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In January 2003, Mr. Ho Kwok Ping ("KP"), the cofounder and chairman of Singapore-based Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts, was debating whether to take his privately held company public. The company developed and operated several boutique resorts and spas around Asia. What set the company apart in the marketplace, and was an integral part of the Banyan Tree brand, was its strong commitment to protecting the environment, both physical and human, driven by its leaders' passionate belief in behaving ethically and responsibly. The company had major plans for expansion in Asia and around the world. These expansion plans required financing, and one obvious option was to take the company public through an IPO. But KP had his doubts about an IPO. Would investors feel as passionately as he did about the company's pro-environment values and initiatives? Or would he and his managers have to compromise their values to deliver acceptable returns to the company's shareholders? In the current economic climate in Asia and globally, was it the right time to go public?

Describes the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's 2003 proposal to allow shareholders to nominate a "short slate" of directors for the board of listed companies. Includes comment letters for and against the proposal.

The response of former Self-Assessment and Career Development student Amy Kelly to the "48-Hour Diary" assignment.

Presents former Self-Assessment and Career Development student Amy Kelly's response to the "Written Interview" assignment.

Describes the acquisition of Nat West by Royal Bank of Scotland. Describes the strategic rationale for the acquisition and the process by which the integration of the two banks was accomplished. The acquisition is remarkable for how successful it was, given the typical high rate of failure of similar acquisitions. Teaching Purpose: To teach about the general lessons of successfully implementing mergers and acquisitions.

After leading the Peninsula Community Foundation (PCF) through a period of tremendous growth, its president, Sterling Speirn, is facing the prospect of a decline in the foundation's asset base for the first time in the foundation's history. In addition, the fact that financial service companies had made recent inroads in the market for administering donor-advised funds in recent years, an area that had been a key source for growth for community foundations for the last few decades, compelled Speirn to evaluate PCF's positioning in the market and to consider potential collaboration opportunities with these companies.

The head of sales and marketing in a large medical devices firm must decide how to assign his sales force. He compares selling in the pharma, specialty pharma, and device industries and analyzes the reasons for the differences.

Rick Cohen, president and CEO of C&S Wholesale Grocers, is trying to decide whether and how to implement the self-managed teams concept in his warehouse. Eight months earlier, C&S had begun to act as principal wholesaler to A&P throughout New England, a decision that was consistent with the firm's growth strategy, but that also represented a significant increase in daily throughput. Cohen was concerned about whether the company's existing operations would be able to meet the needs of all its customers and maintain the high levels of customer satisfaction for which the company was known throughout New England. When implemented successfully, the self-managed teams concept had been credited with enhancing an organization's productivity and competitiveness. Cohen wondered how such a concept could be implemented in the context of a labor-intensive, unionized warehouse environment.

A new political appointee with years of volunteer experience takes over a highly responsible job in the state government and is met with bureaucratic inertia. Describes a successful strategy to overcome organizational resistance to change.

TradeCard Inc. is a New York-based financial supply chain service provider focused on serving importers and exporters. Its product--TradeCard--aligns the documentary and financial requirements of a domestic or international trade transaction with the physical movement of goods. TradeCard launched its product in Hong Kong then moved on to open representative offices in Asia. In November 2002, TradeCard Inc. decided to enter China. Not only is China considered to be the biggest market in the world but most of TradeCard's biggest customers in the United States, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have their products manufactured in mainland China. With China's accession to the WTO, foreign companies, including TradeCard Inc., are eyeing China as a very promising market. However, China has yet to develop its legal, financial, and technological infrastructure to accommodate international players. Discusses how a structured B2B online payment system such as TradeCard can be marketed in China and how TradeCard Inc. can create a critical mass of users in China.

The primary purpose of this case is to provide students with an opportunity to practice the implementation of a simple activity-based costing (ABC) system. In doing so, students are asked to review several possible allocation bases and ascertain the best base by which to allocate plant administration costs. In addition, students are expected to calculate and compare traditional volume-based or direct-labor plus direct materials-based overhead allocation results with ABC--and then analyze which allocation method is most appropriate to the situation at Zauner Ornaments. This case also allows students to apply a managerial perspective and utilize the cost allocation results to identify potential pricing and cost management strategies.

This case has three main purposes: 1. To illustrate the importance of understanding cost behaviors in calculating the contribution of the Corvallis Cup youth soccer tournament to decide whether to continue, drop, or expand the tournament. 2. To provide a vehicle for discussing sunk costs, overhead allocation methods, and the impact of misallocation on the income/loss shown for a segment of an organization. 3. To allow students to perform simple breakeven analysis using relevant costs.

In October 2002, the senior investment officers of UBS AG's Global Asset Management (GAM) division, the largest asset management firm in the world, must decide whether to issue a new quantitative investment product, one that will stand in sharp contrast to GAM's historically fundamentalist and value-style approach. The problem raises sharp questions about the strategic evolution of the industry, its products, and in particular, its leading firms. To some in the firm, it seemed that the new "quant" product was a natural extension of the strategic transformation of GAM since 1995. But others in the senior team wondered whether the market would be ready for this product. The tasks for the student are to map the industry changes, evaluate the transformation of UBS, and assess the fit of the new quant product with the firm's strategic approach. This case was prepared to meet the following teaching objectives: 1) Assess the pace, direction, and implications of globalization of the asset management industry. Key to this assessment is the emerging research on the relative importance of countries versus sectors in explaining investment returns globally; 2) Explore a "country/sector" organization structure for global research; Identify its defining characteristics. Compare it with other possible structures. Determine its advantages and disadvantages as an organizing system. Identify key success drivers. And 3) Evaluate a quantitative investment product relative to other product offerings.

Provides a history of the board of directors of the Coca-Cola Co. through 2003. Describes the evolution in the board's membership, practices, and structure and the role it played in the company's governance. Questions are raised about the relationship between the board and top management, especially how the board is carrying out its responsibilities in the 21st century.

Examines the efforts of an early-stage venture capital firm to formalize processes and build a pyramidal organization in an industry dominated by informal, unpyramidal structures.

In the summer of 2002 the Commissariat for Human Rights, Poverty Alleviation, and Social Inclusion, an agency of the government of Mauritania, had to decide whether and how to modify its Twizé program of shelter and poverty assistance. The program had been piloted in the Dar el Beida resettlement area on the outskirts of Mauritania's capital, Nouakchott, in 1999 and then extended to three other similar resettlement areas in 2000 and 2001. But the Commissariat was worried that the pilot had been expensive, and that it could not afford to apply the Twizé program more widely in its current form. HKS Case Number 1706.0

Describes events associated with Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's intelligence chief and advisor to President Fujimori, his network, and interventions in affairs of the Newmont Mining Corp. Newmont, a U.S. company established in 1921, proclaimed its corporate values to be "behaving with integrity, working loyally, inspiring trust, telling the truth, caring for our colleagues and cooperating with our community." Yet, on February 26, 1998, Lawrence T. Kurlander, a vice president of Newmont, met with Vladimiro Montesinos Torres in Montesinos' office at the Servicio de Intelligencia Nacional (the national intelligence service) to seek his help in getting a resolution favorable to Newmont in a quarrel with the French company Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieres (BRGM) over their shared ownership of the Yanacocha mine. The mine was the richest gold mine in Latin America and one of the biggest in the world. BRGM wanted to sell part of its 25% share in Yanacocha to Normandy Ltd., an Australian mining company. Newmont sued to block the sale and to gain control of the mine for itself. The dispute had made its way to the Supreme Court of Peru. Montesinos secretly taped his conversation with Kurlander, as was his habit, and the tapes provide a rare inside view of how business gets done where the rule of law is subordinated to political influence.

In December of 2002, the Metro Council of Portland, Oregon had to decide whether or not to expand the Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) for the metropolitan area. The UGB had been created as a tool to help promote a more compact, livable, and efficient metropolitan area. But Portland's housing prices had been increasing rapidly, and home builders and others were arguing that the UGB was at fault for too tightly restricting the supply of developable land. This case, intended for a course in urban planning or economics, is designed to support a discussion of how the various forces of supply and demand, including zoning restrictions, affect the price of housing. It can also stimulate an examination of the rationale for various types of zoning or growth controls. Part A (1703.0) describes the basic debate, while Part B (1704.0) is an optional note that provides additional background on how housing prices are measured. HKS Case Number 1703.0

This case introduces a framework for cost modeling.Two data sets (one for injection-molded plastic parts and another for compressors) allow students to apply the cost-driver framework in conjunction with basic spreadsheet and regression analysis. Although obviously applicable in a course on supply chain management, the case can also be used to teach competitive cost analysis for strategic decision making.

Senior executives at Vanguard are evaluating their marketing strategy. In particular, they are looking at their approach to market segmentation, the organization of the marketing function, and the weight placed on marketing metrics in the corporate dashboard in light of an economic and stock market downturn.