個案總覽

The Serena and Lily case describes three challenging situations faced by Lily Kanter, CEO of Serena and Lily, a luxury home goods company. The first vignette involves Marta Calfee, one of Lily's first and most dedicated employees. As the company grows, Marta takes on increasing responsibilities, but it soon becomes clear that her title, compensation and domain are all greater than her actual capabilities, and Lily must determine how to scale back or let go one of her most loyal and trusted employees. In the second vignette, Lily deals with an extremely challenging investor/board member whose abrasive style and conflicting ideas about the strategic direction of the company threaten to severely hinder the company's progress. Finally, Lily is trying to recruit a highly valuable consultant to a permanent position at the company, but must figure out how to compete against a lucrative counter-offer from a highly esteemed retailer.

Nuru International was founded in 2008 as a social venture with the goal to eradicate extreme poverty around the world by helping the rural poor achieve self-sufficiency. The case follows Jake Harriman, founder and executive director, through the multiple human resource challenges he must face in building his nonprofit organization. The first of four vignettes involves Kevin Newton, one of Nuru's first employees, after his promotion to international agricultural director. In his new role, Newton become increasingly vocal and adversarial, voicing his opinions throughout the organization, and Jake must decide how to best handle the situation. The second vignette describes the poorly-handled termination of Nuru's contract grant writer and how Jake must deal with the employee and his supervisor. Finally, an unfortunate accident leads to Jake's absence at the company offsite resulting in two unfortunate situations. In the first, Nuru's recently terminated director of development publicly misrepresents the circumstances leading to his dismissal to the full group of employees attending the offsite. In the second, the employees compile an overwhelming list of gripes about the company, in Jake's absence, which he must ultimately address.

These vignettes are based on a fictional organization, Starling Systems, in which Jack Swain, Starling's COO, has been selected by the company's board of directors to replace the recently departed CEO. Jack must deal with four challenging situations in his early days as CEO. The first involves managing a difficult conversation with Robert Cortez, Starling's senior vice president of finance, who was also vying for the CEO position. Jack cannot use title or compensation to convince Cortez not to leave so must somehow come up with alternate reasons to compel this valuable management team member to stay. The second vignette deals with Jack's revelation based on a conversation with Starling's recently department director of business development that the company's vice president of sales may be mistreating his employees. The third vignette finds Jack in a sticky situation where he has offered the COO position to an outside candidate, and he now must explain to his vice president of operations, currently serving as interim COO, why she was not offered the position. Finally, Jack must deal with infighting between his top performing customer service representative and his newly-hired vice president of customer service.

This case explores three tragic situations that lent themselves to organ donation. In each situation, doctors across the Midwest must work to save borderline deaths while communicating the tragic results to family. The first case deals with an accidental drowning of a toddler in the home pool. The second is a drunk-driving case of an eighteen-year-old resulting in a car crash and lost lives of a couple. Third, a young boy commits suicide by hanging. In each case, extensive details of their death and the timeline of the situation are given. The cases detail why each situation allows for organ donation.

Dystonia is a disease that most of the Marvis family suffered from. Not only this, but mother Stephanie Marvis also was a single mother working hard to finance her four person family. Stephanie and her son David especially had symptoms of dystonia, which forced Stephanie to frequently take her son to the hospital. After much research, Stephanie found the Stanford Hospital's Dr. Fields, who helped implant a device that would halt some of the dystonia symptoms. When the device breaks, David suffers for many months because Stephanie doesn't feel it is necessary to go to the Stanford Hospital. However, when they finally reach the hospital, Stephanie becomes very combative of her situation, defending her choice to not uproot David earlier. The doctors and hospital staff must determine how to communicate with her, while arguing amongst themselves about the appropriate way to address the situation.

Dr. Curley is an obstetrician that deals with a very difficult birth of the new Santorini child. The Santorinis have been through a stillbirth, and upon getting pregnant again, extreme cautions are taken to ensure the safety and health of their new child. This case takes the reader through the difficult decisions that must be made by the doctor and family as "a perfect storm" of birthing complications ensues. The Santorini's son is born with down syndrome and heart problems that require difficult surgeries. To add on to the strain, the family is tied down by significant financial problems. The doctor must decide how to tell the family their options before they expose their newborn to highly risky surgeries, with the added financial difficulties.

A Brief Note on Difficult Discussions Between Doctors and Patients provides students with a framework to help them think about how to have such discussions. The framework has three parts: 1. The contextual realities of a given case. Two categories of contextual realities exist. First, there are the factual components that surround a case. Without a full understanding of all the facts, a doctor will be handicapped in a difficult discussion. Second, there are complicating factors - the "invisible" obstacles that can create unnecessary tension or otherwise compromise a difficult conversation. 2. The goal(s). What is success in a difficult doctor-patient discussion? 3. Guidelines for difficult discussions. The specific steps to take during the discussion to create the best odds for success.

This case is about the diagnosis of Alzheimer's at a relatively young age, at a time when the patients are forced to juggle jobs, family, and dementia. The case is based on the article When Alzheimer's Hits at 40 from the Wall Street Journal (November 14, 2008). While most people who get Alzheimer's are over 65, Andy Smith, the protagonist in the case, is one of about 500,000 Americans living with Alzheimer's or other dementias at an atypically young age. Alzheimer's takes a long time to develop - usually, it isn't diagnosed until 10 years after the first symptoms appear - but more Americans are identifying it early, thanks in part to aggressive screening programs pushed in recent years by groups including the Alzheimer's Foundation of America, a national alliance of caregivers. This case has three vignettes that focus on different difficult conversations between Dr. Henderson and Andy and Cindy Smith. Dr. Henderson is there at the beginning of this ordeal as he attempts to inconclusively identify the cause of Andy's initial symptoms. Finally, after several years and many different treatments, Dr. Henderson diagnosed Andy's condition as Alzheimer's.

This case is centered on Stanford University's Palliative Care program and covers difficult conversations physicians must have with patients and their families. Situations include dealing with the angry family of a terminally ill patient, and how to legally and ethically respond to a patient's request for assisted suicide.

This case uses two vignettes to illustrate ethical questions that may occur at hospitals. In the first, 89-year old widow Theresa Addison is faced with the challenge of finding a facility that will care for her 47 year old son on a long term basis. Her son had been born with cerebral palsy, and facilities had deemed his situation futile. In the second vignette, hospital staff missed a key indicator during a newborn's first baby wellness check, resulting in considerable brain necrosis.

In April 2007, Kristin Richmond laced up her sneakers and began the four mile run to Kirsten Tobey's house. It was a Saturday morning, but the two co-founders of Revolution Foods (RevFoods), a provider of healthy meals and nutrition education to schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles, felt pressure to finalize a plan for effectively managing their relationship with Maria Nunez. Nunez, a skeptical and influential food service administrator, had been undermining the RevFoods program at Green Academy, a charter school in California's Bay Area. Richmond and Tobey believed that if they did not address the issue now, their contract with the school could be revoked, an outcome that could threaten RevFoods's standing with other schools. As Richmond jogged up the last hill before reaching Tobey's residence, she wondered how best to turn their tense relationship with Nunez into a productive partnership.

A search fund is a pool of capital raised to financially support the efforts of an entrepreneur, or a team of entrepreneurs, to locate a privately held company for acquisition. This study, as well as its predecessors in 1996, 1998, 2001,2003, and 2005 portrays the aggregate profile of search funds and the entrepreneurs who formed them, and evaluates the investment returns generated by first-time search funds to their original investors. Together, these studies reflect changes in the characteristics of search fund entrepreneurs and the performance of their funds over time.

Describes a series of three vignettes confronted by a fast-growing extended warranty services company, Extended Service Plans of America (ESPA). Doug Tudor had become the company's president after completing its acquisition for Asurion Corporation in June 2006, after a two-year search and negotiation process. Ninety-four days later, three situations occur simultaneously: one of Tudor's two top managers improperly leaks confidential information to the company's former owners; a terminated employee threatens to badmouth the company to its highest-profile customer; and new information regarding a VP's drinking and performance problems seems to call for urgent action. Allows students to understand how to deal with typical issues faced by small companies, including the dynamics of family-owned businesses, barriers faced when trying to professionalize management, and challenges faced by a new manager trying to build credibility in such an environment.

A search fund is a pool of capital raised to financially support the efforts of an entrepreneur, or a team of entrepreneurs, to locate a privately held company for acquisition. This study, as well as its predecessors in 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2003, portrays the aggregate profile of search funds and the entrepreneurs who formed them, and evaluates the investment returns generated by first-time search funds to their original investors. Together, these studies reflect changes in the characteristics of search fund entrepreneurs and the performance of their funds over time.

Reviews the start-up and growth of Gordon Biersch, a brewpub chain. As the case ends, the founders want to roll out the concept nationally and are considering the issues of organizational design and financing. They are also considering selling a majority stake to one investor.

Tom Bird and Ken Saxon are two young MBAs who buy a company after graduation. Chronicles their efforts as they grow the company from $600,000 in sales to $5 million. The two confront the issue of hiring succession management.

Examines issues encountered by a third-generation, family-owned business. Northwest Security Services (NSS) is a 55 year-old company that has developed a rich history since its founding by Ernest Wilson, a less-than-affable, junior college-educated family patriarch. The majority of the case is spent focusing on several NSS business challenges that are unique to family-owned businesses, including bringing younger generation family members into a business, underperformance by certain family member employees, asset diversification, establishing a corporate advisory board comprised of nonfamily members, division of ownership, payment of dividends, transferring authority and power to younger family members, and the sometimes hazy line between where business stops and family begins.

Founded in 1992, Grand Junction produced a very competitive product in the emerging ethernet desktop switching market. Howard Charney, CEO and a founder of Grand Junction, had spent the summer of 1995 in meetings and negotiations with his senior management team, his investment bankers, and representatives of Cisco to discuss whether Grand Junction should be acquired by Cisco or issue stock in an initial public offering (IPO). Prior to being solicited by Cisco, Charney had not really given any thought to being acquired. Grand Junction was on a fast growth curve, the IPO market was hot, and he and the other founders had planned from the beginning to take the company public. Yet Cisco was very interested, and although it had required a lot of work to get Cisco to a reasonable price, it was possible that the two companies would reach an agreement. Charney, however, was torn between the two options--he wondered which was financially more attractive, how his employees would react, and whether going public was really so important.

Focuses on David Dodson's efforts to purchase Auto Palace (ADAP), an auto parts retailer. His negotiations with the seller and investment bankers are examined. Students are asked to recommend how he should proceed in the final negotiation meeting.

Offers the opportunity to examine two important challenges in starting a company: selecting partners and finding capital. Presents a candid view into the struggle of a young entrepreneur, Dan Stilton, and his two newly acquired partners, Scott Bettor and Henry Tellsworth, as they look for capital to launch their venture, Florida Air, a regional airline.