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In 1997, amidst Japan's ongoing financial problems, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto sought to restructure the financial sector to make it more transparent and globally competitive. He hoped that this effort, dubbed the "Big Bang" after the British financial restructuring a decade earlier, would prove as successful. But the financial problems, which seemed to have abated, looked as if they might be worsening. Thus, Hashimoto had to weigh priorities. Should he focus on long-term restructuring, immediate financial rescue, or both? Might an over-emphasis on long-term restructuring increase the chances that major banks could collapse? And what were the best economic and political strategies in these arenas? As a major developed economy, Japan offers an analog to the problems that faced the United States in its 2008-2009 financial crisis.

When a UK insurance company is plagued with a securities fraud scandal that results in the ouster of the CEO, the head of human resources seizes the opportunity to shake up the culture with a bold replacement. But the chairman of the board is uncomfortable with that strategy, preferring to focus on candidates of a more traditional stamp. How far can - and should - the HR director go to influence the high-stakes appointment? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0911B and R0911Z. CIPD's Vanessa Robinson acknowledges that the HR director has painted herself into a corner by making her case to the board chairman first. To get out, she needs to gather hard data to bolster her argument and demonstrate in business terms the downsides of maintaining the status quo. Debating the relative merits of various CEO candidates is fiddling while Rome burns, says Richard Hermon-Taylor, a management consultant. The company is in jeopardy of imploding, and the search for a new CEO could take weeks or months. The board chairman must take swift action: He should form a special committee to deal with the crisis, retain independent forensic accountants and counsel, announce the appointment of an interim CEO, and develop a communications program to reassure employees, investors, and customers. Charu G. Raheja, an assistant professor of finance at Wake Forest University, warns that the HR director is treading on thin ice. As corporate monitors and advisers to top management, directors must respect one other, the chairman, and, eventually, the new CEO. If that respect is compromised, serious problems can result.

When a UK insurance company is plagued with a securities fraud scandal that results in the ouster of the CEO, the head of human resources seizes the opportunity to shake up the culture with a bold replacement. But the chairman of the board is uncomfortable with that strategy, preferring to focus on candidates of a more traditional stamp. How far can - and should - the HR director go to influence the high-stakes appointment? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0911B and R0911Z. CIPD's Vanessa Robinson acknowledges that the HR director has painted herself into a corner by making her case to the board chairman first. To get out, she needs to gather hard data to bolster her argument and demonstrate in business terms the downsides of maintaining the status quo. Debating the relative merits of various CEO candidates is fiddling while Rome burns, says Richard Hermon-Taylor, a management consultant. The company is in jeopardy of imploding, and the search for a new CEO could take weeks or months. The board chairman must take swift action: He should form a special committee to deal with the crisis, retain independent forensic accountants and counsel, announce the appointment of an interim CEO, and develop a communications program to reassure employees, investors, and customers. Charu G. Raheja, an assistant professor of finance at Wake Forest University, warns that the HR director is treading on thin ice. As corporate monitors and advisers to top management, directors must respect one other, the chairman, and, eventually, the new CEO. If that respect is compromised, serious problems can result.

When a UK insurance company is plagued with a securities fraud scandal that results in the ouster of the CEO, the head of human resources seizes the opportunity to shake up the culture with a bold replacement. But the chairman of the board is uncomfortable with that strategy, preferring to focus on candidates of a more traditional stamp. How far can - and should - the HR director go to influence the high-stakes appointment? Three experts comment on this fictional case study in R0911B and R0911Z. CIPD's Vanessa Robinson acknowledges that the HR director has painted herself into a corner by making her case to the board chairman first. To get out, she needs to gather hard data to bolster her argument and demonstrate in business terms the downsides of maintaining the status quo. Debating the relative merits of various CEO candidates is fiddling while Rome burns, says Richard Hermon-Taylor, a management consultant. The company is in jeopardy of imploding, and the search for a new CEO could take weeks or months. The board chairman must take swift action: He should form a special committee to deal with the crisis, retain independent forensic accountants and counsel, announce the appointment of an interim CEO, and develop a communications program to reassure employees, investors, and customers. Charu G. Raheja, an assistant professor of finance at Wake Forest University, warns that the HR director is treading on thin ice. As corporate monitors and advisers to top management, directors must respect one other, the chairman, and, eventually, the new CEO. If that respect is compromised, serious problems can result.

Hortifruti´s Tierra Fertil (Fertile Land) Program was created in Costa Rica in the 1970s as a result of an initiative carried out by the Uribe family, founders of Corporacion de Supermercados Unidos - Corporacion de Companias Agroindustriales group (CSU-CCA). In 1973, with only five supermarkets, the group had a hard time supplying its points of sale with quality farming products to respond to its consumers´ demands. As a result, that year, Hortifruti-a company owned by CCA--started to organize Costa Rican farmers in order to establish some business criteria, including profit margins and minimum and maximum quality standards. Once these criteria were determined, Hortifruti proceeded to introduce production programs based on market demands. Safer and more hygienic product conditions were promoted both at the packaging and transport stages, including special requirements for suppliers. Small farmers who were unable to meet these requirements and who lived along the way to a point of sale, had their produce picked up at the farm. In 2005, Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world, bought CSU-CCA. Strategies, business model, management practices and work procedures of the newly-acquired organization were revised in order to adjust them to Walt-Mart's equivalents. Given that the Tierra Fertil program had entailed challenges in technical and economic infrastructure development, education, financial resources and cultural differences, the initiative represented a new conceptualization of the "conventional" value proposition as well as a deep understanding of local needs and CSU-CCA believed that Wal-Mart Central America should continue the program. Jorge Cordero, recently-promoted Agriculture Director for Central America, was in charge of elaborating and presenting arguments to help Wal-Mart executives decide about the usefulness of this supply model in Central America operations.

One Acre Fund (OAF) was founded by Andrew Youn in 2005 for the purpose of helping to solve the chronic hunger problem in Africa. The idea is to provide the resources (seed, fertilizer, and education) necessary for African farm families to feed themselves when their land holdings are one acre or less. The business model of OAF is that of a cooperative: OAF buys resources like seeds and fertilizer in bulk at reduced prices and distributes them to small farmers who otherwise could not afford them. This case concerns the negotiation that OAF's manager of external relations and research, Moises Postigo, conducted to buy fertilizer in the last quarter of 2007. The case provides an opportunity for students to analyze a real-world deal-making negotiation in a developing economy. A number of aspects of the context of the negotiation and the negotiation process itself make for good class discussion. Postigo did a good job preparing for the negotiation, making the case one that emphasizes proper use of negotiation planning and sensitive understanding of the negotiation environment. Some of the elements that make for good discussion include the following: OAF was a new organization, unknown to the five major providers of fertilizer in Kenya. The negotiations were entirely conducted by cell phone. Negotiations went through stages of request for a bid, discussion with multiple bidders, selection of a provider, and negotiation. There were multiple issues, including price delivery and form of payment. Postigo was negotiating in the shadow of the possibility that the Kenyan government would start selling subsidized fertilizer to small farmers.

Fiserv, a pioneer in electronic payments, would like to increase the number of consumers who receive bills electronically. Currently, adoption is relatively low. To help guide their efforts, Fiserv managers have done extensive customer research and have segmented the market based on customer perceptions of e-billing. Students must recommend which segments to target and why. To support their recommendations, students must calculate the likely financial costs and benefits of adoption, estimate the likely returns for targeting different segments, and make targeting and positioning recommendations based on these calculations. Because Fiserv's direct customers are billers (such as utilities and credit card companies) and its end users are individual consumers, the case allows a focus on both B2B and B2C issues.

Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, smiled as he reflected on the success of Qualcomm's code division multiple access (CDMA) technology. By the summer of 2009, CDMA was the basis for all third generation technologies available for cellular transmissions. However, while Qualcomm seemed poised for growth, Jacobs wondered how successful the company's contributions to new generation technologies would be and if they should aggressively develop their new service offerings into profitable business units.

Tengion is a young biotech company that is at the frontier of regenerative medicine; a nascent field that seeks to promote the creation of new cells and tissue to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. In late 2008 Tengion management faces a difficult dilemma. In light of the financial crises, the company needs to manage cash burn by prioritizing its R&D efforts. CEO Nichtberger needs to recommend to the board which of two promising new medical treatments to keep developing while placing the other on hold. In comparing the two options, a host of factors need to be considered-- these range from assessing the regulatory challenges, manufacturing challenges, marketing challenges (in particular pricing), and partnering challenges. Each of the treatments would target a unique patient population, that differ in both size and composition. Tengion must also consider how quickly it might expect to bring each of the two treatments to market. The decision could have significant long-term implications for the company's ultimate survival and success.

Key topics include designing teams, managing teams, managing conflict, group dynamics, project management, product development, interdepartmental relations, and organizational change. MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new medical system for monitoring intensive-care patients. MediSys has invested heavily in IntensCare, which is eagerly awaited by the market. The product development team, representing several functional areas of the company, has been working on the product for six months but is now running into significant problems with the product design, the schedule, and their own group dynamics. Recently, pressure increased when they learned that two more powerful competitors had begun work on their own products for this market. Several team members are concerned about meeting the team's targets. Struggling especially hard to overcome the various problems is the marketing manager who has profit-and-loss responsibility for IntensCare.

How is music marketed in the digital era? Nettwerk Music Group built on its foundation as a social, grassroots marketer of music and artists, and emerged as a leader in the Internet-enabled social media environment. For most of the past decade Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride let fans consume music on their own terms. He encouraged file-sharing, the remixing of his artists' songs and videos, and an environment in which "the audience is the record company." In the digital marketplace compact discs mattered much less, said McBride. "Digital assets" were the currency, in the form of ad, television, movie, and videogame song placement, ringtones, mixes, and community-created content. But new artist-label contracts were needed if digital assets were going to flow freely. Moving away from the infrastructure of the music business also meant having to do without the financial, logistical, and promotional power of the major labels. To provide an alternative to the muscle of the major labels, the company is launching a venture capital project called "Polyphonic."

The investment committee of Grove Street Advisors, a pioneer in the provision of customized private equity funds-of-funds for pension fund clients, must decide how to respond to the market opportunities and challenges presented by the turmoil of 2008 and 2009. How can they shift their strategy to fill new market niches, or should they stay with their successful approach thus far, even though the market is getting crowded? The case also presents background about the roles of intermediaries in private equity.

Stone Group Corp., one of the largest electronics manufacturers and distributors in China, practices transfer pricing, an allocation process that assigns costs, sales revenue and gross profits to each of its five divisions. When a customer approaches the company with an order and requests a recommendation for a multimeter model, the general manager of the Instruments Division is asked to quote a transfer price for the multimeters. He must decide whether to sell some of his stock to another Stone division (losing the sales revenue, but perhaps gaining the gross profit needed to meet the division's monthly profit quota) or to keep the product in stock for possible sales (and greater revenue and profit) during the company's fourth quarter.

The head of Patient Escort Services for Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) had to determine the best approach to improve efficiency of the hospital's porter system. Porters represented a vital part of various hospital processes, facilitating timely flow of patients, equipment and materials throughout the hospital. Recently, VGH had experienced incidents in which the capacity of the porters was insufficient to meet the demands of the hospital and, despite best-efforts at scheduling, these problems remained. The head of Patient Escort Services spent several weeks collecting data to determine where the problems existed, and wondered if his data could provide answers to some critical questions: How well did the current porter schedule meet daily demand? What is the optimum number of porters? The head of Patient Escort Services had one week to submit his report to VGH's board of directors.

The newly appointed chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology (department) at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry was thinking about how she would approach the next five year in her new role. The chair thought about two of the important issues she would face: building a cohesive department and nurturing a high performance culture. She became chair at a time when direction was needed. The department had formed in June 2002 as a result of the merger between the Department of Physiology and the small Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology. While the merger had gone well, the chair still sensed that some faculty members in Pharmacology felt as if their department had been taker over by Physiology. At present, it was sometimes difficult to assess performance between faculty members due to differences in workload composition and a lack of documentation. The current thinking was that the department had to move towards adopting best practices in their processes. The chair wanted to look at the issue from a broader perspective. She wondered how the issue could be best framed and what a potential solution might look like.

In October 2008, the senior vice-president for product and business development at IA Clarington (IAC), a life and health insurance company, was preparing for a meeting with the president of IAC. The topic of discussion would be IAC's Target Click Fund, a mutual fund with an options-based guarantee structure targeted towards investors who were looking for growth along with capital preservation. The vice-president had been asked to render his opinion of whether he thought that the fund's scheduled rebalancing date should be accelerated in order to take advantage of a historic decline in global equity markets. The vice-president had to consider several pieces of information in making his recommendation, including that fact that his main competitors would be quick to take advantage of any misguided recommendation. He wondered if the markets had truly hit bottom, and how/if he could time the rebalancing to the lowest point. Also, the investment philosophy behind IAC and click funds encouraged investors to remain invested during turbulent times: what would changing the rebalancing date indicate to those investors?

Less than a month after the close of the merger between The Bank of New York and Mellon Financial, managers at the two firms realized that plans for combining their asset servicing businesses - and realizing the $180 million of annual cost savings that they had promised Wall Street - were fraught with risk. Senior executives must evaluate the seriousness of the risks and identify alternative ways of integrating the two firms, while safeguarding the technologies that process and clear a substantial fraction of the world's financial transactions. [Continues with "B" and "C" cases.]

This case explores the benefits and challenges of creating and sustaining an organizational culture that emphasizes fun and playfulness by telling the story of an inspiring organization that has cultivated such a culture: the Michigan chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation (MAW). The case provides background information on the organization and describes the initiatives and activities that create a playful culture at MAW. It also highlights the benefits and challenges of playfulness for employees, external partners, donors, and wish families, as well as describes how leaders and employees create a culture of "serious play" that maintains the benefits while minimizing the costs of playfulness.

Students explore the variability in earnings due solely to the need to make estimates for several common financial statement asset-related expense items. They consider depreciable asset lives and residual values; estimated uncollectible accounts receivable; and temporary versus permanent losses on marketable equity security investments. The case can be used as an asset module capstone case either an undergraduate- or graduate-level introductory financial reporting/accounting course. Alternatively, it could be used to introduce the asset module of an accounting course. A new medical practice is about to be launched and is seeking investors. As one of the doctors puts the final touches on a pro forma income statement, he must make several estimates that are required/allowed under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to finalize the projected first year earnings figure.

Due to continued budget shortfalls the project manager for the Spinal Cord Rehabilitation Program at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute needed to provide proposals for immediate cost-saving measures. One of these measures included how to schedule the nursing staff. The problem involved meeting certain occupancy target levels while ensuring a minimum number and correct mix of available nurses.