This case focuses on succession planning for Southcentral Foundation's (SCF) long-time president and CEO, Katherine Gottlieb. The case opens with Gottlieb reflecting on a succession planning meeting with SCF's Board of Directors and on her twenty year leadership trajectory. It then transitions to provide information about the American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAIN) health care system and outlines SCF's mission, vision, and key tenants of the organization's culture: customer-ownership, core concepts and continuous improvement. After a subsequent section on SCF's approach to governance and workforce development, the case concludes with Gottlieb's main considerations in selecting the next CEO. Gottlieb is an extraordinary leader who has defined SCF's vision, mission and unique organizational culture for over two decades. Students will consider the challenges a new leader may face in sustaining the existing culture when Gottlieb retires, evaluate the benefits and pitfalls of choosing a homegrown versus external successor for the CEO position, and consider qualities that SCF's next leader must embody.
This introduction to the Design industry includes definitions, and industry statistics, as well as descriptions of geographic clustering, design education, organizational roles of designers, how designers work and get paid, and the growing role of design in management.
AOL Time Warner, which has been billed as the "first fully integrated media and communications company of the Internet Century," raises the fundamental question of how value will be created and captured by the merger of AOL and Time Warner. This case describes just how different AOL was from Time Warner in strategy, culture, and execution, and permits a thorough analysis of how value is proposed to be created through capturing synergies within the new company. The discussion of synergies is divided into three levels: tactical, strategic, and transformational. The key question to address is whether a merger of this sort is the most effective way to create value or whether contracting and other mechanisms is equally good or perhaps superior. A rewritten version of an earlier case.