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Jamie Bailey, owner and president of C. R. Plastics, had successfully grown his business every year since 1994 when he began producing recycled plastic outdoor furniture. This rapid growth had provided its own challenges in terms of constrained financing and by summer 2010, Bailey was desperate for a new source of cash. He subsequently auditioned to be on Dragon’s Den, a television show where entrepreneurs could pitch their business to a group of venture capitalists, who could then choose to invest their own cash in exchange for a share of the business. With a week remaining before he had to present his final pitch, Bailey had to make a difficult prediction: How much money would he need to meet the growing demand into 2011? Complicating his analysis were competing proposals to fundamentally change how production was managed. In addition to reconfiguring labour allocation, one method required significant investment in equipment, while the other increased inventory during the off-season. Which alternative would allow the company to retain a greater share of the equity when Bailey pitched his business to the Dragon’s Den panel?

Two facilities owned by a large U.S.-based multinational enterprise (one in Canada, one in the United States) are competing for a regional manufacturing and distribution mandate. The head of Firstwell’s global operating committee must decide whether the proposal from Firstwell Canada is best not only for the Kingston, Ontario, plant but also for Firstwell Corporation worldwide. The decision could signal a major shift in parent–subsidiary relations.

Pearson Plc is an education company that operates worldwide, with headquarters in London, England. Its six primary business units are North American Education, International Education, Professional, The Financial Times, Interactive Data, and Penguin Publishing. The vice president of product management within the Digital Learning division of the North American Education unit based in Chandler, Arizona, begins to transform the product development processes to better meet the needs of his customers in the education market, specifically in transitioning from using an off-shored Waterfall software development model to an on-shore Agile model.<br><br><br><br>When the vice president first joined Pearson a year earlier, the Digital Learning unit had spent significant resources developing a major upgrade for one of its educational software products. The first version of this new product was challenged by the disconnect between what the software development group was delivering and what the vice president’s customers desired. He is now faced with a decision to continue focusing on the specific methodology the group had implemented (Scrum) or move to a new one (Kanban). Additionally, he has to consider expanding his focus to help drive Agile methodologies both with other groups in his business unit and outside his business unit. These decisions must be made at a potentially critical time for his products as his organization deals with the growing pains associated with the shift to Agile.

In May 2010, the “chief pain officer” of SalesBrain, a neuroscience-based marketing research and coaching company located in California, has been approached for advice by the marketing head of Digital Technology International (DTI), a Utah-based provider of technology solutions for the global publishing industry. DTI has been struggling with communicating the core value proposition of its offerings to customers, including leading newspaper publishers. Its frontline people are delivering messages that are technical, jargon-filled, and complex. Publisher-customers are unable to understand quickly how the technology solutions being offered by DTI can help them become competitive. The sales messages are also not consistent.<br><br>SalesBrain is suggesting a three-step process wherein it will identify the “pain points” being experienced by the publisher-customers of DTI; create a compelling set of claims that DTI could offer about its technology products; and guide its frontline salespersons towards developing appropriate sales scripts that they could use with prospective clients. SalesBrain is deploying the cutting-edge tools of neuroscience marketing in each of the three processes. The chief pain officer must choose between Layered Voice Analysis and Facial Action Coding System as a medium to serve the needs of DTI.

By 2007, AirAsia had become one of the most successful budget airlines in the world. Having dominated Southeast Asia and entered China and India, AirAsia was poised to solidify its place as a top budget airline and one of the most consistently profitable globally. But company founder Tony Fernandes had bigger plans. From the outset in 2001, Fernandes had intended to offer long-haul service, competing against the largest and most established airlines in the world. However, his advisors had urged him to focus on regional, short- to medium-distance service. With many previous successes, Fernandes was once again ready to attempt long-haul service. Despite warnings from industry insiders, Fernandes pushed forward with the expansion. <br><br>Hiring 36-year-old Azran Osman-Rani as the CEO for the new long-haul venture, nicknamed X, was a critical step in this process. By early 2010, X had received its eleventh aircraft and was flying to 15 destinations on three continents. However, over time the substantial differences between long-haul and short-haul operating requirements became more apparent. Consequently, the management decided to formally separate X from AirAsia. This separation, and the inherent challenges for X and its recently appointed head of commercial operations, included: (1) how best to leverage the extensive network of the regional sister company AirAsia in selecting new and profitable destinations for X, (2) how to increase revenues without raising ticket prices, (3) how best to globally position the airline’s brand in non-Asian markets, (4) how to shift his marketing team’s mentality away from a start-up mindset, and (5) how to prepare for a global initial public offering within the next year. See supplement 9B15M018.

In September 2011, the CEO of First Energy Private Ltd, a start-up enterprise in the alternative energy industry in India, is at a critical juncture. The company has commercialized the technology of biomass cook stoves and has been providing, since 2007, clean and affordable cooking solutions to customers in rural India. A marginal rise in the price of biomass fuel in early 2011 has, however, led to a steep fall in demand, making the continuance in the rural household market unsustainable. The company is at a disadvantage in the household segment because the competing product, liquid petroleum gas (LPG), enjoys a price subsidy provided by the federal government. First Energy has been quick to target a niche in the urban commercial market consisting of restaurants, eateries, and hostels. While the margins are high in this segment, the volumes are low. The company must therefore build scale to be able to service the investments in plant capacity, which is under-utilized. The case enables students to come up with strategies for the CEO for market expansion. They will also decide whether to exit from or hold on to the household segment, where the margins are low but the volumes, considering the imminent de-subsidization of LPG, will be high.

Between 2004 and 2011, the Universal Robina Corporation (URC) launched its first ready-to-drink bottled tea product, C2, in three Southeast Asian markets: the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. URC’s founder hoped to replicate the success that ready-to-drink tea had achieved in China and Japan. Because of the differences in competitive tactics and consumer preferences in each market, URC needed to modify its strategic plan for each to improve the likelihood of achieving success with C2. These cases encourage students to discern which characteristics are most important for success and thereby determine the profitability of each new international venture.<br><br>In addition, the cases explore several issues pertaining to the internationalization of an emerging market firm — particularly one lacking the advantage of being based out of a larger developing country like India, China, or Brazil. Based in the Philippines, URC did not have a sufficiently large domestic market to subsidize its international operations or an internationally known brand or national characteristic to achieve leverage in new markets.<br><br>The cases provide a comparative illustration of expansion into three different markets. Case (A) illustrates a local market expansion, while cases (B) and (C) describe international expansions. In each case, students are encouraged to understand the type of localization strategy required to ensure the success of the product launch. Students will also realize that despite being neighbours, the three Southeast Asian countries in these cases have such diverse tastes and consumer preferences that knowledge and experience gained from one market will not necessarily translate to success in the others.

John Cooper had spent the last five years working for Standard Holdings, an early-stage business development and private equity arm of the Standard Group of Companies (Standard). The job was one he took immediately after graduating from business school, and he took the position of business analyst to capitalize on the chance to work with Alan Kirkpatrick, an accomplished and well-respected entrepreneur and founder of Standard. During his years at Standard, Cooper had benefitted greatly from Kirkpatrick’s rich mentorship and devotion to the optimal development of professional relationships. Cooper acquired the confidence to fully exploit his potential and subsequently was invited to participate in many unique experiences and developed relationships with all of Standard’s key stakeholders. Cooper could not help but feel he was being groomed for a senior leadership position much earlier than expected. After receiving an interesting phone call from a recruiter, Cooper wondered how to achieve his goal of career fulfillment and began by investigating other opportunities available to him within Standard and, alternatively, incorporating his own independent consultancy.

In early 2011, the senior executives of the venerable Canadian hockey stick manufacturer Sher-Wood Hockey were considering whether to move the remainder of the company’s high-end composite hockey and goalie stick production to its suppliers in China. Sher-Wood had been losing market share as retail prices continued to fall. Would outsourcing the production of the iconic, Canadian-made hockey sticks to China help Sher-Wood to boost demand significantly? Was there any other choice?

In just a decade, the Danish health care product manufacturer Coloplast underwent a major transformation from a local Danish manufacturing company to a truly multinational corporation. In 2001, Coloplast conducted all its production in-house in three production facilities in Denmark. Ten years later, the company had relocated almost 90 per cent of the production to four different countries, with the majority in Hungary and China. However, a transformation of this caliber rarely comes without challenges. Coloplast’s relocation of production had largely been carried out through a trial-and-error process without an overarching corporate strategy. In this process, the company had experienced many difficulties. Although Coloplast had by 2011 successfully identified and changed the critical issues created by the offshoring initiatives, the executive management now faced a substantial challenge in understanding what Coloplast had learned over the last 10 years and how it could excel based on this history.

Nawaal Motlekar is the managing director of Kwenta Media and founding editor of Mamas & Papas, a recently launched parenting magazine in South Africa. From her early entrepreneurial experiences, Motlekar developed a personal and professional interest in parenting magazines. As a Black South African woman married to an Indian man in an increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural society, Motlekar recognized a gap for a parenting magazine that would appeal to a wider and more racially and culturally inclusive target market. After extensive research and development, she launched the Mamas & Papas magazine in early 2009. The case charts Motlekar’s journey as an entrepreneur, as well as her efforts between 2006 and 2009 to bring the magazine to life. The case explores the quantitative and qualitative research approaches employed by Motlekar, as well as her marketing and branding initiatives towards building a Mamas & Papas brand beyond just the physical magazine. With the magazine having been on shelves for 12 months, Motlekar and her board faced a number of decisions. These included options to increase advertising revenues and circulation, as well as choosing how to extend the Mamas & Papas brand into related categories.

Organized steel retailing was not very popular among steel manufacturers in India. Very few such initiatives were undertaken by Indian players, but the most prominent was the JSW Shoppe concept promoted by Jindal Steel Works (JSW). JSW sold its products through a large network of dealers. However, the management had been concerned with building a brand image for its products, increasing its market penetration beyond the market of builders and fabricators, and attracting the attention of end users who would drive up sales. The company had felt that its distribution model would not serve its purpose, and had designed the unique concept of JSW Shoppe - a franchising model wherein the company would partner with existing and new dealers to achieve its objectives. <br><br>Set in 2010, the case deals with the challenges of transforming from a transactional distribution model to a relationship-based distribution model for franchising. Through the analysis of the case, students will locate the execution flaws in the company’s transformation, and seek the best way to address the issues related to this transformation. The case demonstrates the importance and role of a salesperson and the problems and issues that arise when a distribution model is changed - both from the dealers’ and company’s perspectives. Highlights of the case include the presentation of the challenges of franchising a specialty product, the evaluation of dealers using a balanced scorecard, and the preparation of an elaborate training module for the sales force.

Canada Goose was a Canadian maker of high-end winter outdoor clothing that was available in 40 countries. The company’s CEO was considering entering the South Korean market, which would entail resolving several problems. There were distributor complications, and it was unclear which style of jacket to sell to the new customer groups. Finally, deciding how to position Canada Goose in order to reach the two target groups for Canada Goose in South Korea was something that had bothered the CEO ever since he had first received the market research. Those issues aside, the firm also had to consider how the current state of the company, both in North America and Western Europe, would impact the success of a full-scale entry into South Korea. The CEO was excited for the opportunity for Canada Goose in South Korea, yet he was unsure how to maximize growth while positioning the brand as strongly as possible.

After spending two years as the vice president internal for Making Waves London (MWL), Brianna Murphy was ready to assume her elected position of president for the 2011-2012 year. MWL had a mandate to provide affordable and accessible swimming instruction to children with special needs. Her time spent as vice president had convinced her that changes were needed — MWL had grown in recent years and faced a multitude of service issues, from capacity to quality. Largest among these were difficulty in attracting qualified instructors; higher than expected enrolment resulting in waiting lists; lack of pool capacity; and funding problems. Murphy wanted to ensure that MWL was the best adaptive aquatic program possible, but was unsure how to address and prioritize the issues.

This case describes the restructuring initiatives undertaken at Gujarat State Road Transport Corporation (GSRTC) in India and the challenges faced by the managing director. As a consequence of partial deregulation, GSRTC faced mounting losses due to the activities of stage carriage and contract carriage operators from the private sector. The financial health of the corporation was further compromised by the state of Gujarat’s taxation policies and restrictions. The corporation faced a situation where it had a fleet of dated, fuel-inefficient buses prone to breakdowns, coupled with dwindling resources like bus drivers. <br><br>To break out of the vicious cycle, the managing director initiated a series of steps aimed at revitalizing GSRTC. His initiatives to obtain an operating profit and net profit were interpreted unsympathetically by the trade unions. They took a belligerent stand for wage revision and threatened service disruption. The disruption of an essential service guaranteed by the state eventually led to intervention by the state’s chief minister, in favour of wage revision. The additional wage burden frustrated projections for a possible turnaround. Given the further constraints and stretched resources, how would the managing director re-initiate change and restructure the organization?

The HR 500 Plus Scanner case examines how, in 2000, the Eastman Kodak Company confronts a drastic change in technology (from traditional to digital photography) that is eroding revenue and margins by double digits in its core film, paper, and chemical business. Matt Giorgio, the worldwide product manager for film scanners, is being pushed by upper management to extend the life of film to provide cash for the painful and less profitable transition to digital photography. With limited overall research and development (R&D) and a dictate from the CEO for flawless execution of projects, Giorgio and his team take an aggressive approach to develop, in less than a year, a scanner that can both stave off film market erosion and minimize the program’s impact on corporate R&D. Missing the team’s goal of nine months could cost him his job and leave the company vulnerable to even greater erosion of film, paper, and chemical sales.

This case deals with an exporting challenge faced by Ferro Industries, a small enterprise within the steel industry in India. The company’s manufacturing facility was located in the National Capital Region of Delhi. Ferro’s main products were roll-forming machines, cut-to-length lines, and slitting lines; the company was one of only three firms in the Indian sub-continent catering to the market for such products. This case raises two basic questions in relation to Ferro’s role as an exporter. Firstly, at what stage should an importer have to pay an exporter? Secondly, should the exporter release consignment to the importer before receiving payment? The case illustrates the challenges of exporting and international entrepreneurship for a small firm, taking into account payment risk, product pricing, deal-making strategies, promotional strategy, and client-management strategies. It also addresses the complexities involved in the decision-making process while exporting, as well as outlining various conflict-resolution techniques for closing a deal effectively while considering the appropriateness of taking risks.

This case traces the history and growth of Forbes Marshall (FM), a family-owned company in India. FM provides steam engineering and control instrumentation solutions for the process industry. The company has evolved into a leader in process efficiency and energy conservation through technology tie-ups and focused investments in manufacturing and research. Its joint ventures with the world's leading firms enable it to deliver quality solutions in 14 countries. Forbes Marshall's business practices and processes have combined into a unified philosophy of being trusted partners who provide innovative solutions.

TD Bank Group was one of the few large financial institutions in the world to have prospered during the financial meltdown and subsequent recession in 2008/9. It did this without any government assistance. Furthermore, it emerged from the crisis substantially larger in terms of market capitalization and assets while having the best performance of any of the Big-5 Canadian banks in terms of stock price and total shareholder return during the period 2003-2011.<br><br>The case describes many of the actions led by TD’s CEO, Ed Clark, following his promotion to that role after severe credit losses at the bank. It describes a shift of strategy that focused on reducing market, credit, and liquidity risk while increasing strategic risk. It also describes in depth the governance and management approach to risk at the bank as well as identifying important issues such as the establishment of a risk-management culture, the relationship between executive compensation and risk, and the formulation and promulgation of a clear statement of risk appetite. Further, it allows the instructor to focus on the many types of risk that have to be managed in a financial organization including strategic, market, credit, liquidity, operational, insurance, legal/regulatory, and reputational risk and how these might be traded-off against each other.<br><br>Students are required to identify which actions taken by TD are likely to have contributed to the bank’s excellent performance and the extent to which those actions may have been reflected in the performance of the bank’s stock. They need to consider whether avoiding market, credit, and liquidity risk was worth it for TD given that the company did not achieve superior performance to its peers before the financial crisis, a fact that was reflected in its disappointing stock performance.

Green-Tech Inc., a Canadian company founded in 2006, was dedicated to developing, manufacturing, and marketing portable and stationary systems for the production of bio-oils and bio-char from biomass residues and wastes. Green-Tech was a recent spinoff from a large university research centre with a very good reputation for providing bio-energy solutions. Although focused and well positioned, Green-Tech had to manage relationships with large companies such as Shell that controlled vast and complete supply chains of oil-related businesses, as well as small firms and clients that were unable to manage their waste effectively. Large firms could provide plenty of business opportunities for Green-Tech, but could also jeopardize the company’s autonomy. Small customers on their own might not bring in enough cash flow, but could give Green-Tech sufficient freedom to pursue its own strategic goals. Both relationships seemed to lead to a promising future for this entrepreneurial start-up company, but also created serious risks. At the time of the case in 2011, Fernando Bruteque, vice president and one of the principal engineers of Green-Tech, was seeking the appropriate growth approach for Green-Tech. Being in charge of business operations, Bruteque also had to maintain a balance between research and development (R&D), investor and client concerns, and business opportunities. What would be the appropriate growth strategies and business operation strategies for a resource-constrained firm such as Green-Tech? How should it proceed?