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Personal computer game maker Blizzard filed a lawsuit in 2002 against the developers of the bnetd project. The bnetd project was a volunteer effort of game enthusiasts and programmers frustrated with difficulties encountered playing Blizzard's personal computer games on its 24-hour Battle.net online gaming service. Via reverse engineering of Blizzard's software, the bnetd developers created and disseminated a free open source software program that mimicked the Battle.net playing experience while improving on some of its deficiencies. Blizzard, one of the world's most successful PC game publishers and a part of international media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, charged the bnetd developers with breach of contract and various counts of intellectual property infringement. The defendants maintained that U.S. law, in an effort to spur innovation in the United States, protected their activities. Describes the events leading up to a court-ordered mediation session between the two parties in October 2003. Students are asked, as business managers, to determine the legal and non-legal alternatives available to Blizzard and the bnetd developers, and to decide which strategy to pursue from each party's perspective.

Pioneering the discount store concept in cosmetic retailing in Hong Kong, Eleanor and Simon Kwok had succeeded in building Sa Sa into one of Asia's largest cosmetic and beauty service retailers. Enunciates Sa Sa's growth in the face of a host of environmental contretemps, including the Asian financial crisis and the SARS pandemic. Escalating rents coupled with lower-than-expected tourism figures harbingered continual turbulence in its core market, Hong Kong. Under pressure to maintain margins, other causes of concern were continued losses from its operations in China and the unsatisfactory performance of its beauty services division. Additionally, it appeared that Sa Sa was facing a positioning paradox--that of being a low-cost retailer, stocking goods from parallel imports, while trying to project the upmarket image required by the global brands it stocked. Evaluating Sa Sa's current status, students can develop strategies that would enable Sa Sa's continued success and ability to compete in the changing retail environment.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush launched a military offensive in Afghanistan, which led to the capture of Al Qaeda operatives thought to be behind the attacks. Top US officials debated how to extract crucial information from them about Al Qaeda's future plans. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted to apply aggressive interrogation methods, which it argued were necessary to convince detainees to reveal what they knew. But CIA officials worried such techniques might violate both international treaties banning torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners of war and detainees and, more consequentially, the domestic laws that enforced them. To protect its agents, the CIA sought a clear statement from the Bush Administration on how far agents could go in efforts to force detainees to talk. These cases tell the story of OLC's legal findings and their consequences. Part A (1853.0)describes a series of OLC memoranda on the treatment of detainees in the "war on terror," culminating in an August 2002 opinion that became known as the "torture memo," which narrowly interpreted the legal meaning of torture but took a broad view of presidential wartime powers under the Constitution. Part A ends as Assistant Attorney General and OLC head Jay Bybee must decide whether to sign the opinion. Part B (1854.0) tracks the results of the torture memo, tracing the use of interrogation techniques it sanctioned from CIA detention centers overseas to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the view of some, these harsher techniques eventually "migrated" to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where abusive treatment of detainees became an international embarrassment for the US. HKS Case Number 1853.0

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush launched a military offensive in Afghanistan, which led to the capture of Al Qaeda operatives thought to be behind the attacks. Top US officials debated how to extract crucial information from them about Al Qaeda's future plans. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted to apply aggressive interrogation methods, which it argued were necessary to convince detainees to reveal what they knew. But CIA officials worried such techniques might violate both international treaties banning torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners of war and detainees and, more consequentially, the domestic laws that enforced them. To protect its agents, the CIA sought a clear statement from the Bush Administration on how far agents could go in efforts to force detainees to talk. These cases tell the story of OLC's legal findings and their consequences. Part A (1853.0)describes a series of OLC memoranda on the treatment of detainees in the "war on terror," culminating in an August 2002 opinion that became known as the "torture memo," which narrowly interpreted the legal meaning of torture but took a broad view of presidential wartime powers under the Constitution. Part A ends as Assistant Attorney General and OLC head Jay Bybee must decide whether to sign the opinion. Part B (1854.0) tracks the results of the torture memo, tracing the use of interrogation techniques it sanctioned from CIA detention centers overseas to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the view of some, these harsher techniques eventually "migrated" to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where abusive treatment of detainees became an international embarrassment for the US. HKS Case Number 1854.0

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush launched a military offensive in Afghanistan, which led to the capture of Al Qaeda operatives thought to be behind the attacks. Top US officials debated how to extract crucial information from them about Al Qaeda's future plans. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted to apply aggressive interrogation methods, which it argued were necessary to convince detainees to reveal what they knew. But CIA officials worried such techniques might violate both international treaties banning torture and "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners of war and detainees and, more consequentially, the domestic laws that enforced them. To protect its agents, the CIA sought a clear statement from the Bush Administration on how far agents could go in efforts to force detainees to talk. These cases tell the story of OLC's legal findings and their consequences. Part A (1853.0)describes a series of OLC memoranda on the treatment of detainees in the "war on terror," culminating in an August 2002 opinion that became known as the "torture memo," which narrowly interpreted the legal meaning of torture but took a broad view of presidential wartime powers under the Constitution. Part A ends as Assistant Attorney General and OLC head Jay Bybee must decide whether to sign the opinion. Part B (1854.0) tracks the results of the torture memo, tracing the use of interrogation techniques it sanctioned from CIA detention centers overseas to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the view of some, these harsher techniques eventually "migrated" to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where abusive treatment of detainees became an international embarrassment for the US. HKS Case Number 1854.1

By November 2005 Air Deccan, India's first low cost airline, had been in business for two years. During this time, the airline had grown rapidly, adding both planes and passengers at breakneck speed. Using low fares as its central strength, it had caused huge, unconventional changes in the Indian domestic airline industry. Not satisfied, however, the founder and chief executive officer wondered how to adapt to the future and sustain Air Deccan's tremendous initial success. The case can be used to engage students in the following issues: the entry and positioning of a new brand in a somewhat oligopolistic industry; targeting low income and under-served segments; low-cost, low-price strategies; entrepreneurial start-ups in emerging markets and marketing strategy in high growth SMEs. In the supplement case, Air Deccan (B): From Creating Change to Changing Creatively, product 9B07A015, the chief executive officer evaluates the strategy.

Examines the structural determinants of industry attractiveness (the Five Forces framework) and the implications of industry structure for strategy.

As a comparison of Costco and Sam's Club shows, stingy pay and benefits translate into higher costs in the long run.

Of all the competing objectives every company faces, three pairs stand out: profitability versus growth, the short term versus the long term, and the whole organization versus the units. In each case, progress on one front usually comes at the expense of progress on the other. The authors researched the performance of more than 1,000 companies worldwide over the past two decades and found that most struggle to succeed across the three tensions. From 1983 to 2003, for example, only 32% of these companies more often than not achieved positive profitability and revenue growth at the same time. The problem, the authors discovered, is not so much that managers don't recognize the tensions--those are all too familiar to anyone who has ever run a business. Rather, it is that managers frequently don't focus on the tension that matters most to their company. Even when they do identify the right tension, they usually make the mistake of prioritizing a "lead" objective within it--for example, profitability over growth. As a result, companies often end up moving first in this direction, then in that, and then back again, never quite resolving the tension. The companies that performed best adopted a very different approach. Instead of setting a lead objective, they looked at how best to strengthen what the two sides of each tension have in common: For profitability and growth, the common bond is customer benefit; for the short term and the long, it is sustainable earnings; and for the whole and its parts, it is particular organizational resources and capabilities. The authors describe how companies can select the right tension, what traps they may fall into when they focus on one side over the other, and how to escape these traps by managing to the bonds between objectives.

Governments, activists, and the media have become adept at holding companies to account for the social consequences of their actions. In response, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has emerged as an inescapable priority for business leaders in every country. Frequently, though, CSR efforts are counterproductive, for two reasons. First, they pit business against society, when in reality the two are interdependent. Second, they pressure companies to think of corporate social responsibility in generic ways instead of in the way most appropriate to their individual strategies. The fact is, the prevailing approaches to CSR are so disconnected from strategy as to obscure many great opportunities for companies to benefit society. What a terrible waste. If corporations were to analyze their opportunities for social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices, they would discover, as Whole Foods Market, Toyota, and Volvo have done, that CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed--it can be a potent source of innovation and competitive advantage. In this article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer propose a fundamentally new way to look at the relationship between business and society that does not treat corporate growth and social welfare as a zero-sum game. They introduce a framework that individual companies can use to identify the social consequences of their actions; to discover opportunities to benefit society and themselves by strengthening the competitive context in which they operate; to determine which CSR initiatives they should address; and to find the most effective ways of doing so. Perceiving social responsibility as an opportunity rather than as damage control or a PR campaign requires dramatically different thinking--a mind-set, the authors warn, that will become increasingly important to competitive success.

Companies find it challenging and yet strangely reassuring to take on opponents whose strategies, strengths, and weaknesses resemble their own. Their obsession with familiar rivals, however, has blinded them to threats from disruptive, low-cost competitors. Successful price warriors, such as the German retailer Aldi, are changing the nature of competition by employing several tactics: focusing on just one or a few consumer segments, delivering the basic product or providing one benefit better than rivals do, and backing low prices with super-efficient operations. Ignoring cut-price rivals is a mistake because they eventually force companies to vacate entire market segments. Price wars are not the answer, either: Slashing prices usually lowers profits for incumbents without driving the low-cost entrants out of business. Companies take various approaches to competing against cut-price players. Some differentiate their products--a strategy that works only in certain circumstances. Others launch low-cost businesses of their own, as many airlines did in the 1990s--a so-called dual strategy that succeeds only if companies can generate synergies between the existing businesses and the new ventures, as the financial service providers HSBC and ING did. Without synergies, corporations are better off trying to transform themselves into low-cost players, a difficult feat that Ryanair accomplished in the 1990s, or into solution providers. There will always be room for both low-cost and value-added players. How much room each will have depends not only on the industry and customers' preferences, but also on the strategies traditional businesses deploy.

The Association for the Wellbeing of the Colombian Family, Profamilia, is a private, nonprofit organization founded in September 1965 by Dr. Fernando Tamayo Ogliastri with the objective of distributing family planning to low income families. Profamilia was a pioneer in its field; its impact increased as it became both organizationally and administratively stronger, and as its focus on family planning was expanded to include sexual and reproductive health. After four decades of operation, Profamilia continued to offer services to attend to the sexual and reproductive health of Colombians. By mid-2003, Profamilia, spurred by changes in the health sector in Colombia with the implementation of Law 100 of 1993, needed to redefine its strategy. The health sector reform encouraged the entry of other organizations that competed directly with Profamilia, resulting in the organization's loss of its relative monopoly as a provider of reproductive health services and family planning products. The most visible consequence was the reduction of its participation in the market. Changes in the sector gave impulse to the process of strategic redefinition to face critical tradeoffs between social and economic value generation.

In September 1999, the Microsoft Xbox team was wondering which strategic choices would give it the best chance against the upcoming Sony PlayStation 2. Initially called "Project Midway" within Microsoft, the console project was intended to counter the perceived threat to the Windows franchise posed by Sony expanding the original PlayStation into a broad entertainment platform with the PlayStation 2. Seamus Blackley--the chief instigator for the Xbox within Microsoft--and some of his colleagues were on a flight to Austin, Texas, where they had an appointment with Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer. The purpose of the visit was to convince Dell to manufacture Xbox videogame consoles running Microsoft software. Indeed, the team intended to produce a machine somewhere between a standalone videogame console and a PC tailored to play videogames. It remained unclear, however, where along the spectrum from dedicated console to PC Microsoft should position the Xbox. Would it be an open platform like the PC in the sense that independent developers could publish games on it with no restrictions and without having to pay royalties? Who would produce consoles and under what arrangements? What features should the console include, and how would it be priced to consumers? The home videogame industry had been born in the 1970s during the Atari "golden age", then collapsed suddenly in 1983. It was reborn at the end of the 1980s under Nintento's leadership, which was then challenged for a few years by Sega, only to be conquered by Sony's original PlayStation. And along the way, some companies such as 3DO had tried unsuccessfully to change the prevalent business models. This tumultuous 25-year history might provide Blackley and his colleagues with some useful tips on how best to enter the market.

The global pharmaceutical industry has gone through substantial changes in the last few decade and pharmaceutical firms face major challenges, including headline-grabbing litigation, imminent patent expirations, new technologies, rising drug development costs, generic drug substitution, international competitors, and complex public policy issues. Describes the pharmaceutical industry in 2006, including: the drug development process; threats from biotech and generics competitors; pharmaceutical manufacturing, selling, and marketing; and pharmaceutical consumption in Europe, the third world, and the U.S. Merck and Pfizer are analyzed in-depth and a contrast between Merck, as a research-based firm opposed to mergers, and Pfizer, as a marketing powerhouse growing through acquisitions, is developed. Thirteen exhibits give concrete focus to the issues of the case.

Looks at the different business models of two highly successful and profitable airlines: Chilean-based Lan Airlines and U.S.-based Southwest Airlines. Lan Airlines pursues a hub-to-spoke international full-service model where passenger and cargo operations are highly integrated. Southwest, on the other hand, is set up for a point-to-point, low-fare, "no frill's" service with a homogenous fleet. Designed for a course on the design of business models.

Introduces the Required Curriculum Strategy course to students at Harvard Business School.

An abstract is not available for this product.

Focuses on a district's efforts to improve student achievement at chronically low-performing schools using a strategy that both differentiates treatment to a set of schools and integrates the district's reform work. Details the origins of, and rational behind, the STAR Initiative at San Francisco Unified and describes the various resources and support provided to STAR schools. Finally, documents the challenges and achievements of the strategy in its first year of implementation. A particular emphasis is placed on managerial challenges the design team faces as the district undergoes political unrest.

Pitney Bowes, the world's dominant maker of equipment used in generating and handling mail, is facing flattening growth in its core businesses and needs to create new growth products and businesses. Describes how a group of employees use state-of-the-art techniques for understanding customers' needs to conceive and develop a postage meter for small businesses. Also describes the challenges the team faced in forging an appropriate disruptive channel to this market.

The case describes Lincoln Electric's business strategy and incentive system, and it discusses the global strategy choices that the company faces going forward. Lincoln Electric is deciding whether a strong push into India should be the next step in the company's globalization. The company has enjoyed increasing success in China as a result of its aggressive expansion through both a joint venture and set of majority-owned plants. The company is deciding how it could apply the lessons of the Chinese experience, as well as the lessons of its experience across Asia, Europe, and Latin America, to India. First of all, should Lincoln Electric own a manufacturing operation in India? If yes, Lincoln Electric could enter the India market by acquisition, by joint venture, or by building a new plant on its own. If the company were to enter by acquisition, it was unclear what type of valuation to apply to any of the Indian incumbent companies. If the company were to enter by joint venture, the question was: How could Lincoln ensure its ability to make key business decisions? If the company were to build its own plant, the question was: Would the cost of starting from scratch be more than sufficiently compensated by the total control the company would enjoy?