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The student is starting his or her own business, baking make-to-order cookies. Basic times of each operation are laid out and the student is asked to determine the consequences for the operating system. Serves as an exercise and review of concepts such as capacity, bottlenecks, and throughput times. Students should be able to make several useful suggestions for improving the system. The case ends with a series of open-ended questions.

Contains a description of the events surrounding the financing of Centex Telemanagement, Inc. by Sierra Ventures, a venture capital fund. The case is written from the perspective of the venture capitalists and is designed to teach students about the process of venture capital funding.

Contains a description of a situation confronting the co-founder of a company planning to produce software for microcomputers. The company has just completed raising money from some wealthy investors by forming an R&D Limited Partnership. Development of the program (an integrated business productivity tool) can now begin. The focus is on the structure of the deal and the process of venture formation. Among the issues to be discussed are: Should the company have raised money from these investors under these terms? What can go wrong? What can go right?

In mid-1985, the vice president of marketing for a large manufacturer of disk drives is considering how to deal with a growing "gray market" for his company's products. The case provides good background material on the evolution of gray markets throughout the disk drive industry, and raises related issues of pricing policies, distribution strategy, and sales force management. A condensed version of Note on the Disk Drive Industry, and Peripheral Products Co.

Describes a mine operated by Bougainville Copper Ltd. in Papua New Guinea and the pressures negotiating the mineral contract between PNG and Bougainville Copper. Condensed from Bougainville Copper Ltd. (B), (C), and (D) by J.S. Hammond and G.B. Allan.

Over the long term the stock market responds rationally to the adoption of business strategies that change the level and quality of a company's future cash flows. The stock market usually processes available strategic information efficiently. It is at the business unit level that value is ultimately created or destroyed. To evaluate the performance of business units and the impact of strategic decisions on them, complement your own good judgment and creativity with the four steps described here.

In today's novel and rapidly changing business environment, managers constantly face new market realities and uncertainties. For more than a decade, forecasting techniques have theoretically helped them evaluate the varied factors they face. But much of the promise of these approaches has been unrealized. The forecaster's chart provides a method for evaluating techniques and for choosing a combination that yields the best results. The chart groups and profiles 20 common forecasting techniques and arrays them against 16 important evaluative dimensions.

Strategic planning is not on the way out, contrary to what many of its critics say. If properly used, it becomes strategic management, whereby strategic thinking is a pervasive aspect of running a business and a way of integrating all other control systems. To use strategic planning effectively, companies must prepare line managers for the key role they play in planning, define their business units properly, move beyond general goals, make detailed action plans, fit the plans of all units together at the corporate review stage, and integrate strategic planning with controls like budgeting, information, compensation, and organization.

New product development has become fast paced and competitive. Managers need to realize that the traditional, sequential approach to developing new products will not work in the new arena. Instead, they must adopt a more flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal.

The newly appointed project manager of a highway project in Southeast Asia has a variety of issues to contend with all at once. The project is fully described in Hazelton International. The Hazelton case can serve as a briefing and must be done before this one. This case provides the company schedule and infrastructure information. Decisions need to be made regarding the items in his in-basket. These items are described in An International Project Manager's Day (B) and An International Project Manager's Day (C).

A new project manager faces sixteen items in his in-basket when he reports for his first day of work with Hazelton International Limited. This case, along with An International Project Manager's Day (C), is a supplement to An International Project Manager's Day (A), and should be considered in conjunction with Hazelton International Limited.

A new project manager arrived on his first day of work to find an in-basket full of issues requiring his consideration. Hazelton International Limited, An International Project Manager's Day (A), and An International Project Manager's Day (B). Now, he finds additional items on which he must take action.

Two-party intra-organization negotiation between a company's financial and human resources officers regarding the amount of a budget increase. T. Boyd, a Vice President of Budget and Finance at Multimode, Inc., (a manufacturing firm) is about to meet J. Arnold, a Vice President of the Human Resource Development Office at Multimode. T. Boyd has formally met with other departments to discuss the upcoming year's budget as well as expected productivity increases.

Two-party intra-organization negotiation between a company's financial and human resources officers regarding the amount of a budget increase. T. Boyd, a Vice President of Budget and Finance at Multimode, Inc., (a manufacturing firm) is about to meet J. Arnold, a Vice President of the Human Resource Development Office at Multimode. T. Boyd has formally met with other departments to discuss the upcoming year's budget as well as expected productivity increases.

Two-party intra-organization negotiation between a company's financial and human resources officers regarding the amount of a budget increase. T. Boyd, a Vice President of Budget and Finance at Multimode, Inc., (a manufacturing firm) is about to meet J. Arnold, a Vice President of the Human Resource Development Office at Multimode. T. Boyd has formally met with other departments to discuss the upcoming year's budget as well as expected productivity increases.

On December 19, 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz, stung the administration when he publically threatened to resign. This action was not based on a substantive disagreement over foreign policy. Instead, Shultz was demonstrating his strong opposition to an administration plan to require polygraph tests for all government officials with access to "highly classified information." Roughly 182,000 government employees were to be affected by this plan, including some 4,500 members of the State Department. From the outset, the Reagan administration had been strongly interested in crushing espionage activities within the U.S. Government due to several recent instances during which breeches in U.S. security occurred. This case provides several examples of times when security was breached and chronicles the Reagan Administration's plan to squash espionage. It then details the series of actions that followed as Congress debated the issue. HKS Case Number 681.0.

In 1986, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), a private utility company serving most of northern and central California, was facing the loss of many of its biggest and best customers. The threat came not from conservation, general economic depression, or competing utilities; rather, customers were beginning to self-generate, or operate their own, small-scale power plants. PG&E estimated that industrial and commercial customers, responsible for 28 percent of sales, would soon find it cheaper to generate power on-site than to pay PG&E rates. The situation perplexed PG&E's regulators, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which perceived that industrial and commercial rates could be lowered only at the expense of residential customers or the utility's financial health. Moreover, the region's surplus of generating capacity suggested that new power plants would only make a bad situation worse. Indeed, the CPUC was also struggling with an excess supply of third-party generation, which utilities were required to buy under standard contracts set forth by the CPUC. The case is intended to illustrate issues concerning the regulation of a potential natural monopoly, with an emphasis on the understanding of marginal cost. While the case was designed to highlight the dilemmas of regulators, it can also be taught from the utility's perspective. HKS Case Number 713.0.

In many parts of California, water districts set prices so that agricultural users pay far less than residential users and far less than the true cost of water. While the adoption of a marginal cost pricing system would bring enormous efficiency gains, it would inevitably create losers as well as winners. To anticipate the problems of implementing such a pricing system in California, reformers need to anticipate which regions and which crops in California would be most affected.The case provides the information necessary to do a partial equilibrium incidence analysis, including data on the average factor share of water by crop, the average value created for each crop by marginal applications of water, the degree of interregion variation in the ratio of non-water inputs, and the role of each crop in the California and worldwide market. HKS Case Number 710.0

This case is designed to support a discussion of how to apply an economic evaluation of the appropriate level of control of an externality to a real problem with incomplete information of uncertain quality and high political stakes. It sketches the Reagan administration's stance on the issue, explains how regional interests have divided Congress on the desirability of acid rain control legislation, and presents the essential details of a House bill widely felt to have some credibility and political potential. Congressional estimates of the costs of attaining the several different levels of acid rain control possible under the House bill, by several different control methods, are presented and compared to administration estimates of the cost of acid rain damage to agriculture, forests, materials, and lakes. HKS Case Number 699.0

This case discusses the effect import taxes had on Harley-Davidson. Using statistics on "average unit value" of 790cc and larger imports, Harley determined that eh real value of imports had dropped by $883 between 1979 and 1982. As such, a tariff rate of 48% would be necessary to restore import values to their 1979 level. The case continues by documenting the process Harley Davidson underwent to propose and implement a tariff. Through Harley's process, Japanese cycle producers challenged Harley's case for a steep import. Japanese producers negotiated with Harley to find a solution that suits all parties. This case may be used to discuss demand elasticities, tariffs and regulations, and international business. It should be paired with HKS case This is HKS Case Number 780.0