個案總覽

In November 2020, Paul Dietrich was wrapping up his busy harvest season for the 1,100 acres of farmland he currently operated. Although the fall harvest season demanded much of Dietrich's time and attention, he simply could not ignore an investment opportunity that had been presented to him. A local farmland owner was selling a 150-acre parcel of farmland that adjoined some land parcels already owned by Dietrich. Dietrich estimated that a competitive bid would need to be at least CA$20,000 per acre and the bid would need to be made immediately. He sat down to consider both short-term and long-term impacts on his cash flows.

Arnie Katz, chief product and technology officer at StubHub (SH), was helping to lead a contest intended to result in innovative and valuable new ideas. Product managers presented more than 100 new business initiative proposals to create new value for customers and provide additional revenue streams and differentiation opportunities. The secondary-ticket (resale) market in the United States was becoming increasingly fragmented, and SH was losing market share. It was imperative to move SH from being a trusted platform for conducting ticket-resale transactions to becoming an integral part of fans' experience of live events. This case is intended to be used in conjunction with a technical note on product-market alignment (PMA): ""Product-Market Alignment"" (UVA-OM-1706). Katz and his teams conduct successive rounds of investigation and data gathering across the three dimensions of PMA: defining the customer need, identifying business value, and evaluating operational capabilities. This case also presents a bridge between high-level operations strategy and a more granular discussion of process capabilities. Agile software development is discussed. This case is suitable for operations-management classes focusing on Agile, scale-up, product and project management, emerging technology, and new product development. It can be used with a graduate, undergraduate, or executive education audience.

The ability to achieve product-market alignment (PMA) differentiates businesses that will thrive from those that will fail. Yet many find it difficult to create-and sustain-products that continuously generate value, even as their markets change. Traditionally, managers seeking to develop new products or reexamine current offerings have relied on frameworks that compare customer views on the desirability of various product features to the financial potential of those features. This note expands this common approach to explicitly include the consideration of operational resources and capabilities. This includes the resources needed to develop the product or service and to deliver it. An organization's operational capabilities can dictate whether, how, and which potential new products can be built, so it is important to understand the interplay among marketing, finance, and operations when developing new products or refreshing existing ones. The framework in this note is useful both when developing new products and reexamining existing offerings. This note can stand alone, but works well when used with a case, ""Product Development at StubHub: Don't Stop Believin'"" (UVA-OM-1705), that explores a company's efforts to innovate and create new value for its customers.

Supplement to 211016.

In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Uptown Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Uptown Bank's Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients' money in Uptown Bank's mutual funds over funds managed by other banks, letting Uptown Bank collect additional fees-and the bank had not disclosed this conflict of interest to clients. Both employees agreed that failing to disclose the conflict was a problem, but beyond that, they saw the situation very differently. One employee, Neel, perceived the internal review as a good-faith effort by Uptown Bank's senior management to identify and address the problem. The other, Akash, thought that the entire business model was problematic, even with a disclosure, and believed that Uptown Bank may have even broken the law. They considered their options: Should they escalate the issue internally or report it to Uptown Bank's board of directors? Should they go even further and report their findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission? What would the potential risks and rewards of speaking out be?

In early 2022, the technology firm MicroStrategy unveiled a series of letters with the SEC that questioned its accounting practices around its holdings of Bitcoin. Since 2020, the firm had shifted its strategy to include not just selling software but buying and holding large quantities of Bitcoin. But accounting standards for cryptocurrency remained unclear, which could lead to conflicts such as this one with the SEC.

Ebidding, Shanghai Huizhao Information Technology Co., Ltd.'s key product, was China's only "Internet+" integrated bidding and procurement service provider, integrating supply chain management consulting, project implementation, and electronic bidding platform operation. Its main business was to provide enterprises with a full-process electronic bidding and procurement solution. The Ebidding team had developed a full-process electronic bidding platform in 2012, and it had been upgraded and developed regularly since then. A business expansion opportunity emerged for Ebidding as a result of shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of precautions to combat COVID-19, offline bidding and procurement across China were severely curtailed. Electronic bidding procurement projects were also stalled due to the inability of experts to evaluate online bids. To seize this market opportunity, gain competitive advantage, and grow its business in the face of significant uncertainty, Ebidding would have to determine how to quickly develop a remote decentralized bid evaluation system, gain acceptance for it, and lead customers to accept the new system.

This case describes the ESG journey of Pro-invest Group, an asset management and investment firm specialising in private equity real estate across the globe. It begins in 2017, when the Group is launching its second hotel fund, Pro-invest Australian Hospitality Opportunity Fund II (in parallel to managing Fund I) and there is a growing appreciation of the financial and competitive benefits of strong environmental, social and governance considerations. As investor interest in ESG standards rises, Dr. Sabine Schaffer, co-founder and co-CEO Europe, commits to implementing them at every level of the company. The case describes how she drove these efforts, from achieving the GRESB Real Estate Assessment (formerly Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark) to the adoption of a standardized third-party-administered ESG certification scheme across the Group's hotel assets in Australasia. The case ends in 2021 with Pro-invest looking at certification schemes for potential investments in the UK and Europe. It highlights the decisions that were taken, the challenges faced, and the key learning along the way.

Case B presents the choices the company made and the execution issues it confronted. It shows that the CEO put online revenue growth at the center of the strategy. He also used "test and learn" budgeting process to avoid investing too much in stores. The case enables participants to see how the CEO reorganized parts of the organization to drive strategy execution. This case clearly shows how strategic decisions are crafted, executed and modified. It demonstrates the execution challenges a firm might face when transforming in a competitive marketplace and shows the dramatic transformation and improvement in the firm's financials. It also shows the rare success of a retail digital transformation.

This case details the struggles of a traditional retailer (Matas) wrestling with the changing retail landscape. The Matas management team recognizes that the company's offline retail business is under serious pressure. Top-line growth has flattened, and bottom-line profitability has declined. The online market is expanding rapidly but is a tiny portion of the business. The team is aware that the company needs to grow the online business. However, this shift will be financially difficult because the margins for the online business are near zero and it represents less than 3% of total business. As the market leaders, whatever Matas management chooses to do will inevitably affect its core "in-store" business. The company needs the cashflow from the in-store business to pay dividends to investors. In this situation, the new CEO sets out three priorities (i) reignite store growth, (ii) build new growth paths, and (iii) grow online. Investors are unhappy with this direction and the stock has sunk to an all-time low. The question is whether this new strategy will enable Matas to survive or transform?

When Puneet Chhatwal took over as CEO of Taj Hotels in 2018, he faced an onerous task: improving the financials in a hyper-competitive environment marked by the arrival of foreigners such as Starwood Hotels and online entrants Airbnb and OYO. He perceived that the focus on employee empowerment and welfare (as the basis of service excellence) conflicted with the need to emphasize cost cutting to improve profitability. These inconsistences left managers and staff unsure of the overall strategy. In an attempt to resolve them, the hospitality veteran balanced a top-down drive for change with bottom-up involvement in the strategy-making process. Adept in recognizing and adjusting resource allocation to ensure the parent company IHCL achieved its goals, he delegated tasks to the leadership team and employees but kept them focused on the deliverables. With input from many managers across the organization, a new strategy emerged organically - Aspiration 2022 - that resonated with the entire staff. By late 2019, staff were reporting a stronger sense of direction in day-to-day operations. With this came increased profitability and stock performance in line with group targets. With the success of the turnaround, the CEO seemed set to pursue his strategic vision through 2022. Little did he know that the strategy-making processes he had put in place would be subjected to upheaval as a result of the imminent COVID-19 pandemic.

Lex Machina, a legal analytics start-up, needed cash to drive its continued growth trajectory, and had an appealing Series B term sheet in hand. Founded initially as a joint public interest project between SLS and Stanford's computer science department, Lex Machina had spun off to create a language processing software and machine learning platform to glean insights from legal documents, to support decision making at each stage of the litigation process. Similar to other start-ups, Lex Machina's investors held preferred stock, its founders held common shares, and employees received options granting them the right to buy common shares. After an informal acquisition offer from Bloomberg, the Lex Machina board explored competing acquisition bids. LexisNexis, a longtime leader in the legal database field, emerged as the highest bidder. Should Lex Machina pursue the Series B - or was this the right time to consider acquisition offers? What would be the best option for the company's future - and for the existing stakeholders?

Financial restructuring for a distressed firm and its significant counterparties is the process of "recontracting." This involves significantly altering, replacing, or terminating key financial contracts for the purpose of rehabilitation. Most of these contracts, as of the date of such restructuring, typically relate to debt obligations with claim values that are known to the firm and to each of the counterparties who are involved in the restructuring process. This note examines the non-debt claims a distressed firm may face, specifically looking at (1) employee-related liabilities, such as those related to defined benefit pension obligations and retirement benefits; (2) tort-related claims, such as those related to litigation or environmental remediation; and (3) claims related to executory contracts, such as leases. The latter category is the most common, but it is also the easiest to resolve. In contrast, restructuring employee-related and tort-related claims is much more complex because the value of such claims may not be known at the time of the proposed restructuring. It is restructuring in these two areas, employee-related and tort-related claims, that are the subject of this note. The note contains three case examples for the purposes of class discussion.

The case tells the evolution of the call center transformation at Frontelco (a major telecom company in disguise). "Digital" and "agile" approaches to changing the way how call centers operate seem to produce different results. Debate between proponents of alternative approaches takes place across three levels of organizational hierarchy: the Managing Director seems to prefer "agile", those close to operations in VP ranks seem to prefer "digital", while three "managers in the middle" following each other in Senior Vice President rank seem to follow different strategies as to how to align the top and the bottom. To settle the debate, evidence-based clarity is being sought and the protagonist is tasked to design an appropriate performance measure to show the real impact of competing approaches.

The case tells the story of a project at Frontelco (a major telco company in disguise) aiming at defining and piloting a business model (Network as a Service, NaaS) in response to the advancement of a new technology (5G). It is written from the perspective of a "trusted advisor" who had been invited by the protagonist to provide methodological support to the project team. The team, which primarily represents the perspective of product management, spends significant time and effort on developing a methodical approach to their own work, leaving the substantive issue (business model innovation) to be defined only vaguely, under the dominant influence of a few team members. In the follow up to the case we learn that by the time concerns emerge that the team does not seem to have developed any presentable output, they find out that their key competitor has already made significant progress and the technology department, their "internal rival", has also moved ahead with a concept that allows them to claim ownership for a major corporate-level project.

Supplement to 221057.

The First Opium War (1839-1842) symbolized the peak of the era of European imperialism, with a political and cultural legacy that remains potent to this day. The British Empire, "acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness" as one observer famously claimed, seemed to be financially dependent on the sale of illegal narcotics to China, which had banned the trade. Nevertheless, London was willing to go to war to force China to import its opium, and superior British military technology made resistance unfeasible. Ever since, China's political leaders have seen this even as the beginning of their "Century of Humiliation," and China's political objective ever since has been to upend the political and economic order that made such a humiliation possible.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s when Joseph Stalin, leader of the world's first Communist state, sought to industrialize his largely peasant country on an unprecedented scale, he turned for help to those who had the most experience constructing on such a scale: American businessmen. The ultimate stated purpose of his industrialization program, however, was to end the capitalist system that those businessmen embodied. At the time, the Soviet Union was an international pariah, not recognized by Washington until 1933, surrounded by largely hostile states whose political systems Moscow was trying to subvert in a contest that both sides saw as existential. Despite this, it was American architects and engineers that gave the Soviets the advanced designs and technology they needed to build "socialism in one country," constructing the industrial base that would one day defeat Nazi Germany.

Swedish technology start-up Primateria AB (Primateria) was founded in November of 2004 with the main idea to provide science-backed consulting services for cutting-tool producers and end-users. What had started as a consulting service without the need for assets turned quickly into a production-driven service to support the cutting tool supply chain. The company had managed to consistently grow without external capital, had automated processes, opened a second physical location, and added physical vapour deposition coating capabilities. For the road ahead, the owners had to now decide how to protect Primateria's intellectual property and how to meet the need for localized services for their large international clients quickly.