個案總覽

The chief executive officer of a marmalade manufacturing company needs to update his accounting records for the fiscal year. In order to complete this task, he gathers the previous year's financial statements and a list of cash receipts and disbursements for the current year in order to perform a financial analysis.

Spreadsheet supplement for teaching note UV6806.

This case, a follow-up to Cancer Treatment Centers of America (A), HBS No. 313-012, begins with the debate over New Hampshire's certificate-of-need (CON) law, which restricts hospital expansion. This debate ignited significant public criticism of Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), a for-profit chain of five cancer-focused hospitals that had previously won a CON exception in Georgia, over its for-profit status and low acceptance of government-insured patients. The case also introduces the controversy over CTCA's cancer treatment outcomes-reporting practices, as well as the disparities in outcomes-reporting practices by cancer treatment providers generally. By providing perspectives on both sides of the issues, the case allows students to debate and draw their own conclusions about whether organizations like CTCA should be granted CON exceptions and whether the criticisms of its patient-acceptance and outcomes-reporting practices are well founded.

This background note on technology innovations in education offers a market overview of the edtech sector and discusses trends, common challenges, and criticisms encountered in exploring edtech ventures. The note introduces the promise of educational technology as it directly affects classroom instruction and discusses the common growth drivers (e.g., school accountability, 21st century skills, and advanced technological innovations) and theories of change (e.g., personalization, access, and productivity) for edtech products and services. Furthermore, the note defines the conditions necessary for the success of innovations in educational technology in the classroom including adequate teacher training, funding, and technology infrastructure. The note also highlights several challenges, risks, and criticisms common to the edtech sector, such as the evolving role of teachers, issues of student privacy and data security, implementation challenges, and the limits of education technology's impact in the classroom.

Price is one of the most powerful instruments a manager can use to influence the take-up of her product, especially in a subsidized and noncompetitive market as is common for global health products. However, the question of whether and how to price has been the subject of extensive policy debate: whether to charge users for life-saving health products and services, whether to distribute them for free, or whether to give additional incentives for individuals to use them. This note describes the latest, cutting-edge, research on how pricing influences the end user's decision to purchase and use vitally needed health products, opening a deeper and informed dialogue about pricing. The note concludes with a succinct guide to how to optimally price products based on different organizational goals and product characteristics.

Spreadsheet for KEL778

In late September 2013, Exxon Mobil Corporation announced that it would begin offering benefits to the spouses of its employees in same-sex marriages. This short supplement touches upon what led Exxon Mobil to this decision, some insights into its previous relationship with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, and its standing on LGBT issues relative to its peers in the oil and gas sector and the Fortune 500.

In the fall of 2013, the people of Ukraine disagreed passionately whether their country should intensify ties with the European Union or Russia. After President Yanukovych rejected the free trade agreement with the EU in November, thousands of Ukrainians peacefully protested. But the protest movement morphed into a violent, deadly confrontation in January, culminating in February in mass slaughter, an overthrow of government, foreign invasion, and international crisis. The four months that shook Ukraine is a case study on the interrelated problems of geopolitical struggle, politics of economic pacts and clash of regional economic blocks, post-imperial disintegration and trade, and identity and interdependence.

Spreadsheet supplement to case 114026.

Business schools have done an admirable job of teaching competencies, and many business organizations have defined the framework of competencies that are required to be successful in the institution. However, much less attention has been spent on leadership character and the importance of commitment to the leadership role. There is no consistent understanding among executives about what character means, despite a concurrence that it is important. The movie Invictus portrays Nelson Mandela in his first year as the first black president of the newly desegregated South Africa as he persuades not only both black and white populations to support the national rugby team in its effort to win the World Cup but also the players themselves. It provides a truly brilliant illustration of not only the competencies required to lead but also the leadership character and commitment that are needed to lead during trying times.

On November 25, 2008, the high-end department store Saks slashed its prices by 70 percent, creating a tsunami in the fashion industry. Years later, the ripples of this action still lingered. This action and its effects provide an opportunity to analyze downstream supply chain management, the impacts of Saks' price-cutting throughout the supply chain, and the options available to various stakeholders to mitigate the damage.

Ghurka was a 38-year-old luxury leather goods brand that specialized in leather and twill luggage, handbags, and accessories. Brightwork Brand Holdings Corp. acquired it as an asset purchase in 2011. Ghurka, under CEO John Reuter, worked to re-launch the brand with a ten-year, three-phase growth plan. The company aimed to be profitable by 2016. Management worked to address challenges surrounding the role of wholesaling, Ghurka's advertising strategy, and leather sourcing issues.

Vice Media has gone from the wilderness of a media backwater in Canada to landing in New York City and assiduously building a global youth brand through unique and seemingly inimitable competitive advantages. While globalizing its operations, Vice Media appears to have developed expertise in standardizing certain aspects of its business, adapting others to local context and, increasingly, building a global chain. Given Vice Media's explosive growth, how can its global value chain be structured to maintain the carefully cultivated emotional connection the company has created with its audience?

Rhonda Magee, a new employee at Regina Broadband, was tasked to prepare slides for the company's next earnings conference call. The company had seen good growth through acquisitions, but now was pursuing a strategy of organic growth. Recent changes had raised potential questions about the company's leadership and compensation. As a policy, Regina's management provided limited future earnings guidance to investors. Since the most recent Q4 and year-end earnings data were still being gathered, Magee decided to draft the slides with provisional headlines and insert placeholders for data and results that the CFO could complete before the earnings conference call later in the week. This disguised case sets the stage for the accompanying B case (UVA-C-2368), which takes place directly after Regina releases its earnings.

Within 3 minutes of releasing its Q4 and year-end earnings, Regina Broadband's stock was down by over 25%. The company's CEO and CFO realized they needed to quickly reframe and sharpen the message they would be giving to Regina's shareholders and investors during that afternoon's conference call, scheduled to take place in 15 minutes.

This case tackles the issue of recycling of poly-coated beverage cartons in the United States. In 2008, recycling access to the commodity was low, putting the industry at risk of losing market share to other forms of packaging. The protagonist of the case Alan Murray, then CEO of Tetra Pak North America, pulled industry leaders together under the Carton Council of North America (CCNA) to attempt to boost recycling access in communities across the U.S. to 60%, an amount that would allow the producers of products to carry the unconditional Federal Trade Commission logo on their packages. Still, improving access in small local communities would be difficult. In reading and discussing the case, students analyze the reverse supply chain for recycled cartons, the rationale behind lackluster access to recycling, and CCNA programs designed to reconstruct the reverse supply chain.

Whether characterized as corporate social responsibility (CSR), business ethics, or some other name, best practices in a given industry often fall short, thus causing efforts of companies seeking to improve their own CSR practices to fall short as well. A typical CSR model uses philanthropic donations to demonstrate the company's commitment to social welfare. Even a strategic version of CSR falls short of what it could achieve. To be sure, these can be important efforts worth celebrating, but we seek to raise the bar higher. Our case study focuses on the pharmaceutical industry because of our experience working in and studying that industry. In Section 2, we identify the typical CSR efforts of pharmaceutical companies. Dissatisfied with the scope of current efforts, Section 3 switches from an inductive approach to a deductive one in which we rely on scholarly literature and some exemplary benchmarks to propose a stronger model of corporate ethics. At the heart of this model is the claim that optimum instrumental benefits accrue to corporate CSR actions when they are undertaken for sincere aims rather than for instrumental ones. Section 4 then explains how this framework provides a way for pharmaceutical companies to embrace a more robust model of corporate responsibility that could be extended to other industries as well.

The story of Infosys' growth and transformation from a $250 start-up to its current market valuation of approximately $26 billion provides one of the most pertinent lessons in leveraging India's strengths and managing the challenges faced by an emerging market global enterprise based in India. In this article, we present a wide-ranging interview with Infosys' current CEO, Mr. S.D. Shibulal, as he explains what he considers to be the core strengths of the company that made it successful in the past, lays out his vision for the company's future, and discusses in detail how he sees the company's transformation taking place over the coming years. The conversation uncovers several interesting themes and lessons for multinational enterprises in emerging as well as developed economies, including the relevance of being born global, values-based governance, the necessity of creating hybrid business models that infuse the 'India way' with local cultures and practices in global markets, leveraging strategic partnerships via co-creation and co-evolution, and the delicate balance between 'preservation-creation-destruction.'

Better-aligned operational and strategic plans and a better balance of supply and demand bring tangible benefits to firms. However, functional departments in firms often operate without vertical and horizontal alignment. The outcomes are delays and amplification of the information flow, suboptimal corporate plans, uncoordinated reactions within the business, insufficient operational flexibility, and discrepancies in supply and demand. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) can circumvent these negative consequences and align the organization. Our multimethod research develops a holistic S&OP maturity model that firms can use for the assessment of their internal S&OP processes and shows the pathway to an integrated S&OP approach for the achievement of a better-aligned organization. We present a case study of a medium-sized, Swiss-based pharmaceutical company that has recently implemented S&OP to highlight why companies implement S&OP, the prerequisites and roadblocks encountered during implementation, and the benefits envisioned and achieved. Finally, we reveal the great relevance of the topic by means of a questionnaire survey which shows that organizations' current S&OP performance is underdeveloped and that many improvements are indispensable to enjoy all benefits associated with the alignment process.