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Indian cell phone retailer Go Mobile had implemented high-powered incentives to motivate its store employees to behave as owners and provide exceptional service. As the company scaled up, it faced multiple challenges in building a layer of district managers that were willing and were able to support the highly incentivized store teams. On one hand, the district managers were expected to drive a profitable expansion, supporting complex day-to-day operations at the stores. On the other hand, they were expected to serve as mentors-communicating and teaching the values of the firm to their store managers, sharing best practices, and instilling a long-term perspective of the business. The case presents different mechanisms that the company could implement to motivate the district managers to effectively support the stores and foster growth. This product can be used with the free Job Design Optimization Tool (JDOT), available at: hbsp.harvard.edu/jdot

Per dollar of revenue, no tax policy generates more sound and fury than the taxation of estates. To supporters, the tax is a break on the concentration of wealth and power and an easy way to fund redistribution. To opponents, the tax is an unjust punishment of the frugal that sacrifices economic growth for short-term interests. Instructors may also obtain a Teaching Note, written by this case's author, that provides suggestions for using this case effectively in the classroom.

In 2013, a group of Tsinghua IMBA graduates decided to open a business, originally called "topline technology", to target Chinese consumers by supplying consumer goods reviews and rankings based on independent analysis and reviews. Setting "independent" and "fair" as its core value, the company is determined to help Chinese consumers with better information. CCR faces several major challenges. The biggest challenge is how to establish trust. The trust issue overall in Chinese society means that CCR has to convey a clear message of its independence and trustworthiness to its targeted consumers. Why should consumers believe CCR is fair? Other challenges include but are not limited to: How can Chinese consumers be made to understand its position and value proposition? How can CCR take advantage of current social media platforms such as Wechat and microblog? Finally, as marketing's core is to satisfy customers needs with profit. How to generate profit can also be discussed. Instructors can use the case to explore cultural differences between the west and the east: why simply applying the idea of consumer reports in the US to China may not be enough.

The Indian packaging industry - represented by a mix of paperboard, plastics, metals and glass - had seen great change leading up to 2013. In 2012, Ajanta Packaging ranked among the top suppliers of glass bottles in India with an employee base of more than 50 and net revenues of US$100 million. The glass-bottle industry had a derived demand and depended on major industries using glass bottles in India, such as the liquor and beer, soft-drinks and pharmaceutical industries.The case discusses the stiff competition faced by the glass-bottle industry from different packaging options and materials that had entered the industry in the last four to five years. It assesses the changing market dynamics that could have a big impact on the future of Ajanta Packaging, with many companies shifting to PET bottles, Tetra Pak, flexible packaging and other innovative packaging solutions, to reduce costs and improve the durability of products. Ajanta Packaging was highly dependent on glass-bottle sales, as 95 per cent of its revenue came from them. Should it carry on with the same product range, exploit the declining glass-bottle industry with more customers of glass bottles or enhance its product range with more varieties of PET bottles?

In the summer of 2013, Whitney DeSoto had just been hired as managing director for real assets at the Overton Pension Fund (OPF). Her task was to provide recommendations to the board of trustees to introduce real estate into the fund's portfolio, which to date had been invested solely in stocks and bonds. Combining her knowledge of modern portfolio theory with her institutional expertise in real estate, DeSoto needed to decide what fraction of the fund should optimally be invested in real assets. She then faced the task of deciding whether to invest in public or private real estate. If she thought private real estate belonged in the portfolio, she would need to identify the best investment strategy, the best vehicle, and ultimately the specific investments to recommend.

In 2012, regulatory changes following the financial crisis mean that Barclays Bank is faced with the need to raise large amounts of capital in order to comply with increased capital requirements, tightening rules as to the "quality of capital," and increased risk weights for its capital markets assets. The bank is contemplating offering contingent capital bonds, which would act like debt during "normal times" but would convert to create capital should the bank hit a "triggering event." How should these instruments be designed? Can they be attractive for the bank and for investors?

The founders of Maricopa, Inc., a startup that sold proprietery hair-care products directly to salons, were preparing a board presentation to address the young company's inability to meet financial projections. While the products had caught on with customers, the financial shortcomings raised some questions about the company's business plan. The company had gone through much of its cash and needed additional funding to continue operating. At the same time, two VC investors were deciding how to proceed with their investments in Maricopa. The larger VC firm questioned Maricopa's management's decisions and was hesitant to further fund the company. However the Maricopa investment was much more important to the smaller VC firm, and it's representative on Maricopa's board worked hard to convinve her counterpart from the larger firm that while the firm had struggled, it was a young startup with strong potential. Without the larger firm investing again in Maricopa, the business was at risk of going under.

Sean Warrick is an estate planning adviser at Hellwig & Macon. He is preparing for meetings with two clients. His first clients are Peggy and David Bartley, a professional married couple of moderate wealth. His second clients are Ray and Michelle Polanski, a couple that married late in life and had highly asymmetrical wealth and age. In the case, Warrick is reading a report written by Peter Sullivan, a top estate planning adviser, which considers how estate planning strategies might need to change due to recent changes in estate tax law. Specifically, Warrick must decide whether each couple should continue with their preexisting estate planning strategy, whether they should modify this strategy somewhat, or whether they should abandon their current strategy entirely.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm launched in 2009, has quickly broken into the VC industry's top ranks, in terms of its ability to invest in Silicon Valley's most promising startups. The case recounts the firm's history; describes its co-founders' motivations and their strategy for disrupting an industry in the midst of dramatic structural change; and asks whether a16z's success to date has been due to its novel organization structure. a16z's 22 investment professionals are supported by 43 recruiting and marketing specialists-an "operating team" that is an order of magnitude larger than that of any other VC firm. Furthermore, the operating team aims to not only assist a16z portfolio companies, but also to be broadly helpful to all parties in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, including search firms, journalists, PR agencies, and Fortune 500 executives. The bet: by providing "no-strings-attached" help to ecosystem partners, the partners might someday reciprocate by steering founders seeking funding to a16z. The case closes by asking whether a16z should seek to double its scale over the next years.

Case describes the funding landscape for enterprise technology startups and how there has been a renewed interest in these types of companies in 2012 and 2013. The case highlights recent IPOs within this sector and the venture capitalists who have created funds to pursue an enterprise information technology investment thesis. Case focuses on the company Splunk to highlight the intricacies and nuances of building a successful enterprise startup from funding to IPO. The case also highlights issues around fund raising, selecting the right venture capitalists, and whether to accept an acquisition offer.

After four months in his new position, the assistant operations manager of a family-run, mid-sized insurance company must deal with the performance issues of a long-time employee. The offender's high rate of errors and his slow completion times, along with his increasingly defiant attitude, have gone on for too long, especially since this performance is negatively affecting the other employees in the operations department. Since past efforts have done little to remedy the issues, the assistant operations manager knows his next move needs to resolve them. New to his role, he wants to ensure that he handles this difficult situation well.

This case discusses the only privately owned bridge between Canada and the United States and the possible construction of a second competing and publicly owned bridge. With an upcoming crucial vote on the fate of the public bridge, a Michigan student must decide how to vote and whether she believes that a central public infrastructure should be privately held. She contemplates a deeper issue as well - the fundamental principle of capitalism, a system that sometimes perpetuates inequalities since individuals are rewarded for their hard work and are able to defend their self-interests. The student recognizes that her vote is not just about the future of the public bridge but also about her beliefs in balancing individualism and equality.

How, in a business climate in which building relationships with customers has dominated both managerial thought and marketing budgets, could Filene's Basement have fired a loyal customer, one who was formally and informally recognized as a best customer? This case allows students to reverse-engineer a fired customer's relationship with discount retailer Filene's Basement, from her perspective, to uncover the critical incidents and behaviors of each party that shaped their relationship trajectory. The company's customer relationship management (CRM) programs are analyzed to show how they influenced and encouraged unprofitable customer behavior.

In May 2014, Bill McDermott will become the sole CEO of SAP AG, the world leader in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) field. The case occurs in January 2014 at SAP's investors meeting, at a time when the company's stock is near record high. A 2010 strategy committed the company to a transition to cloud computing. The main driver behind this transition was the development of SAP HANA, an in-memory computing technology that combined database, data processing, and application platform functionality. Ownership of cloud infrastructure was a key question. SAP could build, own, and operate its own data centers, or partner to locate SAP HANA and other products with other cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM. McDermott also had to make decisions around the organization and leadership of the company's cloud efforts.

Narrates the story of Emirates, an airline founded in 1985 in Dubai that by 2013 was among the three largest commercial airlines in the world. The case emphasizes how Emirates capitalized on its location-a small city-state strategically located to reach ¾ of the world population in a flight of less than eight hours-to build a fast-growing and profitable hub-based business model. The case details how Emirates' chooses new routes, technology, and equipment and manages its human resources, marketing and branding, and government relationships-together forming an internally consistent strategy that capitalizes on opportunities across geographic markets. Importantly, students are asked to evaluate if the airlines' strategy will be sustainable as Emirates faces technical and political challenges to expand and must compete with numerous new players from the Middle East.

Since founding CancerScan in 2008, Jun Fukuyoshi and Yoshiki Ishikawa had helped to improve cancer screening rates in Japan. Between 2005 and 2007, awareness of breast cancer in Japan rose from 55% to 70%, but the incidence of breast cancer screenings remained constant. Jun and Yoshiki applied marketing research techniques to increase the screening rate for breast cancer, a disease which killed over 12,000 Japanese women in 2011. Cancer screening initiatives accounted for 60% of the company's 2013 sales of $2.5 million.

The Kursk, a Russian nuclear-powered submarine sank in the relatively shallow waters of the Barents Sea in August 2000, during a naval exercise. Numerous survivors were reported to be awaiting rescue, and within a week, an international rescue party gathered at the scene, which had possessed between them all that was needed for a successful rescue. Yet they failed to save anybody. Based on the recollections and daily situational reports of Commodore David Russell, who headed the Royal Navy's rescue mission, the case explores how and why this failure-a classic coordination failure-occurred. The Kursk rescue mission also illustrates the challenges of pluralistic risk and disaster management, and asks students to consider how to bring about solutions in the face of pluralistic risk issues, such as the depletion of natural resources and many other disasters, when multiple parties with competing and often conflicting values and expertise have to learn to coordinate and establish a virtual, well-aligned organization.

Peak Sealing Technologies (PST), a manufacturer of premium carton sealing tapes, stresses technological innovation as the company's core value. But when a new regional competitor introduces a less expensive and inferior product, PST is faced with a decision that could conflict with their values. Product manager Emma Taylor must decide if the company should augment its existing high-quality product line with a cheaper, less effective product to compete with their competitor. However, this decision could cannibalize PST's premium line. Emma is faced with a key issue in product line management--determining the variety of products in the line that serve the same function. Students are introduced to the problems of "trading down" the product line and must consider whether the company's corporate values are a strength or liability. This case can be used effectively in a first-year MBA course on marketing management to illustrate concepts associated with the risk and strategy of introducing a product line extension. It also allows for more complex analysis that would be appropriate in an Executive MBA program or advanced MBA elective courses in Product Management, Business to Business Marketing, Sales Management or New Product Development.

Business-information technology (IT) initiatives in pedagogy are no longer a novelty. Still, some of the best known music examination boards seem reluctant to change, and continue to adopt a system largely bereft of it to run their business. Aligning business and IT in music examination boards is proving to be a theoretical challenge, and an unresolved issue at the corporate level. Involuntarily participation in the increasingly prevalent reliance on new technologies to augment business opportunity, as part of a wider process of globalization, is no longer a viable option. Although some boards are seeing this alignment as an enabler of business goals, others see it as an inhibitor. Who is right? Which strategy reaches the business goal of maximum enrollments? This paper opens a discussion on possible best-aligned business-IT decisions to enable best business activity and uses a case study to examine the underutilization of business-IT alignment adopted by one of the most successful music examination board in the world. This paper questions whether the use of IT in music examination defines being a market leader or not. By using a survey, in-depth interviews and a pilot study, this paper presents an IT alignment fit between the board and its IT platforms. Finally, the paper leverages the value of an initiative composed of thoughtful business strategy and IT to open up new business opportunities, and raises unanswered questions for the reader.