An agreement signed in 1993 allowed AT&T to re-enter the Chinese telecommunications equipment market. Bill Warwick, the CEO of AT&T China, faces three interrelated challenges in building a business there. The first is how to compete with established, lower-cost rivals in a market with fierce price competition. Second is how to achieve coordination among AT&T's very independent business units to serve the Chinese market. Third is what role to take in the debate about linking renewal of China's most-favored-nation status to its human rights record. In the background is the issue of whether AT&T ought to be in China.

Focuses on the auto supply industry and especially the relations between Johnson Controls (JCI) Automotive Systems Group's Georgetown plant and its main customer, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Toyota's U.S. assembly plant, for which JCI supplies seats on a just-in-time basis. Can be used to investigate the differing patterns of supplier relations that were traditional in the U.S. and Japanese auto industries, to examine the adaptations that Toyota made to its traditional methods to deal with a U.S. supplier, and to study the very high degree of coordination and cooperation that is achieved between the two companies. JCI's adoption of a version of the Toyota Production System is also discussed.