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OnStar, a provider of in-vehicle safety, security, and information services called "telematics," was founded in 1995 as a collaborative venture among General Motors (GM), EDS, and Hughes Electronics Corp. Safety and security services, including roadside assistance, emergency help after a crash, remote diagnostics, and stolen vehicle tracking, were the cornerstones of OnStar's offering. In addition, OnStar provided its customers with a 24-hour connection to convenience services such as navigation and route guidance, vehicle location assistance, and personal concierge services. To generate more revenues, OnStar expanded its offering to luxury vehicles of other auto manufacturers. Looking back, Chet Huber, OnStar president, was quite satisfied with the company's achievements since it was founded: OnStar's subscriber base had grown to more than 2 million and the company was routinely recognized as the leading telematics provider in the world. OnStar was also delivering benefits to its parent company, GM. By maintaining one-to-one relationships with customers, OnStar helped GM sell more cars and trucks, strengthen customer loyalty, and improve operational efficiency. Although revenues for the world market of in-car telematics terminals were expected to reach $20 billion by 2010, competition in the market was intensifying. Richard Wagoner, GM's CEO, and Huber needed to explore a number of strategic and operational questions around the future of OnStar: How would OnStar create ongoing value to GM? How should OnStar position itself to gain high acceptance and subscription renewal rates? What further strategic partnerships should OnStar form to maintain its leadership? How should GM leverage the continuous stream of vehicle and customer data it received from OnStar?

This case tells the story of the establishment and growth of public television in New Jersey, focused on the rise and fall of its first executive director, Lawrence Frymire. It implicitly raises the question of why Frymire-someone with a distinguished broadcasting career who had overseen the network of publicly-owned stations for a decade and had been responsible for getting them on the air in the first place-seemed suddenly to lose the confidence of the gubernatorially-appointed board to whom he reported. Were the motives of the board, and perhaps New Jersey's Governor, high-minded or narrowly political? What warning signs might Frymire have noted to forestall his dismissal? The case provides a vehicle for discussion about the politics of public authorities and the careers of those who work for them. HKS Case Number 1772.0

Oil shocks, war, tax cuts, deficits, market bubbles--nothing has really affected the long-run rate of GDP growth in the last 30 years.

Despite a long-term decline in the circus industry, Cirque du Soleil profitably increased revenue 22-fold over the last 10 years by reinventing the circus. Rather than competing within the confines of the existing industry or trying to steal customers from rivals, Cirque developed uncontested market space that made the competition irrelevant. Cirque created what the authors call a blue ocean, a previously unknown market space. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In red oceans-that is, in all the industries already existing-companies compete by grabbing for a greater share of limited demand. As the market space gets more crowded, prospects for profits and growth decline. Products turn into commodities, and increasing competition turns the water bloody. There are two ways to create blue oceans. One is to launch completely new industries, as eBay did with online auctions. But it's much more common for a blue ocean to be created from within a red ocean when a company expands the boundaries of an existing industry. In studying more than 150 blue ocean creations in over 30 industries, the authors observed that the traditional units of strategic analysis-company and industry-are of limited use in explaining how and why blue oceans are created. The most appropriate unit of analysis is the strategic move, the set of managerial actions and decisions involved in making a major market-creating business offering. Creating blue oceans builds brands. So powerful is blue ocean strategy, in fact, that a blue ocean strategic move can create brand equity that lasts for decades.

It's fairly obvious: To make intelligent investments within your organization, you need to understand how your whole industry is changing. But such knowledge is not always easy to come by. Companies misread clues and arrive at false conclusions all the time. To understand truly where your industry is headed, you have to take a long-term, high-level look at the context in which you do business, says Boston University professor Anita McGahan. She studied a variety of businesses from a cross section of industries over a 10-year period, examining how industry structure affects business profitability and investor returns. Her research suggests that industries evolve along one of four distinct trajectories--radical, progressive, creative, and intermediating--that set boundaries on what will generate profits in a business. These four trajectories are defined by two types of threats. The first is when new, outside alternatives threaten to weaken or make obsolete core activities that have historically generated profits for an industry. The second is when an industry's core assets--its resources, knowledge, and brand capital--fail to generate value as they once did. Industries undergo radical change when core assets and core activities are both threatened with obsolescence; they experience progressive change when neither is jeopardized. Creative change occurs when core assets are under threat but core activities are stable, and intermediating change happens when core activities are threatened while core assets retain their capacity to create value. If your company's innovation strategy is not aligned with your industry's change trajectory, your plan for achieving returns on invested capital cannot succeed, McGahan says. But if you understand which path you're on, you can determine which strategies will succeed and which will backfire.

Building a strong supply chain is essential for business success. But when it comes to improving their supply chains, few companies take the right approach. Many businesses work to make their chains faster or more cost effective, assuming that those steps are the keys to competitive advantage. To the contrary: Supply chains that focus on speed and costs tend to deteriorate over time. The author has spent 15 years studying more than 60 companies to gain insight into this and other supply chain dilemmas. His conclusion: Only companies that build supply chains that are agile, adaptable, and aligned get ahead of their rivals. All three components are essential; without any one of them, supply chains break down. Great companies create supply chains that respond to abrupt changes in markets. Agility is critical because in most industries, both demand and supply fluctuate rapidly and widely. Supply chains typically cope by playing speed against costs, but agile ones respond both quickly and cost efficiently. Great companies also adapt their supply networks when markets or strategies change. The best supply chains allow managers to identify structural shifts early by recording the latest data, filtering out noise, and tracking key patterns. Finally, great companies align the interests of the partners in their supply chains with their own. That's important because every firm is concerned solely with its own interests. If its goals are out of alignment with those of other partners in the supply chain, performance will suffer. When companies hear about the triple-A supply chain, they assume that building one will require increased technology and investment. But most firms already have the infrastructure in place to create one. A fresh attitude alone can go a long way toward making it happen.

Just five years ago, salespeople at Whirlpool were in the habit of referring to their supply chain organization as the "sales disablers." Now the company excels at getting products to the right place at the right time while managing to keep inventories low. How did that happen? In this first-person account, Reuben Slone, Whirlpool's vice-president of global supply chain, describes how he and his colleagues devised the right supply chain strategy, sold it internally, and implemented it. Slone insisted that the right focal point for the strategy was the satisfaction of consumers at the end of the supply chain. Most supply chain initiatives do the opposite: They start with the realities of a company's manufacturing base and proceed from there. Through a series of interviews with trade customers large and small, his team identified 27 different capabilities that drove industry perceptions of Whirlpool's performance. Knowing it was infeasible to aim for world-class performance across all of them, Slone weighed the costs of excelling at each and found the combination of initiatives that would provide overall competitive advantage. A highly disciplined project management office and broad training in project management were key to keeping work on budget and on benefit. Slone set an intense pace--three "releases" of new capabilities every month--that the group maintains to this day. Lest this seem like a technology story, however, Slone insists it is just as much a "talent renaissance." People are proud today to be part of Whirlpool's supply chain organization, and its new generation of talent will give the company a competitive advantage for years to come.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For many years, multinational corporations could compete successfully by exploiting scale and scope economies or by taking advantage of imperfections in the world's goods, labor, and capital markets. But these ways of competing are no longer as profitable as they once were. In most industries, multinationals no longer compete primarily with companies whose boundaries are confined to a single nation. Rather, they go head-to-head with a handful of other giants. Against such global competitors, it is hard to sustain an advantage based on traditional economies of scale and scope. MNCs must seek new sources of competitive advantage. Whereas multinationals in the past realized economies of scope principally by utilizing physical assets and exploiting a companywide brand, the new economies of scope are based on the ability of business units, subsidiaries, and functional departments within the company to collaborate successfully by sharing knowledge and jointly developing new products and services. Collaboration can be an MNC's source of competitive advantage because it does not occur automatically--far from it. Indeed, several barriers impede collaboration within complex multiunit organizations. To overcome those barriers, companies will have to develop distinct organizing capabilities that cannot be easily imitated. The authors develop a framework that links managerial action, barriers to interunit collaboration, and value creation in MNCs to help managers understand how collaborative advantage can work. The framework conceptualizes collaboration as a set of management levers that reduce four specific barriers to collaboration, leading in turn to several types of value creation.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. In recent years, gray markets--in which a firm's products are sold or resold through unauthorized dealers--have become ubiquitous. They exist for tangible products (lumber and electronic components) and intangibles (broadcast signals, IPOs); for massive goods (automobiles and heavy construction equipment) and for light, easily shipped products (watches and cosmetics); for the mundane (health and beauty aids) and the life saving (prescription drugs). Gray markets aren't going away soon. Although they ebb and flow as exchange rates, price differentials, and supply conditions change, surveys confirm the increasing incidence and scope of gray markets. In many situations, their sales outstrip authorized sales. An inability to compete with gray markets can wreak havoc on firms and industries. Unfortunately, because it is so hard to get data on gray market activity and what firms are doing to deal with it, there is little published guidance to help managers. The sale of legitimate products in the wrong place or through the wrong channel poses unique problems to companies. But there are unique solutions that can successfully manage them. Using several examples that show the scope and complexity of the gray market problem, the authors explain how managers can apply a framework based on sensing, speed, and severity to manage it. They also point out scenarios in which gray markets are actually helpful and should be tolerated.

At the end of 2001, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and Barclays Bank PLC were in advanced negotiations regarding the potential merger of their respective retail, corporate, and offshore banking operations in the Caribbean. Some members of each board wondered whether this was the best direction to take. Would the combined company be able to deliver superior returns? Would it be possible to integrate, within budget, companies that had competed with each other in the region for decades? Would either firm be better off divesting regional operations instead? Should the two firms just continue to go it alone with emphasis on continual improvement? A decision needed to be made in the coming week.

QUALCOMM, Inc. had transitioned from a fledgling startup into a Fortune 500 wireless technology leader. Its CDMA technology was considered the preeminent technology and was the world's fastest growing wireless communications technology. CEO Irwin Jacobs had a number of concerns as he determined how to sustain the company's success. How should the company allocate its resources among products? How could QUALCOMM encourage other countries--China and India in particular--to move to CDMA-based systems? How should QUALCOMM defend its position against other new technologies?

Paybox.net AG was the world's first mass-marketable mobile payment system. Launched in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, it has been steadily losing ground. The company's founder, and architect of the technology underlying Paybox, must decide if his product has a future and, if so, what the market strategy should be.

Companies enact defenses against hostile takeovers to protect their independence and current management initiatives or to help ensure that hostile bidders are pressured to present their best offers. The critical challenge for executives is to determine--in anticipation of attacks on their firm--which defense strategies best fortify stockholder investments. Reviews the motivations for hostile takeovers, discusses the effects of popular defenses, and showcases several high-profile takeover bids to provide executives with well-reasoned and empirically supported evaluations of the major strategies they can use to maximize shareholder wealth.

San Diego City Schools embarked on an ambitious, districtwide reform effort to improve student achievement in 1998. Examines the role of resource reallocation in supporting the district's reform strategy, highlighting how resource allocation choices and processes affect organizational coherence and strategy execution. In the fall of 2003, the district leadership contemplates making substantial changes to its resource allocation system in response to a serious budget crisis and mounting internal and external pressures for change.

Supplements the (A) case.

This case traces the development of the worldwide watch industry from its inception through to mid-1990. In particular, it allows the reader to observe some fairly dramatic shifts in industry leadership, as well as several dramatic examples of product redefinition along the way. The case is rich enough in content to allow the reader to identify a number of often-recurring reasons for the changes in industry leadership.

Supplements the (A) case.

In 2002, a money manager is considering how to vote her shares in Hewlett-Packard on the proposal to merge with Compaq. The (A) case presents information about the strategic and financial motivations of the merger. Included are completed valuations of both HP and Compaq and detailed summaries of the leading advocate (Carly Fiorina) and critic (Walter Hewlett). The tasks for the student are to value the prospective synergies in the deal and critically assess the strategic arguments (pro and con). The (B) case affords a detailed examination of the terms of the proposed merger. The tasks for the student are to critically assess the specific design of the deal and its impact on shareholders. Of particular interest are the impact on earnings per share (that is, EPS dilution), the governance of the new firm and whether this is, indeed, a merger of equals. The (C) case describes the outcome of the proxy contest. Here the task for the student is to evaluate the strategies of each side in communicating with shareholders and presenting arguments. The objectives of the case module are to expose students to the mechanics of proxy contests, exercise skills in valuation and strategic analysis, and critically evaluate deal terms. The (A) and (B) cases can be taught in sequential classes, or in one class. The (C) case is typically distributed at the end followed by a brief discussion.

In 2002, a money manager is considering how to vote her shares in Hewlett-Packard on the proposal to merge with Compaq. The (A) case presents information about the strategic and financial motivations of the merger. Included are completed valuations of both HP and Compaq and detailed summaries of the leading advocate (Carly Fiorina) and critic (Walter Hewlett). The tasks for the student are to value the prospective synergies in the deal and critically assess the strategic arguments (pro and con). The (B) case affords a detailed examination of the terms of the proposed merger. The tasks for the student are to critically assess the specific design of the deal and its impact on shareholders. Of particular interest are the impact on earnings per share (that is, EPS dilution), the governance of the new firm and whether this is, indeed, a merger of equals. The (C) case describes the outcome of the proxy contest. Here the task for the student is to evaluate the strategies of each side in communicating with shareholders and presenting arguments. The objectives of the case module are to expose students to the mechanics of proxy contests, exercise skills in valuation and strategic analysis, and critically evaluate deal terms. The (A) and (B) cases can be taught in sequential classes, or in one class. The (C) case is typically distributed at the end followed by a brief discussion.

Explores the concept of strategic alignment within a public school district.