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Senior executives at Vanguard are evaluating their marketing strategy. In particular, they are looking at their approach to market segmentation, the organization of the marketing function, and the weight placed on marketing metrics in the corporate dashboard in light of an economic and stock market downturn.

BRAC is the world's largest NGO and has over the past 20 years experienced tremendous rates of growth. The case looks at diversity within the organization and the aspects of management that have made the organization so successful.

This case introduces a framework for cost modeling.Two data sets (one for injection-molded plastic parts and another for compressors) allow students to apply the cost-driver framework in conjunction with basic spreadsheet and regression analysis. Although obviously applicable in a course on supply chain management, the case can also be used to teach competitive cost analysis for strategic decision making.

This note is a brief summary of how credit-rating agencies do their job. It includes historical information on rates and capital spreads. The note serves as useful supplementary reading, for students encounteing, for the first time, bonds in a capital-structure case, a capital-markets case, or a cost-of-capital case. The note is designed for undergraduate and executive audiences.

Continues the history of the KIPP Academies--two high-performing public middle schools founded in 1995 by Michael Fineberg and David Levin in Houston and New York.

Unifine Richardson is a food manufacturer with 110 employees. The company's sole supplier of honey announced that effective immediately it was no longer able to supply Chinese honey. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency had rejected the importation of Chinese honey due to recently found traces of an antibiotic chemical. China had provided 20% of the world's honey supply. Faced with escalating prices, issues with customer preferences, and possible product recalls, the purchasing manager must determine the company's next step. Considerations include international sourcing, supply disruptions, supply chain management, and quality issues.

Formed in late 1996, Boeing Australia Ltd. (BAL) was a relatively new company and a global extension of the U.S. firm, the Boeing Co. BAL developed capabilities in the areas of space and communications, site management, and the upgrade and maintenance of military aircraft and equipment. As BAL grew, so did the legacy information system it used for both internal communications and external dealings with customers. BAL, however, faced difficult decisions as it sought to upgrade its procurement systems and processes to improve operations. In early 1999, BAL recruited a new national procurement manager, Russell Menere, whose immediate task was to look for gains in productivity by improving procurement processes, either through cost savings or by reduced processing time. To meet this objective, Menere initiated a number of short-term improvements. These included the rationalization of a large number of BAL's suppliers, improving BAL's relationships with its key suppliers; the introduction of a credit-card purchasing system for low-value, large-volume consumables; and the adoption of electronic ordering processes with BAL's larger suppliers. In 2002, with new opportunities available through e-business technology, Menere needed to decide what BAL's next step should be. Should BAL invest in a new system that would simplify the procurement process across different divisions and support complex interfaces with suppliers? Should BAL continue to sit on the fence and seek short-term improvement tools for integration with its existing legacy systems?

Unleashing free-market democracy in developing countries breeds ethnic hatred and instability--yet that's the very prescription wealthy democracies have promoted for healing the ills of underdevelopment. One solution is to give poor majorities a stake in local corporations and capital markets.

It's only a matter of time before some company becomes the Enron of human rights abuse, warns the general counsel in this fictional memo to the CEO. Activist U.S. courts are accepting more and more human rights claims against the business practices of global firms in developing countries. Companies should take steps now to avoid ugly and costly legal battles.

Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Bangladesh's GrameenPhone, discusses the failure of foreign aid to rescue moribund third-world economies and the need to empower local entrepreneurs. The most important feature of his company, he explains, isn't the phone system itself but the microloans that mobilize an army of individual entrepreneurs to meet an unsatisfied need profitably.

What became of the golden age of global marketing? Where are the multinational companies churning out standardized products for a world of voracious consumers? A global economic slump and mounting anti-American sentiment put an end to that party. But the multinationals' retreat to local harbors may leave them ill prepared for what's about to happen.

BRAC is the world's largest NGO and has recently initiated a number of successful profit-making commercial enterprises, ranging from dairy processing to vegetable exports, as well as a university. Explores the tensions and benefits of a major nonprofit entering the commercial arena and the consequences for the organization.

Mike Graves, the general manager of a U.S. apparel company's 50/50 joint venture with a Chinese manufacturer, has made the joint venture into a big success, at least in the eyes of its Chinese executives and local officials. Zhong-Lian Knitting has turned around three money-losing businesses and has increased its payroll from 400 to 2,300 employees. But Mike's boss, the CEO of the U.S. company, Heartland Spindle, doesn't share the rosy view. He's looking for a 20% ROI, which he says will require laying off 1,200 Chinese workers. He also wants to aim at the high end of the clothing market, meaning the JV will have to meet much tougher standards of quality than it has been able to do so far. To make matters worse, the Chinese executives now want to make a fourth acquisition, which they hope will position the venture to start its own brand of apparel--a move that could eat into profits for years. Can Mike keep the joint venture from unraveling? In R0308A and R0308Z, four commentators offer expert advice on this fictional case study: Eric Jugier, the chairman of Michelin (China) Investment in Shanghai; Dieter Turowski, a managing director in mergers & acquisitions at Morgan Stanley in London; David Xu, a principal at McKinsey in Shanghai; and Paul W. Beamish, the director of the Asian Management Institute at the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business in Canada.

For all the talk about global organizations and executives, there's no definitive answer to the question of what we really mean by "global." A presence in multiple countries? Cultural adaptability? A multilingual top team? We asked four CEOs and the head of an international recruiting agency--HSBC's Stephen Green, Schering-Plough's Fred Hassan, GE's Jeffrey Immelt, Flextronics' Michael Marks, and Egon Zehnder's Daniel Meiland--to tell us what they think. They share some common ground. They all agree, for example, that the shift from a local to a global marketplace is irreversible and gaining momentum. "We're losing sight of the reality of globalization. But we should pay attention, because national barriers are quickly coming down," Daniel Meiland says. "If you look ahead five or 10 years, the people with the top jobs in large corporations...will be those who have lived in several cultures and who can converse in at least two languages." But the CEOs also disagree on many issues--on the importance of overseas assignments, for instance, and on the degree to which you need to adhere to local cultural norms. Some believe strongly that the global leader should, as a prerequisite to the job, live and work in other countries. The executives' essays capture views that are as diverse and multidimensional as the companies they lead.

More than 100 miles from Bangalore, India, there's a rural area called Kuppam where one in three citizens is illiterate, more than half of the households have no electricity, and there's a high rate of AIDS. It's exactly this challenging atmosphere that prompted Hewlett-Packard to choose Kuppam as one of its first "i-communities" initiatives. Through the program, HP creates public-private partnerships to accelerate economic development through the application of technology while simultaneously opening new markets and developing new products and services. HP brings to these initiatives the management disciplines of a successful technology business. For example, it unearths customer needs using an iterative cycle that involves prototyping products and services and then closely observing residents' experiences with them. It fields a diversely talented team that brings many skills to the initiative. It takes a systems approach, simultaneously examining all the elements that must come together to create a working solution to a given problem. It establishes a "leading platform" on which other players--companies, nonprofits, and government agencies--can build technologies and applications. Practices like these help ensure that HP's investment yields real, sustainable results for the community in question. But HP also sees returns to its own business. In Kuppam, the company is discovering the need for (and developing) new products like a solar-powered digital camera, with printer, that fits in a backpack. By engaging the community and its leaders and working with them to design valuable new tools and capabilities, HP is gaining the knowledge it needs to be a stronger competitor in other developing regions.

Abraham Lincoln would have well understood the challenges facing many modern emerging nations. In Lincoln's America, as in many developing nations today, sweeping economic change threatened older industries, traditional ways of living, and social and national cohesion by exposing economies and societies to new and powerful competitive forces. Yet even in the midst of the brutal and expensive American Civil war--and in part because of it--Lincoln and the Republican Congress enacted bold legislation that helped create a huge national market, a strong and unified economy governed by national institutions, and a rising middle class of businessmen and property owners. Figuring out how to maximize the benefits of globalization while minimizing its disruptions is a formidable challenge for policy makers. How do you expand opportunities for the talented and the lucky while making sure the rest of society doesn't fall behind? It may be helpful to look at the principles that informed the policies that Lincoln and the Republican Congress instituted after they came to power in 1861: Facilitate the upward mobility of low- and middle-income groups to give them a significant stake in the country, emphasize the good of the national economy over regional interests, affirm the need for sound government institutions to temper the dynamics of the free enterprise system, tailor policies to the national situation, and realize that a period of turmoil may present a unique opportunity for reform. These principles drove the reforms that helped Americans cope with and benefit from rapid technological advances and the fast integration of the American economy in the 19th century. They may be instructive to today's policy makers who are struggling to help their own citizens integrate into the fast-changing global economy of the 21st century.

On January 1, 1995, representatives from 76 countries signed the World Trade Organization (WTO) charter, which for years had been part of a temporary trade agreement. The WTO's emergence as a fully empowered supranational body seemed to reflect the triumph of what the first President Bush had described as the "new world order." That order was based on two assumptions: that a healthy economy and a sound financial system make for political stability and that countries in business together do not fight each other. The number one priority of U.S. foreign policy was, thus, to encourage the former Communist countries of Europe and the developing nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to adopt business-friendly policies. Private capital would flow from the developed world into these countries, creating economic growth. It sounded too good to be true and so it proved. The new world order of Bush pere and his successor, Bill Clinton, has been replaced by the new world disorder of Bush fils. Under the second Bush's administration, the economic and political rationale behind the Washington consensus of the 1990s has unraveled, forcing a radical change in our perceptions of which countries are safe for business. Negotiating this new environment will require companies to evaluate political events more rigorously and more carefully assess the links between political, economic, and financial risk factors. With careful analysis, business leaders can increase their companies' visibility and better respond to the uncertainties of the new world disorder.

Driven by ideology, religion, and mistrust, the world seems more fragmented than at any time since, arguably, World War II. But however deep the political divisions, business operations continue to span the globe, and executives still have to figure out how to run them efficiently and well. In "What Is a Global Manager?" (first published in September/October 1992), business professors Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal lay out a model for a management structure that balances the local, regional, and global demands placed on companies operating across the world's many borders. In the volatile world of transnational corporations, there is no such thing as a "universal" global manager, the authors say. Rather, there are three groups of specialists: business managers, country managers, and functional managers. And there are the top executives at corporate headquarters who manage the complex interactions between the three--and can identify and develop the talented executives that a successful transnational requires. This kind of organizational structure characterizes a transnational rather than an old-line multinational, international, or global company. Transnationals integrate assets, resources, and diverse people in operating units around the world. Through a flexible management process, in which business, country, and functional managers form a triad of different perspectives that balance one another, transnational companies can build three strategic capabilities: global-scale efficiency and competitiveness; national-level responsiveness and flexibility; and cross-market capacity to leverage learning on a worldwide basis. Through a close look at the successful careers of Leif Johansson of Electrolux, Howard Gottlieb of NEC, and Wahib Zaki of Procter & Gamble, the authors illustrate the skills that each managerial specialist requires.

As they search for growth, multinational corporations will have no choice but to compete in the big emerging markets of China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil. Although it is still common to question how such corporations will change life in those markets, Western executives would be smart to turn the question around and ask how multinationals themselves will be transformed by these markets. To be successful, MNCs will have to rethink every element of their business models, the authors assert in this seminal HBR article from 1998. During the first wave of market entry in the 1980s, multinationals operated with what might be termed an imperialist mind-set, assuming that the emerging markets would merely be new markets for their old products. But this mind-set limited their success: What is truly big and emerging in countries like China and India is a new consumer base comprising hundreds of millions of people. To tap into this huge opportunity, MNCs need to ask themselves five basic questions: Who is in the emerging middle class in these countries? How do the distribution networks operate? What mix of local and global leadership do you need to foster business opportunities? Should you adopt a consistent strategy for all of your business units within one country? Should you take on local partners? The transformation that multinational corporations must undergo is not cosmetic--simply developing greater sensitivity to local cultures will not do the trick, the authors say. To compete in the big emerging markets, multinationals must reconfigure their resources, rethink their cost structures, redesign their product development processes, and challenge their assumptions about who their top-level managers should be.

More and more small and midsize companies are joining corporate giants in striving to exploit international growth markets. At the same time, civic leaders worry about their communities' economic future in light of the impact of global forces on the operation and survival of businesses. How can communities retain local vitality yet still link their businesses to the global economy? Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter addresses that question in this classic HBR article, originally published in 1995. To avoid a clash between international economic interests and local political interests, globalizing businesses must learn how to be responsive to the communities in which they operate, Kanter says. And communities must determine how to create a civic culture that will attract and retain footloose companies. The author surveyed five U.S. regions with direct connections to the global economy--Boston, Cleveland, Miami, Seattle, and the Spartanburg-Greenville region of South Carolina--to determine their business and civic leaders' strategies for improving their constituents' quality of life. She identified ways in which the global economy can work locally by capitalizing on the resources that distinguish one place from another. Kanter argues that regions can invest in capabilities that connect their local populations to the global economy in one of three ways: as thinkers, makers, or traders.