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This supplement to Bayer CropScience in India (A): Against Child Labor focuses on Bayer’s formulation of a value-driven strategy with three pillars: communication, implementation, and education.

As of 2010, ING DIRECT USA has had a successful first decade, having grown into one of the largest U.S. banks with $90 billion in assets. It has developed an innovative culture and a unique approach to banking, and has a strong brand name. As a result of a regulatory requirement in the Netherlands, ING Group is required to divest ING DIRECT USA by 2013. The chairman, president, and chief executive officer is reviewing his organization and thinking about what challenges the firm will face in the future.

In this role-play case, you are the new general manager of the Elmwood Group and have scheduled a meeting with your direct report, Darcy Gallagher, who is a sales manager. Gallagher, who has been consistently rated as an exceptional performer over his career at Elmwood, excels in business development, problem solving, and customer focus, and delivers strong results. However, Gallagher has significant gaps in his leadership competencies and skills, and in your view he meets but does not exceed current job requirements. Gallagher’s prior managers have vaguely referenced his need to improve his soft skills but have not followed up with him. For a proud, overrated manager like Gallagher, recognizing and accepting the gap between perception and reality will not be easy. Gallagher, who believes that he has sponsors in higher places, may challenge your authority as the general manager.

This role-play case follows the Performance Coaching case involving Darcy Gallagher. You are the new general manager of the Elmwood Group and four weeks ago you conducted a performance review with your direct report, Darcy Gallagher, who is a sales manager, and outlined three leadership gaps that Gallagher needed to address. The purpose of this new meeting is to discuss Gallagher’s career aspirations at Elmwood Group. In advance of your meeting, Gallagher has submitted his career development plan to you and he aspires to be a vice president at Elmwood, which is unrealistic. In this career coaching discussion, Gallagher needs a reality check about his career plan, and his capability and motivation to develop the strong skills in leading and developing people that are required in leadership roles.

The owner of a small home and garden shop in Chaguanas, Trinidad, is faced with declining sales and the recent entry of a competitor offering similar products at competitive prices. In order to compete, he is considering moving to a larger location and expanding his business to capitalize on emerging opportunities, such as the demand for landscaping services by wealthy professionals. He is uncertain how his current customers would react to such a move and is considering what kind of marketing activities he should engage in to ensure the business’s long-term survival.

Bert took a position to teach English in South Korea after graduating with his business degree from a Canadian university. It was his second time teaching English in South Korea, and because he had a fantastic experience the first time, he took a second position without doing a lot of due diligence before arrival. Soon, however, he realized that a city tax was being deducted from his pay, and he had suspicions that his boss was making up the city tax, in order to deduct money from the English teachers’ pay. Since Bert’s visa to stay in the country was tied to his employer, he could not look for a new employer, nor could he effectively find legal recourse against his employer, because foreign teachers had few rights in South Korea.

The project manager for American Constructors Inc. (ACI) sat down with his team on September 24, 2009, to evaluate the progress of its building expansion project in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The team had been working on the World Outreach Church expansion project for over a year already and it was nearing completion. Originally scheduled for completion by March 2010, the project deadline was pushed ahead to December 14, 2009, at the request of the client, who desired to use the property for the Christmas season. In an effort to maintain the reputation of ACI, which had grown to be known as a premier contractor in Tennessee, the project manager and his team needed to determine if the December 14 deadline was feasible.

The huge growth of information technology (IT) and information technology enabled services (TIES) businesses in India and, in particular, in Hyderabad, led to the establishment of Indian and multi-national companies. With large numbers of employees and thousands of square feet of office space, these companies recognized that maintaining their premises was not part of their core competence and outsourced their housekeeping requirements, thus creating a new industry. A single mother who was unable to make ends meet on her salary as the principal of a catering college grabbed a tiny opportunity to provide cleaning services at the Oracle office in the Cyber Towers at Hyderabad and, over 10 years, built up Golden Star into the third-largest housekeeping services provider in the city, with over 2,000 employees. While maintaining her strong personal ethical values, she built a young, professional team and maintained high standards of professionalism and quality of service. The case is set at the time when she is faced with the typical dilemmas of organic growth: to take on allied functions of office management, such as maintenance of electrical and mechanical equipment - a growing trend in the industry; to expand geographically to manage the offices of her clients in several cities; or to make a huge amount of money by simply selling the business she had built from scratch.

This case focuses on management innovation in the South African dairy industry, describing how an innovative new yoghurt product, Danimal, was created specifically for the market at the base of the pyramid. It explains how management of the product line embodied the various innovation opportunities and challenges presented. The concept was initially introduced in order to assess the feasibility of profitably servicing this market. However, the project was not simply about introducing a cheap brand to the poor but was more about creating brand awareness in the market at the base of the pyramid. The new product took into consideration the nutritional shortcomings in the diet of children in this market and also allowed for the lack of available infrastructure — electricity and refrigeration. <br><br>The case illustrates the importance of a product being affordable, relevant, and available to its market. Innovation went further than product design and also took into account the necessity of a lean distribution channel. This took the form of micro-distributors, referred to as Danimamas, who comprised township residents that were unemployed or part-time employed. The case offers insights into the complexity of doing business in developing countries. It concludes with the challenge of how to ensure that the project continued on its upward trajectory.

High Mountain Technologies is a diversified research and manufacturing company that produces a wide array of products based on patented technology. A certified management accountant has been given the assignment of completing a capital budgeting analysis of two projects — a GPS transmitter and surveillance aircraft. Rogers has been instructed to calculate the net present value for each project, including an appropriate cost of capital, so that the company can make its final decision.

MS Project Minimum Time for teaching note product 8B10D016.

MS Project Most Likely Time for teaching note product 8B10D016.

MS Project Maximum Time for teaching note product 8B10D016.

Spreadsheet for teaching note product 8B10N19.

The case describes the introduction of a human resources (HR) system named Project Vishwamitra (PV) in 2000 in a large, public-sector manufacturing organization, T.P. Engineering Corporation (TPEC). PV was introduced with considerable leadership support and visibility. It was intended to provide every engineer trainee at TPEC a friend and guide to ease their entry and socialization into the organization. The senior managers assigned to guide the trainees were called mentors. For about five years, the project ran smoothly — the trainees felt supported whenever they needed help, and the mentors were happy to guide trainees. But afterwards, certain important changes took place in the organization in the staffing of leadership positions. With expansion and new projects, the growth trajectory of TPEC showed a sharp increase. With longer-standing employees moving out and a significant rise in the number of trainees recruited, PV ran into difficult times. However, no changes were made in the system or processes. Meetings between trainees and mentors became more infrequent and, in certain areas, there was no contact between the two. In the midst of degeneration, one of the leaders was able to revive the project in one of the company units. TPEC had highly ambitious growth plans and the number of trainees was expected to increase from 450 in 2010 to 750 in 2011. The company faced a choice regarding the form in which PV should continue.

In the 1990s, Red Hat established itself as a leading proponent of the open source software movement and sought to carve out for itself a significant role in the open source marketplace. As of 2011, the company reported $177 million in non-GAAP operating income in FY2010, based on revenues of $748 million. Red Hat’s market capitalization was set at $8 billion as of January 25, 2011. It operated 65 offices worldwide, including 12 Global Support Service Centers, and employed 3,580 people. The Red Hat brand was most closely associated with Linux even though its stable of product offerings had grown to include a number of other noteworthy system software and middleware products, such as JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. As Red Hat’s Linux product line had come to be widely accepted as an enterprise software platform, the company had transformed its thinking about and delivery of customer support. This case study explores the innovative ways that Red Hat went about this transformation process.

Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (M&M) is a manufacturing leader in the utility vehicles (UVs) segment in the Indian automotive industry. Since 2004, M&M has been exporting UVs to South Africa, the only country in the African continent with a significant middle-class population. M&M has set up a fully owned subsidiary in South Africa, which enjoyed the growth wave in the South African automotive industry up to 2007, then fell into a three-year slump, largely as a result of a recession in the global automotive industry. Now on the verge of industry renewal in 2011, the subsidiary needs to plan its next steps. The case is positioned in May 2011, when M&M’s subsidiary must choose from four alternatives. M&M can continue with its prevailing business model of importing completely built units (CBUs) from its Indian operations to meet local demand while using South Africa as a re-export hub for the burgeoning markets in sub-Saharan Africa. It can also choose to collaborate with a local vendor to assemble vehicles locally from completely knocked down (CKD) components imported from India. Alternatively, M&M may choose to set up its own manufacturing facility in South Africa, like many of its competitors. Lastly, M&M can choose to wait and watch until it notes definitive signs of revived demand. The case provides an opportunity for students to examine each alternative and make a decision on M&M’s way forward in South Africa.

In 2010, a sticky accelerator pedal tarnished the once-vaunted reputation of the Toyota Motor Corporation. These authors, who have written two widely acclaimed books on Toyota, argue that the pedal’s stickiness was caused not by relaxed manufacturing standards, as was commonly believed, but rather by failing to reconcile the means with the ends in trying to meet a corporate goal. Readers who hope to create a culture of excellence will learn why that particular reconciliation is important and how to achieve it.

Pricing is no longer a purely economic challenge, or a problem that can be solved through simply lowering prices or allocating costs and adding markups. Pricing must focus on value exchange — that customers will buy a product when it delivers value in excess of its price after adjusting for alternatives — and the marketing orientation of the firm. The challenges of pricing can be categorized as price setting (setting the right price in the first place), discounting, price structures (the strategic approach through which specific transactional prices are set), and overall pricing strategy. Various qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques have been developed that help with pricing challenges. Executives must realize that they cannot rely upon the output of a single equation or quantitative analytical technique, as pricing is a strategic challenge, not an “engineering” challenge. In examining the four basic challenges of pricing, this article reminds us that firms exist to serve customer needs profitably. The right price reflects the ability of the product to address a customer challenge, and the right price extracted from customers must exceed the firm’s cost to deliver. Price structures enable executives to align their prices with customers’ willingness to pay without resorting to discounting. The modern understanding of pricing, as detailed in this article, is crucial for executives to embrace in order to make better decisions for their firms.

Promoting women to executive positions and nominating them to sit on boards are goals that are still, for the most part, a long way from being realized. As these authors show, responsibility for stepping up to meet these goals starts at the top. This article provides five principles that can be applied to accelerate the promotion of women to executive positions and board rooms.