個案總覽

The Foundation for Informed Medical Decision-Making has created an interactive videodisc system that provides patients with customized support regarding medical treatment or screening decisions when they face a choice between two equally effective courses of action. The videodiscs, known as shared decision-making programs (SDPs), were the result of considering grant-funded research into treatment outcomes and patients' preferences concerning varying medical treatments. Over a six-year period, the foundation has partnered with a variety of commercial firms to manufacture and market the SDPs. Despite robust evidence supporting the effectiveness of the SDPs and the enthusiastic response of early purchasers, the foundation has been unable to widely disseminate the product and faces major debt.

Describes the rocky transition from an outdated, nonintegrated information system to a new customized system built by programmers in a small, IT-dependent foliage company that distributes plant material. The old system has increasingly become a "burning platform," but the project to build the new system is plagued by delays, the idiosyncrasies of the business, and lack of IT knowledge on the part of senior managers. The transition threatens to put the company out of business, and the crisis forces the COO to take charge of the project personally. After the new system goes live, however, it proves to be buggy and unreliable. The company comes even closer to collapse, and COO Penny Roberts must rally the team around an unpopular project whose success no one can guarantee. Teaching points include IT systems transition, IT management in small companies, and how to deal with an IT-based, business-interrupting disaster.

The hard-hitting "Truth" campaign has been one of the most successful antismoking initiatives in history. The focus of the "Truth" campaign is to dissuade teenagers from smoking. The sponsor of the campaign, the American Legacy Foundation, is now trying to decide whether to readjust its priorities and focus on what it calls "the other side of the equation"--encouraging already-addicted adult smokers to quit smoking. However, the only way to do this is by diverting resources away from the "Truth" campaign, a campaign that they know is working. Includes color exhibits.

Describes the 1949 firefighting tragedy in Montana that led to the deaths of 12 smoke jumpers. Explores the myriad of poor decisions by the firefighting crew and their foreman.

This short fictional case forms the basis of a team decision-making exercise. The case, inspired by a real decision facing a major telecommunications company, describes a cross-functional management team convened by the CEO for the purpose of developing a recommendation about whether to conduct a full-scale launch of a new high-speed Internet access service. In the class session, groups of six participants are asked to conduct team meetings to arrive at a consensus about the launch decision--drawing from the information contained in the shared case and from privately held information contained in individual role sheets provided separately to each member. Although different team members hold very different perspectives about the launch, teams can arrive at thoughtful recommendations by working together to share their knowledge.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

Accompanies The BCPC Internet Strategy Team: An Exercise and provides unique background information on one of the team members.

This B case allows students who have completed the Tastee Snax Cookie Company case (UV5918) to analyze how the duration of project described in that case can be most cost-effectively shortened.

This note provides an introduction to process analysis, covering key concepts such as bottlenecks, capacity, capacity utilization and throughput time. Concepts are illustrated in a context that is simple and familiar to most students: neighborhood drycleaner. The note is suitable as a technical reading on process analysis in a required MBA or undergraduate course in operations management.

Bryant Pharmaceutical's flagship product, a popular arthritis medicine called Seflex, is selling well--but not well enough. With generic versions due on the shelves in a couple of years, the drug company is looking for a dramatic sales increase. VP Laura Goldenberg knows she has to reach more consumers, but in an environment where people bombarded with advertising are using devices such as TiVo to skip ads, her job has suddenly taken on a new intensity. In search of a new, gangbuster campaign, Laura and her ad agency come up with the idea of product placement--not your typical integration of a product into a television or movie script, but a less traditional approach. Their idea is to hire a much-loved, elderly actress to extol the virtues of Seflex on a morning news program. The news segment would be about arthritis, and Seflex would be casually mentioned during the interview. The company would have to pay the actress $1 million, and there are risks: What if it gets out that Bryant is paying her? What if the actress errs and says something about Seflex's side effects? Should the company green-light Laura's plan? This fictional case study looks at the pros and cons of traditional product placement and newer, more subtle alternatives to advertising. Commenting on the case in R0310A and R0310Z, are Bob Gamgort, president of Masterfoods USA; Michelle R. Nelson, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; FTC commissioner Mozelle W. Thompson; and Mike Sheehan, president and CEO of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos.

A golden statue of a winged youth once perched on the roof of AT&T's old headquarters. But when AT&T lowered the 24-foot-high statue for regilding so that it could be placed in the company's new headquarters, the chairman was shocked to discover that the figure was anatomically correct. So he decreed that it also be gelded. The altered "Golden Boy" thus became a metaphor for AT&T's recent embattled history, and it serves as a cautionary symbol for all companies operating in today's brutal business environment, where perception can be as important as reality. While image consultants and executives work to gild a company's image, special interest groups and the media can geld a company with countless little cuts. The author, a former executive vice-president of public relations for AT&T, provides an insider's view of some of the company's most painful public relations scrapes. The author offers four lessons: Don't become hypnotized by your own buzz; understand the way the business media think; address the needs of all your stakeholders; and be sensitive to the possible emotional resonance of what appear to be straightforward facts.

The past decade may well be remembered as the era of the high-flying, aggressive leader. Corner-office titans like Kenneth Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, and Bernard Ebbers graced the covers of business magazines. Then scandal set in, and the stars fell to earth. In this article, social psychologist Roderick M. Kramer asks an important question: Why do so many leaders--not just in business, but also in politics, religion, and the media--display remarkable adeptness and ability while courting power, only to engage in even more remarkable bouts of folly once that power has been secured? Kramer, who has spent most of his career researching how leaders get to the top, says that the systems through which we select our leaders force executives to sacrifice the attitudes and behaviors that are essential to their survival once they have reached the top. Society has learned to consider risk taking and rule breaking as markers of good leadership. As a result, leaders come to believe that normal limits don't apply to them and that they are entitled to any spoils they can seize. The leaders who do remain grounded exhibit five common psychological and behavioral habits: They simplify their lives, remaining humble and "awfully ordinary." They shine a light on their weaknesses instead of trying to cover them up. They float trial balloons to uncover the truth and prepare for the unexpected. They sweat the small stuff. And they reflect more, not less.

As China's economy grows and opens further, the opportunity it presents to multinationals is changing. Foreign companies are moving to country development and new strategic choices. Now, foreign firms can actually go after the Chinese domestic market, and it's worth going after. Improvements in China's infrastructure, workforce, and regulatory environment are making it possible for companies to lower their costs to reap new competitive advantages. However, the reforms required for admission into the World Trade Organization will be politically difficult for China to implement, and its progress will be slowed by the scarcity of resources for the country's shaky banking system, the inadequacy of the social safety net, environmental problems, and local governments' cash shortage, among other things. But for at least the next ten years, multinationals should be the biggest winners in China. To reap the benefits, a multinational must properly nest its effort into its overall organization, show "one face to China" at the national level but also tailor local strategies, be wary of joint ventures, and mitigate risk, in particular the theft of intellectual property.

Most Westerners preparing for a business trip to China like to arm themselves with a list of etiquette how-tos. Such advice can help get companies in the door and even through the first series of business transactions. But it won't sustain the prolonged, year-in, year-out associations Chinese and western businesses can now achieve. During the authors' work with dozens of companies and thousands of American and Chinese executives over the past 20 years they have witnessed communication breakdowns between American and Chinese businesspeople time and time again. The root cause: the American side's failure to understand the much broader context of Chinese culture and values. Americans see Chinese negotiators as inefficient, indirect, and even dishonest, whereas the Chinese see American negotiators as aggressive, impersonal, and excitable. Such perceptions have deep cultural origins. Yet those who know how to navigate these differences can develop thriving, mutually profitable, and satisfying business relationships. Four cultural threads have bound the Chinese people together for some 5,000 years and these show through in Chinese business negotiations: agrarianism, morality, the Chinese pictographic language, and wariness of strangers. Ignore them at any time during the negotiation process, and the deal can easily fall apart.

Most multinational corporations are fascinated with China. Carried away by the number of potential customers and the relatively cheap labor, firms seeking a presence in China have traditionally focused on selling products, setting up manufacturing facilities, or both. But they've ignored an important development: the emergence of Chinese firms as powerful rivals--in China and also in the global market. In this article, Ming Zeng and Peter Williamson describe how Chinese companies like Haier, Legend, and Pearl River Piano have quietly managed to grab market share from older, bigger, and financially stronger rivals in Asia, Europe, and the United States. As the government's policies about the private ownership of companies changed from forbidding the practice to encouraging it, a new breed of Chinese companies evolved. The authors outline the four types of hybrid Chinese companies that are simultaneously tackling the global market. China's national champions are using their advantages as domestic leaders to build global brands. The dedicated exporters are entering foreign markets on the strength of their economies of scale. The competitive networks have taken on world markets by bringing together small, specialized companies that operate in close proximity. And the technology upstarts are using innovations developed by China's government-owned research institutes to enter emerging sectors such as biotechnology. Zeng and Williamson identify these budding multinationals, analyze their strategies, and evaluate their weaknesses.

During the soar-and-swoon days of the late 1990s, many people believed that information technology, and the Internet in particular, were "changing everything" in business. A fundamental change did happen in the 1990s, but it was less about technology than about competition. Under Director Diana Farrell, the McKinsey Global Institute has conducted an extensive study of productivity and its connection to corporate IT spending and use during that period. The study revealed that IT is important--but not central--to the fate of industries and individual companies. The primary factors in the productivity surge were competition and innovation. In those industries that saw increases in competitive intensity, managers were forced to innovate aggressively to protect their revenues and profits. Those innovations--in products, business practices, and technology--led to the gains in productivity. In fact, a critical dynamic of the new economy--the real new economy--is the virtuous cycle of competition, innovation, and productivity growth. During the 1990s, IT was a particularly powerful tool for three reasons: IT enabled the development of attractive new products and efficient new business processes, it facilitated the rapid industrywide diffusion of innovations, and it exhibited strong scale economies.