個案總覽

Flextronics, the world's largest contract manufacturing firm, made a strategic decision to expand its business to include original design and manufacturing (ODM) services. As an ODM supplier, Flextronics designed and built products that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) purchased and sold under their brand names. Purchasing from an ODM allowed OEMs to bring new products to market quickly and efficiently. ODMs could sell the same basic product to many OEMs, providing substantial design and manufacturing efficiencies. Flextronics' first ODM products were cellular phone handsets. The company had substantial hardware capabilities, which grew out of its contract manufacturing experience. In 2004, Flextronics considered adding software design expertise and considered a number of approaches to accomplish this. Having learned of the outstanding reputation of Indian software companies, the company's CEO and the president of its Design and OEM Services operation visited India. Describes the contract manufacturing and design landscape in 2004, with a focus on software.

Apple has reaped the benefits of its innovative music player, the iPod. However, its PC and server business continue to hold small market share relative to the worldwide computer market over the past few years. Will the iPod lure new users to the Mac? Will Apple be able to produce another cutting-edge device quickly?

Wal-Mart has been expanding, both domestically and internationally. Covers recent developments at Wal-Mart, including new stores, new store formats, and international expansion.

Provides a brief introduction to the application of game theory to business settings. Sets up and analyzes a minicase involving commitment.

Illustrates the challenges of managing a global business enterprise. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Most start-up companies today consider overseas expansion from their inception. Yet, says the author, entrepreneurs and their managers often underestimate the cost of expansion and lack a clear conceptual framework for it. On the basis of studying 50 entrepreneurial ventures in more than 20 countries, the author concludes that such ventures follow a variety of different expansion paths. The most successful are those that best manage the constant tensions between resources and opportunities, each of which run the gamut from purely local to worldwide. Offers a framework that defines the choices a venture has at its inception and throughout its life and shows how to use the framework to assess and direct a venture and mitigate developing tensions by anticipating a variety of strategic, financial, organizational, and regulatory factors. Uses case examples of a software company that took a balanced or "diagonal" path (the most common), an air-freight delivery service that progressed from pursuing local opportunities with local resources to pursuing cross-border opportunities with local resources, and a consumer-loan provider that began by pursuing a local opportunity with local resources, then added cross-border resources.

Aegis Analytical Corporation was founded in 1995 by Gretchen L. Jahn and Justin O. Neway to provide process manufacturing software and consulting services to pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers. Aegis developed a software program that quickly compiles disparate data into a single report. Within minutes, the program develops reports on drug tests and manufacturing quality that previously might take months to compile. With a target market of large pharmaceutical manufacturers, Aegis knew it faced a challenge of getting "in the door" of these companies and of convincing them that Aegis and its software would be around for awhile. To help with the marketing, Aegis formed two alliances with two companies that manufactured and sold complementary products to pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. While there were advantages to partnering with these divisions of Honeywell and Rockwell, most notably the visibility and credibility that these big names offered, many disadvantages developed. Most important is that Aegis's product was just one of many that Honeywell or Rockwell would promote. While there were incentives in place to encourage Honeywell and Rockwell to promote Aegis's product, after a year neither strategic alliance had resulted in a sale of Aegis's software. Aegis's founders were faced with the decisions of whether they should continue with either or both of the alliances. If they chose to continue the alliances, what could they as a small company do to encourage their much larger partners to promote the Aegis product? If they chose to terminate the alliances, can they rely only upon their internal sales staff to adequately promote and sell their product? What would be the effect on their reputation by no longer partnering with Rockwell or Honeywell? Another option might be to attempt to set up new alliances? If so, what steps should they take to increase the probability of success?

As the modern economy has evolved, business has increasingly used management science and information technology in an attempt to generate reliability - predictable outcomes on a consistent basis. The author argues that despite these efforts, there is little evidence that the ability of organizations to accurately understand the world and predict the future has increased one iota. Massive spending on these systems has not prevented corporations from being ambushed by new competitors and changing markets, and the author argues that the reason for this is a natural tension between the pursuits of reliability and validity. Reliability seeks to produce consistent, predictable outcomes by utilizing a system that is restricted to the use of objective data - for instance, predicting a customer's future purchases by using data collected in their Customer Information File (CIF) in a CRM system. Considering judgmental factors such as the mood of the customer or their attitude towards new products would be seen as an abomination in a reliable system. Validity, on the other hand, seeks to produce outcomes that meet the desired objective, even if the system employed can't produce a consistent, predictable outcome. The author describes three key implications of the obsession with reliability for management and says that to succeed in the next 20 years, firms will have to figure out how to become a more welcoming place for validity-oriented systems and for people who are more comfortable handling 'fuzzy' data and using their judgment.

Studies the U.S. credit card industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. After an industry background review, a discussion of generic strategies follows in which strategies, like product proliferation and cost improvements, are achieved through superior IT. These strategies are exemplified using the leading players in the industry. On the other hand, these strategies are easily imitable, the basic product is standardized, and the industry is highly fragmented. What accounts then for the exceptional level of profitability enjoyed by this industry?

The case is set in June 1999 as Marcel Telles, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Companhia Cervejaria Brahma (Brahma) - the largest brewer in Brazil - considers a possible merger with the Antarctica Group (Antarctica), the second-largest Brazilian brewer. If the merger were to be completed, the combined firm would control 75% of Brazil's beer market and forecast pro forma revenues of over $US2.8 billion. The case provides a concise overview of the Brazilian beer market and Brazil's volatile macroeconomic and regulatory context, and summarises the century-long rivalry between Brahma and Antarctica. For a century after their founding, Antarctica led Brahma in terms of market share, profitability, new product introductions and management innovations, although the two brewers were roughly comparable in size. Under Telles' leadership, however, Brahma pulled ahead of its rival in the span of a decade. The case explores the reasons for this dramatic reversal of fortune and describes in detail the actions Telles and his top management team took to change Brahma's culture, set and execute operational improvements, and create real options for future revenue streams

Capital One CEO and founder, Rich Fairbank, had much to be proud of both in terms of his and co-founder Nigel Morris' accomplishments and the accomplishments of Capital One. However, he and Morris didn't want to rest on their laurels. In 2000, they called a meeting with their senior managers to assess the company's strategy. Specifically, Fairbank wondered whether the company had executed on the optimal strategy throughout its history and whether the company's strategy was consistent, yet fluid and flexible, during changing times. Also, had the various functions optimally aligned with the company's strategy? Other financial companies imitated Capital One's successes. Fairbank wanted to ensure that the company remained ahead of the competition, while maintaining its culture of testing and innovation.

The Leveens started a high-end catalog business as a small home-based venture in 1987. It grew into a nationally recognized, $60 million company, offering products that ranged from unique pens and pencils to leather briefcases and fully furnished offices. In 1999, it reached saturation in the U.S. marketplace, and the owner-founders must consider new avenues of growth, including expansion of the catalog business into international markets; private labeling products for a large, national retailer; retailing in partnership with others; or retailing through company-owned, free-standing stores.

Law is the last great untapped source of competitive advantage, argues professor Larry Downes.

To compete against Wal-Mart, companies should exploit the weaknesses of other Wal-Mart competitors, say consultants Darrell Rigby and Dan Haas.

Intellectual property comprises an ever-increasing fraction of corporate wealth, but what's the good of that if an ever-increasing fraction of the property is copied or stolen? Faced with developing countries' limited and inadequately enforced patent and copyright laws, some companies are resorting to market-based strategies to protect their intellectual property. These include preempting or threatening competitors, embedding intellectual property in environments that can be protected, bundling insecure intellectual property with its more secure cousins, and actually entering the businesses that pose a threat. The authors urge companies coping with weak property rights to follow a decision tree when choosing which strategies to use and when: Start by thinking of the strategies that will protect your business' core. If, for example, a first-mover advantage is within reach, making yourself more committed to intellectual property could be the answer. If you and your rivals are equally matched, ask yourself, "Can those that threaten me with copying be copied in turn?" The knowledge that each of you can hurt the other may dampen the competitive intensity or even lead to voluntary sharing of property. If these solutions fail or don't apply, try forging a connection with a product or business closely related to your own. Doing so may prevent a valued asset from falling into a rival's hands or make the asset harder to misappropriate. This approach can even help you expand your piece of the market pie or reduce the cost of making the threatened product, perhaps to the point where you can compete against pirated goods. Finally, if there still doesn't seem to be a way of making money from your threatened product, you may choose to move into the very business that has hurt your own. Such strategies are behind the economics of successful companies like Intel and NBC, say the authors.

In the past few years, companies have become aware that they can slash costs by offshoring: moving jobs to lower wage locations. But this practice is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how globalization can transform industries, according to research by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). The institute's yearlong study suggests that by streamlining their production processes and supply chains globally, rather than just nationally or regionally, companies can lower their costs--as we've seen in the consumer electronics and PC industries. Companies can save as much as 70% of their total costs through globalization--50% from offshoring, 5% from training and business-task redesign, and 15% from process improvements. But they don't have to stop there. The cost reductions make it possible to lower prices and expand into new markets, attracting whole new classes of customers. To date, however, few businesses have recognized the full scope of performance improvements that globalization makes possible, much less developed sound strategies for capturing those opportunities. In this article, Diana Farrell, director of MGI, offers a step-by-step approach to doing both things. Among her suggestions: Assess where your industry falls along the globalization spectrum, because not all sectors of the economy face the same challenges and opportunities at the same time. Also, pay attention to production, regulatory, and organizational barriers to globalization. If any of these can be changed, size up the cost-saving (and revenue-generating) opportunities that will emerge for your company as a result of those changes. Farrell also defines the five stages of globalization--market entry, product specialization, value chain disaggregation, value chain reengineering, and the creation of new markets--and notes the different levers for cutting costs and creating value that companies can use in each phase.

More and more, businesses are counting on their suppliers to lower costs, improve quality, and develop innovations faster than their competitors' suppliers can. To this end, many experts agree that American firms, like their Japanese rivals, should build supplier keiretsu: networks of vendors that learn, improve, and prosper in sync with their parent companies. As history has shown, however, that's easier said than done. Some U.S. corporations created supply chains that superficially resembled those of their Japanese competitors, but they didn't alter the nature of their relationships with suppliers. As a result, relations between U.S. manufacturers and their suppliers have sunk to the lowest levels in decades. But reports of keiretsu's demise are overblown. The Japanese supplier-partnering model is alive and well--in North America as well as Japan. During the past 10 years, automakers Toyota and Honda have struck successful partnerships with some of the same suppliers that are at odds with the Big Three and created effective keiretsu across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. So how do Toyota and Honda do it? The authors, who have studied the American and Japanese automobile industries for more than 20 years, found that Toyota and Honda have built great supplier relationships by consistently following six steps: they understand how their suppliers work, turn supplier rivalry into opportunity, monitor vendors closely, develop those vendors' capabilities, share information intensively but selectively, and help their vendors continually improve their processes.

When managers from Wendy's International and Tyson Foods got together in 2003 to craft a supply chain partnership, each side had misgivings. There were those in the Wendy's camp who remembered past disagreements with Tyson and those on the Tyson side who were wary of Wendy's. But the companies had a tool, called the "partnership model," to help get things started on the right foot. Drawing on the experiences of member companies of the Global Supply Chain Forum at Ohio State University, the model offers a process for aligning expectations and determining the most productive level of partnering. It rapidly establishes the mutual understanding and commitment required for success and provides a structure for measuring outcomes. This article puts the tool in the reader's hands. Partnerships are justified only if they stand to yield substantially better results than the firms could achieve on their own. And even if they are warranted, they can fail if the partners enter them with mismatched expectations. Over the course of a day and a half, the partnership model elucidates the drivers behind each company's desire for partnership, allows managers to examine the conditions that facilitate or hamper cooperation, and specifies which activities managers must perform to implement the relationship. This tool has proved effective at Wendy's and elsewhere in determining what type of partnership is most appropriate. Colgate-Palmolive, for example, used it to help achieve stretch financial goals with suppliers of innovative products. But the model is just as effective in revealing that some companies' visions of partnership are not justified. In matters of the heart, it may be better to have loved and lost, but in business relationships, it's better to have headed off the resource sink and lingering resentments a failed partnership can cause.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. The conventional planning process does not work for strategic experiments that are truly bleeding edge. Nevertheless, many companies cling to what they know--planning that holds managers responsible for numbers. But that is not practical for entering completely new territory, when numbers are essentially pulled out of a hat and their underlying assumptions rarely revisited. A better approach to planning comes from researchers at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. It emphasizes learning instead of numbers, and it draws on in-depth studies of such companies as New York Times Digital, Thomson Corp., Corning, and Analog Devices. Their approach, theory-focused planning, diverges from conventional planning in six critical ways. Companies that use it concentrate on a few critical unknowns instead of the usual horde of details in conventional plans; they focus on the theory underlining the predictions rather than the predictions themselves; they look for trends rather than numerical benchmarks; they review the plan often, in response to important new data, instead of annually; in that review, they consider the experiment over time instead of just for the current period; and they emphasize leading indicators rather than financials. Companies still hold managers of strategic experiments responsible for performance, but performance is gauged according to how quickly managers learn from new data. To be successful in uncharted waters, the ability to learn from experience is paramount.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 705-448.