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Suitable for MBA, EMBA, GEMBA, and executive education programs, this note sets the stage to unfold an analysis of popular notions about how the world works. On one hand, some believe that global competition has created a flattened world and that globalization has leveled the playing field. Yet a zest to view the world as flat, others have said, results in an underestimation of the differences between countries-standardization, exact replication, and scale expansion on a global basis could be problematic. In this note, we acknowledge that the flat world has some lumps, but regardless of whether the world is considered to be flat or round, there are certain implications on both sides that business leaders need to be aware of in order to create global efficiency. The note offers three practical examples that students can work through and apply their learning.

This survey of Google's rise to prominence as the de facto search engine of choice focuses on the theme of relevance as a guiding principle. As Google has diversified its offering through both organic growth and acquisition, the potential manifestations of relevance have multiplied, to the point where the nature of its market may need to be reassessed.

In 1992, the United Nations (UN) Convention on Climate Change urged UN members to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in order to limit global warming and climate change. In 1997, international negotiations established the Kyoto Treaty in which 160 signatory nations agreed to achieve specific reductions by the period 2008 to 2012. While the overall commitment was to reduce GHG emissions to a level 5.2 per cent lower than 1990 levels, nations committed to different percentage reductions. Each signatory would determine how it wished to reach its target, and no penalties were threatened to those who might not reach their goal. By 2001, when the time came to ratify the treaty, various credits were provided to some nations for carbon sinks, particularly for existing forests. Even with such concessions, the United States refused to sign, as did most developing nations. The Kyoto Protocol proceeded at very different speeds in different nations. International negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancun in 2010 attempted to add clarity to the intentions of signatories. However, many significant details had not yet been addressed. Future negotiations in Rangoon and elsewhere would be necessary.

This note provides background on the complex issues regarding the supply and consumption of water and how this natural resource is at increasing risk, resulting in significant economic, political and environmental issues.

This note discusses the technical and managerial aspects of pricing a product line. Product lines are multiple variants of essentially the same product, where individual products in the line may vary by quantity (size) or quality. The discussion takes the point of view of the manufacturer of the products rather than the retailer, but the implications of selling through a channel are also discussed. The note draws on the disciplines of economics and psychology to inform good marketing practice.

This note summarizes basic principles of tort law and is intended as background information for business students studying legal aspects of management.

Appropriate for marketing classes. This note follows the evolution of selling starting with the skills set forth by Dale Carnigie in the 1950s through the 1970s followed by consultive selling in the 1980s and 1990s and the valued added selling of the 21st century.

This note is intended to provide students with a basic understanding of how to evaluate empirical research papers. While reading both case studies and empirical research require close attention and scrutiny, evaluating empirical research requires a different "lens"-this note briefly outlines how to adopt this mindset. It includes a review of the major sections of an empirical research paper (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion), as well as guidelines on how to evaluate each section.

Appropriate for courses in operations management and process improvement. Hundreds of prospective students visit the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration throughout the academic year to interview for admission and gain a better understanding of the Darden educational experience. In anticipation of these visits, the Darden Admissions Office coordinates a typical schedule of events with the first-year (FY) and second-year (SY) student hosts, the faculty members who will be teaching the MBA case discussion classes that all prospective students will attend, Abbott Center personnel, and of course the prospective students.

Determining what employees want from their jobs has long been important to employers who wish to motivate them. This note explains the concepts of work values, organizational culture, and person-organization fit. Students will complete a personal values profile and an organizational culture profile to allow assessment of person-organization fit.

The marketing mix that a manager may deploy can affect the sales of a product and can be categorized under the traditional four Ps of marketing (product, price, promotion, and placement). But the perennial question managers face concerns the combination of these different marketing mix variables that will give them maximized sales, highest share, lowest inventory, or maximized margins. Quite often, these questions are answered by historical data: for example, past sales or market share for different levels of expenditures on these marketing mix variables. In this note, we consider the design of models that allow managers to obtain robust price and advertising elasticity estimates.

The Darden School mailroom and the activities of its manager are analyzed using process mapping and waste identification tools. The note illustrates how one can observe and analyze a process for which opportunities to create process maps, evaluate waste and savings potential, and create stakeholder buy-in for improvements are identified. Lean tools discussed include process flowcharts, SIPOC, seven waste analyses, and stakeholder engagement. Students who undertake their own process mapping projects should complete a report similar to what was created for the Darden School mailroom.

This technical note, based on the more comprehensive note, "Eliciting and Evaluating Expert Forecasts" (UVA-QA-0734), provides a streamlined presentation of Brier and log scores as tools for assessing forecasting records among a pool of experts. The note is designed to be used in conjunction with a forecasting exercise.

Notwithstanding the professed intention of a party to an MOU, a "preliminary" agreement can have binding effect. This note explores the circumstances under which MOUs may give rise to binding and enforceable agreements.

Unlike traditional marketers who must wait days, if not weeks, to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, online marketers are confronted with an abundance of data that can be tracked and measured almost in real-time. Despite the volume of data and powerful tools available to online marketers (for free or at low cost, making analytics as affordable for startups as Fortune 500 firms), online metrics are widely misunderstood and misapplied, and are often misused to say much more than they should. Understanding how online metrics work, what they measure, and which of them are most relevant based on specific marketing functions and campaign goals is a valuable skill for every marketer. <br><br>This note frames online metrics in the context of campaign goals (from search marketing to back-end analytics) while discussing the various marketing functions (from display advertising to brand management) that benefit as a result of access to specific metrics. Throughout the note, each metric is placed along a return on investment continuum designed to give insight into the role of each metric over time as it relates to a firm’s bottom line.

An Excel macro is a series of commands that can perform certain tasks automatically, such as obtaining data from another Excel file or the web, updating computations, generating reports, and running models. Macros can save time, reduce user errors, and complete tasks that would be extremely difficult for a user to do otherwise. This note uses examples and screenshots to introduce macros and macro recording in Microsoft Excel.

The web query feature of Microsoft Excel can be a great help in retrieving data from the web. A web query can be set up in Excel in a similar way to browsing a web page. In this note, historical stock prices are obtained from the web for use in Microsoft Excel, and a macro recorder is used to process the data and view and modify the corresponding Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.

This note is designed to give readers an overview of some useful tools within Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), including offset, vlookup, dynamic charts, form controls, and pivot tables. These tools have purposes such as eliminating errors in data entry or extracting insights from large sets of categorical data. This note contains explanations followed by examples and screenshots for each tool.

Governments throughout the world have offered subsidies for a wide variety of reasons, including increasing investments and jobs (particularly those that are high-tech), stimulating economically depressed regions, supporting domestic agriculture, and preventing bankruptcies through “bail-outs.” Subsidies now play a key role in business location decisions, and impact international competitiveness. Recipients of subsidies can offer their goods and services for sale at lower prices than would exist in the absence of subsidies. Foreign-based corporations may regard these lower prices as unfair competition in international trade. Consequently, international trade negotiations have come to focus on many of these subsidy programs as trade distortions that should be limited by formal international agreements. Some countries, especially the United States, impose special countervail duties if their corporations are being hurt by foreign subsidies. With current and projected reductions in trade barriers, subsidies will become relatively more important as a trade-determining process. Nevertheless, subsidies are implemented to pursue certain social objectives, and so an intergovernmental pact that limits subsidies may diminish, rather than improve, the well being of signatories.