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The Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish Rugby Football Union are two sporting organizations that have innovated through their business models to grow their sports, create world-class sport facilities and improve their ability to win European competitions. Yet they reside in one of the smallest countries in Europe - Ireland. While the Gaelic Athletic Association is a volunteer organization whose amateur status (in which players and coaches are unpaid) imposes significant limitations on its revenue-generating abilities, the professional Irish Rugby Football Union has earned substantial income through the success of provincial and national Irish rugby teams. Both organizations compete for scarce financial, physical and human resources and are now faced with a rapidly changing environment following the deepest recession in the history of the Irish Republic and emigration of talent abroad. This case challenges students to analyze the business models of the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish Rugby Football Union and explore how the models can be innovated to ensure survival of these cultural assets for the next generation.

The COO of a global knowledge-outsourcing and technology-services firm has been selected by his company's board of directors to step in and rescue a large-scale digitization project that is in danger of missing its rapidly approaching deadline. The project requires the firm to create digital archives of a daily American newspaper, spanning 150 years. With teams from two different countries paired to work on this significant venture, things quickly go awry on several levels as a result of misunderstandings about client expectations, lack of employee training (both from a standpoint of cultural awareness and with respect to the use of new technology), and poor project management. The COO must quickly develop an action plan to address these issues and ensure the success of the project in the face of an ultimatum from the client: deliver the project on time or lose it completely.In the role of the COO, students must create an action plan to overcome the issues that threaten to derail the project.

In recent years, the Indian shampoo market had been growing at an exponential rate, with several categories and brands of personal care products showing significant growth. Like consumers in several emerging markets, Indians had begun to place a heightened degree of importance on physical appearance, perhaps as an outcome of Westernization and exposure to media. Traditionally, Indians were known to use herbs to nurture and enhance their hair. Now, however, Indian consumers were caught between the propositions of "synthetic" hair-care brands versus the "natural benefits of the herbal" brands, despite the fact that some degree of processing was required for both types. Amid this dichotomous culture of hair-care products, how could the Himalaya brand establish itself as a differentiated herbal offering?

In mid-2013, Tesla Motors was riding a wave of success: It had launched its first really mass-produced car-the model S-to rave reviews; had recently raised first-year production targets; and had started taking orders for its next car, the Model X. Tesla seemed to be on its way to defying the skeptics and becoming the first US company to enter the car industry with a mass-produced car since WWII and the first to successfully launch a fully electric car. Or was it not?

Amazon launched its website in July 1995 to sell books online. Since then it has expanded into a variety of businesses that some see as unrelated. By 2019 Amazon has grown to become a digital giant with over $233 billion in annual sales but its profitability has been uneven. Has it spread itself too thin or is it positioning itself well for the future?

This case explores the very different paths taken by the Ford Motor Company and the General Motors Corporation in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Henry Ford's Model T was a car for the masses. After considerable experimentation, Ford Motor perfected a mass production system that converted the vast majority of jobs in the factory into routine tasks. It pioneered the moving assembly line, and it pursued processes that became increasingly integrated and mechanized. While it's single-minded focus on cost minimization led to spectacular market success for a time, the resulting inflexibility made it difficult for the company to respond to market changes. This created an opportunity for General Motors and others, particularly in the face of technological shifts to closed-body designs and metal stamping technology, as well as the marketing-led idea of the annual model change. The case offers a setting to examine several frameworks: exploration versus exploitation, the emergence of dominant designs, and vertical integration versus transaction costs and supplier hold-up. The A case closes with the question of what GM should do about supplier Fisher Body. The B case summarizes the shift to all-steel body stamping and engine manufacturing as the core technologies for automobile production, and how these changes made it difficult for Ford to maintain its first-mover advantage.

Human resource (HR) management practices in Japan are significantly different from those in Europe and North America. A knowledge of the traditional Japanese HR system, including practices relating to recruiting and compensation, unions and the labour market, is crucial for foreign companies operating in Japan as well as those seeking to do business with Japanese firms. While Japan's distinct HR system was once considered a source of competitive advantage, changing economies and labour markets have called its current effectiveness into question. The traditional system primarily provided stable long-term employment for full-time employees; however, for a variety of reasons, non-regular forms of employment, including part-time and short-term positions, are on the rise. HR managers in Japan must consider relevant societal and economic changes and develop more effective HR systems in response.

As first step, Somerville officials developed an inventory of the main programs of each of Somerville's 18 departments and the costs associated with each program. Calculating costs at the program level required a less detailed analysis than calculating costs at the activity level. They identified the activities associated with each program and established performance objectives for each activity. During the fall of 2004, HKS Prof. Linda Bilmes and her students helped Somerville officials accomplish these steps. Together, this information allowed officials and residents to understand for the first time how the City's expenditure of tax dollars translated directly into the City's delivery of services that constituents valued. Encouraged by the results, the Mayor asked Prof. Bilmes and her students to focus on a municipal activity of particular concern to officials and residents: traffic enforcement. Mayor Curtatone asked whether increasing enforcement of the City's traffic laws might pay for itself through increased citation revenue. The case walks through the steps Bilmes and her students took to determine the answer, including allocating personnel expenditures to the activity of traffic enforcement, allocating non-personnel expenditures to that activity through selection and use of an appropriate cost driver, and calculation of the revenue generated from traffic enforcement.

In an era of rapidly evolving systems of health care delivery, the impact on patients, physicians, hospitals, medical device manufacturers and small business owners are often conflicting. This case highlights these conflicts and stressors from all perspectives, providing unique insights and offering potential options.

Desi Shack is a "fast casual" restaurant, started by two HBS alumni, that serves Indian and Pakistani cuisine in midtown Manhattan. The founders are looking to expand into a second location and also plan to hire a COO, and there is very little room for error in the decision-making process if Desi Shack is to continue operating. This case discusses questions of location choice and hiring decisions, and provides an example of a framework entrepreneurs might use to think about the many factors that must go in to making these choices.

Ina Food Industry Co. Ltd. ("Ina Food") is situated in the city of Ina, Nagano Prefecture, and surrounded by the soaring mountains of the Japanese Alps. Hiroshi Tsukakoshi, Ina Food's 75-year-old chairman, has led the company through an incredible 55 years of continuous revenue and profit growth. The company is a leading manufacturer of powdered agar, a traditional gelatin product derived from seaweed. In the summer of 2012, Tsukakoshi is looking through the windows of his office in Ina City. He is thinking about how he aims for his company to be a corporation that is conscious of the global environment. He feels he has done a good job so far. The business has prospered and does not present any urgent problems. However, he also feels that he should not simply sit back and savor his success. He is facing his retirement and has concerns about the long-term growth of the company. He is thinking it might be the right time to introduce some new marketing strategies for the company. There is also another reason for concern: Japan's deflationary environment, persistent for 20 years now. He is interested in increasing sales volume and profit by raising prices when most other companies are lowering theirs under deflation. In this environment, even keeping prices constant means a relative increase of price. Tsukakoshi believes that, in essence, as long as a company is confident in the competitiveness of its products, there are always methods to raise prices and increase profits. The key is raising the prices of merchandise and services in a way that the customers can accept. Raising prices in a difficult economic climate is a risky decision. Nevertheless, the company is successful in raising the price under deflation. While the Japanese economy faces serious difficulties, the company has obtained successful results thanks to marketing, producing, financing, and allocating resources.

Nike's labor practices were the subject of high profile public protests in the 1990s, and CEO Mark Parker said the company still had a lot of work to do in that area. The case also details how making sustainability a key part of the design process led Nike to develop more innovative and high-performing products, such as a breakthrough running shoe called the Flyknit, which was widely worn at the 2012 Olympics. Following protests in the late 1990s over unsafe working conditions, low wage rates, excessive overtime, restrictions on employee organizing, and negative environmental impacts, Nike began shifting from a reactive to a proactive mode. During the 15 years covered in this case, Nike made significant changes in its sustainability practices, including moving its Corporate Responsibility team much further upstream in the organization, where it could have a greater impact on decisions by providing input early in the process. The company also developed multiple indexes that measured its sustainability practices and those of its independent contract manufacturers. The indexes had metrics for measuring the relevant impacts of product waste, water, chemistry, labor, and energy. Nike's critics said many labor issues had not been resolved, but Nike made progress in that area through collaboration with governments, NGOs and labor unions, and through management compliance trainings. If a contract factory did not score high enough on the company's sustainability and labor ratings scales, Nike would impose sanctions on the factory or even drop it from the supply chain. These actions took Nike off the top of most activists' target lists.

A student has just completed the first day of an Executive MBA program. He had completed his undergraduate business degree more than a decade earlier and now ponders how to best tackle the demanding program workload, while continuing to fulfill his commitments both at work and in his personal life. Even greater, though, are the challenges of effectively communicating and coordinating schoolwork assignments with his seven-person "virtual" learning team. The teaching note provides a Virtual Team Characteristics Framework to highlight the critical variables associated with effective virtual team outcomes.

As marketers love to teach students, differentiation must be the focal point of marketing strategy. But what happens when a firm's competitive set is shared by similar customers, perceived differentiation is weak among rivals, and loyalty is a thing of the past? This was the dilemma the French luxury jeweler Mauboussin faced: how to leverage its iconic brand to access new customers, domestically and abroad, and through new channels, while preserving the image of luxury goods founded on the myth of rarity and exclusivity? The case was designed and used for the latter portion of an international MBA marketing course and would work well in most international business courses.

The case is set in June 2013, and deals with a small to medium-sized Singapore-based property developer's decision on whether to launch a sustainability initiative and engage in sustainability reporting as an innovative practice to improve the long run viability of the company through improved operational efficiencies. The question arose off the back of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession with which the adoption of sustainability by large property developers in Singapore coincided, and which proved the vulnerability of the property development industry to macro-economic effects. Top management at the company had tasked Annie Tan, the company's COO, to render an initial critical evaluation of the competitors' sustainability initiatives and sustainability reporting, before making recommendations on the adoption and design of a sustainability initiative and sustainability reporting for the privately held property developer that specialised in small-scale customised property developments.

This note describes the mobile telecommunications industry in 2012, and how the various participants were positioned for the future. This was a period of rapid change, as some competitors were rapidly growing, while others were undergoing equally rapid descent. The note focuses on ecosystems that evolved around competing operating systems and microprocessors, and highlights developments in each industry layer-software, hardware, handsets, and network operations-as well as strategic issues related to intellectual property.

In June 2012, an area sales manager at NutriPack India, a multinational company dealing with fast-moving consumer goods, had to find a way to match the success of his predecessor in increasing retail outlet coverage in central Maharashtra. He studied the territory data and identified the Jalgaon region as having the potential for high growth. However, the single distributor for Jalgaon was upset because he had already increased his operations the previous year and was unconvinced that this had been profitable. The area sales manager needed to convince this distributor of the benefits of his past investments, and also convince him to make further investments (e.g., hire more salespersons). This case illustrates the challenges that young area sales managers face when they have to deal with experienced distributors in the Indian retail trade, especially in smaller towns where relationships can greatly affect business. Students will gain an understanding of the key performance indicators required to focus on developmental issues in a territory. They will appreciate financial considerations as a major tool in dealing with intermediaries, such as distributors, and will gain practical knowledge in how to convince a distributor of his past investments and profitability, and pave the way for further investment for retail expansion.

The head of Data Marketing Analytics and Mobile for Intel Asia-Pacific was reviewing the proposed media plan for the Catch & Win 2.0 campaign. The media purchase needed to be finalized quickly in order to be included in the current quarter's budget, but he could not help feeling that the proposed spend across the markets and advertising types could be used more effectively. He thought that the key was to use the company's own experience and data regarding social media engagement within their markets rather than to rely on the generalized industry metrics provided by the contracted media agency, and now he must improve the proposed media plan.

A management consultant has been hired to fix the morale issues at a branch of SkillsForTomorrow (SFT) in Pennsylvania, United States. SFT is a government-sponsored organization tasked with helping at-risk young adults gain vocational training toward preparing them for a successful career in one of several areas, including automotive and machine repair, construction, health care and information technology. The program provides support to students beyond technical training, including the development of interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills and skills in effectively conducting a job search and interview - all towards the goal of graduating individuals that are prepared to live independently and become productive citizens (and taxpayers). Several factors are influencing the morale of the SFT management team, some of which point directly to the sponsor of the consulting project, the executive director at SFT Harrisburg. The consultant must identify the root causes of the management discord and derive a solution that can help solve the various issues. The consultant will need to consider the political and interpersonal aspects of the consulting relationship between herself and the executive director.