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This case is about how Coopers Brewery, a very small family-owned fourth generation family business, fought off a determined takeover bid by an international brewer. Although the takeover bid formally began in 2005, it had its origins in 1983, so the case illustrates how and why organizations get involved with each other and how that can play out in unexpected ways later on. Although the case detail is about the takeover bid, it is designed primarily for use as a business strategy analysis case for use in the early part of a strategic management course. It also contains sufficient competitor analysis to conduct a rudimentary industry analysis. It could separately be used for mergers and acquisitions analysis but this is seen as the background material.

Traditional management thinking addresses either the service provider's or the client's individual competences and competitive advantage in service innovation. This is myopic in the extreme; value creation should be based on the simultaneous recognition of the interests and competencies of both parties. This article examines the service innovation strategies in the ICT field from the perspective of the resource-based view of the firm and the management competencies involved. First, the characteristics of three main types of service innovations (established service, incremental service innovation, and radical service innovation) are outlined, as these can be shown to require different value creation approaches. Second, a service strategy matrix is constructed illustrating the client-driven, provider-driven, and collaborative service innovation strategies. The article provides a recipe for managing the service co-creation modes, with guidelines given on how to succeed through collaborative capabilities and culture, as well as appropriate business models.

This article proposes a framework to address a central conundrum in strategic management: How can firms transcend the trade-off between the momentum that results from the strong strategic commitments needed to gain industry leadership with the need for strategic agility in the face of strategic discontinuities? The article develops an analysis of the meta-capabilities underlying strategic agility, which is clustered around strategic sensitivity (both the sharpness of perception and the intensity of awareness and attention), resource fluidity (the internal capability to reconfigure business systems and redeploy resources rapidly), and leadership unity (the ability of the top team to make bold decisions fast, without getting bogged down in "win-lose" politics at the top). Based on an in-depth study of Nokia's evolution over the past twenty years, this article shows how these three meta-capabilities interact over time and proposes a framework to enable a firm to maintain and regain strategic agility as it matures.

This article presents the "strategy diamond," which extends received strategic management theory by integrating the positional view and the resource-based view, the formulation and implementation of strategy, and the firm's internal selection environment into one relatively simple conceptual framework of dynamic forces driving firm evolution. The article suggests that this framework can be helpful in stimulating further research to drive towards a dynamic theory of strategy. The strategy diamond facilitates understanding the dynamic interplays between strategy logic and strategy execution, and its jargon-free "natural language form" may facilitate strategic conversations and help inculcate a strategic mentality into organizations. This framework has been useful for senior executives in two major corporations. Four case studies highlight how the framework may help instill strategic discipline in high-technology ventures operating in extremely dynamic environments.

After a merger, managers should strengthen sales and marketing before cutting costs. That's because revenue growth generates long-term shareholder value.

In January 2003, Dr. David Acheson, the new Chief Medical Officer of Health of the FDA was charged by his boss with working jointly with the EPA to develop a comprehensive set of federal guidelines for fish consumption for all Americans. The guidelines needed to balance the benefits of fish consumption with the potential risks of exposure to mercury, dioxin, and PCBs - exposures of particular concern to pregnant women and young children. The case includes an additional document entitled Mercury and Fish Consumption that provides background material and reviews of studies of mercury exposure.

"Suffolk County is experiencing elevated cardiovascular disease mortality relative to New York State," explained Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, Commissioner for the Department of Health Services of Suffolk County. Given the general affluence of the area, he finds the CVD mortality rates "a paradoxical situation. We need to determine strategies to address this high priority health issue for our county."

From December 2000 to February 2008, the top 15 companies in the pharmaceutical industry lost roughly $850 billion in shareholder value. Although a number of factors - including the rise of generics, pricing pressures, regulatory requirements, and legal entanglements - are to blame, Garnier, the CEO of GlaxoSmith-Kline, believes that declining R&D productivity is his industry's primary problem. The way to solve it, he says, is to return power to the scientists - by reorganizing R&D into highly focused groups headed by inspirational leaders, seeking the best science outside as well as inside a company, fixing broken processes, and promoting a strong culture of innovation and passion for excellence. GSK has replaced its organizational pyramid with 12 "centers of excellence." The company has worked to untangle the quest for breakthrough drugs from the effort to develop best-in-class offerings and has overhauled incentives for the scientists who actually make discoveries. It has also pursued contractual relationships with academia and biotech companies in a bid to secure the best science, wherever it may reside. When the company began a sweeping reengineering of its R&D, it had only two products in late-stage development. Today it has 34 - the most in the industry. But much more remains to be done, the author says. Significant cost efficiencies could be achieved by offshoring clinical trials. Development of new blockbuster drugs could be simplified and accelerated if researchers targeted only a limited segment of the potential patient population and then expanded to others over time. The innovation malaise in pharmaceuticals is not unique, Garnier says. Many other industries face the same challenges. A cultural revolution and a broad transformation of the organization are necessary first steps to rebuilding the R&D engine.

When products become commodities, manufacturing companies may seek to differentiate themselves with value-added services - a potentially profitable strategy. Unfortunately, companies often stumble in the effort. Reinartz and Ulaga conducted in-depth studies of 18 leading companies in a broad variety of product markets to learn what distinguished the successes from the rest. They discovered four steps to developing a profitable services capability. Recognize that you already have a service company. You can identify and charge for simple services - as Merck did when it stopped quietly absorbing shipping costs. Switching services from free to fee clarifies their value for managers as well as for customers. Industrialize the back office. To prevent delivery costs from eating up service-offering margins, build flexible service platforms, closely monitor process costs, and exploit new technologies that enable process innovations. The Swedish bearings manufacturer SKF provided off-site access to an online monitoring tool that could warn of potential failure in customers' machines. Create a service-savvy sales force.Services require longer sales cycles and, often, decisions from high up in a customer's hierarchy; what's more, product salespeople may be inimical to change. Schneider-Electric did a major overhaul of its sales organization and trained its people to switch from cost-plus pricing to value-based pricing. Focus on customers' processes and the opportunities they afford for new service offerings. You may need to acquire new capabilities to take advantage of those opportunities: The industrial coatings specialist PPG had to learn how painting robots function after it offered to take over Fiat's Torino paint shop. Services can both lock in customers and help acquire new accounts. They should be developed with care and attention.

In today's complex world, companies often find themselves facing confounding strategy problems. These issues are not just tough or persistent; they're "wicked" - a label used by urban planners for problems that cannot be definitively resolved. Poverty and terrorism are classic examples. A wicked problem has innumerable causes, morphs constantly, and has no correct answer. It can be tamed, however, with the right approach. In this article, Camillus, a professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business, explains how executives can tell if they're dealing with a wicked strategy problem. In a 15-year study involving 22 companies, he identified five key criteria. If a problem involves many stakeholders with conflicting priorities; if its roots are tangled; if it changes with every attempt to address it; if you've never faced it before; and if there's no way to evaluate whether a remedy will work, chances are good that it's wicked. According to the author, the need for faster growth is, in all likelihood, a wicked issue for Wal-Mart. Traditional linear processes - identifying the issue, gathering data, studying all the options, choosing one strategy - don't work with wicked problems. They instead demand social processes that constantly engage stakeholders, explore related issues, reevaluate the problem's definition, and reconsider the assumptions of stakeholders. A strong corporate identity is essential: It serves as a rudder that helps the enterprise navigate a sea of choices. Because it's impossible to tell which options are appropriate, executives should stop analyzing them and start experimenting with actions. Eventually they will make progress by muddling through. Envisioning possible futures and identifying moves that will realize the one the company hopes for will uncover promising remedies. That's how PPG Industries, a 100-year-old manufacturer, has successfully coped with its wicked strategy issues.

The authors argue that consumer valuations of goods and services are a lot more arbitrary than we may think, and are affected by several 'arbitrary' components and biases. They describe the phenomenon of 'Tom's Law', whereby Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer discovered a great law of human behavior: that in order to make a person covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. They introduce the concept of 'coherent arbitrariness' and show how arbitrariness is enhanced by ambiguity in a good or bad experience.

Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau describes how finding the 'sweet spot' between the needs of consumers, society and our planet is a complex task, but shows that it can be a significant source of competitive advantage for those who do it well. Cescau provides specific examples of how Unilever's presence in the emerging economies of Asia and Africa is contributing to the global development agenda, describing in detail the new business models his firm has created for products that meet social needs.

If a brand is the relationship between a business and its customers, the retail space is its most visceral conversation. Considering a shopper's context is the key to understanding their motivations and making green products and services more relevant to them. By better understanding what shoppers desire from green offerings and what matters in the context of their shopping experience - i.e. time and convenience - products and services can connect with people in a more relevant way. The authors, from leading design firm IDEO, describe four strategies for engaging shoppers with products that encourage a sustainable lifestyle for all.

Cities have an unprecedented opportunity to change the way they supply and use energy. New eco-cities such as Dongtan in China are leading the way, even as existing cities turn to technologies rooted in the past - from adobe architecture to passive solar heating. When complemented by conservation, more-efficient technologies, and new decentralized, small-scale energy services, these efforts can help cities confidently navigate the challenges ahead while reducing the impact of climate change. The authors show that, done right, energy transformation in cities can be the doorway to security and vitality in urban life.

Canada's Outstanding CEO of the Year for 2007, Gord Nixon of RBC Financial Group, talks to Roger Martin about some of his biggest challenges and opportunities as chief executive of Canada's largest bank. The interview touches on the effects of global financial turmoil on the bank and the opportunities such turmoil presents; his predictions for global banking in the near term; and why Newsweek named RBC the top large company in the world at effectively managing environmental risks.

This industry note examines the oil and gas industry. The note first provides background information on industry financial performance, the role of OPEC, and the problems oil-producing nations have had in capitalizing on their resource wealth (i.e., the resource curse). The note then summarizes the major competitors among the integrated oil companies (IOCs), national oil companies (NOCs), and independents. The note describes the major business segments, including exploration and production, refining and marketing, natural gas, and petrochemicals. The note concludes with a discussion of industry evolution.

This note examines the relationship between video gaming devices (console, handhelds, mobile and PC) and gaming software development. The impact of broadband, wireless technologies and other innovations are also presented.

The owner of a small scuba diving operation in the Bahamas is reassessing his strategic direction in the light of declining revenues. Among the changes being considered are shark diving, family diving, exit, and shifting operations to another Caribbean location. These options are not easily combined, nor are they subtle. The case is intended to provide a work-out on the relationship between strategy, organization and performance, and how changes in strategy will dramatically affect the organization. The case also highlights the importance of understanding demographic changes as part of an environmental analysis.

On Tuesday, August 23, 2005, meteorologists in the US National Weather Service spotted a tropical depression in the southeastern Bahamas. As it strengthened into a tropical storm, weather officials gave it a name, Katrina, and closely tracked it as it turned into a hurricane, crossing south Florida and then moving into the Gulf of Mexico. There, fed by the gulf's warm waters, Katrina turned into a monster: a "Category five" hurricane, with winds gusting past 170 miles per hour and an unusually wide span of over 100 miles. Katrina initially appeared to be heading next for the Florida Panhandle, but on Friday it made a dramatic shift; it turned westward and appeared to take dead aim at one of the most storied and fragile cities in the US: New Orleans. With landfall expected on Monday morning, state, local, and federal emergency response officials sprang into action, following the roadmaps laid out in their emergency plans. This case tells the story of the lead-up to the storm, detailing the plans that officials would draw on to prepare for the hurricane's onslaught, the steps that were taken to evacuate and shelter hundreds of thousands of residents in metropolitan New Orleans, and the communications among different agencies and levels of government as the storm drew near; it shows officials concerned about the effects of the hurricane, but confident that their preparations were commensurate with the challenges that Katrina would pose. The case asks readers to consider why local, state, and federal governments all proved unready to respond effectively to a catastrophic event which had been long predicted. Part A can be taught alone or in tandem with Part B of the case, which describes the post-landfall response to the devastating impact of the hurricane; it would be useful in classes on emergency or strategic management as well as on intergovernmental relations. HKS Case Number 1914.3

On Tuesday, August 23, 2005, meteorologists in the US National Weather Service spotted a tropical depression in the southeastern Bahamas. As it strengthened into a tropical storm, weather officials gave it a name, Katrina, and closely tracked it as it turned into a hurricane, crossing south Florida and then moving into the Gulf of Mexico. There, fed by the gulf's warm waters, Katrina turned into a monster: a "Category five" hurricane, with winds gusting past 170 miles per hour and an unusually wide span of over 100 miles. Katrina initially appeared to be heading next for the Florida Panhandle, but on Friday it made a dramatic shift; it turned westward and appeared to take dead aim at one of the most storied and fragile cities in the US: New Orleans. With landfall expected on Monday morning, state, local, and federal emergency response officials sprang into action, following the roadmaps laid out in their emergency plans. This case tells the story of the lead-up to the storm, detailing the plans that officials would draw on to prepare for the hurricane's onslaught, the steps that were taken to evacuate and shelter hundreds of thousands of residents in metropolitan New Orleans, and the communications among different agencies and levels of government as the storm drew near; it shows officials concerned about the effects of the hurricane, but confident that their preparations were commensurate with the challenges that Katrina would pose. The case asks readers to consider why local, state, and federal governments all proved unready to respond effectively to a catastrophic event which had been long predicted. Part A can be taught alone or in tandem with Part B of the case, which describes the post-landfall response to the devastating impact of the hurricane; it would be useful in classes on emergency or strategic management as well as on intergovernmental relations. HKS Case Number 1915.3.