At dawn on May 29, 2015, Swiss authorities acting on behalf of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation entered a plush hotel in Zurich, Switzerland to arrest nine senior executives of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), soccer’s global governing body, as delegates from across the world convened to elect a president to lead them for the next four years. The incumbent president, who had been in office since 1998, at first refused to step down, but pressure from the media, sponsors and fans as the investigation escalated forced him to resign a few days later. The organization’s signature event, the World Cup, had grown into a quadrennial cash cow through the shrewd sale of broadcast and marketing rights. Now, charges of corruption were forcing its governance and practices into the limelight. How could the executive forge a path ahead and what steps were needed to repair the organization’s reputation and survival?
Canadian Pacific (CP), a North American railway company, had recently come under attack from an activist shareholder, Pershing Square Capital Management (Pershing). Pershing had accumulated a 14 per cent shareholding in CP and had recently announced its intention to replace the CP board of directors and its chief executive officer. The case reviews the history of CP, its recent performance relative to Canadian National, and the basis for Pershing's allegations that CP had lagged its competitor in terms of performance and that this was attributable to poor governance and management. The board of CP must decide whether to make concessions to Pershing or risk an all-out proxy battle which it may well lose.
Canada’s economic axis was originally domestic, running east to west. Later, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, it ran north to south. Now, Canada is in free trade negotiations with the European Union and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and has a bilateral pact with Japan. This article, by a former senior policy advisor to the prime minister of Canada, begins by examining Asia’s economic miracle, including China’s rise and Japan’s generation of the largest increase in wealth creation in world history. It then describes the proposed but somewhat uncertain Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would include various Pacific nations, as well as Canada and the United States. It argues that the top priority for Canada should be a bilateral free trade agreement with Japan and that three issues should guide Canada’s actions: a) Canadian manufacturers can become part of Japanese global manufacturing by producing specialized parts; b) Japanese banks, trading firms, and manufacturers have entered into alliances and networks to invest in new technology, share production, transfer technology, and enter new markets; c) Japan, which invented lean production and just-in-time production, is aggressively transforming global supply chains and Canada could become a North American gateway for container flows from Europe and Asia. In describing the global economic climate, this article shows the economic shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the importance of leveraging the new opportunities therein.