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In 2005, an executive vice president at Wal-Mart must decide whether to expand the retailer's selection of organic food. The decision is made in the context of wider attempts to move the giant retailer slightly upscale and to focus on environmental sustainability.

In response to a huge crisis in 2000, the new CEO of Procter & Gamble has to decide whether to continue with an unusual organizational design or to revert to the old matrix organization. Describes all the organizational designs used by Procter & Gamble from the 1920s onward, including geographic, product, and matrix architectures. Market development organizations, global business units, and global business services unit, each of which is heavily interdependent with the others and none of which has a clear decision-making advantage, comprise the unusual organizational design. Examination of the different organizational designs, trade-offs associated with each organizational architecture as well as the accompanying implementation problems.

In 2003, 3M initiated contact with Yunnan Baiyao Group Co., Ltd. to discuss potential cooperation opportunities in the area of transdermal pharmaceutical products. Yunnan Baiyao (YB), 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, 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.

Wumart Stores (Wumart) is a privately owned, indigenous Chinese retail chain operation founded by a private entrepreneur in 1994. The decade after its inception saw the company grow from a small, suburban supermarket to the seventh largest chain retailer (over 500 stores) in China. By using regional market positioning focusing on one of China's wealthiest regions--Beijing; implementing low-cost expansion strategies; taking the opportunity to restructure state-owned assets; employing multi-format store development in both the most mature and fastest growing segment; and making the earliest commitment to information technology among its domestic peers, Wumart establishes strong competitive advantages that set it apart from its domestic competition. On the company's 10th anniversary, China fully opened its retail sector to foreign participation. Vying for a share in China's vast consumer market, but having been hindered by many regulatory obstacles, foreign retailing giants can now compete on a level platform backed by their ample financial resources, deep industry and management expertise, and long-term commitment to China. The market is becoming ever more competitive and is expected to experience massive consolidation. In the end, only the best performers with significant scale will survive. The test is for Wumart's management to develop strategies to sustain its competitive advantages in the face of challenges from both domestic peers and foreign giants, to carry on the success story, and to eventually realize its ambition of becoming an everlasting national brand.

Illustrates the adaptation and implementation of a private sector management tool, the Balanced Scorecard, to a public school district. As part of a continuous improvement initiative, the Director of Planning and Policy facilitates the development of a strategy map and scorecard for the district. She then helps cascade the scoreboard down to individual school scorecards, and up to the school board, where it is used to monitor and guide the district's accomplishments. The implementation, however, hits some problems when the superintendent resigns, followed by high turnover among his replacements. Enables a discussion of the role of centralization versus decentralization in setting school objectives and accountability, issues that arise when introducing performance management into public school districts, and the role for leadership and governance in driving improvements in school achievement.

In today's fast-paced competitive environment, firms face the need to be increasingly nimble and adaptive. While often able to establish a certain level of performance based upon existing technologies, firms are equally as often left flat-footed in the face of emerging, novel technologies. Discusses strategic entrepreneurship as the means through which firms can simultaneously exploit their current competitive advantages while exploring future opportunities. Achieving a balance between exploitation and exploration consists of more than merely allocating resources evenly between the two processes. As discussed, exploitation and exploration are operationally, structurally, and culturally distinct processes.

The chairman of Gome Ltd, a well known appliance retail chain, congratulated his management team for their excellent performance over the past year. For three consecutive years, Gome had been ranked the largest electrical appliance retail chain in China, and the second largest overall retail chain. Claiming to be the only true national player, Gome achieved total sales of RMB23.9 billion in 2004, and in 2005 doubled its number of stores to 426. The company's four-year plan is to capture 10-15% of the market share nationally. Gome would need to double the number of stores in the coming three years, and more importantly, work out a strategy to fend off its local and global competitors.

In January 2000, Jose Antonio Justino, accepted an offer to become the Managing Director of the Consumer Division of Johnson & Johnson Brazil (in Portuguese-Johnson & Johnson Comercio e Distribuicao Ltda.). Johnson & Johnson Brazil (J&J Brazil) had been the early leader in Brazil in a variety of products, including disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, bandages, cotton swabs, sunscreen, and baby care products. Unfortunately, performance had deteriorated in recent years, with both sales and profitability dropping significantly. Market share in many categories was falling because of increased competition from local firms and multinationals. The company group chairman of J&J's global consumer business told Justino in February that he would have to present a business plan at a J&J meeting in Mexico in May 2000. The business plan would have to identify the specific steps that would allow J&J Brazil to restore profitability by the end of 2000 and position the company for future growth

In January 2000, Jose Antonio Justino, accepted an offer to become the Managing Director of the Consumer Division of Johnson & Johnson Brazil (in Portuguese-Johnson & Johnson Comercio e Distribuicao Ltda.). Johnson & Johnson Brazil (J&J Brazil) had been the early leader in Brazil in a variety of products, including disposable diapers, sanitary napkins, bandages, cotton swabs, sunscreen, and baby care products. Unfortunately, performance had deteriorated in recent years, with both sales and profitability dropping significantly. Market share in many categories was falling because of increased competition from local firms and multinationals. The company group chairman of J&J's global consumer business told Justino in February that he would have to present a business plan at a J&J meeting in Mexico in May 2000. The business plan would have to identify the specific steps that would allow J&J Brazil to restore profitability by the end of 2000 and position the company for future growth

The new chief executive officer (CEO) of ING Insurance Asia/Pacific wants to improve the regional operation of the company. ING Group was a global financial services company of Dutch origin with more than 150 years of experience. As part of ING International, ING Insurance Asia/Pacific was responsible for life insurance and asset/wealth management activities throughout the region. The company was doing well, but the new CEO believed that there were still important strategic and operational improvements possible.

Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings ("Phoenix TV") was established in 2006 as a joint venture with News Corporation's ("News Corp's") STAR TV unit and Liu Changle, a Shanghai businessman and former military journalist, as the major stakeholders. Presenting its family of channels as the Chinese TV viewers' window to the world, Phoenix TV was able to capitalize on ambiguities in China's regulatory environment and (with tacit consent from the authorities) was the only foreign TV broadcaster to target news programming at mainland Chinese viewers. In China, where significant restrictions existed on audience measurement and advertising was still a young business, ad sales were largely driven by a media outlet's image. Phoenix TV claimed an audience comprising China's highly educated, high-income, urban elite. The broadcaster's access to the highly coveted Chinese market far surpassed that of foreign media groups such as Time Warner and Viacom. Yet its share of viewing, on a national basis, trailed behind that of the state broadcaster, CCTV, and large domestic media groups, who were raising production standards and winning over audiences with dramatic programming. Phoenix TV's management was mindful of looming developments on the horizon: the convergence of telecommunications and broadcasting, the further liberalization of China's media industry, and the gradual roll-out of digital TV networks around the country, which would increase demand for content and provide new possibilities for subscription-based TV. Above all, Phoenix TV's chairman, Liu Changle, was concerned that the broadcaster was overly dependent on advertising revenue. In June 2006, China Mobile acquired a 19.9% stake in Phoenix TV from News Corp. Through a new alliance, Phoenix TV hoped to branch out into new media as a content provider for China's largest mobile operator.

Creating Centrino required Intel to make major changes to its strategy and organization. The development of Centrino was part of Intel's "right hand turn" toward increased performance measures, including improvements coming from increased power efficiencies and away from maximizing processor clock speed. This strategic shift, together with the introduction of new multi-core architectures, fundamentally changed the company's definition of success for the future. It was a dramatic move forced on the company, in part, by physics and changing industry and competitive forces; but also made possible, in part, by a radically innovative microprocessor architecture developed by its scrappy, geographically distant microprocessor design center in Israel.

Cities, buildings, products, services, systems, and strategies all face the same need to combine expertise, insight, engagement, and adaptation. As a result, it is time to confront the tensions of design, say the authors, who then define three approaches to design: the formulaic approach, exemplified by planned-city Brasilia; the visionary approach, exemplified by IKEA; and the evolutionary approach, exemplified by Linux. Along the way they show that design is not just a metaphor for management, but the very essence of it.

Retailers live or die by a simple creed: stock products that sell, and don't stock products that don't sell. As North American and European companies source more of their goods from China, the risk of getting this wrong increases dramatically. Some companies - including Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Toyota -- are having second thoughts about their China-sourcing strategies, and are either reworking their North American logistics networks or even retreating from China. The authors argue that a firm focus on reducing time and variability in the China-anchored supply chains serving North America and Europe can help companies dramatically reduce their costs, improve their margins, and build competitive advantage. They show why North American and European companies should be looking closer to home, where the cost-of-labor penalty (relative to labor rates in China) is more than compensated for by superior supply-chain performance that is significantly less variable and virtually unaffected by port and surface-capacity constraints.

Yesterday's approaches to problem solving just won't cut it in today's complex environment, say the authors. The high-value decision maker of the future will be characterized by a capacity for Integrative Thinking. They show that Integrative Thinking stands not as an enemy to traditional business disciplines, on whose shoulders it can be seen to squarely rest, but rather as a constructive challenge to produce more adaptive-reasoning patterns, more valuable instruments of prediction, and a more inclusive approach to inter-disciplinary dialogue. The new model for business education they argue for acknowledges the vital role of integration in modern business, stressing the virtues of 'nimble mindedness', 'big mindedness' and 'tough mindedness' over the seductive trap of narrow perfectionism.

Focuses on a simple question: should Zimmer develop a gender-specific artificial knee? The decision is complicated because while the idea seems to make sense, there is little clinical evidence that a gender-specific knee produces superior patient outcomes, and orthopedic surgeons are likely to be skeptical of the innovation.

Once a decision has turned out poorly-such as Merck's decision to launch and support the painkiller Vioxx-it is easy to criticize. However, are these bad outcomes the result of a good decision which turned out unlucky, or are they decisions where the bad outcome could have been predicted? This case follows Merck's pharmaceutical product Vioxx from initial development to launch and subsequent withdrawal, and considers the decisions made at each stage by the Merck executives involved. The case concludes by examining the financial impact of the Vioxx withdrawal on the company and on the Merck stock value.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Today, as consumer choices on one side of the planet affect living conditions for people on the other side and complex supply chains span the globe, businesses are facing a host of "sustainability" problems--social and ecological imbalances created by that globalization. Beginning in the late 1990s, organizational members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL--including Shell, Harley-Davidson, HP, Xerox, and Nike, among others) began a series of initiatives focusing on collaborative solutions to a variety of sustainability issues. The group's goals have included the application of systems thinking, working with mental models, and fostering personal and shared vision to face these complex sustainability issues. Through its work, SOL (of which two of the authors are founding members) has learned that successful collaborative efforts embrace three interconnected types of work--conceptual, relational, and action-driven--which together build a healthy "learning ecology" for systemic change. In this article, the authors offer examples from particular projects in which learning ecology provided an important foundation for substantive progress, and they draw lessons for companies and managers regarding each of the three types of work. Ultimately, the authors conclude that conceptual, relational, and action-driven work must be systemically interwoven and that there is little real precedent for that. They offer several guidelines for how it can be accomplished, emphasizing leadership and transactional networks. Finally, they pose three questions that must be answered if systemic solutions are to be successful: (1) How can we get beyond benchmarking to building learning communities? (2) What is the right balance between specifying goals and creating space for reflection and innovation? and (3) What is the right balance between private interest and public knowledge?

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. As companies are increasingly taking on the challenge of global sustainable development, they are forced to rethink the standard business plan based on increasing consumption of products. Drawing from case studies involving Gage Products, PPG Industries Inc., and Xerox Corp., the author shows that some companies are already building their business plans around services and a few key products, and that they are seeing benefits both to the bottom line and in customer retention and acquisition. The author identifies six keys to the new model: building on existing service strengths, redesigning contracts to redefine the basis of profit to create win-win situations when product consumption is reduced and services are improved, communicating the new business plan to current customers, changing sales incentives, acquiring new organizational skills to ensure a better understanding of consumption, and learning to highlight the potential benefits of taking steps to improve the environment.

In December 1999 Thomson Financial (TF) began a radical transformation from forty-one divisions toward a more integrated firm organized around customer segments. This required active, coordinated involvement from business, organization, and technology functions, as well as sustained investment and execution through the crises of the technology market crash and September 11, 2001. By 2005 TF had emerged as one of the top three financial information firms globally (with Bloomberg and Reuters).