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Talismark, which helped its customers manage their waste, was considering re-engineering its business fundamentals to dramatically increase profitability by changing its sales and information processes. Implementing the changes would be expensive and would interrupt its new customer acquisition efforts, and it would be 18 months until the company could begin to acquire new business. The case explores the rationale and consequences of re-engineering a business.

Newspaper headlines and editorials revealed the intense attention the euro zone had received in the last few months. The current crisis occurred shortly after Greece announced that its 2009 budget deficit was 13% of GDP-twice as high as previously predicted. For some, this was the beginning of the end for the euro zone. Could it lead to the demise of the euro altogether? Others insisted that expelling Greece might be necessary. In tune with headlines at the time, the exchange markets did not display much confidence in the euro. By summer 2010, the euro had lost at least 10% of its value against the dollar since the beginning of 2010. Financial markets were nervous. What should EU leaders do help stave off a major crisis?

The managing director of a steel plant faces the decision of how much of each raw material to order for the plant for the following month. Due to lower and upper bounds on the amounts of each raw material in a batch and varying amounts of electricity and time consumed for different raw materials, one can't simply use the cheapest raw material. A linear program and the solver optimization function of Excel will provide the optimal amounts that meet the constraints. Interestingly, the best mixture for a batch is not the best mixture for a monthly plan. Shadow prices indicate the value of relaxing constraints. The typical monthly model from a student will be nonlinear, although it can be written as a linear model. This case provides the basis for an introductory class on linear programming and linear versus nonlinear models.

The case explores the use and importance of corporate sponsorships, specifically how these relationships are formed with the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. The associate director of National Corporate Programs at the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (the Foundation) needs to determine the Foundation's direction regarding its corporate sponsorship program. Due to the slowdown in the economic environment, a major sponsor of the Foundation, who has contributed more than $1 million to the charity over the past five years, decided to pull two products from the shelf. The associate director needs to find a way to replace that support. Fortunately, the Foundation was approached by three corporations who were interested in becoming corporate sponsors. The associate director and her team now need to evaluate the three corporate sponsorship proposals to determine whether they fit with the Foundation's values and goals.

In winter 2010 Bob Stetzel, the new Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Vermont Teddy Bear (VTB), hopes to replace or modernize many of the company's existing systems and invest in some new applications. This catalog marketer (via online and print catalogs) offers three separately managed brands: Vermont Teddy Bear (VTB), PajamaGrams, and Calyx Flowers. Sales are highly seasonal, with peak volumes at Christmas, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Stetzel has spent his first few months on the job cataloging systems and databases, learning about the 'spider web' of middleware connecting various applications and platforms, and locating employees with expertise to fix them. The company has survived an economic downturn and several costly strategic missteps. The CEO is seeking new sources of revenue and ways to leverage their well-known brand, while the CIO needs to set Information Technology (IT) priorities: should they invest in a full-featured Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) package or take other steps that would more quickly yield tangible results? Whatever choice he makes, Stetzel will have to convince the CEO and the Board of Directors to provide the necessary resources. This case provides students with an opportunity to place themselves in the shoes of a CIO wrestling with strategic IT alignment challenges at a time when resources are severely constrained and competitive rivalry is fierce.

This case traces the history and evolution of Knowledge Management at the World Bank. While primarily a financial institution offering customized loans and grants across a wide range of sectors in some 100 countries, the World Bank has increasingly become involved in developing, storing, and transferring knowledge requested by its clients for project and other development. Currently there is a growing interest and demand for the sharing of Bank knowledge and its more formal knowledge-based advisory services. Many of the more advanced middle-income countries have graduated from the Bank's development assistance programs, but still want to have access to the Bank's knowledge capital, whether this is in the form of cross-country evidence, informal policy notes, or specialized advisory services. In this case, it is against this background that the Bank and its shareholders are grappling with the question of how best to combine and leverage its knowledge capabilities along with its financial resources. HKS Case Number 1936.0

Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee communication that HPCL introduced as part of its effort to adapt to increased market competition during the early 21st century. (HPCL, previously a wholly state-owned company within a state-controlled industry, had begun to operate in an increasingly privatized environment.) At the center of the new model was a series of "vision workshops"--structured conversations in which employees at all levels of the company took part in developing strategic and organizational visions for their regional offices, for their business units, and for the company as a whole. The case also discusses HPCL's use of digital technology to enhance employee communication; its leaders' increased emphasis on direct, "one-to-one" interaction with employees; and some of the consequences (both external and internal) of this more conversational model of organizational communication. As of 2010, HPCL was a Fortune Global 500 company, with more than 11,000 employees and with annual revenues of more than $23 billion. The question that company leaders now faced was whether HPCL's novel approaches to communicating with employees were appropriate to its next stage of internal development and external growth.

After its 2009-2010 fiscal crisis shook the euro, could the Greek government stabilize debt, avoid default, and stay on the euro? This case looks at the Greek social and political road to fiscal crisis; the economics of that crisis and efforts to recover from it; the danger the crisis posed to the euro; cooperation and conflict among European states, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund to try to help Greece emerge from crisis; and the role financial markets played in these events.

Charles "Charlie" E. Merrill was a visionary who opened the door to investing for the masses in America. The "financial supermarket" strategy, which Merrill conceived in the late thirties, revolutionized the brokerage and financial services of his time and is widely recognized as one of the most important strategic innovations in the history of the financial sector. This case opens a window on the genesis of Merrill's strategic insight. It focuses especially on how Merrill came to identify the analogy (banking as supermarkets) that led him to see his industry through a very different lens than most of strategic leaders at competing firms.

Eisai has used knowledge creation as the engine of growth for its operation in Japan and was wondering if it can be utilized on a global scale.

Porcini's Inc. operates a chain of 23 full-service restaurants located near shopping malls and downtown areas in the northeastern United States. Known for providing excellent service, Porcini's serves high-quality Italian cuisine made from fresh ingredients. Looking for expansion opportunities, management considers launching a new chain of lower-cost, limited-menu restaurants called Porcini Pronto. The new outlets will be located along busy interstate highway exits in the region and will serve outstanding Italian food at reasonable prices to both travelers and local residents. Management is concerned that a poor customer experience at Porcini Pronto could tarnish the company's well-established and successful restaurant brand. The management team asks the vice president of marketing to develop the concept and to create an operating strategy for the new outlets. The VP must also analyze three alternative expansion strategies before management will make any commitments to the project. If Porcini's builds and operates the new restaurants, the company will maintain complete control of operations and the customer experience but expansion will take a very long time. Franchising and syndication are two other options which provide faster expansion but introduce the risk of losing control of the brand. The VP must analyze the options and make his final recommendation.

This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the complex, consultative buying process. However, with the rise of social media, prospective customers are getting more of the information they require earlier in the purchase process online. As they do so, their physical interactions with EMC salespeople are decreasing, while their digital interactions are increasing. Given the changing business environment, BJ Jenkins, senior vice president of Global Marketing, faces significant challenges as he tries to maintain EMC's culture of customer centricity. These include 1) translating EMC's platinum service levels, designed to appeal to the world's largest companies, to small businesses and B2C customers, 2) understanding how the replacement of physical interaction with digital interaction in the consultative selling process affects EMC's business, and 3) managing a VAR sales model that distances EMC from its customers.

This case poses the question: given what was known at the time of its adoption, in February 2009, was the federal Health information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act good public policy? The HITECH Act, included in President Barack Obama's federal stimulus bill, was intended to introduce major incentives to encourage the spread of heath information technology throughout the U.S. health system. The case is ideal for a policy analysis class. The case assumes no special knowledge of the health care system or information technology, and provides students with several categories of background information: * The central criticisms of the US health system, and why health IT proponents thought health IT was an essential ingredient in solving these problems. * Evidence that use of health IT in the United States lagged behind (1) the health care systems of other industrialized nations and (2) the use of IT in other information-heavy US industries. * The reasons health care providers were not, on their own, investing in health IT at the level advocated by proponents. * Mixed evidence as to the advantages of health IT for US health care providers that had already adopted it. * The history of federal action (administrative and legislative) on health IT as of February 2009 and arguments, pro and con, for a more aggressive federal role. * A summary of the HITECH Act as proposed by the Obama Administration. The case equips students to stand in the shoes of Congressional decision-makers (or their advisers) in February 2009, and argue why they might either support or oppose this piece of legislation. The case may be used on its own. It may also be used as the first part of a two-case unit with HKS Case 1938.0, "B. Inciting a Computer Revolution in Health Care: Implementing the Health Information Technology Act." HKS Case Number 1937.0.

This case, ideal for strategic leadership classes, poses the question: given the ambitious goals of the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the hurdles to its successful implementation, how should incoming National Coordinator for Health Information Technology David Blumenthal proceed? The case describes Blumenthal's resources, most notably: *$27 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentives to hospitals, physicians, and other eligible providers who invested in ""certified"" electronic health systems *$2 billion in other funds to address specific obstacles to widespread acquisition of health IT systems. *Broad regulatory authority to define ""meaningful use"" and set certification criteria. It also describes Blumenthal's major challenge: to persuade thousands of hospitals and hundreds of thousands of doctors that health IT systems were worth the time and trouble it would take to buy them and integrate them into daily clinical practice. Small, cash-strapped community hospitals and individual practitioners constituted a particular concern. Finally, it describes the nature of Blumenthal's regulatory task: to define meaningful use quickly and to strike the right balance. Define meaningful use too strictly, and large numbers of health care providers might turn down the proffered incentives. Define it too loosely, and the expensive federal initiative would deliver little more than the market would have produced anyway. The case may be used on its own. It may also be used as the second part of a two-case unit with HKS Case 1937.0. This case includes an 8:00 min. video where David Blumenthal talks about challenges he faced, in particular when dealing with individual practitioners who didn't have the bandwidth to adopt electronic health records. Blumenthal explains the arguments he used to persuade them, and reflects more broadly on the timing and stages of this transition to "get information flowing in the healthcare system.

In early 2006, Helen Drinan, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Caritas Christi Health Care System (CCHCS), Boston, received two sexual harassment charges against the organization's CEO and President, Robert Haddad. While she knew she was legally charged with acting, she faced a complicated situation: one, the hospital system was owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Boston with Cardinal O'Malley as the Chairman of the Board for the system; and two, these charges came after the priest molestation cases which rocked the Catholic Church of Boston. In Case A, Drinan presented the well-documented results from an independent investigator into the sexual harassment charges against Haddad. Although Drinan's investigator presented clear evidence as to Haddad's guilt, the Cardinal decided to launch a second investigation, using the Church's lawyers. Drinan, interpreting this action as a delaying or avoidance tactic, decided that she must act. But, what should she say, to whom and how should she frame this critical conversation? In Case B, students read the letter Drinan sent to O'Malley, voicing her values. There is an extensive Epilogue that the instructor can report from or hand out to students that brings the case to a conclusion.

When a set of giant robotic arms developed for the International Space Station breaks down during a crisis, project manager Samantha Van Sant finds herself in the hot seat. Did her team compromise quality by pushing the contractors too hard on speed? How can she prevent future mishaps-should the arrangement with the contractors be renegotiated to include different incentives or more safeguards? Gary L. Moe, a director of McKinsey's Business Technology Office; Tom Quinly, president of aerospace contractor Curtiss-Wright Controls; and HBR readers weigh in on the speed-versus-quality quandary.

When a set of giant robotic arms developed for the International Space Station breaks down during a crisis, project manager Samantha Van Sant finds herself in the hot seat. Did her team compromise quality by pushing the contractors too hard on speed? How can she prevent future mishaps-should the arrangement with the contractors be renegotiated to include different incentives or more safeguards? Gary L. Moe, a director of McKinsey's Business Technology Office; Tom Quinly, president of aerospace contractor Curtiss-Wright Controls; and HBR readers weigh in on the speed-versus-quality quandary.

When a set of giant robotic arms developed for the International Space Station breaks down during a crisis, project manager Samantha Van Sant finds herself in the hot seat. Did her team compromise quality by pushing the contractors too hard on speed? How can she prevent future mishaps-should the arrangement with the contractors be renegotiated to include different incentives or more safeguards? Gary L. Moe, a director of McKinsey's Business Technology Office; Tom Quinly, president of aerospace contractor Curtiss-Wright Controls; and HBR readers weigh in on the speed-versus-quality quandary.

This case describes Latvia's transition from a Soviet republic into an EU member, its economic boom and subsequent bust in 2008, and its policy response. After implementing significant economic and political reforms in order to qualify for EU membership in 2004, Latvia had turned its sights toward joining the single-currency eurozone, pegging its currency to the euro in 2005 as a step toward that goal. From 2000 to 2007, Latvia achieved faster GDP growth than any EU state. However, when large inflows of capital suddenly dried up in 2008, Latvia had to obtain a financial rescue package from the IMF, World Bank, EU, and several regional countries in order to avoid a full-blown financial and currency crisis. Latvia then adopted an aggressive economic adjustment program centered on maintaining its currency peg, which meant competitiveness would have to be restored by reducing domestic prices, wages, and public expenditures in order to drive down the real exchange rate. Latvia's policy program and initial results are discussed in the case.

On October 26, 2004, Norman Nicholls ― partner of the consulting company "Seattle Management Consultants" in London (UK) ― received a phone call from Jesper Lind, board member of Telco-Equipment-Experts. Jesper told Norman: "If you don't change your recommendation on the outsourcing job you are doing for Damotel, our business relationship might suffer in the future."