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When the XFL professional football league debuted on February 3, 2001, it generated a Nielsen rating of 10.1, higher than any nationally televised program in a Saturday evening time slot. The next week, ratings plummeted, and by week nine the XFL game earned the title as the lowest rated sports event in television history. Co-owners WWFE and NBC officially disbanded the XFL on May 10, 2001. What went wrong? How could two seasoned and respected figures in entertainment--WWFE's Vince McMahon and NBC's Dick Ebersol--have miscalculated so badly?

On March 22, 2001, Microsoft Corp. warned computer users that an individual posing electronically as a company representative had fooled VeriSign, Inc., the leading digital certificate authority, into issuing two fraudulent digital certificates in Microsoft's name. The certificates could be used by malicious attackers to trick computer users into running unsafe software programs. Despite the discovery of the fraud and the follow-up investigation by the FBI, the person who registered the certificates could not be found. The Microsoft case was the world's first reported case of digital certificate fraud. It raised serious questions about the sophistication of digital certificates and signatures and the rules governing the conduct of issuers and users in the electronic marketplace. The accident also revealed that a simple identity certificate/signature comes with complex and nonstandard policies and procedures that are vulnerable to regulatory and security flaws.

Much of the landscape in which today's media companies find themselves as they contend with the impact of digitization of content and the convergence of means of distribution was shaped by regulatory forces. Three government rulings in particular were influential: the Consent Decree of 1948 (often referred to as the "Paramount Case"), the Financial Interest and Syndication ruling (also called the "FinSyn" ruling of 1970 of the United States Federal Communications Commission), and the United States Supreme Court ruling in Universal City Studios et al. (including Disney) vs. Sony Corp. (also known as the Betamax case of 1984). These regulatory forces broke up tight vertical integration between content production and distribution (Paramount case and FinSyn ruling) or helped to pave the road for the introduction of new technologies for distribution (Betamax case).

Preston Resources, a small Australian gold mining company, bought the Bulong nickel mine for A$319 million in November 1998 and financed the acquisition by issuing a US$185 million (A$294 million) project bond. At the time, mining had been underway for several months, and construction of the processing plant was essentially complete. Almost from the beginning, however, a series of design and operating problems shut down production and required costly repairs. Although processing performance improved by late 2000, maintenance issues continued to plague the plant, and output remained significantly below forecast levels. This case, set in 2002, concerns the financial consequences of these problems, including a bond default in January 2000 and Preston's efforts to restructure the project debt.

Scott Malkin, CEO of Value Retail, a developer and operator of European outlet villages serving luxury brands, is planning on developing a 18,503 m2 open-air outlet village to be built 98 kilometers south of Milan on land he was about to acquire for 7.26 million lira. Is this a good investment? What are the risks associated with the project? Could Value Retail pursue its outlet strategy in Italy? Includes color exhibits.

Merck has been approached by a small biotech research firm with the proposal that Merck buy the rights to a new drug that promises to treat obesity and lower cholesterol. The drug is in the middle of phase I of the FDA approval process. Pat Harlow, the chief licensing officer, has been leading Merck's investigation team. A meeting is scheduled for tomorrow at which Merck's response to the offer will be drafted.

In 2001, the Unilever Superannuation Fund sued Merrill Lynch for damages of 130 million British pounds. Over the period 1977 to 1998, the Unilever Fund had significantly underperformed the benchmark, and its trustees contended that the poor returns resulted from negligence by the fund manager, Mercury Asset Management (which Merrill Lynch had subsequently purchased). In response, Merrill/Mercury argued that although they may have made some poor judgments, they had not been negligent, and abnormal market circumstances had been the cause of the underperformance. The court case was expected to have ramifications for the entire pensions industry.

Since the 1960s, corporate venture capital has had a mixed history. Companies seem to form separate venture capital programs during boom years and then withdraw their commitments during economic downturns. This case opens with a fictional situation: Ron Flores, the vicepresident of corporate development at AllTech, the world's largest enterprise software company, is trying to evaluate whether the company should establish a separate corporate venture-capital group to spearhead investments in young companies. Flores has two days to put together a recommendation for the company's CFO. To make his decision, Flores reviews several documents, which make up the bulk of the case, including an overview and brief history of corporate venture capital and an overview of the venture investing activities at Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., and Xerox Corp.

Cynthia Mitchell has finally gotten a plum management opportunity at AgFunds, a Houston-based company that provides financial services to farmers and farmer-owned cooperatives. Peter Jones, regional vice president, has recruited Cynthia to revive the Arkansas district, which has been losing customers for 15 years. The sales force there isn't bad; it's just been poorly managed by an indifferent boss for too long. Still, Cynthia knows she'll need at least one powerhouse sales rep to get things back on track. She thinks she's found that person in Steve Ripley, this year's top trainee at AgFunds, who is inexplicably available three months after the training period is over. In the interview, he proves to be ambitious, intelligent, and personable. But several of Cynthia's colleagues suggest that Steve might not be the best fit for the job: He's a black man in a company whose customer base is mostly conservative and white. Uncomfortably recalling her own experiences at AgFunds--she'd been rejected for a position in a territory that was deemed too unfriendly to female sales representatives--Cynthia addresses the issue with Peter. The mostly white farmers in Cynthia's district just won't trust their books to a black professional, Peter explains. And other minority professionals at AgFunds have derailed their careers trying to make inroads in unfriendly districts. "Steve deserves to start out in a more hospitable district. Once the right opportunity opens up, he'll be hired, and he'll do brilliantly," Peter reassures Cynthia, but she's still uncertain. Should she ignore her customers' biases and hire Steve, possibly setting him up to fail? Or would it be better to let Steve wait for a friendlier opportunity? In R0207A and R0207Z, experts David A. Thomas, Herman Morris, Jr., Daryl Koehn, Alicia Leung, and Glenn C. Loury comment on this fictional case study.

Cynthia Mitchell has finally gotten a plum management opportunity at AgFunds, a Houston-based company that provides financial services to farmers and farmer-owned cooperatives. Peter Jones, regional vice president, has recruited Cynthia to revive the Arkansas district, which has been losing customers for 15 years. The sales force there isn't bad; it's just been poorly managed by an indifferent boss for too long. Still, Cynthia knows she'll need at least one powerhouse sales rep to get things back on track. She thinks she's found that person in Steve Ripley, this year's top trainee at AgFunds, who is inexplicably available three months after the training period is over. In the interview, he proves to be ambitious, intelligent, and personable. But several of Cynthia's colleagues suggest that Steve might not be the best fit for the job: He's a black man in a company whose customer base is mostly conservative and white. Uncomfortably recalling her own experiences at AgFunds--she'd been rejected for a position in a territory that was deemed too unfriendly to female sales representatives--Cynthia addresses the issue with Peter. The mostly white farmers in Cynthia's district just won't trust their books to a black professional, Peter explains. And other minority professionals at AgFunds have derailed their careers trying to make inroads in unfriendly districts. "Steve deserves to start out in a more hospitable district. Once the right opportunity opens up, he'll be hired, and he'll do brilliantly," Peter reassures Cynthia, but she's still uncertain. Should she ignore her customers' biases and hire Steve, possibly setting him up to fail? Or would it be better to let Steve wait for a friendlier opportunity? In R0207A and R0207Z, experts David A. Thomas, Herman Morris, Jr., Daryl Koehn, Alicia Leung, and Glenn C. Loury comment on this fictional case study.

Cynthia Mitchell has finally gotten a plum management opportunity at AgFunds, a Houston-based company that provides financial services to farmers and farmer-owned cooperatives. Peter Jones, regional vice president, has recruited Cynthia to revive the Arkansas district, which has been losing customers for 15 years. The sales force there isn't bad; it's just been poorly managed by an indifferent boss for too long. Still, Cynthia knows she'll need at least one powerhouse sales rep to get things back on track. She thinks she's found that person in Steve Ripley, this year's top trainee at AgFunds, who is inexplicably available three months after the training period is over. In the interview, he proves to be ambitious, intelligent, and personable. But several of Cynthia's colleagues suggest that Steve might not be the best fit for the job: He's a black man in a company whose customer base is mostly conservative and white. Uncomfortably recalling her own experiences at AgFunds--she'd been rejected for a position in a territory that was deemed too unfriendly to female sales representatives--Cynthia addresses the issue with Peter. The mostly white farmers in Cynthia's district just won't trust their books to a black professional, Peter explains. And other minority professionals at AgFunds have derailed their careers trying to make inroads in unfriendly districts. "Steve deserves to start out in a more hospitable district. Once the right opportunity opens up, he'll be hired, and he'll do brilliantly," Peter reassures Cynthia, but she's still uncertain. Should she ignore her customers' biases and hire Steve, possibly setting him up to fail? Or would it be better to let Steve wait for a friendlier opportunity? In R0207A and R0207Z, experts David A. Thomas, Herman Morris, Jr., Daryl Koehn, Alicia Leung, and Glenn C. Loury comment on this fictional case study.

After more than 10 years of operation, the Women's Thrift Cooperatives (WTCs) in the impoverished Karimnagar and Warangal districts of Andhra Pradesh are an established part of the lives of their women members. As such they represent opportunities and challenges for the women and the non-governmental organization, the Cooperative Development Foundation (CDF), which planted the seed for their growth and has since supported them with technical assistance. The cooperatives are savings institutions that also lend money to their members and they rely solely on the spread between the interest they pay on the savings and the interest they earn on their loans to support their operations. In recent years the fund utilization of the thrifts has decreased, leading to some concern about their financial sustainability. The members and CDF are attempting to do something about this by starting a dairy cooperative to sell milk in the city of Warangal - the women will use the proceeds from loans from the thrifts to finance their milk purchases. There is also concern that the thrifts' accounting practices are disguising some loans in default, resulting in an overly rosy financial picture. CDF and the leadership of the cooperatives have to work out how to get the thrifts to recognize the losses that the defaults constitute without undermining their faith in the thrifts. And finally, there is pressure on the CDF from the leadership themselves to relax its rule, which the thrifts freely adopted, that prohibits leadership participation in electoral politics. The thrifts have provided a fertile training ground for women to become involved in the public life of the village, and they are now in demand as candidates for political office, given the early 1990s Indian constitutional amendments that set aside one-third of all local council seats for women. HKS Case Number 1656.0

In 1995 Haiti's banking sector undergoes reformtwo important aspects of which are a lowering of the reserve requirement on banks and a lifting of the interest rate ceiling on loans. These reforms give banks the opportunity to expand their lending activities, but who to lend to? Some banks turn to the informal sector, which dominates the Haitian economy, and to microfinance as a way to serve entrepreneurs working in this sector. Pierre-Marie Boisson, Chief Economist of Sogebank, the largest bank in Haiti, begins selling the idea of microfinance to his board of directors in the late 1990s. By 2000 the new microfinance affiliate of Sogebank, Sogesol, opened its doors for business. A year later it has 2,200 active clients and has extended over 4,500 loans. As expected Sogesol is incurring losses, but it had built a sound operational base with the help of Accion International, which is a part-owner and technical assistance provider. Its challenge for the coming year is to further improve its productivity to maximize the number of clients each of its loan officers serves and to expand beyond metropolitan Port-au-Prince to Haiti's provincial towns. Beyond these internal challenges, Sogesol faces two external threats. Competition from other microfinance providers not only threatens its market share, but, more ominously, threatens to create overindebtedness of entrepreneurs in the informal sector. The solution to this problem is a credit bureau system that allows lenders to share information about their borrowers. But a central bank effort in the mid-1990s to institute such a system failed, and it is unclear who will lead a renewed effort. The other external threat Sogesol faces is the uncertain regulatory environment in which it is operating. Haiti has no microfinance regulations, and Sogesol is operating under the umbrella of Sogebank's bank regulations. HKS Case Number 1657.0

The Delphi Corp.'s board of directors faces a transition as lead director Thomas Wyman approaches mandatory retirement. Chairman and CEO J.T. Battenberg reflects on Delphi's history and its successful reinvention by Wyman and Battenberg when it separated from its 100-year-old parent company, GM. Examines how boards of directors interact with top management and how management can work effectively with an active board.

The founders and proprietors of a successful 23-year old women's apparel store are facing a critical issue. Can they grow by adding a second store that will not compete with their existing operation? If so, where should it be located, what managerial changes are required to make the second store successful, and how can it be funded without putting at risk the financial stability of the existing business?

Describes the evolution of WorldSpace, the world's first major provider of digital radio service to the developing world. The brainchild of Noah Samara, an African-born, American-trained lawyer, WorldSpace has a dual commercial and social mission. Samara wants to address the problem of development by bringing "information affluence" to the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Specifically, he wants to provide high-quality news, entertainment, and education content transmitted through a low-cost digital radio system. In less than a decade, Samara has achieved a great deal: He has raised over $1 billion for the project, acquired the rights to a vast swath of the world's digital radio spectrum, and launched two proprietary satellites. The question now is, Can he combine his social objectives with a for-profit mission? And will the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America want what WorldSpace is selling?

The Entropia management team and a Harvard Business School field study team look for applications for "grid computing" in the financial services industry, identifying a "go-to-market" plan for this new technology.

The Electronic Tendering System (ETS) was a flagship project under the Hong Kong Special Administration Region's (HKSAR's) e-government strategy to lead by example in the adoption of electronic means for government transactions with the public and businesses. With the success of the initial launch in April 2000, HKSAR planned to extend the ETS to all other government procurements, with a goal of transferring 80% of all procurement tenders online by the end of 2003. Also under consideration was an electronic marketplace system (EMS) for the small value purchases and to integrate the two systems for a total procurement solution.

The Netherlands suffered economic crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite (or perhaps because of) its access to North Sea gas. In response to mounting inflation and unemployment, a tripartite agreement between employers, unions, and government was reached in 1982. This agreement laid the basis for macroeconomic stabilization in the 1980s. At the same time, a variety of structural reforms were introduced--centered on improving the flexibility of the labor market by increasing part-time work. The results appeared impressive: by the mid-1990s, the Netherlands was enjoying strong economic growth and unemployment rates of below 3%, much lower than its large continental European neighbors. However, many observers doubted the sustainability of this so-called "polder model." Low unemployment had been achieved in part by reducing participation rates. Some doubted whether a declining working population could sustain the Dutch standard of living. At the same time, the Netherlands was not a leader in technological development, and others were concerned whether it could compete effectively in the new global information economy.

Vans is best known for selling footwear and apparel to skateboarders, surfers, and other alternative sports athletes. In April 2002, Gary Schoenfeld, the CEO, is facing a number of challenges. With respect to footwear, he must decide what to do about two product lines that are struggling--the outdoor line of hiking shoes and the women's collection. More broadly, Vans is currently embarking on a number of new ventures, some of with which the company has little experience. For example, Vans is in the process of promoting a full-length movie, creating its own record label, and working with video-game developers to develop games based on its sporting events. Traces the up-and-down history of a niche fashion brand in a market in which consumers are notoriously fickle. In recent years, the CEO appears to have revived the brand; however, it is unclear whether the company is in danger of losing its hardcore customer base as it ventures into the consumer mainstream.