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TEKCOM Corporation (TEKCOM) was one of the largest exporters of film-faced plywood (FFP) in Vietnam. The company experienced double-digit growth in its FFP trading business from 2005 to 2011. In 2012, TEKCOM ventured into FFP manufacturing. However, after building strong brand equity in both local and foreign markets as a mid-range FFP producer, TEKCOM faced a major constraint to its growth ambition. Veneer, a key raw material for making FFP, was in short supply in Vietnam. Sourcing veneer from overseas suppliers was expensive. Furthermore, the domestic FFP market was becoming increasingly competitive. An escalation in the company's orders backlog, due to a severe shortage in veneer, led TEKCOM's chief executive officer to review his company's business model and strategy to sustain growth. In June 2017, TEKCOM was considering various options to address the supply shortage and the prospect of market expansion with new products. However, there were major risks associated with all available options.

This case study focuses on a professional services firm ("Performance Improvement Consulting") and its sales calls on Hi-R-Me, a potential client. The case is supplemented by videos showing the initial contact call, a follow-up discovery call, and a face-to-face meeting. Then, students view alternative ways of making each call. The materials are intended to build skills and awareness relevant to personal selling and, in particular, to the role and importance of "up-front contracts" in structuring productive sales calls.

Beeplus, a designer and operator of co-working spaces, was founded in 2015 by a group of enterprising college students led by Robert Jia. It currently has five co-working space projects in Zhuhai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. This case maps the journey taken by Beeplus and its management team in its foray into the highly competitive co-working space industry, and offers a greater understanding of the critical success factors for a company operating in an aggressive market in China.

Kaizen, meaning change for the better in Japanese, is a set of activities directed at improving standardized work, equipment, and procedures for carrying out daily production or other business operations. It was popularized by Toyota as an integral part of its Toyota Production System. This note provides describes some of the underlying practices, and a simple outline for conducting a kaizen event.

In 2017 Edward Jones, the largest brokerage firm in the U.S., is deciding whether and how to implement a new "solutions" business model to replace its traditional "product" or "transactional" approach. Many of the required changes appeared to violate some of the tradeoffs that had made the previous approach successful. Was this the right way forward for Edward Jones? Where did this leave the classic strategy with its reliance on the one financial advisor office as the sole channel of distribution?

RONA Inc. (RONA), a Canadian giant in home improvement retail, received an unsolicited offer of CA$1.76 billion from Lowe's Companies, Inc., (Lowe's) in 2012. Lowe's, a U.S. company, was already operating in the Canadian market through a subsidiary, and its goal in acquiring RONA was to rapidly upscale its operations. RONA's board of directors declined the offer. Lowe's came back in February 2016 with a second offer worth $3.2 billion. Negotiations followed, the deal was completed in March 2016, and RONA officially became part of Lowe's Canada in May 2016. One year later, the debate re-ignited. In October 2017, Lowe's Canada's president stated that he hoped to demonstrate within five years that this was the best option for RONA. Was it?

This case provides for a discussion about how retail banks provision for loan losses, and how to analyze the riskiness of loan portfolios and the adequacy of the allowance for loan losses. What is unique about the setting is that a smaller regional bank made a large loan based on an unsubstantiated appraisal. Students can observe how the loan moves to nonperforming status in one quarter, then is directly written off in the subsequent quarter without affecting the allowance for loan losses.

Student spreadsheet for case UV7563.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In the Introduction, Trust, Entrepreneurship and the Developing World (26 pages), Khanna argues that good ideas from the developing world can easily morph into failed ones-coupled with acrimony and mistrust-if an entrepreneur inadvertently presumes on the sustenance of trust-enhancing societal foundations that are much more robust in the developed world. In this context, the entrepreneurial solution is to embrace the situation and to explicitly focus on nurturing trust in myriad ways as a complement to whatever business or societal problem the entrepreneur intends to solve.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 1, The Why's and How's of Trust (36 pages), Khanna compares the dairy industries of China and India to reveal the why's and how's of trust. Why? Because trust weaves together in a web all those needed for productive enterprise-and because, when this web is torn, there's a dramatic fall from grace. How? There are many ways to weave this web of trust, even in the same prosaic context-the production of milk. The Chinese solution emphasizes speed and high technology. In this chapter, Khanna profiles an entrepreneur borrowing tricks from California's technology industry to make his cows "happy"-while the Indian solution is a slow-but-rock-solid, community-based solution developed over decades and anchoring the future. The disparate entrepreneurial paths to the same high-productivity goal share the emphasis on trust that cocoons everyone, from dairy farmer to end consumer.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 2, The Mindset Change (26 pages), Professor Khanna argues that in the developing world, entrepreneurs must evolve their mindsets to look at problems as parts of an interconnected set that need to be addressed simultaneously. The entrepreneur rarely has the luxury of focusing only on a single aspect of a complex problem. Of course, this means that she faces a heavier burden than those in a more developed country setting. The story of a surgeon-entrepreneur, Dr. Devi Shetty, shows how this mindset change both elicits and contributes to the web of trust. Trust helps the entrepreneur create the conditions to create.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 3, Building on Existing Social Norms (36 pages), Professor Khanna shows that entrepreneurs will find it far easier to weave their webs of trust in the developing world if they capitalize on constructive, preexisting social norms and practices. These have often been in place for decades, if not centuries, in long-running, thriving societies. In this chapter, this web of trust can be seen playing out on a nationwide scale with entrepreneurs trying to develop financially and socially sustainable microfinance firms in both Mexico and India, while in the process propelling millions of their clients-mostly poor women-out of their subsistence existence.

Trust: Creating the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries is a four-chapter book with an introduction published by Berrett-Koehler Publisher in 2018 and written by Tarun Khanna, professor at Harvard Business School. Entrepreneurs in developing countries with great ideas cannot rely on the usual foundations for an efficient business climate-laws, regulatory oversight, and government protections-as they might in the developed world. As a result, these entrepreneurs must not only create, but also create the conditions to create. One important lesson of this book is that obstacles to entrepreneurship and the necessary creation of trust in businesses in the developing world must be tackled holistically. The problems facing entrepreneurs in the developing world can neither be easily modularized nor tackled in bits and pieces. Professor Khanna shares many insights with readers on how to build and develop that trust. In Chapter 4, Working as a Team with the State (36 pages), Professor Khanna shows that the developing world is characterized by widespread mistrust of the state, with government seen as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. Yet, Khanna contends, pillorying the state is pointless. In Brazil, the state made a successful push with conditional cash transfers to move people from poverty to subsistence. But would-be entrepreneurs there have stagnated, lacking a bridge to society's mainstream. If one thinks of the different parts of society as members of a team, the situation is much like the selecão-Brazil's fabled football team-which has fallen apart lately. In India, by contrast, an unlikely entrepreneurial partnership between technologists and the state has leapfrogged the world's tech leaders to provide a billion-plus residents a unique biometric identity where none existed earlier. Both Brazil and India spotlight the need to understand entrepreneurship as a team sport for it to have impact at scale.

This case examines a series of challenges facing the Wikimedia Foundation as it sets its strategic course for the next decade. Topics include mission alignment, non-profit revenue models, technology evolution, regulation and the freedom of knowledge, and building and managing web ecosystems.

Supplement to case 217054.

In early 2014, Paul Bills, CFO of Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), sat down with David Wan, the company's CEO, to discuss budget preparations for the coming year. Bills noted that the performance of Corporate Learning, one of HBP's three business units, would be affected by a business model change for its largest product that required a change in the timing of revenue recognition. Corporate Learning was in the process of revamping its flagship product, Harvard Manage-Mentor (HMM) from version 11.0 (HMM11) to version 12.0 (HMM12). The revamped software would be hosted exclusively on HBP's server rather than on its clients' servers, allowing updates to take place continuously. Given the change, accounting standards required HBP to change the recognition of revenue from the date of software delivery (for HMM11) to ratable recognition over its contract life (for HMM12). As Bills and Wan discussed the accounting change, they recognized that its impact on Corporate Learning's and HBP's performance could be material and would have to be reflected in the budget. In addition, they wondered how the new accounting would affect the company's policy for awarding sales incentive compensation on HMM, as well as how they communicated with employees and the firm's sole shareholder, the Harvard Business School.

In early 2018, Toys "R" Us, an iconic toy retailer, filed for liquidation due to intense competition, heavy debt, poor store merchandise, and a non-user-friendly website. Some experts believed that if Toys "R" Us had filed for bankruptcy after the holiday season, its turnaround efforts would have been more successful. However, a toy maker and founder of MGA Entertainment made a bid to purchase Toys "R" Us, but his offer was denied on the grounds of the value being less than the threshold liquidation value. In April 2018, as he continued in his efforts to buy Toys "R" Us and turn it around, industry experts worried about the future of the toy industry. Was the toy industry likely to suffer due to the exit of such an iconic brand? How would the changing consumer preferences for online games affect the future of toy makers and retailers? Could the current chief executive officer of Toys "R" Us have saved the company and if so, where should he have focused his turnaround efforts?

In the summer of 2018 in the United States, Wendy's faced an important decision related to its international markets. The company had a small international presence; of its 6,537 restaurants worldwide, only 637 restaurants were located in international markets. The company was faced with a saturated and stagnating U.S. market and fierce competition from a number of fast food rivals, including McDonald's Corporation, Burger King Corporation, and Carl's Jr. Restaurants LLC, and the surest path to growth seemed to be an expansion into foreign markets, where fast food was still growing. Wendy's chief executive officer needed to determine which international market(s) to target and how many restaurants to open in each international market.

In 2010, EPCOR Utility Inc.'s application to implement new metering technologies was denied by the Alberta Utilities Commission. By 2014, however, several key changes had taken place in regulations and in the cost of smart meters. With another application to the Alberta Utilities Commission due in just four months, the director at EPCOR Utility Inc. was contemplating several options, all of which involved carefully considering the interests of many different stakeholders and the development of a thorough and thoughtful implementation plan.