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In late summer 2005, Hurricane Katrina - the worst natural disaster in U.S. history - wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, causing massive loss of life and property damage. (Just a few weeks later, Hurricane Rita would inflict even more suffering across much of the same area.) The evacuation of special needs individuals (e.g., the institutionalized, those with medical conditions, people without access to cars, etc.) from New Orleans was especially problematic, not simply in getting people out of the city but also in tracking who had gone where, letting their families know what had happened to them, caring for them properly in receiving areas, and repatriating them to their homes and loved ones.

Supplement for IMD519

Supplement for IMD519 and IMD521

Supplement for ES1221

Supplement for ES1221 and ES1222

Dental Associates of Northern Virginia is one of the largest dental networks in northern Virginia. In this series of two cases, the head administrator is caught between staying abreast with new technology by investing in innovative all-porcelain crown-making machines and holding steadfast to a laggard strategy of wait and see. This choice also aligns with the head administrator making a larger decision of whether to enhance the core competency of his network by developing a complete in-house laboratory or continuing to rely on an expensive, but reliable, outside laboratory for all-porcelain restorations. Together the two cases in the series are rich in concepts dealing with cost, timeliness, quality and flexibility as students are forced to see an operations problem from both patient and doctor perspectives. The cases also consider the ever-changing world of technology and how it impacts a doctor's practice along with an entire network of offices.

This case is an addendum that updates HBS Case No. 502-025, "The Future of Hybrid Electric Cars." It covers the 10 years, 2001 to 2011.

Overview on the state of Nokia since the "Emerging Nokia?" case was written.

Supplements the (A) case.

This case examines Grassroots Capital's decision of whether or not to continue investing in a Bolivian microfinance bank that is suffering financial distress.

The case describes in detail Desko's customer order process. It highlights the importance of this key business process and how its inefficiencies can significantly diminish the SME's performance.

This is a (B) case for AQR's Momentum Funds. It follows the first year of performance of the funds after launching, and gives students a critical inflection point for analyzing the nascent stages of a new product launch and the potential path dependence of the product depending on initial returns. It allows students to wrestle with the way forward given these conditions, and how (if at all) it changes their views, pitch, and perspective on the strategy, and traditional long-short strategies more generally.

Supplement to "U.S. Healthcare Reform: International Perspectives," HBS No. 710-040, updating key events and disputes concerning the reform law, including the 2010 Congressional elections, legislative proposals, legal challenges, and responses by employers.

15 years after ending apartheid, formal unemployment in South Africa was still at 24%. While the country had grown at 4 to 5% annually during the 2000s, the financial crisis set it back by 1 million more unemployed. Moreover, it seemed as if the nation were stuck between low wage and fully developed competitors. The government of Jacob Zuma has just adopted a "New Growth Path," hoping to create several million jobs over the next few years. Both the Finance Minister and the head of the Central Bank support the initiative, but worry how they can sustain fiscal discipline and control inflation, in light of these stimulative policies. Organized labor, meanwhile, has little sympathy for any sort of sacrifice.

Supplement for IMD509

Daniel Kim was considering "blowing the whistle" on his friend, the CEO of a fast-growing startup where Kim had spent most of his professional career. When Kim joined the company, called Cardio-Metric, in 2002, it consisted of seven young engineers (including its two 25-year-old founders) working from a one-bedroom Minneapolis apartment. By 2008, when the venture capital-backed company recorded $110 million in revenues, Kim had become close friends with the founders, who served as CEO and chairman. Cardio-Metric's success, however, concealed troubling internal developments. Since 2002, the CEO's management style had progressed from unconventional, to questionable, to egregious. Kim, Cardio-Metric's on-and-off CFO, had repeatedly confronted the CEO over his behavior-including charging large purchases with no clear business purpose to Cardio-Metric and presenting unrealistic financial projections to investors-but the CEO dismissed Kim's concerns and ordered him not to share them with others at the company. By April 2009, Kim believed the problem had grown out of control, and he was considering disclosing the CEO's actions to the board of directors and a team of external auditors. There was much at stake. Kim's disclosure would undoubtedly ruin his friendship with the CEO, endanger Kim's own role at the company, and even jeopardize the future of Cardio-Metric itself.

The (A) case describes how GE Healthcare developed an ECG device optimized for low-income mass markets in India. It also discusses the organizational changes GE made to better serve the Bottom of Pyramid (BOP) markets.

This case is a supplement to Nestlé: A Social Media Nightmare (A).

The purpose of this exercise is to let students experience a few biases that can be deleterious to strategic decision-making. In particular, students are induced to fall into a confirmatory trap, and to experience other biases such as anchoring and sampling bias. Although the exercise can be performed individually, it is a better vehicle to explore how some team-level dynamics and structural choices can either increase or reduce the probability of falling into such biases. The exercise creates a situation that mirrors the one leading to the Challenger disaster.