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The superintendent of the St. Thomas Golf Course had to develop the 2010 operating budget for the maintenance of the golf course and recommend the extent of infrastructure expenditures for the upcoming year. The course was facing increased labour costs due to recent government-mandated increases in the minimum wage. The recommendations had to be made in terms of a weak economy in the area and a recent decline in membership. The student must first assess the financial position of the course prior to determining the extent to which discretionary expenditures should be recommended. The case requires the development of an operating budget and permits a discussion of follow-up procedures for monitoring the budget.

A young man in India follows his passion through to near-bankruptcy. Equipped with an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, he avoids a high-paying corporate job and instead starts a stockbroking firm. After ups and downs in several businesses, he finally decides his real fulfilment will come from producing a full-length movie — Ashta Chamma, based on the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Ernest. The case chronicles the various issues he faces: funding the production, choosing the director, choosing a story that will satisfy his requirement of family entertainment, casting the principal characters, and creating a team that can bring the production to the movie theatres. The case goes behind the scenes of the film world in Tollywood, the Teluga film industry in Andhra Pradesh, and highlights the pressures faced by an entrepreneur in the industry. A rare combination of creativity, professionalism, and good business sense bring about success for the entrepreneur. Part B of the case presents the outcome after the release of the movie.

This supplement to Ashta Chamma — The Biggest Small Movie Ever Made (A) presents the outcome after the movie’s release.

A successful Canadian road construction and maintenance company is contemplating U.S. market entry via a subsidiary in Texas. The case deals with market entry considerations: speed of entry, the need to invest in learning about a market, and the importance of staying focused on what is a reasonable, original strategy.

This is a supplement to Currie Road Construction Limited (A). Having operated for two years in the Texas market, the company is confronting a variety of difficulties. The case looks at the organization issues of reporting relationships, control systems, and staffing.

This is part of a case series. Simon Cohen parked his Acura SUV outside his Monterrey office, let the fingerprint scanner check his ID to open the door, and jogged upstairs past the huge poster showing containers and cranes at the port of Manzanillo. He paused for a moment in the company's boardroom. Here, a week earlier he had agreed with his business partners how they would restructure the company's ownership, and build on the success of the last 10 years. 'How could Thomas change his mind?' he wondered. Simon shook his head and strode into his office, wondering what to do. Over the previous 10 years, Simon and his three business partners - his brother Jose, Manfred Jaekel and Thomas Kroeger - had built up a successful freight forwarding business, with offices in Monterrey and Guadalajara. Manfred and Thomas ran their own separate, and longer-established branch in Mexico City. Simon had won some large, multinational customers, and had benefited from the increase in imports from China. By focusing on customer service, and by building up a hard-working team, he had grown bigger than the original Mexico City operation. There had been some friction over the years, but Manfred had proposed combining the companies into a group, and after some negotiation a verbal agreement had been struck on 15 August 2007. But, a week later, Thomas had phoned to say that he would not go ahead with the deal they had agreed. Simon was forced to reconsider his options.

Supplement to case LBS119. This is part of a case series. Simon Cohen parked his Acura SUV outside his Monterrey office, let the fingerprint scanner check his ID to open the door, and jogged upstairs past the huge poster showing containers and cranes at the port of Manzanillo. He paused for a moment in the company's boardroom. Here, a week earlier he had agreed with his business partners how they would restructure the company's ownership, and build on the success of the last 10 years. 'How could Thomas change his mind?' he wondered. Simon shook his head and strode into his office, wondering what to do. Over the previous 10 years, Simon and his three business partners - his brother Jose, Manfred Jaekel and Thomas Kroeger - had built up a successful freight forwarding business, with offices in Monterrey and Guadalajara. Manfred and Thomas ran their own separate, and longer-established branch in Mexico City. Simon had won some large, multinational customers, and had benefited from the increase in imports from China. By focusing on customer service, and by building up a hard-working team, he had grown bigger than the original Mexico City operation. There had been some friction over the years, but Manfred had proposed combining the companies into a group, and after some negotiation a verbal agreement had been struck on 15 August 2007. But, a week later, Thomas had phoned to say that he would not go ahead with the deal they had agreed. Simon was forced to reconsider his options.

Supplement to case LBS119. This is part of a case series. Simon Cohen parked his Acura SUV outside his Monterrey office, let the fingerprint scanner check his ID to open the door, and jogged upstairs past the huge poster showing containers and cranes at the port of Manzanillo. He paused for a moment in the company's boardroom. Here, a week earlier he had agreed with his business partners how they would restructure the company's ownership, and build on the success of the last 10 years. 'How could Thomas change his mind?' he wondered. Simon shook his head and strode into his office, wondering what to do. Over the previous 10 years, Simon and his three business partners - his brother Jose, Manfred Jaekel and Thomas Kroeger - had built up a successful freight forwarding business, with offices in Monterrey and Guadalajara. Manfred and Thomas ran their own separate, and longer-established branch in Mexico City. Simon had won some large, multinational customers, and had benefited from the increase in imports from China. By focusing on customer service, and by building up a hard-working team, he had grown bigger than the original Mexico City operation. There had been some friction over the years, but Manfred had proposed combining the companies into a group, and after some negotiation a verbal agreement had been struck on 15 August 2007. But, a week later, Thomas had phoned to say that he would not go ahead with the deal they had agreed. Simon was forced to reconsider his options.

Supplement to case LBS119. This is part of a case series. Simon Cohen parked his Acura SUV outside his Monterrey office, let the fingerprint scanner check his ID to open the door, and jogged upstairs past the huge poster showing containers and cranes at the port of Manzanillo. He paused for a moment in the company's boardroom. Here, a week earlier he had agreed with his business partners how they would restructure the company's ownership, and build on the success of the last 10 years. 'How could Thomas change his mind?' he wondered. Simon shook his head and strode into his office, wondering what to do. Over the previous 10 years, Simon and his three business partners - his brother Jose, Manfred Jaekel and Thomas Kroeger - had built up a successful freight forwarding business, with offices in Monterrey and Guadalajara. Manfred and Thomas ran their own separate, and longer-established branch in Mexico City. Simon had won some large, multinational customers, and had benefited from the increase in imports from China. By focusing on customer service, and by building up a hard-working team, he had grown bigger than the original Mexico City operation. There had been some friction over the years, but Manfred had proposed combining the companies into a group, and after some negotiation a verbal agreement had been struck on 15 August 2007. But, a week later, Thomas had phoned to say that he would not go ahead with the deal they had agreed. Simon was forced to reconsider his options.

At a meeting in September 2007 of the executive committee of Bayer MaterialScience, Greg Babe knew he was expected to present a detailed plan for reducing overhead costs at the company's North American headquarters. Earlier that year the committee had suggested shutting down the headquarters altogether; to preserve the region's credibility-and his own position-Babe would have to find some impressive savings. And he did. The plan he presented would cut 25% from the $400 million in overhead costs. But Babe didn't stop there: He asked for $70 million in additional resources, which he would use to completely transform and grow the business. That bold proposal paid off. The committee endorsed his plan and granted the $70 million, giving Babe 18 months in which to deliver. Now he would have to lay off hundreds of employees, retrain 1,000 others, outsource many operations, roll out new IT systems, and modify the company's product offerings. Following the mantra "Simplify, standardize, automate," the members of his transformation team redesigned virtually every one of the company's business processes. But perhaps most important, they developed change-management skills within the organization.

Since 1776, when Adam Smith described how the division of labor could spur economic progress, work has increasingly been broken into ever smaller tasks performed by ever more specialized workers. Now, however, as knowledge work expands and technology advances, we've entered a new era of hyperspecialization: Work previously done by one person is divided into more-specialized pieces done by multiple people, achieving improvements in quality, speed, and cost. For example, the start-up software firm TopCoder chops its clients' IT projects into bite-size chunks and offers them to its worldwide community of developers in the form of competitive challenges. The developers aspire to be ranked among the company's top coders, virtually guaranteeing quality in the winning end products. A company called CastingWords produces transcripts of audio files by farming out segments to remote workers for simultaneous transcription: Many hands make (extremely) fast work. The nonprofit Samasource sends data-entry work to marginalized individuals in the developing world, where tiny jobs lasting just minutes and paying just pennies give workers an economic boost while creating substantial savings for clients. Managers who want to capitalize on hyperspecialization's possibilities need to learn how best to divide knowledge work into discrete tasks, recruit specialized workers, ensure the quality of the work, and integrate the pieces into a final whole. Meanwhile, companies and governments must be aware of the potential perils of this new age: "digital sweatshops" and other forms of worker exploitation; nefarious schemes hidden behind task atomization; work that becomes dull and meaningless; increased electronic surveillance of workers. All these, the authors believe, could be ameliorated by global rules and practices and a new form of "guilds" to provide workers with a sense of community and support for professional development.

Social media and technologies have put connectivity on steroids and made collaboration more integral to business than ever. But without the right leadership, collaboration can go astray. Employees who try to collaborate on everything may wind up stuck in endless meetings, struggling to reach agreement. On the other side of the coin, executives who came of age during the heyday of "command and control" management can have trouble adjusting their style to fit the new realities. In their research on top-performing CEOs, Insead professors Ibarra and Hansen have examined what it takes to be a collaborative leader. They've found that it requires connecting people and ideas outside an organization to those inside it, leveraging diverse talent, modeling collaborative behavior at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. In this article, they describe tactics that executives from Akamai, GE, Reckitt Benckiser, and other firms use in those four areas and how they foster high-performance collaborative cultures in their organizations.

Boston Scientific founder John Abele has been party to his share of groundbreaking innovations over the years. But the revolutionary advances in medical science that these breakthroughs brought about were not the efforts of one firm alone, let alone one inventor. Abele tells two fascinating stories of collaboration-one about Jack Whitehead's upending of hospitals' blood and urine testing procedures and the other about Andreas Gruentzig's success in bringing balloon catheterization into the cardiology mainstream. Both Whitehead and Gruentzig spearheaded the emergence of entirely new fields, bringing together scientist-customers to voluntarily develop standards, training programs, new business models, and even a specialized language to describe their new field. The process of collaboration, Abele says, is fraught with contradictions and subtlety. It takes consummate leadership skills to persuade others to spend countless hours solving important problems in partnership with people they don't necessarily like. Moreover, managing egos so that each person's commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way that doesn't disadvantage others requires an impresario personality. Finally, true authenticity-something that few people can project-is critical for earning customers' trust and convincing them that their valuable contributions won't be used for anything other than moving the technology forward.

Bob Iger became Disney's CEO in 2005, following a rough five years for the company that included a hostile takeover attempt, a shareholder revolt, and a battle with two prominent board members. High on his agenda was ending the internal warfare and winning back employees' enthusiasm and admiration. He also needed to help the company see technology as an opportunity rather than a threat and to strike the right balance between tradition and innovation. It was time, for example, to move on to computer-generated animation-and even to update the bland Mickey Mouse, who was originally meant to be impish and irreverent. (Donald Duck filled that role after Mickey became a corporate symbol and a role model for kids.) Iger is a strong believer in taking big risks, in being accessible, and in paying attention to one's instincts. He's driven by challenges-as an early experience shows: At the age of 23 he was told by his boss that he wasn't promotable. He believes that a CEO's role involves determining strategy; establishing ethics for the company, its employees, and its products; and hiring and motivating great people. In this edited interview with HBR's editor in chief, Iger talks about executive compensation, the changing nature of stock ownership, Disney's use of social media, and the company's new theme park in Shanghai.

The adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is true. The right social network can have a huge impact on your success. But many people have misguided ideas about what makes a network strong: They believe the key is having a large circle filled with high-powered contacts. That's not the right approach, say Cross, of UVA's McIntire School of Commerce, and Thomas, of the Accenture Institute for High Performance. The authors, who have spent years researching how organizations can capitalize on employees' social networks, have seen that the happiest, highest-performing executives have a different kind of network: select but diverse, made up of high-quality relationships with people who come from varying spheres and from up and down the corporate ladder. Effective networks typically range in size from 12 to 18 people. They help managers learn, make decisions with less bias, and grow personally. Cross and Thomas have found that they include six critical kinds of connections: people who provide information, ideas, or expertise; formally and informally powerful people, who offer mentoring and political support; people who give developmental feedback; people who lend personal support; people who increase your sense of purpose or worth; and people who promote work/life balance. Moreover, the best kind of connections are "energizers"-positive, trustworthy individuals who enjoy other people and always see opportunities, even in challenging situations. If your network doesn't look like this, you can follow a four-step process to improve it. You'll need to identify who your connections are and what they offer you, back away from redundant and energy-draining connections, fill holes in your network with the right kind of people, and work to make the most of your contacts. Do this, and in due course, you'll have a network that steers the best opportunities, ideas, and talent your way.

In 2008 Merritt Paulson announced plans to bid for the right to convert the minor-league Portland Timbers into an expansion franchise in Major League Soccer starting in 2011. Since the deal required him to renovate the existing stadium for soccer, he proposed converting a beloved neighborhood park into a stadium for his baseball team, the Portland Beavers-and he wanted more than half of the $85 million project to be paid for by public funds. Perhaps not surprisingly, the plan caused an uproar, and Paulson found himself unprepared for the intense public scrutiny and criticism that followed. Another person might have buckled under the pressure and abandoned the effort. But Paulson developed a thick skin, learned how to negotiate in the spotlight, and saw his vision become a successful reality.

The South African archbishop, civil rights leader, and Nobel Peace Prize winner talks about finding the patience to overcome apartheid and how he has benefited from the prayers of others.

Governments throughout the world have offered subsidies for a wide variety of reasons, including increasing investments and jobs (particularly those that are high-tech), stimulating economically depressed regions, supporting domestic agriculture, and preventing bankruptcies through “bail-outs.” Subsidies now play a key role in business location decisions, and impact international competitiveness. Recipients of subsidies can offer their goods and services for sale at lower prices than would exist in the absence of subsidies. Foreign-based corporations may regard these lower prices as unfair competition in international trade. Consequently, international trade negotiations have come to focus on many of these subsidy programs as trade distortions that should be limited by formal international agreements. Some countries, especially the United States, impose special countervail duties if their corporations are being hurt by foreign subsidies. With current and projected reductions in trade barriers, subsidies will become relatively more important as a trade-determining process. Nevertheless, subsidies are implemented to pursue certain social objectives, and so an intergovernmental pact that limits subsidies may diminish, rather than improve, the well being of signatories.

The owner of South Side Restaurant, a mid- to upper-class restaurant located in Chicago, Illinois, must decide which of three bottles of wine to add to the restaurant’s wine list. Given that the restaurant prides itself on its environmental and social positioning and that its consumers have come to expect performance in this area, the wine’s carbon footprint represents an important decision criterion. South Side Restaurant is a for-profit restaurant and the owner must balance this environmental criterion with short- and long-term financial returns.

This case deals with the problems that Platmin faces as it heads toward full production at a new open-cast mine in Pilanesberg, South Africa. Platmin is in a very difficult situation that is affecting the viability of the operation. The main issue is the timing of the production — investment in mining is typically heavy in the beginning, but when the mine starts producing, payback of loans is usually substantial. Any delay in production has an exaggerated effect on the payback period and, by extension, the viability of the mine. The second major issue is the economic downturn, which has seen the price of platinum decline substantially; however, this may benefit Platmin because it is a low-cost producer, and the downturn has led to some competitors leaving the industry or “mothballing” operations that are not viable at the current platinum price. On the other hand, while Platmin is seeing a shakeup in the industry, it is experiencing pressures on its margins, and this also has an effect on its capital funding.