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In the autumn of 2013, the president and chief executive officer of Schenck Shanghai Machinery Corp. Ltd., a subsidiary of the Dürr Group situated in Shanghai, China, was reviewing his business operations. The Dürr Group was a multinational machine tool manufacturer based in Germany. In emerging economies, the mid-market had become the battleground between foreign and local firms. Traditionally, foreign investors earned healthy margins in the premium segment, but many realized that they were missing out on fast-growing market segments and were facing potential threats from local competitors who were moving up-market. To remain competitive and to ensure future growth and profitability, while not compromising the brand's reputation, the Chinese subsidiary had to ensure continued support from headquarters in Germany.

A Singapore-based financial services company, the second largest lender in Southeast Asia, offered to acquire a Hong Kong bank, the eighth largest lender in the country, for a premium price per share. Three months later, a multi-billion hedge fund firm based in the United States had accumulated close to 8 per cent of the Hong Kong bank’s shares. According to Hong Kong’s securities law, the Singapore-based financial institution would have to acquire 90 per cent of the Hong Kong bank’s shares to successfully take the bank private, and there were only 25 days left for the company to meet this requirement. The hedge fund firm’s unspoken message was clear: raise your bid price to buy our shares or we will keep the company public at your expense.

Rockland Hospitals, a family-run entrepreneurial health care venture, had gone from a 90-bed capacity in 2004 to 808 beds in 2014. It had created an identity as an affordable, quality-driven health care provider in the National Capital Region of India. However, the managing director needed a growth plan that would achieve his goal of creating a medical corridor in the National Capital Region with a consortium of four super-specialty hospitals. Should he focus on capacity utilization and enhancing the efficiency of existing hospitals? Was attracting more medical tourists from foreign countries the answer? Or should he strive to create a health care network that reached the remotest corners of India?<br><br>Can be used with Rockland Hospitals: Innovating Health Care in India (B). 9B15A034

Rockland Hospital, a family-owned entrepreneurial health care group, had conceptualized an integrated health care network that could connect patients, clinics, diagnostic centres, secondary-care hospitals and three existing Rockland specialty hospitals through an information technology interface. Implementation and control of the strategy had to be seamless. When profitability and growth came with the necessary conditions of coordination, transparency and accountability, how could Rockland ensure effective, efficient medical treatment and services to the end user? Could Rockland manage the complexities of multiple stakeholders and multiple health care delivery paths?<br><br> Can be used with Rockland Hospitals: Innovating Health Care in India (A), 9B15A033.

In 2013, ShangGong Group — a Chinese sewing machine manufacturer — had successfully acquired three German manufacturing companies that were more technologically advanced than it was. The aim of these acquisitions was to help ShangGong catch up to other multinational players in the international market. While the CEO had learned a few lessons from the first acquisition, the strategic and operational challenges were different this time. He needed to act decisively while dealing with the companies’ many stakeholders in Europe and China. One of his goals was to strengthen ShangGong’s market position in China using both its German and domestic brands. Beyond the recent acquisitions in Germany, how could he solidify ShangGong’s leadership in China and eventually challenge the Japanese companies who were leading the global market?

Two engineers founded a start-up for the design and development of Internet of Things and wearable technology products. They received initial seed capital from family in lieu of equity shares. The company developed a product that could be used to search for misplaced items through the user’s phone. The product was expected to be ready for mass production in a week. However, in spite of potential huge demand, the company did not have funds for mass production because it used the seed capital on the design and development. The supplier would not produce unless the start-up paid up front. The technology start-up needed to analyze all the available options for funding mass production of its product and choose the most suitable one.

The director of JMD Oils, an edible oils firm, is considering the strategic options to drive his company to the next level of sales and profitability. The business has been showing a steady performance, but he feels that it could improve substantially. To increase profits, the director could increase sales volumes or increase gross margins. An increase in volume could be achieved by increasing the geographical footprint, which would require setting up additional factories. Increasing the margins would require a shift from a dealer push strategy to a consumer pull strategy, which could be achieved by brand building. The director needs to estimate returns from brand building and geographical expansion. The financial risks for each are different and the implementation challenges complicate the decision. What strategy will gain the confidence of investors and yield the best results for JMD Oils in the long term?

With over one million employees, Mega Railway Network is one of the largest recruiters in the world. As the result of criminal activity in one of its largest rail yards, a worker lost his life in the line of duty. The circumstances of the incident have led to a high-stakes strike action by workers at one of its busiest rail depots. As the divisional operations manager, chief transportation manager or the head of locomotive engineers (drivers), you must reconcile differences between management and staff or risk stalling the hundreds of freight and passenger trains that pass through each day. As a worker, you need safety and other concerns addressed.

In December 2013, an entrepreneur based in Orange, a small town in Australia, is considering the difficulties besetting his five-year-old start-up, the Orange Watch Company. He faces seemingly insurmountable challenges: his business is located far away from major cities; Australia is not close to the demand or supply market for high-end watches and watch parts, which is largely in Asia and Europe; and he has limited financial resources. Yet he continues to persist in his efforts to grow the firm. He has come close to bankruptcy several times and his venture is far from being able to provide a steady stream of income. He is wondering whether to continue to push forward or if he should shut his business down.

The inventory manager of sales and distribution for Toffee Inc., a confectionery company, had just concluded a meeting with all relevant personnel. The meeting had not been entirely positive. The words of the production manager still echoed in his ears: “If the ingredient inventory is not re-examined and re-worked to the firm’s advantage then [soon] the final products based on these ingredients will cease to yield the kind of profits that the firm expects.” The inventory manager needed to prepare a comprehensive forecasting and inventory management plan with a view to minimize the cost of managing the supply chain by judicious use of resources, better forecasting, and improvement in the ingredient inventory purchasing and management systems.

The Vanca, an online apparel brand and supplier to online retailers (“e-tailers”) has achieved a fair degree of success by focusing on quality, innovative designs, “fast fashion” and a strong network with its customers. Management is looking to grow the business further; however, there are challenges such as uneven sales across some of its product ranges, maintaining its competitive edge and the threat from private labels being introduced by the industry’s three largest e-tailers. The Vanca’s chief executive officer, a successful entrepreneur, has called a meeting to consider these challenges and to prepare the company’s next growth model.

The Friends of Western Buddhist Order, an organization dedicated to spreading the teachings of Buddha in modern context, started a giftware company called Windhorse, with a two-part vision of making work a context for spiritual growth and raising money for charity. After operating for more than 20 years, Windhorse experienced challenges in keeping up with its rapid business growth. To bridge this gap, the company recruited non-Buddhists to the organization; however, many of the Buddhist members felt that the purpose and meaning that had bonded the members to the organization was fading. As a result, an increasing number of Buddhists started leaving the organization, while many new members were unwilling to work for the low remuneration. Was it viable for such a value-based organization to continue to pursue financial prosperity?

As a leading name in the Indian tractor industry, New Holland Tractors India (CNH) is known for its participative employee culture and holds the distinction of having no employee union organization to date, a feat generally unheard of in this industry in India. Thanks to its excellent community-management policies, CNH has derived certain indirect benefits in the form of increased workplace productivity and improved employee behaviours. The company wants to roll out some aggressive plans for growth, but of late, a series of altercations between its blue-collar and white-collar employees threatens to disturb workplace harmony. In terms of its human resource policies, CNH’s management team must decide whether to maintain the status quo or put some new strategies in place.

InfoSoft Global is a seven-year-old start-up in the charting-software market. In 2008, it earns revenues of US$3.35 million in a market that its founder estimates to be US$100 million. Should the founder continue growing steadily within a niche, as he had done in the past, or should he make some new strategic choices to target a bigger share of the US$100 million market? Which technologies and devices should he bet on? What customer segments should he focus on? Should he add more complementary products to his company’s portfolio? What new channels should he leverage for greater market reach, and what strategy must he adopt to get there?

Hand signals from a 16th-century mathematics textbook and exchange-rate "currents" from 18th-century Italian ports were just two of the innovations that lubricated the gears of preindustrial European commerce.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The globalization of companies can be -and frequently has been -looked at in different ways: in terms of the internationalization of sales or assets, cross-border supply chains or shared services, organizational structures, functional policies (marketing standardization versus customization) and so on. In this article, the authors look at much less-studied individual measures of globalization: the extent to which the executives who head the world's largest corporations -at the CEO level and at the level of the managers listed as reporting directly to the CEO -are native or not to the country where the corporation is headquartered. Some studies indicate that national diversity in the top management team can be associated with better performance. What's more, the presence -or absence -of nonnative executives in a company's top management team can send a signal to employees outside the home country about the long-term career prospects for foreign middle managers already in the company as well as for potential hires. The basic pattern emerging from the authors'research, both at the CEO and the top management team level, is unmistakable: Even at the world's largest companies, natives generally rule the roost. In 2013, 67 of the Fortune Global 500 companies (13%, or about one in eight) had a foreign-born CEO. The share has barely budged since 2008. Looking at the full top management teams, the authors found that on average 15% of the top management team members, excluding the CEO, are nonnatives. The authors examine some of the possible reasons for this and look for correlations that may explain why certain countries have higher rates of nonnative CEOs. They then examine several levers for enhancing a company's ability to deal with international differences and distances.

Not long ago, many observers worried that ever-expanding multinationals -many of which had revenues exceeding the gross domestic products of smaller countries -were going to take over the world. But as globalization marches onward, powerful local companies are increasingly winning out against multinational competitors. This is especially true in emerging markets, where multinationals are assumed to enjoy superiority and CEOs are counting on growth. In China, the ice cream, laundry detergent and appliance markets provide interesting examples of this phenomenon. Despite the presence of multinationals in these markets, the market-share leaders are local companies. A similar pattern is being repeated in other emerging markets. The authors note, however, that in some cases multinationals have been able to resist the market gains of local competition, whether through first-mover advantages or by acquiring the leading local players and nurturing their local identity and strengths. For decades, multinationals were able to make good returns by acting as efficient global conduits for assets that were difficult to transfer, including intangibles such as product designs, technologies, management systems and company cultures. Transfers within the multinational company were more efficient than obtaining those assets through open-market transactions. However, a number of forces have been eroding that advantage. First, in the drive to reduce costs, established multinationals increasingly focused on activities with the highest returns. This meant that lower-value activities were outsourced and often offshored to emerging economies, creating global markets in which local companies can also source components and services. The result is that once-closed value chains have been opened up, enabling local players to source "plug-and-play"modules that can be combined to create products very similar -and sometimes superior -to those of foreign multinationals.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The business world is rapidly digitizing, breaking down industry barriers and creating new opportunities while destroying long-successful business models. Given the amount of turmoil digital disruption is causing, authors Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research say it's time for companies to evaluate these threats and opportunities and create new business options for the more-connected future of digital ecosystems. In recent research, board members at large companies estimated that 32% of their company's revenue would be under threat from digital disruption in the next five years; 60% of board members felt their boards should spend significantly more time on this issue next year. Despite the threats from companies including Uber, Airbnb and Amazon, increasing digitization offers opportunities for companies to leverage strong customer relationships and increase cross-selling, the authors argue. The authors offer a framework, supported by examples, for helping managers think about their competitive environments. "The combination of moving from value chains to ecosystems and increasing consumer knowledge,"the authors write, "provides business leaders with four distinct business models, each with associated capabilities and relationships."Companies can choose to operate as (1) suppliers, (2) omnichannel businesses, (3) modular producers or (4) ecosystem drivers. The authors found that businesses focused narrowly on value chains were at a disadvantage compared with those that thought more broadly about their business ecosystems. Companies that had 50% or more of their revenues from digital ecosystems and understood their end customers better than their average competitor saw 32% higher revenue growth and 27% higher profit margins than their industry averages.

By May 2015, Zivame, an Indian online lingerie retailer, had established itself as a market leader in this category by providing traditionally conservative Indian women a reliable solution to help them confidently purchase their most intimate wear while avoiding any confrontation with sales executives, mostly men, of brick-and-mortar stores. It helped its customers understand their lingerie needs, browse through styles, order their right size and get their orders delivered quickly at their doorstep without any embarrassment. Reliable customer care, availability of various national and international brands and a wide range of sizes and styles had made the brand popular in its target market, averaging 1,200 daily orders, almost a 200 per cent jump from the previous year. Can Zivame reach its goal of becoming a billion dollar enterprise in the next five to seven years or will confining itself to the women’s lingerie segment become a hurdle to future growth?

In India, customers were used to the idea of buying groceries in stores. BigBasket.com, India’s first online grocery retailer, was set to break this mindset. Customers were signing up at an aggressive rate based on word-of-mouth. With a commitment to provide a top-quality product assortment at competitive prices, BigBasket successfully provided last-mile delivery to customers across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai. While traditional brick and mortar grocery retailers were struggling, BigBasket became the first online grocery retailer to report a breakeven in March 2014 in one of the cities where it operated.<br><br>Brick and mortar grocery retailers had started focusing on a hybrid model and analysts believed that hybrid models had more profit potential than pure online grocery retailers. Despite this, BigBasket had arranged funding from venture capitalists, receiving the highest-ever amount of Series A funding among the online retail industry in India. BigBasket leveraged innovative, customer-centric policies that not only boosted customer confidence but also enhanced overall profit margins. Could it permanently change the shopping habits of consumers? Was the breakeven a short-term phenomenon for BigBasket or would it achieve similar performance in other cities? Would online grocery retailing be profitable in the long run?