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This note is an abridged version of UV0433, Real Options.

Recent droughts and the increase in food prices they trigger underscore that freshwater scarcity is bound to be a major challenge of the 21st century. Increased water demand due to population growth and rising living standards (with changing diets and lifestyles) strains available water resources. In spite of reports about an imminent water crisis, the world is not running out of water. Water is a renewable global resource of which there is more than enough. The major concern is that water is very unevenly distributed across and within countries. Water scarcity is thus primarily a local phenomenon, and fears mount that climate change might worsen an already bad situation in water-scarce areas.

This note provides an opportunity to understand how private equity investors need to adapt to emerging markets.

This note introduces convertible notes in angel financing. It begins by delineating the differences between a priced and non-priced round. It then describes a specific example of a convertible note, with attention paid to technical details regarding valuation caps.

This history of the U.S. tobacco controversy is a reading for a class on "The Insider," a film about whistleblowing in the U.S. tobacco industry, taught in the course, The Moral Leader.

This technical note describes a methodology for evaluating the political economy of business-government relations in an emerging or frontier economy. The note argues that there are not one but four markets in an emerging economy: the market of "rentiers" such as mining companies that earn profits by maximizing rents in the export sector, "powerbrokers" that use monopoly power and government relations in regulated industries to earn outsized profits selling domestically, "workhorses" that operate in largely competitive (and familiar) sectors serving domestic customers, and "magicians" that rely on country-specific advantages including special treatment and incentives to export in competitive sectors. Firms operating in each of these markets require a different strategy; moreover, each market requires a different approach for regulation and private sector development. If we look at the mix of business activity across these four markets in a country, we can better understand the nature and trajectory of business-government relations.

This note describes the Congruence Model, a method by which an organization can assess whether its building blocks (critical tasks, formal organizational arrangements, people, and culture) are aligned (congruent) with its strategy. The model postulates that misalignments are at the root of performance gaps within the organization.

This note will aid in introducing students to the Private Equity Finance course.

This note will provide an overview of valuation methodologies in private equity.

The effective manager and leader understands and appreciates trust at both the personal and the organizational levels. Most managers focus more on being trusted than on trusting. The best way to be trusted is to be worthy of trust-to be trustworthy.

This note identifies the main issues involved in the effective management of the marketing communications process. It first defines the purpose of communication. Then it classifies the tools available to communicate with consumers. In the sequel, it elaborates on how consumers respond to communication attempts. Finally, it lays out a framework for marketers to manage the entire communication process.

Identifying an appropriate benchmark is an essential step in assessing a manager's performance. In the prospectus or fund advertising materials, a benchmark for the fund is typically identified, and the performance of the fund relative to that benchmark is given. The issue of concern is whether or not the benchmark provided has a similar risk profile to the fund.

This technical note on ethics builds on and further develops the conversation about ethics. It provides background, language, and concepts to identify and analyze managerial problems from an ethics perspective. The focus of our use of these tools is to help managers understand the ethical dimensions of their decisions and to make defensible choices. Part 1 provides a brief summary of four traditions in ethics that are a key starting point for discussing what ethics is and how it works. Part 2 takes the broad summary from Part 1 and uses it to form four "decision rules" that are focused on application and used by managers to understand the moral dimensions of a given case. Part 3 highlights some of the key moral dimensions of thinking about ethics in a global context and provides a number of useful resources. Part 4 presents a series of tools for pushing decision-making in order to foster better choices and to limit the tendency to "rationalize" decisions.

Some technology transitions are exceedingly difficult for incumbent firms to execute. The bankruptcy filing by the Eastman Kodak Company highlighted the difficulty companies faced when their core business transitioned from an analog to a digital world. Kodak's business was built on the sale of a complex manufactured product - color photographic film that was exceedingly difficult to manufacture - with correspondingly high barriers to entry. Over more than a century, it developed the complex chemistry and high speed coating technologies that enabled it to roll-coat tiny strips of plastic with as many as 24 layers of complex organic dyes and photosensitizers at thousands of square feet per minute. Its color film and paper products including Kodachrome and Kodacolor preserved many of the iconic images of the last century. Beginning in the 1990s, the company built a digital photography business, yet by 2012 the company was in reorganization and its prognosis was guarded. Kodak faced a particularly challenging analog to digital transition, like many companies that have faced the waves of creative destruction wrought by technological innovation. Why was an analog to digital transition in the core technology of a business particularly challenging? This note reviews some of the management research on how firms have fared with technology transitions, and then explains why the conversion of a technology from analog to digital is uniquely problematic. The challenge that faced Kodak is the same challenge facing companies like Panasonic and Sony, telecom equipment companies, and other industries now that the underlying technology through which products and services are built has changed.

World population growth and increasing urbanization will require new cities in the future around the world. This technical note attempts to systematize the key design decisions that developers and policy makers alike must make to be able to proceed.

This technical note analyzes and explores frameworks for improving interventions in organizations. Organizations are complex ecosystems of assumptions, artifacts, and interactions. By understanding how the current system is arranged and recognizing the broader impacts of any intervention, leaders can make more impactful and lasting changes to their organizations. Any framework is only as good as the assumptions that are baked into it. Often the data needed to answer the questions in this framework are not readily known; therefore, leaders must be open to using methodologies such as ethnography, interviewing, focus groups, and conversations to better solicit these data from key stakeholders.