個案總覽

The last year's rather adventurous journey from 2004 to 2009 had taught the fifth-largest toy-maker in the world - the LEGO Group - the importance of managing the global supply chain effectively. In order to survive the largest internal financial crisis in its roughly 70 years of existence, the management had, among many initiatives, decided to offshore and outsource a major chunk of its production to Flextronics. In this pursuit of rapid cost-cutting sourcing advantages, the LEGO Group planned to license out as much as 80 per cent of its production besides closing down major parts of the production in high cost countries. Confident with the prospects of the new partnership, the company signed a long-term contract with Flextronics. This decision eventually proved itself to have been too hasty, however. Merely three years after the contracts were signed, LEGO management announced that it would phase out the entire sourcing collaboration with Flextronics. This sudden change in its sourcing strategy posed LEGO management with a number of caveats. Despite the bright forecasts, the collaboration did not fulfill the initial expectations, and the company needed to understand why this had happened. Secondly, what could LEGO management have done differently?

The president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Goodwill Industries of Greater Grand Rapids Inc. (Goodwill) was analyzing a staff proposal to begin selling donated books online. Her initial response to the proposal had been to approve the idea without any reservation; however, some pointed questions raised during discussion at a recent board meeting caused her to revisit her support for the project. The CEO determined that to make a thoughtful recommendation about the proposal, she needed to evaluate three main criteria: 1) The strategic and financial fit of the proposal in relation to the current salvage buyers of Goodwill's books; 2) The operating and revenue needs of Goodwill's retail stores, and; 3) Alignment of the proposal with Goodwill's mission statement.

This case traces the attempt by the Liberal Government of Ontario, Canada, to introduce recycling fees on a large range of household products as part of the government's larger provincial waste management program. The Ministry of the Environment created an industry-funded, non-profit organization called Stewardship Ontario to oversee the regulation and collection of recycling fees in the province. In 2008, Stewardship Ontario began to levy recycling fees on a limited number of household products, fees that producers and retailers passed on to the consumers at the point of transaction. Ontario's consumers seemed to accept these fees as part of the cost of doing business in a province that was attempting to become a greener and less wasteful place to live. However, in 2010, Stewardship Ontario changed the fee structure on household products from a product-based to a material-based structure: products were now assessed a fee according to the kind and degree of material (chemical, metal, plastic) in the product. This change greatly expanded the number of products on which a recycling fee could be assessed, and it greatly complicated the fee structure for both producer and consumer. Consumers this time took notice of the new fees, and, objecting vociferously to the number of new fees and to the fee structure's lack of transparency, they called on the Minister of the Environment to scrap the program or at least to explain it clearly.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Social Media Group had to develop a social media campaign for ING Direct Canada, an online retail bank. The CEO had successfully developed social media campaigns for other businesses in the past but ING wanted the CEO to measure the success of the campaign. With little information available on how to determine the success of such strategies, the CEO set out to design one of Canada's first measurable social media campaigns.

This note is meant to provide students access to some of the world's greatest speeches. It contains excerpts that span over 2,000 years of history, from Pericles' Funeral Oration to Stephen Lewis's Aids in Africa speech. An introduction by the author explains why future business leaders need to study such speeches.

The chief financial officer of Granite Apparel is trying to determine which of the three fundraising options is optimal for Granite Apparel to finance a projected rapid growth strategy. The three options are an initial public offering of equity, a privately placed debt issue and a private placement of preferred shares.

The chief financial officer of Acer Incorporated has to decide how to manage the higher level of complexity of the company's exchange risk after their restructuring. This must be done in a way which is consistent with Acer's core principles, one of which is to find simple effective solutions to unavoidable business risks. The case addresses the technical issues of exposure measurement and hedging, the challenge of hedging expected, but not contracted, future foreign currency revenues, and IFRS hedge accounting requirements.

As if the challenges facing a business leader today weren't already formidable, along comes one that may be the most difficult and least understood of all. Emerging risks, unanticipated and unplanned for, such as the eruption of a volcano in Iceland earlier this year, are having a serious impact on companies' long-term strategies and earnings. Though a relatively new phenomenon, emerging risks can be managed, and this author describes what leaders can and need to do to prepare their companies for them.

Many a good idea has been sabotaged by a co-worker who, during a presentation, cuts right in to say, That's a good idea but. Readers of this article will learn what tactics they can use to effectively disarm and discourage such a saboteur and allow their ideas to be heard fully and ultimately win acceptance.

Creating wealth is considerably different than sustaining that wealth, particularly if you are an entrepreneur or corporate executive. The path to this particular type of sustainability can be a perilous one, but a Family Office can smooth that path and ensure that it remains clear for those who will inherit the wealth.

In the book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, co-authors Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan essentially wrote that, It's all in the execution. Perhaps the most important step in executing well is to build a bridge that connects the vision and the strategy to the execution plan. Readers will learn what those bridges are and how they can build them to last.

Changing the Canadian public service has been a perennial goal of almost every government. But the failure of the change exercises, has highlighted how the best-intended change management can be outdone by a lack of clarity, resolve and purpose. This author suggests what managers need to do to get the job done

There is risk management as we know it, and then there is CSRisk, as this author defines it, a triad of Creativity, Strategy and Risk Management. As he writes, the development and merging together of these three capabilities will allow CEOs to build globally competitive businesses and rest secure knowing that their exposure is limited to the absolute minimum. Readers will learn how to build a CSRisk capability in this article.

Attention must be paid, wrote the great American playwright, Arthur Miller. If only companies did pay attention to workers on the bottom rungs of the organizational ladder - like those on the top rungs - what would happen? As the authors discovered in their research, the company will benefit as much as the employees themselves.

Managing supply chain risk can be extremely daunting due to the many moving parts in a supply chain. This article highlights this risk and suggests what firms operating in the global environment can do to manage it. It explains how organizations consider global sourcing for reasons of organization, improvement, finances, and revenues. A major under-appreciated factor in dealing with offshore suppliers is the element of risk, with one key risk factor being the cultural gap between two firms. The first levels of risks are familiar and include preconceived circumstances and are often based on past experience. The next levels, however, are typically less likely to be risk factors, but their consequences are more severe when they do become factors. Categories of risk include culture, distance, communication, urgency, and intellectual property. Leaders most often consider intellectual property, but neglect one or more of the other potential pitfalls. To illustrate supply chain risk, this article considers the example of a global French automotive parts firm with a problematic Greenfield operation in China. The operation’s supply chain crises resulted in the French firm spending far more than it had expected with a low-cost supplier. This article proposes fundamental changes to the French firm’s approach that would have led to cost savings: 1) source two suppliers at the outset; 2) spend the necessary time to understand the cultural and operational dynamics in China; and 3) embrace visibility as a simple and effective risk-assessment tactic.

...You can't control people through policies, procedures and policing. You can only do it through a strong risk management culture and absolute integrity in all leaders. Leadership on Trial, A Manifesto for Leadership Development, p. 39, comment recorded in Montreal. This observation is one of the thousands shared by the 300 C-suite executives, who participated in a series of candid discussions spearheaded by a group of Ivey faculty over the past year. Our basic purpose in bringing together these executives was to find out if better leadership could have made a difference in preventing the financial meltdown that led to the recent global economic crisis.

<p style="color: rgb(197, 183, 131);"><strong> AWARD WINNER - Oikos Sustainability Case Writing Competition</strong></p><br> The owner and operator of Y U Ranch, a Longhorn cattle ranch in southern Ontario, is required to make a set of interesting but seemingly unimportant decisions. In this case series, students will see that each decision builds on the previous decision (i.e. the decisions are path dependent). Taken together, these cases illustrate why industrial farming has supplanted the farm-based agricultural system. After reviewing the case series, the instructor can engage students in a discussion about the importance of systems in influencing organizational resilience.

This is a supplement to Y U Ranch: Strategy and Sustainability in Cattle Ranching (A), product 9B09M080 and, taken together, this case series illustrates why industrial farming has supplanted the farm-based agricultural system.

This is a supplement to Y U Ranch: Strategy and Sustainability in Cattle Ranching (A) and (B), products 9B09M080 and 9B09M081 and, taken together, this case series illustrates why industrial farming has supplanted the farm-based agricultural system.

Polar Challenge was a company that offered an annual 320 nautical-mile race to the magnetic North Pole organized by Arctic experts. It had been successful in the United Kingdom, establishing marketing partnerships with the BBC, Sony, Fujitsu and others. Polar Challenge saw the United States market as untapped potential for both sponsors and racers. In 2008, with the centennial of polar exploration approaching in 2009, the company decided to offer the race to Americans. The director of marketing is given responsibility for establishing a presence in the United States, but he soon finds that U.S. companies and media outlets do not have the level of interest he expected. In addition, companies worldwide were cutting back on advertising spending in response to the global economic crisis. This case examines a number of issues focused on expansion into new markets and resource commitments to such endeavours. It can be used to discuss the importance of understanding the target market, targeting the unique needs of different customer segments, adapting product offerings to international markets and establishing realistic goals.