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A new publishing company has just purchased the Pacific Sentinel, a fictional West Coast newspaper. The new publisher is willing to invest $1 million in the future success of the paper and has asked the executive editor and advertising manager to develop a joint plan for how the money should be spent.

Discusses techniques entrepreneurs use to manage risk and reward in the early stages of the venture.

Supplements the (A) case.

Supplements the (A) case.

This case argues that central to being a professional is the pledge to manage conflicts of interest such that client interest is placed foremost.

Supplements the (A) case.

In this HBR interview, business-etiquette consultant Barbara Pachter describes common executive gaffes, explains why managers still get etiquette wrong, and offers some rules of thumb about good business manners.

How do you market to marketing-savvy consumers? According to this professor, today's consumers, ironically enough, appreciate the authenticity of the old-fashioned, up-front sales pitch.

The research firm Catalyst presents new findings on the barriers that keep women from advancing through the corporate ranks. Its recent survey of Fortune 500 executive women and CEOs shows wide agreement: Lack of line experience bars women from the most senior jobs.

Consumer-product consultants have analyzed the revenue growth of more than 500 major national brands and conclude that any brand, regardless of its competitive position, can outperform the average for its category through aggressive innovation and promotion.

The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 on the Pentagon brought death and destruction to one of the nerve centers of American power, a site where top military officials came to work every day. When terrorists deliberately crashed a commercial jetliner into the southwest wall of this giant government landmark, it rendered a large portion of the building unstable and started a ferocious fire inside, where--rescuers hoped--Pentagon workers might be trapped but still alive. Despite the serious nature of the attack, the emergency response to the disaster was led by neither a high political official nor a four-star general. Instead, remarkably, the response and rescues at the Pentagon were led by James Schwartz, the assistant chief of a county fire department in the State of Virginia. A few hours into the emergency, Schwartz was, in fact, introduced to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "the man who owns this ground" by one of Rumsfeld's own generals. This case describes the unprecedented emergency response operation and many of its key turning points and places it within the broader context of a national system in which authority is widely decentralized. Specifically, the case tells the story of how Arlington County, Virginia Fire Department used the "incident command system" to oversee the Pentagon emergency response and how it responded when the professional mandates of far higher-profile agencies--including the Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Environmental Protection Agency--collided with those of the firefighting and rescue effort. Despite years of practice and preparation, fire officials would face a string of predicaments at the Pentagon emergency that had never been foreseen. The case can serve as a platform for discussion about inter-jurisdictional cooperation in emergency response and, by extension, cooperation across units of government in a wide variety of situations. HKS Case Number 1712.0

Spreadsheet supplement for INS582.

Capital One, a credit card company, has built its business on a strategy with a clear customer focus: The company systematically gathers and analyses information on its customers in order to correctly assess their individual credit risk and to offer products and services tailored to their individual needs. The case is designed to illustrate how the concept of customer relationship management (CRM) can be translated into strategy, organizational design, hiring, marketing processes, and IT infrastructure of a company.

In July 1996, the French social security governmental agency (the CNAM) sent a letter to all doctors urging them to prescribe generic amoxicillin instead of Clamoxyl, SmithKline Beecham's (SB) blockbuster antibiotic. Pierre Chahwakilian, Marketing Director of SB in France must decide how to respond: (1) milk Clamoxyl and divert promotional investments towards Augmentin, a more specialized and still patent-protected antibiotic, (2) strengthen Clamoxyl's brand equity among doctors by increasing the effort of medical reps, by launching new forms, or with new advertising, (3) go against SB¿s corporate philosophy and reduce the price of Clamoxyl, or (4) change nothing and count on the resistance of French doctors towards generics. The B case (Augmentin in 2002) shows that GSK (the company formed by the merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham) now faces the same options for Augmentin, another blockbuster antibiotic. Should they use the strategy that was so successful for Clamoxyl or have the market conditions changed so much that a whole different approach should be followed?

easyGroup is contemplating its entry into the cinema exhibition business in the UK through the launch of a no-frills cinema. The company believes that it can redeploy the capabilities, such as yield management, that led to the success of easyJet, its low cost airline business, into this new venture. The case examines the market for cinema in the UK, as well as the evolution of easyGroup's portfolio of companies, with a view to assessing the attractiveness of the company's planned launch of easyCinema.

Espoir Cosmetics has received a tantalizing offer: sponsorship of the sequel to the Hollywood hit Diana's She Devils. For Natasha Singh, the U.S.-based company's global marketing officer, the movie is an ideal vehicle for global brand building. As the film is released in each country, Espoir can launch tie-in lipsticks and nail polishes. But some of Espoir's regional executives don't see it that way. One of them--Vasylko Mazur, the head of Eastern European operations and Tasha's old friend--is particularly upset. "Tasha," he says, "you don't realize how different Eastern Europe is from the rest of the world. Movie-based promotions won't do anything for my sales." Tasha understands his point of view. When she was Espoir's marketing head in India, she had to fight for her unconventional local initiatives. But she has come to believe that tastes are changing rapidly all over the world. From Eastern Europe to the smallest towns in India, customers want the products they see on TV, in the movies, and in international magazines. Should Espoir take its new branding initiative global? In R0306A and R0306Z, offering their perspectives on this fictional case study are Peter M. Thompson, president and CEO of PepsiCo Beverages International; Jennifer L. Aaker, associate professor of marketing at Stanford Business School; Harish Manwani and Simon Clift, executives of Unilever; and Masaaki Kotabe, professor of international business at Temple University.

When executives need to persuade an audience, most try to build a case with facts, statistics, and some quotes from authorities. In other words, they resort to "companyspeak," the tools of rhetoric they have been trained to use. In this conversation with HBR, Robert McKee, the world's best-known screenwriting lecturer, argues that executives can engage people in a much deeper--and ultimately more convincing--way if they toss out their PowerPoint slides and memos and learn to tell good stories. As human beings, we make sense of our experiences through stories. But becoming a good storyteller is hard. It requires imagination and an understanding of what makes a story worth telling. All great stories deal with the conflict between subjective expectations and an uncooperative objective reality. They show a protagonist wrestling with antagonizing forces, not a rosy picture of results meeting expectations--which no one ends up believing. Consider the CEO of a biotech start-up that has discovered a chemical compound to prevent heart attacks. He could make a pitch to investors by offering up market projections, the business plan, and upbeat, hypothetical scenarios. Or he could captivate them by telling the story of his father, who died of a heart attack, and of the CEO's subsequent struggle against various antagonists--nature, the FDA, potential rivals--to bring to market the effective, low-cost test that might have prevented his father's death. Good storytellers are not necessarily good leaders, but they do share certain traits. Both are self-aware and both are skeptics who realize that all people--and institutions--wear masks. Compelling stories can be found behind those masks.

Turnaround champions--those leaders who manage to bring distressed organizations back from the brink of failure--are often acclaimed for their canny financial and strategic decision making. But having studied their work closely, Harvard Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter emphasizes another aspect of their achievement. These leaders reverse the cycle of corporate decline through deliberate interventions that increase the level of communication, collaboration, and respect among their managers. Ailing companies descend into what Kanter calls a "death spiral," which typically involves finger pointing and deriding colleagues in other parts of the business, rising tensions and declining collaboration, helplessness, passivity and, finally, denial. To counter these dynamics, Kanter says, and reverse the company's slide, the CEO needs to apply certain psychological interventions--specifically, replacing secrecy and denial with dialogue, blame and scorn with respect, avoidance and turf protection with collaboration, and passivity and helplessness with initiative. The author offers in-depth accounts of how the CEOs at Gillette, Invensys, and the BBC used these interventions to guide their employees out of corporate free fall and onto a more productive path.

Three out of four acquisitions fail; they destroy wealth for the buyer's shareholders, who end up worse off than they would have been had the deal not been done. But it doesn't have to be that way, argue the authors. In evaluating acquisitions, companies must look beyond the lure of profits the income statement promises and examine the balance sheet, where the company keeps track of capital. It's ignoring the balance sheet that causes so many acquisitions to destroy shareholders' wealth. Unfortunately, most executives focus only on sales and profits going up, never realizing that they've put in motion a plan to destroy their company's true profitability--its return on invested capital. M&A, like other aspects of running a company, works best when seen as a way to create shareholder value through customers. Most deals are about customers and should start with an analysis of customer profitability. Some customers are profitable; others are money losers. The better an acquirer understands the profitability of its own customers, the better positioned it will be to perform such analyses on other companies. In this article, the authors show that customer profitability varies far more dramatically than most managers suspect. They also describe how to measure the profitability of customers. By understanding the economics of customer profitability, companies can avoid making deals that hurt their shareholders, identify surprising deals that create wealth, and salvage deals that would otherwise be losers.

What makes a great manager great? Despite differences in their personal attributes, successful managers all excel in the making, honoring, and remaking of commitments. Managerial commitments take many forms, from capital investments to personnel decisions to public statements, but each exerts both immediate and enduring influence on a company. A leader's commitments shape a business's identity, define its strengths and weaknesses, establish its opportunities and limitations, and set its direction. Executives can all too easily forget that commitments are extraordinarily powerful. Caught up in the present, managers often take actions that, while beneficial in the near term, impose lasting constraints on their operations and organizations. Managers who understand the nature and power of their commitments can wield them more effectively throughout a company's life cycle. It doesn't mean you should try to anticipate all the long-run consequences of every commitment. But it does mean that before making important decisions about, say, operating processes or partnerships, you should always ask yourself: Is this a process or relationship that we can live with in the future? Am I locking us into a course that we'll come to regret?