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This case explores a shift in strategic direction at PepsiCo, the second-largest food and beverage company in the world. It concentrates on the formation of a new group, the Global Nutrition Group, whose purpose was to bring focus to the company's efforts to significantly expand its offerings in nutritious food and beverages. The case explores the background to that decision and the complexities the company faced in altering its product portfolio over the long run (which also included efforts to make its core snack and soft drink products healthier), while at the same time maintaining short-term profitability. The evolution of the product portfolio was part of a larger effort to implement a new strategic vision, encapsulated in the phrase, "Performance with Purpose." The phrase, in brief, expressed a commitment to deliver financial results in a way that was good for the world as well as good for the company.

A recent business graduate decided to contact her former classmates from her value investing course. She emailed them with a proposal to re-evaluate the company they had valued for their final project, National Presto Industries (Presto). Presto was a diversified company operating in three different industries: housewares/small appliances, absorbent products, and defense. The price had dropped about 25 per cent and perhaps it was time to take it off of the group's "watch list," as it might now be undervalued and worth purchasing. Presto was initially brought to the group's attention through a screening process that identified Presto as having a low price to earning value, a high dividend yield, and a small market capitalization. It was unusual in that it was a company that was over 100 years old and operated in stable and unglamorous segments, yet was still considered a growth company. If it was determined that Presto was a good buy, the team also wanted to establish an exit price, but due to a tight concentration of shareholders and low average daily trading volume, the team wondered how this low liquidity would impact the stock's share price.

Swedish Match is a profitable smokeless tobacco company with low debt compared to other firms in its industry. The firms CFO now wants to revise the firms conservative financial policy.

In early 2009, Wal-Mart executive Andy Barron realized the firm's lighting business was facing a challenge. After achieving a goal of selling 100 million compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs by the end of 2007, sales of the energy-efficient bulbs had started to plateau, leading to a dim outlook for 2009. Barron needed to examine what barriers might be keeping consumers from adopting more of the bulbs, which offer both cost savings and environmental benefits. In this 2-part case students study the historic price points and sales of CFL bulbs, Wal-Mart's 2007 promotion of CFL lighting, and research about consumer adoption of the bulbs in order to understand how the retailer might achieve its goals. The case asks: How can consumer habits be changed? How can new products overcome barriers to adoption? What can managers do to promote sales of new products, given human behavior where biases, values and emotions have an impact on the choices people make? How can economic theories explain consumer behavior as it occurs in the real world? The Epilogue to the first case asks students to discuss what developments occurred after the 2009 implementation and how they impacted CFL sales.

In July 2008, the vice chairman, General Electric (GE), and president and chief executive officer (CEO), GE Energy Infrastructure, was mulling over whether GE should re-enter the windpower market in India. Financial incentives had been announced by the Government of India for wind farm operators who generated power through wind energy. These incentives might encourage market development so that GE could leverage the technological strength of its wind-powered turbines. However, as recently as 2005, GE Energy had pulled out of the Indian market after a frustrating stint in the country. The vice chairman needed to weigh the pros and cons of re-entering India and make a decision. There was reason for caution, however, from GE's point of view. India was a complex market in which to operate, and the wind energy market was still developing. To be successful, GE would need to build a local supply chain and compete with Suzlon's (the major domestic competitor) speed of delivery. Suzlon's was a formidable player. Should GE re-enter India?

Steven Rogers had always thought that someday he would like to own a business with one or both of his daughters. As his eldest daughter, Akilah, finished her final semester at Harvard Business School, she told Rogers that she would like to create with him a Chicago-based real estate venture that included buying, rehabbing and renting homes in the Englewood and South Shore neighborhoods of Chicago. Rogers quickly realized that his biggest challenge was how to equitably structure the ownership of the business. He gathered advice from family business experts and slowly began to build a plan that would benefit each member of his family. Meanwhile, Akilah assumed responsibilities associated with the business as she finished her final semester at HBS. The case ends with Rogers Family Enterprises owning its first three houses.

This fictional short case sets up a hiring scenario that can be analyzed through the lens of the best practices found in "Note on Best Practices in Hiring" (GSB Case E-416). A CEO wants to hire a VP of Strategy and Business Development. How will he know what he is looking for and when he has found the right person?

Chris and Alison Weston describe how they, a well-educated middle class couple, ended up committing mail fraud, for which they each served a year and a half in federal prison. The case highlights for students how otherwise upstanding individuals much like themselves can commit crimes without being truly aware that they are doing it.

Bill Casey had a suspicion the sporting goods chain he managed was losing sales because of inconsistent customer service. To quantify customer engagement issues, Casey decided to work with a start-up that analyzed interactions between customers and employees based on security video footage. While Casey realized that statistical process control is used in manufacturing and engineering to identify variation in a process, he wondered if the method would work for a retail business. In this case students learn how statistical process control studies are built and applied, and consider Casey's analysis to determine how his business might improve its customer engagement, as well as the risks in implementing the methodology.

The established credit raters were criticized for inflating the mortgage credit bubble that imploded in 2008. A new rating agency, KBRA, is considering how to capitalize on the opportunity this presents and how to enter the industry. A small group of managers have to decide on a business model, how to meet hiring and funding needs, and what types of ratings to start with: municipal, corporate, or structured. Where are the needs for new ratings stronger? How can investors be convinced to use the new ratings? How can KBRA compete with Fitch, Moody's, and S&P?

PunchTab was a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2011 that was developing an Internet-based turnkey customer loyalty program for website owners, mobile applications developers, and brands. Founder/CEO Ranjith Kumaran must make strategic decisions about how to fund PunchTab's early operations and growth given the many options available: individual angel investors, super angel funds, incubators, and seed funds inside traditional venture capital firms.

Healthpoint Services sought to address rural India's shortage of quality and affordable healthcare with a multi-service platform that comprised telemedical health clinics called eHealthpoints, clean drinking water, a diagnostic lab, and a pharmacy. Could they convince rural Indians to leapfrog from local healers to telemedicine? And could they convince Investors that their capital Intensive, bundled offering was a high-growth, self-sustaining venture? Healthpoint Services grappled with multiple challenges: changing mind-sets of patients and investors, generating traffic at their eHealthpoints, expanding their product portfolio, and growing within and outside India.

David Swensen and the Investments Office staff must decide whether to continue to allocate the bulk of the university's endowment to illiquid investments-hedge funds, private equity, real estate-given the impact of the recent market turmoil. The case explores the risks and benefits of a different asset allocation strategy and also considers how to classify some of the different assets. It highlights the issues around allocations across different subclasses, e.g., between venture capital, hedge funds, and real assets.

Turbine, Inc., is releasing a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, The Lord of the Rings Online, based on the popular film trilogy. The firm's CEO needs to consider market conditions and game characteristics to build a business model for the game, decide which type of consumers to target-the hardcore gamers or the casual gamers-and form the optimal pricing scheme. One particular challenge he needs to face is that there is a dominant incumbent in the MMO market that Turbine enters, World of Warcraft. The case encourages students to explore the nature of the competition in the MMO market and to define characteristics of a successful business model.

The purpose of this case is to help students critically evaluate the market value of LinkedIn's stock following its recent IPO. In the context of strong investor appetite for social media companies, LinkedIn is the lamp bearer among U.S. companies in that industry that are considering tapping into public markets. The case can serve to illustrate the challenges of valuing an early-stage high-growth company with a great deal of uncertainty about fundamental value and how quoted prices might reflect expectations that are hard to justify. Regardless of which valuation method is employed (e.g., residual income, discounted cash flow, multiples), the case provides a platform (i) to map the firm's key success and risk factors into forecasts and estimates for its future performance and cost of capital, and (ii) to critically assess the implied assumptions underlying the market's expectations. The case is best suited for a course on business valuation at all levels (undergraduate, MBA, executive programs).

On the night of April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Gas in the Macondo well had surged upward unexpectedly, causing a mix of drilling mud and seawater to spew uncontrollably into the air much like a volcanic eruption. Eleven crew members died during the explosion. The nation mourned their loss, and people watched as BP struggled to contain the environmental damage. Millions of barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in the weeks that followed. The federal government relied on BP to manage the accident's aftermath, in part because government officials lacked the expertise required to stop the spill. Meanwhile, BP downplayed their responsibility for the failure. As the firm failed repeatedly to stop the spill, the public became angry. This industrial disaster became the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Drawing on the Presidential Commission's investigation, as well as numerous journalistic accounts, the case provides a detailed description of the events leading up to this catastrophic accident. Readers examine the key decisions that BP and its partners made as they drilled this well. They discover the alternative choices that could have been made and learn about the disagreements that took place (as well as those that failed to surface). Moreover, the case provides an opportunity to examine how BP's history and organizational culture shaped the way those decisions were made. The case describes how Tony Hayward and his predecessor, John Browne, led the firm and shaped the culture during the past two decades. In addition, the case explains how the regulatory environment and political forces shaped decision-making in the oil industry. The case concludes by examining the aftermath of the accident, particularly the public relations miscues that BP experienced as it tried to manage the crisis.

The founder of Sushilicious, a new restaurant in California, was thinking about how to make his second year in the business even more successful. His objective is to grow the current base for his restaurant with a limited marketing budget. The founder has had success building his first restaurant using a combination of social media tools and now wonders how he can build upon his current communication strategy.

This note is an introduction to simulation in Excel and VBA. The note demonstrates different ways of doing simulation in Excel and Excel VBA with examples. The concepts used and explained in the note are random number, probability distributions, data tables, loops and arrays, histograms and descriptive statistics.

For the last 24 years Nouveau Event Planning has been operating the largest wedding expo in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, an event called the Wedding Extravaganza. In 2001 the Wedding Odyssey became the second Wedding Expo in Windsor, and started to pose a significant threat to the Wedding Extravaganza. Some strategic decisions in the case include pricing, customer retention, and selection of an appropriate target market. Students are asked to determine the best course of action for the exhibition through analysis of the competitive landscape and future potential of the wedding industry.

On Wednesday, July 6th, 2011, the communication director, for the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS), in Toronto, Ontario, was faced with a challenging situation. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) had just released an online article that focused on the 2011 CCS budget, more specifically how the CCS allocated millions of dollars each year. Furthermore, the CBC article provided details on how the proportion of donation money the CCS spent on cancer research each year had decreased from 40 per cent in 2000 to under 22 per cent in 2011. With the CBC report circulating in both television and online media, public speculation into CCS's financial management of public donations was starting to grow. It was clear that the CCS communication team would need to respond. A communication strategy would need to be developed for the CCS to follow moving forward, along with a press release to be posted the next day on the CCS website.