個案總覽

Highlights the key role of selecting creative in brand communications, the challenges of building a brand in a turbulent cultural environment, the challenges of extending an advertising campaign, and the interpretation of ads as a crucial senior management skill. Includes color exhibits.

Provident Life & Accident Insurance Co. has made an initial bid to acquire a primary competitor, Paul Revere, from conglomerate, Textron. The due diligence process uncovers a significant block of problematic disability insurance policies. Provident is forced to assess the negative impact of this discovery on its initial valuation and revise its bid. In the process, the divergent views of the evolution of these policies by the bidder and seller have to be translated through discounted cash flow analysis into appropriate bid prices. Finally, this DCF analysis, in combination with multiples analysis, is used in negotiations with Textron and public shareholders.

Brigitte Gagne, Le Petit Chef's director of microwave R&D, is deciding on the product development agenda for next year. She has to decide which of the available projects to fund, and evaluate the overall portfolio of projects currently under development. The recent poor performance of the firm prompts Gagne to think about reassessing the way projects are generated, evaluated, and selected at Le Petit Chef. However, Gagne has a pressing deadline to meet--the executive team is due to review the next year's agenda at a meeting in Paris tomorrow.

The MinderSoft case explores the entrepreneur's attempt to raise a first round of venture capital. The founder and venture fund's valuation differ by a large amount. The founder must decide whether to accept this offer or search further. The case is designed to help students compare frequently used valuation frameworks including the venture capital method and discounted case flow methods.

During his first three years as CEO, Lloyd Byrne transformed Bretplex from an uninspired family-controlled company in the machine tool business into a midsize industrial conglomerate. Sales doubled, market value tripled, the company's management team grew stronger, and the board's makeup was enhanced by the appointment of several glamorous nonexecutive directors. After that strong beginning, however, Bretplex's previously unstoppable growth ground to a halt. The turning point was the company's acquisition of Hazlemere Measures, a British equipment manufacturer. The price of the acquisition had been bid up by an aggressive competitor, and the market believed Bretplex paid too much. Soon, other acquisitions were being examined. Worse, the company began missing its revenue estimates and revised them downward only as reporting dates drew near. More uncertainty emerged when Laura Barrington, the manager of an activist shareholder fund, began asking whether Lloyd had what it would take to lead the company to recovery. Board members Harriet Poole, a CEO herself, and Jefferson Souza, a strategy guru, debate solutions for Bretplex. If the company fires Lloyd, Jefferson says, the market will think the company is serious about getting its house in order, and Barrington and the fund will probably back off. Harriet, distracted by events at her own company, fears that it will be highly disruptive for Bretplex to lose its much-admired leader and, possibly, some of its senior managers. She is inclined to stick with a restructuring plan just approved by the board. In R0109A and R0109Z, commentators Norm Augustine, Charles Elson, Richard H. Koppes, and Nell Minow offer advice on this fictional case study.

During his first three years as CEO, Lloyd Byrne transformed Bretplex from an uninspired family-controlled company in the machine tool business into a midsize industrial conglomerate. Sales doubled, market value tripled, the company's management team grew stronger, and the board's makeup was enhanced by the appointment of several glamorous nonexecutive directors. After that strong beginning, however, Bretplex's previously unstoppable growth ground to a halt. The turning point was the company's acquisition of Hazlemere Measures, a British equipment manufacturer. The price of the acquisition had been bid up by an aggressive competitor, and the market believed Bretplex paid too much. Soon, other acquisitions were being examined. Worse, the company began missing its revenue estimates and revised them downward only as reporting dates drew near. More uncertainty emerged when Laura Barrington, the manager of an activist shareholder fund, began asking whether Lloyd had what it would take to lead the company to recovery. Board members Harriet Poole, a CEO herself, and Jefferson Souza, a strategy guru, debate solutions for Bretplex. If the company fires Lloyd, Jefferson says, the market will think the company is serious about getting its house in order, and Barrington and the fund will probably back off. Harriet, distracted by events at her own company, fears that it will be highly disruptive for Bretplex to lose its much-admired leader and, possibly, some of its senior managers. She is inclined to stick with a restructuring plan just approved by the board. In R0109A and R0109Z, commentators Norm Augustine, Charles Elson, Richard H. Koppes, and Nell Minow offer advice on this fictional case study.

In the late 1990s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, under heavy pressure to find ways to relieve developing countries of large volumes of accumulated public debt, devise a way they believe offers a way to link such debt relief with their long-term goal of decreasing world poverty. Aid allowing for reduction in debt would be linked to the development of a so-called Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan (PRSP), a blueprint for how nations would use the financial resources freed by debt relief both to increase economic growth and to decrease the number of persons in poverty. This case focuses on the development of such a plan in the West African country of Mauritania, a predominantly desert nation twice the size of France with a population of just 2.6 million. Specifically, the case describes the challenges faced by the government team charged with development of the PRSP as it grapples with a mandate that the plan be developed through a process of thorough public participation. Only recently democratic, and with a long history of military rule and ethnic and racial conflict, Mauritania posed difficult challenges for those seeking to involve the public. Although a wave of non-government organizations had developed in the 1990s, not all were considered either representative or legitimate. HKS Case Number 1623.0

Notwithstanding its reputation as a free market bastion, Hong Kong has long been home to a well-developed, government-supported "social sector." Although many non-governmental social service organizations began as purely private and charitable, the government, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, began to pay an increasing share of their budgets through payments known as "subventions." In the mid-1990s, however, the leaders of nonprofit social service organizations become increasingly concerned that the conditions under which their organizations receive public support-including pay scales, job descriptions, and staffing levels set by the government-allowed too little management flexibility. This case describes the evolution of a replacement "subvention" system one which, instead of providing support for specific positions and supplies, would instead provide the social service nonprofits with "lump sum" grants-a single pot which NGO managers would apportion. The case details the complexity of planning and implementing such a transition, focusing among other things on the transition arrangements required to ensure continuity of services and minimum of workforce disruption. The government must deal specifically with fears of senior social workers that the new system will give managers an incentive to replace them with new, more junior hires. In addition to allowing for discussion of the specific dilemmas faced in Hong Kong, the case can be a point of departure for a more general discussion about the variety of imaginable relationships between the public and nonprofit sectors and how such arrangements are, as a practical matter, effected. HKS Case Number 1630.0

Nat Henshaw, president of CEI Ventures Inc. (CVI) a subsidiary of the nonprofit Coastal Enterprises Inc. (CEI), was involved in a balancing act. He was a manager of a for-profit venture capital fund, Coastal Ventures Limited Partnership (CVLP), with a social mission that valued good-quality jobs, employee ownership, and a concern for the environment. Henshaw and his board of directors were also thinking about the next venture capital fund, which they wanted to have in place when they began to wind down the investment activity of the current fund. Did they have the right balance between profit and social mission? Could they invest the remaining 60% of CVLP's funds in the next two years in a manner that struck the right balance? And did they have a good enough track record to attract investment into a new fund? Many students will be unfamiliar with this type of institution and the case provides sufficient details on the institutional structure of a community development venture capital fund and the way it operates to serve as an introduction to this subject. It demonstrates the way in which both institutionally and operationally the fund is designed to promote both profitable investments and a social mission. Nevertheless, the fund faces considerable problems in maintaining this balance. The case can then serve as a platform for a discussion of the effectiveness of such an institution in promoting community economic development. More generally, this case can be used to teach students about the "double bottom-line," where the bottom line is of a business which is the subsidiary of a nonprofit institution, which set up the business in the first place as part of its efforts to fulfill its mission. Such arrangements are becoming more common in the US nonprofit sector and they raise issues about the legitimacy of for-profit subsidiaries and the blurring of the line between the for-profit and nonprofit world. HKS Case Number 1669.0

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, high atop a great many of the older, concrete-block buildings of lower-income parts of central Hong Kong and the neighborhoods of the Kowloon peninsula, informal metal-framed wooden structures were built to house thousands of the city's families in austere, though inexpensive, quarters. These "illegal rooftop structures" comprised what could be a called a shantytown of the air, one made up of structures which, though built illegally, were nonetheless bought, sold, and rented on the open market. Such structures, moreover, were just one example of the larger phenomenon of so-called unauthorized building works in Hong Kong. These UBWs, as they were known in the city's Buildings Department, included balconies added to windows-sometimes used for beds on which people slept high in the air-as well as hundreds of thousands of storefront street signs and canopy extensions to the ground floors of buildings in commercial districts, the latter used to create spaces rented to stores and restaurants. By 1999, it was estimated that UBWs of all kinds in Hong Kong totaled a staggering 800,000. By one estimate, if authorities continued enforcement as they had been doing, it would take more than 130 years to effect the removal of all such structures-assuming that new ones were not built in their place. This case raises the thorny question of the extent to which and methods by which Hong Kong should use the law to minimize or eliminate such unauthorized building works-in a city where some parts of the public care most about public safety, while others-often much poorer-care most about shelter. HKS Case Number 1631.0

The power shortages and blackouts of late 2000 and early 2001 drew international attention to the electricity deregulation regime adopted four years earlier by the state of California. This case provides a definitive account of the nature of that deregulation, as well as the process through which it was developed and the options considered as it was crafted. It focuses on the choices California made as it put in place a system that would divide the electricity generation, transmission and retail distribution systems that had, historically, been integrated. The case describes how California regulators and elected officials sought to maintain the operating and coordination efficiencies associated with the existing vertically- and horizontally-integrated system while allowing a competitive market to flourish. Because it stops short of describing what exactly seemed to go wrong when the power crisis hit California, the case demands discussion and analysis of the unintended consequences of the deregulation regime chosen-including the decision to fix retail prices during a transition period. It provides detailed descriptions of the role of a key new institution, the "independent system operator" and the role California chose for it to play in facilitating power transactions. HKS Case Number 1632.0

When Hugh Price became president and chief executive of the National Urban League in May 1994, he knew he was taking the helm of an organization groping for new moorings in the post-civil rights, post-Great Society, post-welfare state era. During the Reagan administration of the 1980s, the large annual federal grants and contracts that had steadily grown during the 1960s and 1970s, sustaining the National Urban League and its network of 113 affiliates, were abruptly slashed. People wondered if the Urban League would dissolve. This case chronicles what happened with the NUL during this era of transition. Pair with the sequel (HKS 864). HKS Case Number 1634.0.

It is now recognized that new venture start-ups can offer a career choice that is a little sexier, a little wilder, and in the long run equally lucrative, to the consulting or banking jobs that typically dominate post-MBA career paths. The FrogPubs case describes two entrepreneurial bad boys who ten years ago chose a different path, forming a partnership to develop their own, traditional business start-up. In the case, the two entrepreneurs discuss the thrills and chills involved in writing and implementing their business plan, as well as the lessons they learned while building their successful business brick by brick. The case study is organized in a way that allows discussion based on natural focus points ranging from potential bankruptcy in the early days, to later issues of personnel management, joint-venture partnership and protecting and exploiting a unique but maturing business concept. Please visit the dedicated case website to access case videos and other support material.

iMotors was an online used car retailer. Its business model reconfigured the industry value chain and allowed it to create significant new value for consumers. The case highlights the tension between value creation and value appropriation, limits to growth and the importance of establishing legitimacy in creating new categories. It also raises the question of the sustainability of competitive advantage.

The idea that the introduction or expansion of urban light rail systems could ease traffic congestion and air pollution has caught the imagination of many in American cities in recent decades. Yet, at the same time, questions about the efficiency and benefits of rail, compared with other transportation systems, have also arisen. This series of cases describes a long-running political and analytic battle in Seattle between rail transit proponents-including some of its leading planners and citizens-and opponents who believe the costs of a proposed new system, to be financed through a $3.9 billion bond package, will exceed its benefits.

An entrepreneurial, publicly traded biotech company has begun production and sales of its core product--cartridges that permit DNA samples to be analyzed on a microchip. In the early quarters, sales are difficult to forecast and the company has experienced fluctuating production volumes and unpredictable gross margins, which has upset the board of directors. The finance staff investigates whether to adopt a new costing approach based on capacity. With large amounts of unused capacity, the decision of how to apply capacity costs is critical to the company's management and its reporting strategy with analysts.

Provides a detailed description of the processes and tasks associated with creating a new venture in an emerging industry (subscription car-sharing for urban dwellers). Chronicles the entrepreneur's concept development, industry analysis, market research, identity definition, and brand building. Also provides background on writing the business plan, creating a budget and building financials, developing a management team, creating business partnerships, and financing the businesses.

Discusses sustaining brand equity after a highly successful commodity-product branding ad campaign.

Henkel has to decide whether to replace its strong local detergent brands in Italy and Spain with its leading international brand, Persil. It faces pressure from retailers for international brand standardization. Its competitors, including P&G and Unilever, are consolidating their portfolios around a few global "power brands."

This case is a condensed version of "Philip Morris U.S.A. and Marlboro Friday (A)". In July 1993, Philip Morris executives met to consider second-quarter data on U.S. tobacco sales. Three months earlier, the company had announced a 40-cent-per-pack promotion for Marlboro cigarettes, the number-one-selling cigarette in the world. On the day of the announcement, April 4, Philip Morris stock fell $14.75, to $49.375, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 68.63 points. On June 4, the company announced an extension of the promotion through August 8. After eight months of consecutive share declines, Marlboro's share had rebounded by three points. Philip Morris executives now faced several important decisions: Should the Marlboro promotion be extended beyond August 8? Should the promotion be replaced with a permanent cut in wholesale prices? Should the prices of other Philip Morris premium brands be lowered? Finally, should the prices of the company's discount brands be altered in any way?