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Presents five situations in which professionals face ethical dilemmas.

This case is designed for an MBA course in management planning and control systems, an MBA course on mergers and acquisitions, an MBA course on strategy implementation, or any class on executive compensation systems. It gives students exposure to executive compensation plans, the design of performance measurement and incentive compensation systems to facilitate the implementation of strategy, and issues that arise in post-merger integration. Significant differences in executive compensation for British Petroleum and Amoco Corporation prior to the merger between the two companies pose interesting challenges to successfully integrating the two executive teams after the merger. Students are asked to evaluate the post-merger executive compensation plan for BP Amoco in light of company's post-merger strategy, differences in the pre-merger executive compensation plans, and issues surrounding post-merger integration in their preparation and class discussion.

Can two successful authors build a scalable consulting practice based on their unique view of customer relationship management (CRM)? Should they emphasize strategy or execution? The case describes how Peppers and Rogers grew from two people earning speaker fees to a 160-person publishing, consulting, and Internet technology promotion company. Now they want to grow faster and take advantage of the IPO capital market that has enabled the birth of competitors like Scient, Viant, and Zefer in the market for e-commerce and dot.com consulting.

Chronicles M. Douglas Ivester's 26-month term as chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Co., and how he navigated the company through a series of what some considered "small crises."

The CEO of Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc. needed to give sales and profits a serious boost; despite the company's excellent brand equity, it was losing market share and struggling to make a profit. The company's product was on store shelves in all U.S. states, but efforts to enter foreign markets had only been haphazard with non-U.S. sales accounting for just three per cent of total sales. The CEO needed to focus serious attention on entering the world's second largest ice cream market, Japan. An objective of Ben & Jerry's was to use the excess manufacturing capacity it had in the U.S., and it found that exporting ice cream from Vermont to Japan was feasible from a logistics and cost perspective. The company identified two leading partnering options. One was to give a Japanese convenience store chain exclusive rights to the product for a limited time. The other was to give long-term rights for all sales of the product in Japan to a Japanese-American who would build the brand. For the company to enter Japan in time for the upcoming summer season, it would have to be through one of these two partnering arrangements.

Two young and inexperienced MBAs buy a virtually bankrupt company. They design a decentralized control system organized around profit centers. As a case in control systems, there is ample detail for a discussion of design issues, control of independent profit centers, and details about decentralized control. A rewritten version of an earlier case.

Describes TixToGo, a Silicon Valley start-up company that offers online solutions to individuals and organizations that want to offer activities and/or collect registration fees for events over the Internet. A serial entrepreneur and his partner started the company in San Francisco in 1997. While the business model seems quite attractive, TixToGo has had difficulty gaining momentum. The founders have therefore decided to hire Lu Cordova, a manager and entrepreneur with considerable start-up experience as CEO. Her first day on the job is May 18, 1999. TixToGo is also her first job as CEO of a company she did not start. The company has $12,000 in the bank. The monthly burn rate is $30,000. Lu needs to act quickly.

Some of the senior managers at Ameritrade, an Internet brokerage firm, are selling their holdings in the firm. Why are the managers selling, how will it affect shareholders, and what should the CEO do about it? The CEO is concerned that the market will interpret managerial sales as a signal that the managers believe the firm to be overvalued. He also wonders whether the sales might interfere with the firm's plan to raise funds in the capital markets. Finally, he thinks that, at a minimum, such sales undermine a carefully thought-out compensation plan that pays managers with stock options to align managers' incentive with those of the shareholders.

Discusses the complete transformation and turnover in every division of Garanti Bank. Describes the multiple change projects managed and cross-cultural issues confronted during the 1990s and the organizational challenge of transforming Garanti Bank into one of Turkey's premier financial institutions.

Describes the financing and growth of Infosys, an Indian software start-up. Infosys defies a number of stereotypes about barriers to entrepreneurship in India. The company was founded by a small group of entrepreneurs with little equity and without backing from a large family conglomerate. While Infosys has been very successful recently, there was also a highly uncertain period in the company's history. At the time of the case, Mr. Murthy, Infosys' CEO, and his team once again face important challenges regarding future growth and financing. Infosys' shares trade on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The company must decide whether it should seek to also list its shares on a U.S. stock exchange and, if yes, whether to list on NASDAQ or NYSE.

Silicon Valley start-up Everdream wants to turn the provision of PCs to small business into a turnkey service including excellent 24/7 support. This case explores what this will take by focusing on the question of what, if anything, Everdream can guarantee.

Rebecca Wilson, a recent policy school graduate, has started an unexpectedly successful small nonprofit to help urban high school students tap the many sources of financial aid for post-secondary education and thus boost their odds of attending college. As she seeks to expand her operation, she needs to reach beyond the network of friends and supporters who bankrolled the start-up. Applying for foundation support requires her to prepare formal financial statements for the first time. It embeds basic accounting in the context of a comprehensible organization, to solidify students' intuition about the function of financial statements, and guides them through the preparation of simple but complete actual and pro forma statements. An Excel spreadsheet paired with the case offers templates that allow students to construct realistic financial statements with very limited preparation and a minimum of computational drudgery. HKS Case Number 1595.0

Describes a potential trans-Atlantic merger between two young companies in the Internet space. VacationSpot.com, based in Seattle, and Rent-A-Holiday, based in Brussels, both offer online listings and reservations for independent leisure lodging (i.e., villas, apartments, and bed and breakfast places) around the world. Both companies were started in 1997. At the time of the case (April 1999), the two companies are world-market co-leaders and discussing a merger. While the lodging inventory of both companies is very similar, their most recent post-money valuations have a ratio of approximately 9:1. Merger negotiations have come to a standstill over the valuation issue. Both sides need to decide whether to restart negotiations and what terms to propose.

Details how to design, launch, and scale a rapidly growing Internet venture. Focuses on the challenges and opportunities involved in leveraging a network of partners.

This set of cases (labeled A through M [UV1898 through UV1911]) presents various vignettes, each with a specific dilemma about genetic testing and the ethical issues and difficult decisions that this testing presents to patients, doctors, employers and employees. "A Note on the Human Genome Project" (UV1911) is about genetic testing which provides background and information on the issues.

Rosenbluth, the third largest U.S. travel agency, uses the Internet to serve new customers with a high-service strategy. Rosenbluth acquires Biztravel.com and integrates the customer support and logistics aspects of service delivery.

In late 1996, Manuel Diaz, head of Worldwide Sales for Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Computer Systems Organization (CSO), is reviewing the results of an audit of HP's enterprise customer management approach with the objective of identifying market and organizational opportunities that might provide HP the next wave of growth while further reducing sales and support costs. HP's current customer management approach, although successful, had involved structural changes that had forced a deep-rooted overhaul of HP's traditional regional sales approach. The new recommendations would necessitate another round of drastic changes in the way HP manages relationships with its large enterprise customers. Diaz does not want to put the sales organization through another round of changes unless he is sure they are necessary. He has to figure out if the organization is ready for more change, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs of implementation. The case provides a detailed review of the audit process and the findings.

Dell Computer Corp. announced a share repurchase program shortly after a significant stock price drop. In this announcement, the company also states that it will use options contracts. This case looks at the options transactions and how they relate to Dell's employee stock option program and the share repurchase program.

A senior human resources manager at the YUAN Group, a medium-size, multi-industry company, is reflecting on her first year on the job. She had implemented many new human resources systems, involving salary surveys, performance evaluations, bonus sharing and benefits, but these changes were not always received enthusiastically by the top management team and other employees. This case illustrates the effects of trying to implement large numbers of human resources system changes rapidly in a traditional organization.