The development of the smart grid--the integration of traditional elements of energy transmission and delivery with information technology--heralds a new era in the power industry. Many new business opportunities will be created as the smart grid gets developed. What strategies should Cisco employ to become a leader in this industry? What obstacles and challenges must Cisco overcome to compete successfully in this new industry?

Created by hedge fund and financial managers, the Robin Hood Foundation fights poverty through grants to nonprofit organizations. As the global financial crisis continues to impact the poor disproportionately, the Foundation needs to ensure that its funds are being spent on the most effective poverty-fighting programs. The organization's senior vice president, Michael Weinstein, has developed a benefit-cost (BC) approach to analyze the performance of program grants. How effective is the method? Is funding programs with the highest BC ratios a good way to fight poverty? In three or five years, how will Robin Hood know whether it is succeeding?

Within 10 months of Gregg Steinhafel's taking over as CEO at Target, the U.S. was mired in the most significant economic downturn in 50 years. Top competitor Wal-Mart had positioned itself well for the crisis, while Target's same store sales began to slide. While Steinhafel believed that Target's long-term strategy and positioning were right, he pondered a set of strategic and operational challenges. Did Target have the right mix of offensive and defensive tactics to weather the downturn and position itself for the economy's eventual recovery? How far could Target go in emphasizing low price-the "pay less" side of its slogan-without eroding the company's core promise of offering unique and upscale products that customers would not see at other low-priced retailers? Would the benefits of adding fresh food to Target's general merchandise stores outweigh the associated challenges?

Roll Back Malaria, a global partnership dedicated to fighting malaria has not met its founders' expectations of effectively combatting malaria. In 2005, after several internal evaluations, RBM leadership has decided to engage the Boston Consulting Group to work on a Change Initiative that when completed will enable RBM to address the eradication of malaria both more effectively and through larger scale efforts. However, the Initiative has become derailed after BCG's first major presentation to the RBM board. Will this end the Change Initiative prematurely?

After United Way CEO Brian Gallagher began shifting the organization's focus from old-school fundraising to community impact, Gallagher and local leaders like Elise Buik, CEO of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, faced a series of challenges regarding how to best use United Way's resources to address the root causes of social problems.

Goldman Sachs' five-year, $100 million philanthropic initiative to provide practical business and management education to 10,000 women around the globe recently celebrated its first anniversary and over 1,200 women were either enrolled in, or graduated from sponsored certificate programs. The case describes the conception, development and implementation of the initiative and outlines some key strategic decisions facing the firm as they roll-out the program over the coming years. These include: how to organize the network of schools that deliver the educational services, how to determine the best outside partners to provide additional services for the women entrepreneurs, how to best assess the impact of the program, and finally the extent to which the initiative provides contributions to the long-term strategy of the firm.

In September 2008, Todd Bradley, executive vice president of Hewlett-Packard Company's Personal Systems Group (PSG) gathered his thoughts before a meeting with his top executives and managers for product design and marketing. On the agenda was a discussion of strategic next steps for the group. Hewlett-Packard (HP), a technology company providing a wide range of products and services including computers, handheld devices, servers and digital entertainment, employed 172,000 people and posted $104 billion in sales in 2007. PSG, one of HP's three major divisions, offered notebook and desktop personal computers, handheld mobile computing devices, monitors, workstations, and related support services. Bradley's PSG had played an important role in HP's financial success over the previous three years.

Brazilian meat packer JBS surprised many in the U.S. beef industry when it acquired Swift & Co.--a company more than five times its size--in 2007, then moved to acquire the U.S.'s fourth and fifth largest beef producers in 2008. The new JBS Swift slashed costs and restructured, turning around a quarterly loss of $99 million to a gain of $140 million within 6 months. JBS aimed to position itself to supply beef markets around the world, but it faced a perfect storm of rising feed and fuel prices, a global credit crisis and industry analysts skeptical about the company's debt load.

The Bridgespan Group was launched in 2000 by management consulting group Bain & Company as a nonprofit focused on strategy consulting for nonprofits and philanthropists. Over the next eight years, Bridgespan expanded its services to include executive search, knowledge sharing, and a web-based job matching service. While its growth was welcome, Bridgespan's leaders and board wanted to strengthen Bridgespan's positive impact on the nonprofit sector as a whole.

Tennessee-based nonprofit Youth Villages had an impressive record of serving emotionally and behaviorally troubled youth and their families, with higher success rates and lower costs than most child services providers. Yet expanding to offer its services on a broader scale proved challenging.

On a winter day in December 2007 at the American Family Mutual Insurance Company (AMFAM) headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, Dave Anderson and Jack Salzwedel remained in the conference room after the senior management meeting had concluded. Anderson, CEO of AMFAM since January 2007 and Salzwedel, named President in August 2006, reflected together on how far the company had come over the past two years. Both recalled meetings in which top executives simply read out activity reports to help prepare a previous CEO for a largely ceremonial board meeting. These days, they sensed energy and movement at different levels--whether in a strategic planning meeting, or in Salzwedel's recent visit to a regional office to explain in person the content of and motivation for the company's new strategic plan. Anderson and Salzwedel were pleased that the just-ended meeting exhibited the kind of engaged discussion, "pushback," and argumentation they had been encouraging.

Home Depot popularized the concept of "do-it-yourself" for customers eager to build, repair, and improve their own homes. Home Depot stores were stocked with a wide range of home-improvement goods and had knowledgeable employees ready to help customers choose the right products, tools, and materials and even explain how to use them. To some extent, Home Depot store managers "did it themselves" as well. For its first 20 years, Home Depot was known for its entrepreneurial spirit and was run rather informally. Store managers, who tended to be experts in home improvement, made their own merchandise-planning decisions and had considerable autonomy in running their stores. Purchasing was also decentralized. As it grew in size, many in the company believed that a more disciplined approach to operations would be important for further growth. In 2000, the company hired Bob Nardelli, a former GE senior executive, to lead the change. As chairman and CEO, Nardelli centralized merchandising and purchasing and brought process discipline to store operations, simplifying and standardizing store processes and introducing Six Sigma quality methodology. Nardelli's changes led to higher profitability. Nevertheless, Home Depot's stock price remained nearly unchanged during his tenure and certain aspects of customer service suffered significantly. These results raise an important question not only for Home Depot, but also for other companies in which employees perform both routine production-related activities and nonroutine customer-service activities: Is there a trade-off between process discipline and customer service? If so, what aspects of customer service?

On a fall day in September 2003, Robert Swanborough made his way down a thickly carpeted hallway in Purolator's headquarters in Toronto, Canada, toward a meeting with his two deputies. Several months earlier, Swanborough, then vice-president of Marketing, had been named vice-president for Sales Effectiveness atop a transformed sales division. The previous week, the team had presented to top management the results of the customer segmentation research that Swanborough had contracted while in marketing. The research identified customers that would be willing to pay more for the services that Purolator was or could potentially provide to them. The new Sales Effectiveness team planned ....