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E-consulting began as a specialized consulting service in the late 1990s. In January 2000, more than 100 firms were characterized as e-consultants. By December 2001, more than 50% of these firms had disappeared. This case tracks the rapid rise and sharp decline of e-consulting.

Examines the founding and evolution of a for-profit microlending organization in Bolivia. Explores the mechanics of microlending, nonprofit and for-profit approaches to serving the informal sector, and how the industry evolves over a 15-year period.

The Internet portal Lycos has acquired Tripod, a provider of home-page-building tools, and now must decide how to integrate the acquisition.

Space Data Corp. plans to partner with the U.S. National Weather Service to place transceivers on weather balloons and thereby create a national mobile communications network. The company is in the late development stages and is planning to launch a regional test that will demonstrate its ability to provide paging and messaging. It intends to sell its service to existing mobile carriers, such as Skytel and Verizon, rather than directly to end users. This case illustrates how Space Data has applied flexible business processes throughout its initial market research and technology development to create a system that can make optimal use of its limited resources and respond rapidly to changing conditions. As the case concludes, the executive team at Space Data faces three opportunities, each with very different costs and benefits for the company. It can proceed with a regional test of paging and messaging as planned, leap forward to develop a more complex but potentially more lucrative voice service (forgoing a regional test), or make a transition to the small but financially stable telemetry market. Includes color exhibits.

Explores the motivation for businesses to be concerned with the global AIDS epidemic. The formation of the council serves as an example of how business leaders are building a network of companies to develop an effective business response to AIDS-both through workforce programs and by harnessing commercial strengths to develop effective AIDS programs. Examines the difficult choices that the leadership of the council must make in expanding the organization. Provides a backdrop for the organization by discussing the evolving international context surrounding AIDS and its treatment-highlighting the role of business, government, and civil society in the developments that occurred in 2000 and 2001. Also provides a brief profile of MTV, a member of the council that has made a major commitment to increasing youth awareness of AIDS.

This case describes the compensation and performance evaluations at an investment management company. The senior management team of Massachusetts Financial Services (MFS) Investment Management was contemplating an introduction of hedge funds at the firm, but many believed that typical hedge fund manager pay (20% of the upside) would harm the MFS culture, which glorified "star performance but not star egos." The case presents the MFS compensation philosophy and plan (including the plan's emphasis on subjective compensation), the types of people it attracted, the resulting culture, and how the senior management team approached the hedge funds question. It includes side discussion on firm-specific human capital.

Military metaphors are commonplace in business writing about strategy, but they are rarely used in the negotiation literature. This case takes the Marine Corps philosophy of warfighting and compares it with the tactics and techniques of effective negotiators. Some of the characteristics of war--such as friction, imperfect information and communication, fluidity, and disorder--are also parts of negotiations. Likewise, some of the techniques military strategists use, like exploiting gaps in the enemy's lines and using boldness and speed to surprise the enemy, can also work for negotiators. Most critically, however, this case applies the notion of complexity to both warfare and negotiation and introduces students to the ideas of continual adaptation and dynamic responses to changing environments.

Describes the history of investment banking.

Describes the major global stock exchanges.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 502-030.

Uses a decision analysis framework to analyze the value of gaming information before making a full investment in an entrepreneurial venture.

Harry Rawlinson is managing director of Aqualisa, a major U.K. manufacturer of showers. He has just launched the most significant shower innovation in recent history: the Quartz shower. The shower provides significant improvements in terms of quality, cost, and ease of installation. In product testing, the Quartz shower received rave reviews from both consumers and plumbers alike. However, early sales of the Quartz have been disappointing. Rawlinson is now faced with some key decisions about whether to change his channel strategy, promotional strategy, and the overall positioning of the product in the context of his existing product line.

Describes an "application software" company that has been through several evolutions--from consulting firm to applications service provider (ASP). The firm has received significant venture funding to pursue the ASP model but this has not worked, at least at the time the case ends. The company faces a choice: continuing with its current ASP business model, increasing its burn rate to convert to a licensed software model, or decreasing its burn rate to offer a more custom version of the ASP product.

Discusses various macroeconomic, regulatory, technological, and financial forces that led to increased corporate restructuring in the United States beginning in the mid-1980s. The U.S. financial system is often viewed as the most developed in the world and a model for other countries to follow. Similarly, the U.S. model of corporate governance--with its emphasis on shareholder value and an active market for corporate control--is also viewed as a model. Examines pressures for corporate restructuring and the emergence of an active market for corporate control for very large firms beginning in the early 1970s. Discusses the effects of this restructuring on corporate profitability and productivity, and provides data on the evolution of a number of indicators of performance, including productivity by sector, market capitalization relative to replacement cost, and rates of return both on assets and on equity. In brief, it finds that U.S. firms showed significantly improved after-tax returns on shareholder equity over the period while failing to make significant improvements on their pretax returns on assets--adjusted for the effects of the business cycle. Given the lack of comparable accounting data on returns across countries, conclusions about the performance of U.S. firms versus European ones isn't possible.

Mainstream marketing has become so obsessed with rigor, quantification, and scientific rectitude that it has lost sight of the importance of magic, mystery, and imagination. We need to restore the balance somewhat, and the way to do that is to take a look at the boy wizard who has captivated the hearts and minds of readers the world over--and turned marketing on its head. Close examination reveals that Harry Potter is more than a mere passing marketing fad. Harry is different because the books are as much about marketing as the outcome of marketing. They deal with marketing matters, they are full of marketing artifacts, they contain analyses of marketplace phenomena, and they provide insights into the contemporary marketing condition. The books refer to almost every element of the marketing mix, as well as aspects of buyer behavior, environmental conditions, and marketing research. Harry Potter unknowingly has the power to transform the modern marketing paradigm from the positivistic trappings of modern marketing into the magical, mysterious, imaginative substance of postmodern marketing.

Today's strange, new business world needs an augmented model of industry and market analysis that reflects recent developments in industry dynamics, such as globalization, entrepreneurship, technological advances, and the Internet. Here is such an updated model, built on and expanding the basic premises that underlie Michael Porter's Five Competitive Forces Model. Suggestions are offered for how managers can position their businesses for success in the current competitive environment. Competitive rivalry (the force with the greatest influence on ROI and risk) includes both substitute products and the threat of potential entrants, combined because they are so highly interrelated. The presence of durable barriers to imitation is the most powerful deterrent to destructive turbulence. Strategic positioning in competitive markets requires creating a market-focused organization, a new market space, and relationships with key customers and suppliers. Strategy must be conceived as a series of real options.

E-commerce for merchants and consumers is more than just establishing or visiting an attractive web site to conduct business over the Internet. For companies and consumers alike, conducting business in cyberspace entails not only the traditional risks of sales and contracting, but also a new set of risks related to the electronic environment. For entities of all sizes, important components of those risks involve such legal issues as jurisdiction, contract formation, contract validity, contract changes and errors, authentication and attribution, message integrity, and nonrepudiation. Becoming familiar with these issues can help avoid costly disputes in e-business.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In theory, trade promotions should benefit everyone involved. In practice, however, manufacturers and retailers often use trade promotions as weapons in a zero-sum game, and consumers are sometimes left out altogether. It need not be that way. Over the past three years, David Bell, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Xavier Drèze, a visiting assistant professor of marketing at UCLA's Anderson School, have examined the theoretical and practical problems associated with trade promotions, and they explain how the right kind of deal can be created -- a transparent system that generates mutual trust and provides benefits to both manufacturers and retailers. The key is proper implementation of what is thus far a little understood tool: the pay-for-performance trade promotion, in which retailers get rewarded according to how much they sell, not how much they buy. The authors explain how the most accepted way of doing promotions today -- which rewards retailers for effective buying rather than effective marketing -- creates a variety of inefficiencies that drain resources from their intended purpose. Using a hypothetical case involving much-simplified mathematics, they go on to demonstrate how manufacturers can design pay-for-performance options that retailers can embrace. They also illustrate how one national beverage company made pay-for-performance deals work in practice. Finally, they offer practical advice to help senior managers rethink the elements of organizational culture that stand in the way of a more effective approach to trade promotions -- and, by extension, block better, more profitable relationships all along the channel.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In following the traditional model of strategy development, a company seeks to craft the best possible plan so that it can be handed off for a predetermined course of execution involving a predictable set of events and a specific final goal. This scripted approach resembles traditional theater: The actors speak the same lines and the action comes to the same satisfying conclusion, night after night. The model works well when business is going through a relatively stable period. The current situation, however, is not stable: Companies are still trying to navigate the technological tsunami created by the Internet. Under the circumstances, it makes much more sense for companies to follow an improvisational model -- that is, to throw out the script, bring in the audience and trust the actors to innovate on the spot. The metaphor of improvisational theater helps executives think about the way in which an entire organization can become an arena for staging experiments that can transform a company's overarching strategy. Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter lays out the six elements of strategic improvisation and illustrates how companies have made use of each one to get the most out of new technologies. Senior managers who understand these elements can create an atmosphere in which improvisational theater thrives; change then becomes an organic process rather than a painful reaction to circumstances beyond the company's control. Although this approach does not advocate a big plunge into something totally new, it is anything but conservative. Companies that engage in continual improvisation through innovative projects of all sizes and shapes are much better equipped to explore highly threatening disruptive technologies and embrace quite radical changes.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Managers don't have to be told that to innovate they need to embrace drastically different practices from the ones they use for routine work. So why don't they do it? According to Robert I. Sutton, co-director of Stanford University's Center for Work, Technology and Innovation, when business leaders see what innovation actually requires, they often recoil. The right practices seem strange, even wrongheaded. Understandably, it's hard for any executive to take action that will lose money today in order to test ideas that might never make money -- in hopes one idea will make money tomorrow. Nevertheless, Sutton contends, that is just what cutting-edge companies do, bravely tackling ideas that at first blush seemed weird. From his research on such organizations, Sutton has developed eight techniques to move teams and companies from working by rote to innovating. The first two techniques are designed to provoke emotions that interrupt mindless action (provoke unpleasant emotions in others; make yourself uncomfortable). The second two are for smashing mindsets (treat everything like a temporary condition; ignore the experts). The third two help people identify and reject their dearest beliefs (plan to do something ridiculous; hold a sacred cow workshop). The last two are for exploding the composition of organizations and teams (bring in some slow learners; keep changing the composition of teams). Sutton cautions, however, that the exact methods a company uses to spark novel ideas and actions should differ depending on the situation. He recommends giving people freedom to play around with a wide variety of offbeat notions until bringing in new knowledge and helping people see old things in new ways finally enables the company to break from the past.