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Brands make promises to consumers, but where do these promises come from? How do brand teams decide what promise to make? This is where the brand essence statement (BES) comes in. It is a document, picture, video, or some other communication vehicle that captures, usually in words and visuals, the intrinsic nature and indispensable quality that makes the brand unique, compelling, and meaningful to the target. Importantly, the BES goes far beyond marketing communications to describe the holistic nature of the brand, and it informs company-wide decision-making. Identifying the essence of a brand such that it fits with the target, can fit with the current brand, and is superior to competitors requires artistry and science-artistry to create a BES and science to assess, refine, validate, and perfect it. This note explores the process of developing a superior BES-and then consistently executing against it.

Marketing strategy, part of the marketing planning process, flows directly from a company's goals and helps define how the marketing organization will help the firm achieve its objectives. Marketing strategy is guided by the goals and objectives of the organization, the business unit, or the particular product or service for which the plan is developed. The choice of which marketing strategy (or strategies) to pursue then guides the marketing mix decisions, which, taken together, become the value proposition offered to the target market segment(s). Marketing strategy involves four steps, and this note addresses the first three.

This background note explains Cuba's past and current agriculture policies, as well as provides insights into its future potential as relations with the U.S. normalize.

Process behavior charts-also called control charts or Shewhart charts after their creator-provide a means to interpret data as they are generated. While many statistical methods and graphs are useful only for post hoc analysis, control charts provide a visual and statistically sound basis for identifying issues in a process as they arise, ideally allowing prevention of failures before they occur.

The following note attempts to catalog and analyze a set of flawed but common arguments made in business and organizational settings to drive strategic and operational decision making. The arguments are deconstructed into syllogistic form-a set of premises leading to a conclusion-and analyzed for validity and soundness. The final part of this note pays attention to ways decision makers can avoid such bad arguments and the rationalization that often goes hand in hand with them.

Intuition can be a good guide for decision making when the current situation generally matches the situations in which the intuition was formed. But for novel or ambiguous situations, relying only on intuition can blind us to possible negative consequences by focusing our attention only on data that support our intuition. To reduce the likelihood of these errors and to better imagine and prepare for the outcomes of our choices, we use a decision-making framework. This note outlines the process of how to apply a framework.

A fundamental policy decision every government must make is whether, and to what extent, to manage the exchange rate. This note discusses some of the basic costs and benefits of fixed and floating exchange rates.

This note, intended to accompany the short booklet An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, discusses the logical framework behind argumentation and presents the basic logical rules necessary to reach sound conclusions. Throughout, it refers to the philosophical foundations of logical reasoning and attempts to address these concepts in the framework of management. By the end, diligent students should be able to identify the necessary structure and components of a sound argument-as well as the fatal attraction of unsound arguments-and be able to apply these ideas to create long-term value as leaders of firms and organizations.

Since ethics is an integral part of management, it is vital for managers to become comfortable with the language of ethics, and to understand how it is inextricable from the language of business. Students will examine key theories of ethics and how they apply to management decision making.

This technical note provides an overview of religious discrimination law in the United States and provides managers with a meaningful understanding of their rights and obligations when an employee's religious beliefs or practices conflict with his or her work responsibilities. The analysis will touch on intentional discrimination and harassment ("I'm firing you because you're Christian/Jewish/other"), types of religious discrimination that are readily identifiable and resolvable. Less obviously, U.S. law requires that employers provide "reasonable accommodation" whenever a religiously neutral business practice interferes with an employee's religious practice; this reasonable accommodation doctrine is more complex and nuanced. Providing reasonable accommodation presents obstacles for managers that are as legalistically dense as they are financially treacherous. This note aims to help managers identify blatantly illegal practices but it also aims to assist management in navigating the gray areas where the law is underdeveloped or inconsistently applied. The law often provides vignettes of what managers legally can or cannot do, but neither laws nor cases interpreting them provide clear answers for managers attempting to handle challenging religious issues that arise in their firms. Finally, while digesting the information provided in this note, managers must remember that this analysis describes legal solutions, not managerial ones.

This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the trade off between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive systems in team environments, and the inherent problems with designing incentive systems in environments where workers are involved in multiple activities.

This note introduces students to some economic concepts and ideas that are important ingredients for strategy, such as scale, learning, and the effects of market structure on competition. The note approaches these ideas really from a strategy perspective with a focus on their practical implications.

The purpose of this note is to give a brief introduction to dynamic programming. The note introduces dynamic programming terminology and notation and provides motivation for why these problems are difficult to solve. Five examples illustrate how dynamic programming can be applied in a variety of settings.

Whereas there is much focus on improving the cognitive aspects of ethical decision making, many of the drivers of managerial action are nondeliberative. The explosion of academic work in behavioral science has highlighted a number of decision traps, blind spots, and behavioral biases that can substantially influence ethical decision making and action. This note focuses on a number of specific behavioral influences and how they relate to ethics. In addition to highlighting how these behavioral influences can impair decision making, we discuss ways they can be harnessed to potentially improve ethical decisions and actions.

This note identifies the importance of employee/moral voice in organizational functioning. Yet despite the many benefits of employee/moral voice for effective organizational functioning, the process of speaking up about ethical matters can be difficult for both employees and their managers.

The case describes how Justin Trudeau came from a seemingly hopeless third place (in the party rankings) to win a stunning majority and become Canada's 23rd prime minister. Trudeau's win is analysed through a Blue Ocean lens, showing how his campaign broke with the traditional rules of engagement by reaching out to non-voters, and increasing willingness-to-vote while lowering the cost-of-voter acquisition.

Course overview of The Entrepreneurial Manager.