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On their return to Croatia following a six-year visit to the United States, a couple has decided to open their own coffee house, one that is new to Croatia — a California-style coffee house that offers the quality, service, product assortment, ambiance, and efficiency found in sophisticated coffee shops in developed markets, and all for a locally affordable price. The major challenge faced by the couple is how to grow. Specifically, should they consider franchising over organic growth? If so, how should they go about franchising in a country where the market is developing and where franchising is under-regulated, underdeveloped, and misunderstood?

The Minister of Justice for the Republic of Iceland is contemplating how to work with the various stakeholders to implement the recommendations for the structure of policing. The main issue to address is how to consolidate the number of region-based police forces. The minister's views on restructuring the police force are shared by the police association; however, a number of municipalities and police commissioners are not as enthusiastic about the proposed changes to the structure of the police organization. He understands that change is never a pain-free process. Formal reports have been submitted and now is the time to make some decisions.

The chief executive officer (CEO) of Fortune Motors, the largest Mitsubishi dealership in Taiwan, has to consider his vision for the survival of the company. Fortune Motors' sales in 2003 had fallen below 50,000 units for the first time in 10 years, and market share had been falling for several years. The CEO had a plan to enter the business of financing used-car purchases. He thought that the balanced scorecard would be a useful tool to help him implement this change. The first step was to construct a corporate scorecard.

The year 2007 had to have been one of the worst in the history of British Petroleum plc (BP). In the span of four months, two separate independent reports (the first one commissioned by BP itself) had identified a deeply rooted culture of risk within BP where money and profits were valued above worker and environmental safety. These reports were in response to an explosion in 2005 at an oil refinery in Texas City, in the United States, which killed 15 people and injured more than 180, but the reports also referred to pipeline leaks in Alaska as well as other serious safety lapses throughout BP's global operations. The Texas City explosion was the worst but not the first major incident at a BP facility, and the revelations in the reports severely damaged the credibility the so-called super-major oil company had earned over the last decade. The job of restoring investor and stakeholder confidence as well as the firm's reputation fell to the BP board and its star group chief executive, Lord John Browne. The B case, product 9B08M003, examines the role played by the board with respect to the personal integrity of Lord Browne. The teaching objectives are to introduce students to examining the role of the board with respect to risk management as well as its social responsibilities to various stakeholders.

This supplement to product 9B08M002 examines the role played by the board with respect to the personal integrity of Lord Browne, who had been several times identified as the chief executive officer of the year by the Financial Times.

Coloplast's future global manufacturing strategy was based on relocation of volume production of mature product lines to low cost countries like Hungary and China, whereas most creative and innovative activities (pilot production, ramp-up and range care) were retained in Denmark. The large scale project of offshoring, first volume production and later perhaps other activities, to Tatabanya, Hungary constituted a major shift in the operational strategy for Coloplast, which resulted in a series of organizational and managerial challenges. An important feature of the case is the surprise to the management team of how challenging it was to globalize the operations despite Coloplast's international experience operating a network of subsidiaries in more than 26 countries. The management team learned how important it is to have the structure, the organization and the mindset in place when offshoring production. Sourcing internationally is very different from selling internationally as it involves the entire organization. The learning process of the management team and the challenges they faced is unfolded in this case.

The experienced entrepreneurial chief executive officer (CEO) of Jadelink International Limited was striving to create a modern jewelry brand representing a new perception in jade. The CEO has achieved early success by growing sales rapidly and bringing Jadelink products to Shanghai, the trendiest city in China. But the company wanted to expand business to the Asian and international luxury goods markets. This requires intensive capital to continue to build up the company scale. This case examines the establishment of a new business in China, managing business growth and acquiring venture capital. It also allows discussion of factors leading to successful entrepreneurship and dealing with business highly associated with industry tradition, people connection, and product design and innovation.

The director of information technology (IT) at Ritcher, a major Hungarian pharmaceutical company with operations throughout Eastern Europe, is planning for the IT department for the near future. The three main considerations for the coming year are: Is the current IT structure appropriate to meet the growing demands of the organization? To what extent should IT affiliates be centrally controlled? How can IT best serve the rest of the company?

Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required by a service agreement. Rather than finding a swift resolution to the rapidly escalating customer situation that motivated his trip, he finds himself facing distributed work, global collaboration, conflict and management issues that are threatening to unravel his team.

New metrics have been introduced to a software technical support call center operation. These metrics have revealed a wide range of performance between employees both for time taken to answer customers' questions and the customer's perceived quality of service. The call center manager is wondering how to make use of these metrics. He is inclined to go public with them, whereas the head of human resources believes that this could be damaging to employee morale and will also make it more difficult for the company to recruit in a market experiencing labor shortages.

The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) considered how to advise the company's chief executive officer (CEO). As a company in the space industry, MDA relied on its exports to the United States. Joint ventures were helpful in securing contracts from the U.S. government but they were not always advantageous in other ways because these ventures required partnerships with competitors. At this time, MDA had no long term strategy to address this issue. The supplements MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (B) and (C) look at subsequent events that were unforeseen at this particular time.

The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) had been informed that U.S.-based Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK) had proposed a takeover of MDA's main business line - its security and intelligence business. The director was faced with several financial and ethical dilemmas which he needed to resolve before meeting with the board. The supplement MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (C) looks at the decisions that were made and the results of these decisions.

MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (C) is the third part of a three-part case. The director and chair of the governance committee at MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd. (MDA) reflects upon the past two-and-a-half months. He and other members of the board of directors faced difficult decisions but were pleased to see that their decisions had almost unanimous support from stockholders. As he read the business section of the newspaper, he wondered whether the decisions had been considered carefully with all the stakeholders in mind.

A consultant with CARE Enterprise Partners (CEP) is tasked to provide consulting for three social enterprises in different stages of development, each benefiting from CEP funding and support. CONASE - an oatmeal manufacturer selling to the government's vaso de leche free breakfast program - asked for advice on strategic analysis and creative approaches to customer relations. Seviagro - a market linkage social enterprise aggregating produce from smallholder artichoke farmers for resale to a large processing and export company - requested support with cost analysis and accounting. Corporacion Solar - initially established as a buyer and reseller of spinach produced by Andean farmers but currently transitioning from a market linkage model to a hybrid model - was looking for assistance in reshaping its growth strategy to target major buyers in Lima with a more diversified product offering. The three for-profit social enterprises profiled in this case sample a new breed of locally-reliant, market-driven models, which could further Peru's rural development in mountainous regions like the Ancash province. Their success could be tremendously influential in charting a new approach to development in the Andes. Success here could also endorse CEP's pioneering approach to development around the world. But despite careful start-up planning and very promising triple-bottom line projections, each enterprise confronted unexpected challenges in customer relations, cost management, sourcing and distribution. As these social ventures were getting off the ground, their founders' ability to simultaneously meet their social goals and remain economically viable was in jeopardy. The case asks students to put themselves in the consultant role and reposition these social ventures for sustainable growth.

As of mid-2008, Regio's sole shareholder, chairman and president is leading his team through a strategy refreshing process. Regio, an Estonian company established in 1989 as a map-maker, is now involved in four principal business activities: location-based services for mobile phones, geographical information systems (GIS) software development, the creation of geospatial data and the production of maps. The company's current revenues are about 5 million euro dollars and the president is wondering what he can do to propel the company to new heights of 40 million euro dollar to 50 million euro dollars in revenues by 2015.

This case provides students with a deeper understanding of commodity futures markets in general and natural gas markets in particular. It also provides an introduction to hedge funds and insight into the largest hedge fund collapse in history. Third, it introduces such concepts as liquidity risk, value-at-risk, spread trades and the use of derivatives. As of the case date, Amaranth had not publicly disclosed the positions that led to $6 billion in losses during the month of September 2006. The case was written using public information and provides key pieces of data to allow students to reverse engineer possible positions Amaranth may have held.

The chief financial officer of Pixonix Inc. is trying to decide if she should hedge, given the current strength of the Canadian dollar. Her company licenses proprietary software through a U.S. company that will cost $7.5 million in three months time. The case provides the students with the opportunity to understand the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on her firm's cash flows and some of the instruments available to manage risk, including puts and calls and forward contracts.

The financial system is the heart of free market economies. The 2007-2008 financial crisis raised concerns that the global financial and economic system might experience a truly substantial collapse. New financial instruments had proliferated to the degree that it had become impossible to calculate the market value of many of them, and so it had become impossible to know the market value of institutions that held them or that guaranteed them. The initial disaster occurred with the U.S. subprime residential mortgage market, but it quickly spread globally to institutions that held new financial instruments related to these mortgages. Firms that had guaranteed these financial instruments found that their net worth was disappearing, leading to concerns about the institutions that had relied on their guarantees. Meanwhile, new kinds of hedge funds introduced the risk of greater volatility, and they exposed investors to sudden shocks. Many banks were caught in this web and suddenly had to obtain additional equity capital in order to meet regulatory requirements and maintain the confidence of depositors. As a result of these developments, liquidity disappeared from the financial system. It seemed that recession in the United States was inevitable. Previous expectations that other economies had become decoupled for the United States were being replaced by fears that economies throughout the world would follow the United States into recession. Central banks reacted dramatically with attempts to reduce interest rates and to increase financial liquidity, and the U.S. government cut personal taxes through a tax refund program. It was not clear whether monetary and fiscal policies could prevent a long and deep recession. Debate arose concerning the advisability of a wide variety of new regulations that might be able to prevent future recurrence of such a financial crisis.

The president of a small mining company is faced with an opportunity to purchase a mining refinery to complement its existing mining operations. It has the potential to bring the company into a situation of positive cashflow, but the small size of the company and high risk of the mining industry has left the president with few alternatives to raise the capital. The case focuses on the issuing of a Euro-denominated bond to finance this purchase and provide funds for future acquisitions. The case discusses the alternatives available in such a situation as well as the risks associated with changes in the price of metals and the value of the U.S. dollar, Canadian dollar and the Euro on the ability to make regular payments on the Euro-denominated bond and other financing alternatives.

This case explores the expansion of an imported product - garlic and herb cubes. This case can be used to explore the merits of alternative channels of distribution or it may be used more broadly to explore the development of a more effective marketing program. Students are asked to 1) assess how the competition affects Toppits' marketing plan; 2) select a customer group to target and determine how this group affects the marketing plan; 3) determine and evaluate distribution options; 4) develop a promotional strategy and budget and 5) make a decision.