個案總覽

Set in mid-2002, this case illustrates "a day in the life" of a district sales manager of a Silicon Valley company, as the technology market faced a downturn. The case enables a polarized class discussion about the tradeoffs that a new district manager might make relative to hiring / firing and setting quotas, after inheriting a mixed bag of talent in an underperforming district. It also seeks to provide with additional texture about the types of challenges and activities that such an individual would face (different from those faced by a sales representative). The case enables students to engage in discussions about four key dilemmas faced by the district manager: (a) Which representatives should he retain in his district, and which should he fire?, (b) How should he negotiate quotas/goals with his superior (regional manager), and with his representatives?, (c) Should he train an employee who will likely fall short of the company's growth goals, or replace him in hopes of hiring on a better performer?, and (d) What should Jim do about an employee who appears to insist in putting the customer's interests ahead of the company's?

When Vineet Nayar became president of HCL Technologies, a global IT services business, in April 2005, he knew the company needed drastic change. Since its founding as a hardware company in the 1970s, HCL had grown into an enterprise with $3.7 billion in revenues and a market capitalization of $5.1 billion. The company had 41,000 employees in 11 countries, but it was ill-prepared for the increasingly competitive market. With the shift from hardware to software and services, HCL had slipped behind its Indian competitors and multinational companies. Details the first phase of the transformation Nayar led in hopes of rejuvenating the industry pioneer. The tagline for this phase was "Employee First, Customer Second."

Supplements the (A) case.

Much popular thinking in the business world is shaped by delusions--fundamental errors of judgment that distort our understanding about company performance. One of the most important delusions is the halo effect, which is the tendency to attribute many positive features to successful companies and to make the opposite attributions when companies falter. The halo effect, in turn, contaminates the data used in many large-scale studies of company performance, including some of the most popular studies of recent years. The result is a misplaced belief that companies can follow formulas to achieve high performance, when in fact performance is better understood as relative, not absolute. To achieve high performance, companies must do more than follow formulas--they must differentiate themselves from rivals by making choices under conditions of uncertainty.

Would it be possible for Google to enter China without violating its informal corporate motto, "Don't Be Evil?" In 2005, Google, Inc.'s top management team and board of directors struggled to decide if the company should enter China--and if so, how. Since 2000, the company had offered a Chinese-language version of its popular search engine hosted on servers outside China. However, Chinese users found this service slow and unreliable, and Google was rapidly losing market share, particularly to the Chinese firm Baidu. At the same time, the number of Internet users in China--and with them the potential for online advertising revenue--had been growing almost exponentially. Yet, serious ethical questions remained unresolved. China operated the most far-reaching and sophisticated system of Internet censorship in the world. Any Internet firm doing business there would have to filter content that the communist regime considered offensive. Moreover, the Chinese government had demanded that other U.S. Internet firms identify individuals who had used their e-mail or blogs to criticize the authorities, and at least one dissident had been jailed as a result. Was doing business in China compatible with Google's mission to make the world's information "universally accessible and useful?"

Wayne Eisener has received two job offers. The first offer is an executive vice-president position at Richmond Hill Mortgages (RHM). The second offer is a junior lawyer position at Weiler and Simons LLP, Barristers and Solicitors. The mortgage company offers a small base salary but potentially large commissions in the long run. The law firm offers a higher base salary and the opportunity to be promoted to partner within five years. However, Eisener would need to update his knowledge of law substantially. As he reflects on the advantages and disadvantages of each job, Eisener must consider his past and how each job will help him accomplish the goals of providing for his family and creating a resurgence in his career.

The patent system is introduced to the non-legal professional by reviewing the historical justification for having a patent system and the foundations of the U.S. patent system, contrasting patents with trade secrets, exploring invention requirements for obtaining a patent, and reviewing the patent application process, international patent protection, and the elements of infringement, validity, and enforcement through litigation.

Managing conflict and differences has always been an essential, but challenging, skill to master for effective leadership. This case was designed to build expertise in developing external and internal relationships and dealing with conflict. Grounded in the pedagogy of experiential learning, the case consists of three role-play scenarios that exemplify three challenging education situations. In each scenario, two individuals are faced with a possible difference in perspective or goals. The role-play requires students to assume the role of one of the individuals, and each scenario requires one student to initiate the follow-up discussion. Please note: This case should be printed single-sided only.

The case asks students to develop a method for identifying individuals at risk of having chronic kidney disease. A 6,000 subject training set containing 34 potential predictor variables is provided along with a 2,819 subject validation set the instructor uses to evaluate student predictions. The case is based on an actual study which resulted in a simple nine-question survey that instrument health professionals use to help patients decide whether to be tested for chronic kidney disease.

A managing director of international equities for a large public sector pension fund has to decide how the pension fund would vote on say for pay. Say for pay represents a vote held at the annual general meeting whereby shareholders have an annual and non-binding (thus it has no legal effect on the board or the corporation) opportunity to vote on executive compensation. Such a vote is obligatory in Australia and the United Kingdom and is starting to be practised in the United States. The case introduces students to elements of executive compensation, governance issues with executive compensation, the compensation analysis process, and the business model of investment bank / merchant banks and the use of private equity funds as vehicles to create value and retain value to the general partner and shareholders or the investment bank / merchant bank.

CEMEX grew through acquisitions from a Latin American to a global company under the leadership of a CEO who believed in the importance of a "one enterprise" culture and benchmarking against world standards. As the CEO ponders an acquisition that would double the company's size and take it to new geographies, he wonders if the right capabilities are in place for what should be changed to manage the integration process effectively.

An abstract is not available for this product.

Greg Mills describes his search for the perfect engagement ring which includes an analysis of the prices of 6,000 diamonds. An engineer, Greg hopes to impress Sarah Staggers by using regression to find an underpriced diamond. Students are asked to either select one of the 6,000 diamonds or provide point forecasts for prices of 3,142 diamonds in a hold-out sample. The instructor can use the actual prices of the held-out diamonds to evaluate student pricing models.

Spreadsheet supplement for case UV0869.

These three caselets provide practice using risk preference and utility, with both exponential utility (constant risk aversion) and logarithmic utility (decreasing risk aversion). The second caselet is an extension of "Integrated Siting Systems, Inc." (UV0355). Students may use TreePlan to conduct a sensitivity analysis of risk tolerance, and can employ Solver to find optimal risk sharing. Students will learn concepts and garner insights regarding portfolio risk in making investments, how intangibles can affect evaluation of risk, and how expected utility can exploit risk sharing.

Resina is a global manufacturer of resins and surfacing solutions headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, and has three production facilities and 12 sales offices in China. The head of Asia Pacific for Resina needs to decide what should be done about Beijing and Guangdong. Should Beijing remain in operation, be shut down, or moved to another area where demand for liquid bulk resins is stronger. Similar options exist in Guangdong. In aiming towards profitable operations, he needs to consider the buoyancy of local demand, Resina's partner in Beijing, local and foreign competitors and appropriate managers in each operation.

In 2003, 3M initiated contact with Yunnan Baiyao Group Co., Ltd. (YB) to discuss potential cooperation opportunities in the area of transdermal pharmaceutical products. YB's, namesake, of one of its main products, Yunnan Baiyao, was a household brand in China for its unique traditional herbal medicines. In recent years, the company had been engaged in a series of corporate reforms and product/market diversification strategies to respond to the change in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry and competition at a global level. By 2003, YB was already a vertically integrated, product-diversified group company with an ambition to become an international player. The proposed cooperation with 3M was attractive to YB, not only as an opportunity for domestic product diversification, but also for international diversification. YB had been attempting to internationalize its products and an overseas department had been established in 2002 specifically for this purpose. On the other hand, YB had also been considering another option for some time, namely, whether to extend its brand to toothpaste and other healthcare products. YB had to make decisions about which of the two options to pursue and whether it was feasible to pursue both.

AIG is an American insurance company. A trade dispute between the United States and the European Union threatens to block the accession of China to the World Trade Organization, and AIG plays a role - it is the only foreign firm to own fully-controlled subsidiaries in China. The disagreement concerns what will happen to these existing subsidiaries, as well as potential new ones that AIG might seek to establish in China in the future. What are the issues from the perspective of each of the stakeholders and what options are available that will resolve this dispute?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In the past, companies have tried to manage risks by focusing on potential threats outside the organization: competitors, shifts in the strategic landscape, natural disasters, or geopolitical events. They are generally less adept at detecting internal vulnerabilities that creep into organizations and other human-designed systems. Indeed, as companies increase the complexity of their systems they often fail to pay sufficient attention to the introduction and proliferation of loopholes and flaws. A crucial thing to remember is that the possibility of random failure rises as the number of combinations of things that can go wrong increases, while the opportunity for acts of malicious intent also goes up. Build new applications on top of legacy systems and errors creep in between the lines of code. Merge two companies and weaknesses sprout between the organizational boundaries. Build Byzantine corporate structures and processes and obscure pockets are created where bad behavior can hide. Furthermore, the enormous complexity of large systems like communications networks means that even tiny glitches can cascade into catastrophic events. In fact, catastrophic events are almost guaranteed to occur in many complex systems, much like big earthquakes are bound to happen. So, without the benefit of perfect foresight, how can businesses uncover and forestall the fatal flaws lurking within their organizations? There are three complementary strategies: (1) Assess the risk to make better-informed decisions, such as purchasing an insurance policy to cover the risk; (2) spot vulnerabilities and fix them before catastrophic events occur; and (3) design out weaknesses through resilience. These ideas have been around for years, but researchers have recently had to reinvent them in the context of extremely complex, interconnected, cascade-prone systems.