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Students are asked to assess a potential purchaser's personal goals and skills, as well as: financial feasibility, operating capacity and current promotional strategy to determine if a legal courier company should be purchased. Students are expected to develop detailed cash budgets, evaluate current pricing and promotional strategies, and to make recommendations about financing and the number of employees to hire under different volume assumptions.

Kirsti Paakkanen has achieved a celebrity status in Finland for her enigmatic leadership of the Finnish design company Marimekko. Purchasing the company in a state of near bankruptcy in 1991, Paakkanen took several actions to restore profitability and realize growth. As of 2006, the company has sales of $64 million (of which 80 per cent are from Finland) and net profits of $8.4 million. Over the last few years, Paakkanen and her team have focused on growing international sales. Recently, the company has opened concept shops in Japan, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Sweden and the United States owned by foreign partners. In light of the international expansion, Paakkanen is wondering if any changes to Marimekko's personnel policies and/or organization structure are necessary.

The chairman of Gome Ltd, a well known appliance retail chain, congratulated his management team for their excellent performance over the past year. For three consecutive years, Gome had been ranked the largest electrical appliance retail chain in China, and the second largest overall retail chain. Claiming to be the only true national player, Gome achieved total sales of RMB23.9 billion in 2004 and in 2005 doubled its number of stores to 426. The company's four-year plan is to capture 10 to 15 per cent of the market share nationally. Gome would need to double the number of stores in the coming three years, and more importantly, it needed to work out a strategy to fend off its local and global competitors.

A machine tools distributor is planning to build an extension on to its warehouse. The owner is concerned over how to source the $200,000 required to finance the expansion. This case is intended to introduce students to financial analysis. The concepts of ratio analysis, projected statements and debt repayment are central to the case. The case requires students to draft a set of projected statements to determine the amount of required financing, assess the financial health of the company and its ability to take on more debt.

The owner of Tutti Matti, a new restaurant specializing in authentic Tuscan cuisine, opened only four months before the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Toronto, Canada. Tutti Matti had a successful first six months, and the early performance was encouraging. However, to continue the restaurant's success and to overcome the added challenges created by SARS, a strong and creative marketing plan was necessary.

This case describes the measurement and evaluation of high performance principles of people management in a retail bank by a consulting company. This case serves as a platform for students to deliberate on what is involved in an organization's quest to achieve competitive success through its workforce. A unique strength of the case is that students are asked to quantitatively test their arguments with data provided in an Excel spreadsheet that accompanies the case (Ivey product #7B07C004). The case is intended as an integrated case across organizational behavior, management science and communication. The organizational behavior teaching approach is included to demonstrate that effective people management is associated with competitive advantages. For management science, the case serves to practice correlation and regression analyses. For communication, the case allows students to prepare a presentation that effectively communicates the complex and comprehensive results of their analyses.

The owners of Black Fly Beverage Company consider the viability of expanding their product-line after less than a year in operation. Since its start-up earlier the same year, sales of the company's original cranberry-blueberry vodka cooler had climbed steadily. Impressed with their early success, the owners wonder whether they should take advantage of their new brand's momentum and invest in the production of a second product.

In January 2003, EPCOR Utilities (EPCOR) was facing great pressure from a radical community group that wanted the company out of its community of Rossdale - where EPCOR was founded in 1891 and had been operating since. The pressure had mounted to the point that EPCOR's sole shareholder, the City of Edmonton, had asked that EPCOR prepare a long-term plan for its operations in Rossdale as part of a formal review of the land use at the site. Operations of EPCOR were $3 billion. The case encourages students to think through the senior vice-president of public and government relations job of engaging (or at least placating) the community from a philosophical level to the practical details of implementation.

Supplement to EPCOR Utilities Inc. A Critical Community Consultation (A), product 9B07M009.

The president of the East Coast Trail Association (ECTA), a non-profit organization located in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, faces numerous challenges as he attempts to pursue the organization's 10-year dream of completing a 540 km coastal and wilderness trail on Newfoundland's Avalon peninsula. One of the largest obstacles standing between him and this goal is gaining access to the land on which the remaining sections of the trail will be built. So far, 220 km of trail has been built with the financial assistance of the federal government and corporate sponsorships. A large pool of dedicated volunteers has also contributed countless hours to building the trail, a cause which stands to benefit not only hikers, but the provincial economy in the form of tourism dollars and economic development. However, both the ECTA's financial and volunteer resources are in decline as the association tries to extend the trail. Meanwhile, the existing 220 km of completed trail are in need of resources and maintenance. Time is also running out as developers buy up coastal lands where the association plans to extend the trail. Without access to land, the dream of a 540 km trail will end.

Excel spreadsheet for product 9B07C004.

When the founder of iStockphoto.com started the company in 2000, his objective was to share his vast collection of stock photography with graphic designers worldwide, and, in the process, help others do the same. By 2002, the organization was a respected and successful online community, but the founder and his partners now had to consider the profitability of their company. iStock was founded on community and collaboration - not commerce. Should the model change and if so, what would it take to make a significant culture change work? The case examines the culture and business opportunities for this start-up. It demonstrates the challenges of generating profit from an online community, as well as the key factors needed to build a community that can be turned into a profitable business.

In 2003, 3M initiated contact with Yunnan Baiyao Group Co., Ltd. to discuss potential cooperation opportunities in the area of transdermal pharmaceutical products. Yunnan Baiyao (YB), was a household brand in China for its unique traditional herbal medicines. In recent years, the company had been engaged in a series of corporate reforms and product/market diversification strategies to respond to the change in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and competition at a global level. By 2003, YB was already a vertically integrated, product-diversified group company with an ambition to become an international player. The proposed cooperation with 3M was attractive to YB, not only as an opportunity for domestic product diversification, but also for international diversification. YB had been attempting to internationalize its products and an overseas department had been established in 2002 specifically for this purpose. On the other hand, YB had also been considering another option namely, whether to extend its brand to toothpaste and other healthcare products. YB had to make decisions about which of the two options to pursue and whether it was feasible to pursue both.

Candor ranks very highly among the characteristics we look for in good leaders. A culture of candor, established and reinforced by leaders who value and model it in their own behaviors, can be a source of competitive advantage for organizations. It ensures that good news travels fast and bad news travels faster, allowing mistakes to be recognized quickly and fixed promptly; people own their actions and own up to their errors so that they can learn from them; people know where they stand, know what's expected of them, and know what it takes to get promoted and fired. Candor is at the heart of aligning people with strategy, and is essential to effective execution, performance management and people development.

Anduro Marketing is a Canadian company that sells technical services to companies wanting to improve their search engine website rankings. Though small, Anduro has attracted several major clients in both Canada and the United States, and expects steady profitability and growth. Anduro believes it can generate substantial additional profit by developing and selling a suite of software products that automate its technical service offerings. Anduro's managers must decide whether Anduro is better off staying with its current safe and profitable strategy or if Anduro should instead pursue a riskier but potentially more profitable software sales model. Several tough questions must be answered to determine whether the risk is worth the reward. The Anduro case provides an interesting description of an Internet technical/marketing services business and contrasts this with software sales.

Leaders expect their followers to be loyal and to be able to depend on their loyalty. Good leaders understand that there is a difference between real loyalty and a related but different concept - fealty. Smart leaders understand that fealty is demanded whereas loyalty is earned. In this article, the author notes some things that leaders can do to earn loyalty.

If organizational structure follows form, the organization that learns well functions well. More precisely, the organization that enables knowledge to flow and be shared at all levels is the organization that performs best. This author describes why learning organizations have the capability to read the market and innovate in ways that lead to success.

Most organizations spend vast sums on information technology to gather, manipulate, store, and use the information and data they gather. Yet, as these authors point out, managing this resource entails protecting it and complying with all laws and regulations. The authors prescribe ten best practices that should allow an organization to protect its data and comply with the law.

Almost faster than you can say mark-to-market accounting, management controls disappeared once Jeff Skilling became CEO of Enron. The rest is sad history and a shareholder's worst nightmare come true. These authors document the subversion of Enron's management controls and suggest the lessons managers can learn from the worst financial collapse in U.S. corporate history.

The spring of 2002 had been grueling for the owner of Pet Care Veterinary Services, a small-animal veterinary practice with two clinics in Southwestern Ontario. Everything seemed to be going wrong at Pet Care's Avery, Ontario location. Profitability was disappointing, medication had disappeared, and the owner had serious concerns about her associate veterinarian's quality of animal care. The owner wondered what would be her best course of action. She could afford to keep the clinic open for another year and try to either fix the operational issues or leave things as they were and see if the problems resolved themselves. The owner wondered whether it would be best to sell and avoid future problems. What price would she ask for the clinic if she chose to sell? Whatever her choice, she knew she had to make a decision quickly, because the uncertainty and stress of running two clinics were beginning to take their toll.