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In the summer of 2000, Bob Embry, the President of the Abell Foundation, asked two consultants to evaluate the performance Career Caravan, a job-to-work transportation program that his foundation was helping to fund. Career Caravan took low-income residents of West Baltimore to jobs in suburban Howard County, Maryland. The idea was that good jobs were more plentiful in the suburbs than in the central city, but that Baltimore's public transit system did not serve dispersed suburban employment centers well and many inner city residents did not have driver's licenses or own cars. But Embry was concerned that "reverse commute" programs like Career Caravan were expensive and did not do away with the need for costly job training to make the clients, many of whom had never been employed before, "job ready." HKS Case Number 1695.0

On October 21, 2001, a postal worker from a mail sorting facility in Washington, DC, died of inhalation anthrax-a disease virtually unseen for a century. The next day, a second employee from the same facility died. Fear of anthrax had already infected the public: media workers in Florida and New York City had contracted the disease. In addition, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) had received an anthrax-laden letter, his staff were all on antibiotics, and the Senate and House of Representatives buildings had closed for anthrax tests. This new threat re-ignited a sense of public panic. Virtually overnight, the United States Postal Service (USPS) found itself at the eye of a national security and public health storm. This case discusses how the USPS dealt with the anthrax crisis. HKS Case Number 1692.0.

Imagine what an extra $100 billion a year could do for philanthropic and other nonprofit institutions. According to a new study, the nonprofit sector could free that amount--maybe even more--by making five changes in the way it operates. The study asked two central questions: Does the sector's money flow from its source to its ultimate use as efficiently and effectively as possible? If not, where are the big opportunities to increase social benefit? According to former Senator Bill Bradley and McKinsey's Paul Jansen and Les Silverman, nonprofits could save roughly $25 billion a year by changing the way they raise funds. By distributing funds more quickly, they could put an extra $30 billion to work. Organizations could generate more than $60 billion a year by streamlining and restructuring the way in which they provide services and by reducing administrative costs. And they could free up even more money--an amount impossible to estimate--by better allocating funds among service providers. The authors admit that making those changes won't be easy. The nonprofit world, historically seen as a collection of locally focused charities, has become an enormous sector, but it lacks the managerial processes and incentives that help keep the for-profit world on track. And when the baby boomers start to retire in less than a decade, public budgets will be squeezed even more than they are today. If the nonprofit sector is to help the nation cope with the stresses ahead, it must become more efficient and challenge its traditional concepts of stewardship.

In the Expo98 (A) case, Julio Cardoso, an INSEAD Alumnus, is being asked to design the ticketing strategy for Expo98. He needs to analyse the objectives for the Expo and to decide what pricing strategy will meet these objectives. He can analyse the results from the Vancouver, Brisbane and Seville Expos. But as each one is different, he needs to decide what is the optimal strategy for Portugal. The (B) case gives an overview of the pricing strategy that was chosen and the results of the strategy and the Expo.

Three decades of research, capped off by two new studies, suggest that managers often hold grossly distorted perceptions of their businesses and markets. The authors conclude that accurate perceptions may be less important to a company's success than managers' willingness to seek feedback and learn from it.

For the sixth year in a row, sporting-gear cooperative REI made Fortune's list of the 100 best companies for which to work. CEO Dennis Madsen shares his thoughts about the things the retailer seems to be doing right--among them, aligning corporate culture with employees' values and not getting too far ahead of customers.

Describes the thoughts of a new trustee prior to his first trustees meeting.

Describes what happens as the trustee reflects on his first several years' experience.

The Trend Micro team's discussion of consumer strategy at its quarterly meeting in Germany provides an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the team's decision process.

Four Star Motorsports is a family owned and operated garage specializing in rally cars and the sale of rally tires. In the winter, the business would have sales on tires if there was excess inventory, however, the owner was recently made aware of new pricing concepts through associates. The owner must investigate various pricing options during the upcoming selling season to increase revenue and to develop a plan that will allow adjustments for customers who are unhappy with the new pricing policy or an excess of tire inventory.

Former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt talks with HBR's Ben Gerson about investors' eroded confidence and what the SEC, Wall Street, and corporate boards must do about it.

At the heart of business today lies a dilemma: Our economy is increasingly dependent on services, yet our innovation processes remain oriented toward products. In this article, Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke points out the challenges of applying the discipline of formal R&D processes to services. Most service companies have not established rigorous, ongoing R&D processes, Thomke says. But the author provides an in-depth look at a five-step process that Bank of America has used to create new service concepts for retail banking. The company has turned a set of its branches into, in effect, a laboratory where a corporate research team conducts service experiments with actual customers during regular business hours, measures results precisely and compares them with those of control branches, and pinpoints attractive innovations for broader rollout. The article describes the program's workings, its successes, and the obstacles the bank faced. The effort reveals an enormous amount about what a true R&D operation might look like inside a service business, he concludes.

The events of this past year have prompted intense soul-searching in many quarters and led us, in this year's list of the best business ideas, to reassess some of the most basic assumptions about strategy, organizations, and leadership. We began by reconsidering the role of the leader. Discussions of leadership focus almost exclusively on the CEO. But attention also needs to be paid to the other people who make organizations work: the followers--to their responsibilities, their power, and their obligation not to follow flawed leadership. And we considered the fate of soft issues, like emotional intelligence, in hard times. It's tempting to dismiss them when your employees will do anything just to keep their jobs. But hard times are good times to employ such tools on yourself. Despite valiant efforts to lead change and eliminate inefficiencies, organizations stay messy. Perhaps it's better to learn to live with messiness. There's growth potential, too, in considering the company as a portfolio of opportunities--but only if managers can sell off poorly performing business units as easily as they've been shedding ailing stocks of late.

In November 2001, an Indian non-governmental organization dedicated to improving the lives and housing of the slum-dwellers of Bombay (Mumbai) learned that there were potential financial problems with a major new housing project in which it had invested and had convinced others to invest. The Society for the Protection of Area Resources Centres (SPARC) had, over the previous four years, repeatedly used its good name and contacts to bring together a group of private and nonprofit investors to construct a three-building, 268-unit development in the middle of Dharavi, generally considered Asia's largest slum. It had convinced one of the world's largest financial institutions, Citibank, to loan funds to India's National Slum Dwellers Federation, the organization that would build the Dharavi project; it had convinced an international nonprofit organization, the London-based Homeless International, to finance the loan, and had advanced its own funds to get the project started. But when Citbank warns that it has doubts about the likelihood of private, higher-income buyers being willing to move into a slum area-even into a new apartment building-SPARC finds it must decide whether and how to respond. Its options range from the pragmatic-simply scaling back the three-tower project-to organizing pressure and protest against Citibank, which appeared to have agreed to invest in part to burnish its image as it sought to expand its branch operations in Bombay. The case highlights some of the unexpected ways in which commercial globalization affects the potential for philanthropy and the tactics and strategy of community activists intent on extra-market measures to improve the lives of the poor. It raises both strategic issues for the nonprofit activists at the center of the narrative and questions about housing policy, as well-among them, the question of the extent of the role which philanthropically-financed "model housing" can play in ameliorating slum conditions.

The founder and CEO of Trend Micro is seeking to develop an effective decision-making process for the company's multicultural executive team as part of his effort to develop a more cohesive and focused global organization. This case describes the company's growth and development, including the efforts made to develop an approach to decision making that melds the best of Eastern and Western cultures.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 303003.

Traces changes in P&G's international strategy and structure, culminating in Organization 2005, a reorganization that places strategic emphasis on product innovation rather than geographic expansion and shifts power from local subsidiary to global business management. In the context of these changes introduced by Durk Jager, P&G's new CEO, Paolo de Cesare is transferred to Japan, where he takes over the recently turned-around beauty care business. Within the familiar Max Factor portfolio he inherits is SK-II, a fast-growing, highly profitable skin care product developed in Japan. Priced at over $100 a bottle, this is not a typical P&G product, but its successful introduction in Taiwan and Hong Kong has de Cesare thinking the brand has global potential. As the case closes, he is questioning whether he should take a proposal to the beauty care global business unit to expand into Mainland China and/or Europe.

This is the first of a two-case series. When Renault sent Carlos Ghosn to turnaround its alliance partner Nissan, observers were skeptical of his chances. After soliciting recommendations from the employees, he unveiled a three-year plan involving plant closures, job cuts, and a refocus on design. Within two years, the company had achieved a dramatic recovery, posting record profits and proposing a dazzling array of new models. Note that there are two versions of the case: 'Redesigning Nissan (A) & (B)' covers the dynamics of taking charge (case A) and the process of leading change (case B). There is also a combined and condensed version of the cases: 'Nissan's U-Turn: 1999-2001', for instructors wishing to cover the material in a single session.

When its main products, gasoline lead additives, were banned in most developed countries, a U.S. company introduced an environmentally friendly, octane-boosting gasoline additive, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT). The product was approved for use in Canada, but not sanctioned for use in Europe or the United States, due to health concerns. In response to public concerns about environmental hazards, the Canadian government introduced legislation that would ban both the import and transport of manganese-based substances, including MMT. Faced with the possibility of losing both its current Canadian market and the possibility of trade in other countries, the company considers a political strategy. Supplement to this case is Ethyl Corporation of Virginia: The MMT Battle in Canada (B), product number 9B02M049.

In 1998 the soon-to-retire founder of China Kelon Group, a major home electrical appliance manufacturer, was confronting issues of market diversification (urban to rural), product diversification (refrigerator to now also produce air conditioners), and the evolution of his senior management team (from an entrepreneurial firm to one managed by professional manager). Besides offering a context to address the above issues, this case illustrate to a non-Chinese audience just how rapidly local Chinese manufacturing has developed, and that such firms are future competitors for foreign companies. It also helps students explore the broader question about the ability of founder/entrepreneurs to effectively manage the transition to becoming a larger, more diversified company. Supplement to this case is China Kelon Group (B): Integration After Merger, product number 9B03M005.