Estimate the potential change in value from re-levering Wrigley using adjusted present value analysis; • Assess the impact on weighted average cost of capital, earnings per share, the credit rating of the firm, and voting control of the Wrigley family; • Consider the merits of dividend or share repurchase as a means of returning cash to shareholders. The central teaching objective of the case is to explore the financial effects of capital structure change. Key here is the trade-off between the tax benefits of debt and the associated costs in the form of financial distress and loss of flexibility. Related issues include signaling to investors, clientele effects (control considerations for the Wrigley family), and incentives created for directors and managers. Finally, the case affords a comparison of dividends and share repurchases.

Spreadsheet Supplement for case 206016.

Spreadsheet supplement for case UV1373.

Supplement to product UV1369.

Supplement to product UV1369.

From a single, modest club in 1962, Bally Total Fitness had grown to become-in management's words-the "largest and only nationwide commercial operator of fitness centers" in the United States in 2004. Bally had faced its share of challenges, but the last couple of years had proven particularly difficult. Competition in its markets had intensified, Bally's stock price had collapsed, the company had restated earnings to the chagrin of shareholders, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had begun to investigate Bally's accounting procedures. Under the direction of Paul Toback, CEO since December 2002, Bally had revisited its unique approach to pricing and selling health-club memberships, boosted the accountability of club managers for profitability, launched new efforts to help club members meet weight-loss goals, altered its marketing message, and begun to strengthen its internal control systems. Toback and his team were committed to increasing the number of Bally members and maximizing revenue per member. Would Toback's efforts restore Bally's battered stock price, stave off companies that were rumored to want to buy the company, and enable Bally to remain a major player in the industry?

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Mote Aquaculture Park is raising sturgeon for the production of caviar. With eggs imported from Eastern Europe, the park is engaging in a unique venture, bringing Russian caviar harvesting to the United States. The project manager is faced with evaluating a number of issues such as political-legal forces, local and international economics, production technologies, and socio-cultural forces. Further, industry factors also play a key role. As he considers Mote Aquacultural Park's current situation, he knows that a thorough review of these environmental factors are necessary.

Singapore has experienced exceptional economic success, lifting its self from third world to first world in fewer than four decades. Moreover, public enterprises have been a key instrument in Singapore's economic growth instead of the obstacle that they are so often in other developing countries. By 2004, however, Singapore was rethinking the role of its public enterprises in part because its economic growth was slowing and its strategy seemed to be faltering. Critics worried that public enterprises were simply not nimble enough to keep pace in an increasingly competitive global economy while defenders argued that a small nation like Singapore could not afford to rely on private companies to make the strategic investments it needed to remain competitive. The debate in Singapore raised interesting questions for other countries. HKS Case Number 1817.0

This case considers the sudden and very large drop in the market value of equity for Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. associated with a series of announcements in 2004. These announcements caused investors to revise their expectations about the future growth of Krispy Kreme, which had been one of the most rapidly growing American corporations in the new millennium. The task for the student is to evaluate the implications of these announcements and assess the financial health of the company. This case is intended to be introductory: it can provide a first exercise in financial statement analysis and lay the foundation for two important financial themes, the concept of financial "health" and the financial-economic definition of "value" and its determinants.

Set in the autumn of 2005, this case recounts the remarkable performance record of Value Trust, a mutual fund managed by William H. "Bill" Miller III at Legg Mason, Inc. The case describes the investment style of Miller, whose record with Value Trust has beaten the S&P 500 14 years in a row. The tasks for the student are to assess the performance of the fund, consider the sources of its success, and decide on the sustainability of Miller's performance. Consistent with the introductory nature of the case, the analysis requires no numerical calculations. The instructor should not be deceived, however: the absorption of capital-market background and the implications of financial concepts in the case will fully occupy the novice. This case updates and replaces "Peter Lynch and the Fidelity Magellan Fund" and "The Fidelity Magellan Fund, 1995." The case is intended for use in the opening stages of a finance course. It provides a nontechnical introduction to the U.S. equity markets and lays the foundation for some basic concepts in finance.

MCI's board of directors is considering competing bids from Verizon and Qwest. Qwest, a smaller company with a weaker balance sheet, is offering almost a billion dollars more. But Verizon, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, has a history of successful mergers and acquisitions.

Founded in 1974, C. K. Yeung Worldwide Ltd. became one of the largest metal traders in Hong Kong in the 1980s. Looks at how the beliefs of its CEO, Joseph Yeung, in honest behavior and Chinese cultural philosophy influenced his management style and made him a successful business leader and entrepreneur.

In 2005, CEO Bruce Rohde has almost completed the integration of ConAgra Foods' collection of 90 independent operating companies into a focused, value-added firm and was beginning to think about his successor. ConAgra had become the second largest food company and No. 1 food service supplier in the United States. Rohde believed that the company, with its solid portfolio of brands and history of leadership in important trends such as healthy foods, was ready to begin its next chapter as one of the great marketing companies, in league with Kraft Food or Coca-Cola. The job of the next CEO would be to unlock the enterprise value of the company in the face of continuing customer consolidation and increasingly diverse consumer requirements.