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For several months, things had been spiraling downwards at Savage Beast, the music-recommendation company started three years before by Tim Westergren. The company's founder-CEO recently left due to pressures both at home and within the venture. Dozens of investors turned thumbs-down on the venture; salaries had been cut; and, tensions had risen within the founding team. Now Westergren, the founder who has taken over as CEO, is facing even deeper pressures as he finds out about a lawsuit filed by former employees, and he is wondering if it is time to give up on ever achieving his vision.

The case illustrates the tensions, trade-offs and adaptation challenges involved in designing a clean technology venture in a changing regulatory, funding and competitive context (Ontario, Canada, 2006-2008). The multiple decision points in the case have the students critically and iteratively assess the prospects of clean technology ventures and the evolving interface between technology and strategy in Canada's emerging clean energy sector. Beyond understanding the specific challenges faced by the venturing team, students are asked to grapple with the controversies and priorities for Canada's environmental policies in the energy sector, discuss competitive tension or symbiotic relationships between incumbents and disruptors, and actively align new venture design and strategy with a rapidly morphing regulatory, technological and competitive environment. The case discussion also opens up a broader platform for exploring the role of incumbents and disruptive business models in informing provincial and national responses to climate change, and, more generally, the role of cleantech venturing and venture capital in fostering climate change readiness and greener energy solutions. The A case asks students to compare and contrast the clean technologies available, discuss their pros and cons, and articulate a compelling business proposition.

In late 2008, Christoph Sutter, CEO of South Pole Carbon Asset Management, reflects on his firm's early success at originating carbon credits in developing nations, and selling them to governments and firms who seek to offset their greenhouse gas emissions voluntarily or to fulfill regulatory obligations. South Pole's early strategy has focused on being a first mover in the niche market for premium quality carbon credits. But as the market evolves in the face of significant policy uncertainty, Sutter wonders what South Pole's strategy should be for the future. This case study can facilitate discussions about environmental markets, about opportunities for entrepreneurship raised by new environmental regulations and about challenges in markets for tradable pollution permits.

The case traces the rise of Enron, covering the company's business innovations, personnel management, and risk management processes. It then examines the company's dramatic fall including the extension of its trading model into questionable new businesses, the financial reporting problems, and governance breakdowns inside and outside the firm. The case offers students an opportunity to explore why Enron failed and to understand the systemic problems in governance that affected its board of directors, the audit committee, the external auditors, and financial analysts.

HNA Group, the parent company of Hainan Airlines, was positioning itself to go global and make a mark for itself as the largest private airline in China. Positioned squarely behind the "Big Three" state-owned carriers, Hainan Airlines sought to create a world-class business. Following modern management practices, keeping sharp attention to cost control and capital operations, making aggressive entries into international markets, and maintaining a special corporate culture, Chairman Chen Feng was confident these factors were the engine that would drive HNA's continued growth.

The Bridgespan Group was launched in 2000 by management consulting group Bain & Company as a nonprofit focused on strategy consulting for nonprofits and philanthropists. Over the next eight years, Bridgespan expanded its services to include executive search, knowledge sharing, and a web-based job matching service. While its growth was welcome, Bridgespan's leaders and board wanted to strengthen Bridgespan's positive impact on the nonprofit sector as a whole.

To deliver 5-6 major new Chinese joint ventures annually, Hong Kong China Gas executives began extracting cross-border negotiating lessons from their 80 existing Chinese JVs. Chairman Alfred Chan and CEO Peter Wong knew that HKGC's growth strategy required significant mainland expansion through negotiating joint-ventures to run gas and water distribution systems in diverse urban and rural locations throughout mainland China--often in the face of entrenched local interests who could have blocking power. Discussions with HKGC's negotiation teams revealed an increasingly sophisticated negotiating approach from target identification and party mapping, to "social mapping" and building guanxi, to creative deal design and tactics, in order to most effectively work out issues of equity, management control, territory, and exclusivity.

The case is intended for use with the HBS Educational Technology Group "Construction Bidding Simulation." Material that can be taught includes quantity survey methodology (from the case); analyzing preliminary estimated costs per building trade (from the discussion questions); playing the multiparty real time competitive bid simulation to receive and process market costs; and debriefing on which bids should be accepted and why. Discussion points include what criteria to use in making the decision, how to process subcontractor bids, and how to award contracts. Many of the issues can be extended from construction into any bidding situation and any industry with multiple subconsultants or vendors.

This note explores the idea identification stage of becoming an entrepreneur. It covers common sources of inspiration for ideas, such as career, education, hobbies and interests. It discusses the importance of team creation, execution and passion. It emphasizes 4 different categories of trends that create opportunities for new businesses to emerge, illustrated with examples. Finally, the note covers testing the basic viability of an idea, including the customer, product, competition, industry, timing, and risk and reward relationship.

In April 2007, Kristin Richmond laced up her sneakers and began the four mile run to Kirsten Tobey's house. It was a Saturday morning, but the two co-founders of Revolution Foods (RevFoods), a provider of healthy meals and nutrition education to schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles, felt pressure to finalize a plan for effectively managing their relationship with Maria Nunez. Nunez, a skeptical and influential food service administrator, had been undermining the RevFoods program at Green Academy, a charter school in California's Bay Area. Richmond and Tobey believed that if they did not address the issue now, their contract with the school could be revoked, an outcome that could threaten RevFoods's standing with other schools. As Richmond jogged up the last hill before reaching Tobey's residence, she wondered how best to turn their tense relationship with Nunez into a productive partnership.

Teena Lerner, the CEO of Rx Capital, had a problem. Her three-year-old hedge fund was highly profitable, but in 2004, one of her four equities analysts lost a lot of money for the firm. If Lerner followed her existing compensation system, designed to reward teamwork, he would wind up significantly underpaying her other analysts, all of whom had performed well. Should she follow the compensation system or not? And what should be done about the underperforming analyst?

The case describes existing performance management systems at a leading business school in India, the National Institute of Management - Central India campus (NIM CI campus). The institution, which is ranked among the top 20 business schools in India, is facing critical issues of attracting and retaining faculty members. The director of the NIM CI campus has implemented a unit based performance measurement and incentive system, which has worked favorably and enabled the institute to recruit top academicians. However, the management committee believes that the system has outlived its utility and desires to replace it with more robust systems that are less vulnerable to misuse. The faculty members, however, support retention of the existing system. The key teaching objective of this case is to understand performance management systems from the perspectives of different stakeholders and develop a framework that meets all objectives of performance management. The case enables users to understand all steps in performance management and examine shortcomings at each stage. The role of incentive systems, both as a tool to enhance individual performance and as a management control mechanism, is also discussed. The case provides users an opportunity to evaluate the strategic significance of performance management.

This case puts students in the role of Target Corporation's CFO as he considers the pros and cons of a variety of capital-investment proposals. The CFO is preparing his thoughts prior to a meeting of the Capital Expenditure Committee (CEC) with other Target senior executives to consider the merits of ten capital-project requests (CPR), five of which were expected to require extra attention. Each CPR has a "dashboard" that summarizes the critical inputs used to compute the net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) as well as data about the type of investment (new store or remodel), market size, location, customer-demographic information, as well as the sensitivity of NPV and IRR to changes in various inputs. Students are tasked with evaluating the CPRs by balancing corporate-growth objectives with the economics of the projects.

Set in May 2008, this case reflects the separate perspectives of chief executive officers Tom Eliot and Bill Flinder as they approach the negotiations of RSE International Corporation to acquire Flinder Valves and Controls Inc. The task for the student is to complete a valuation analysis of the target and buyer and to negotiate a price and exchange ratio with the counterparty. The intent of the case design is for students to be organized into teams and assigned to play the part of either Flinder Valves or RSE International in the negotiation. The case provides supplementary private information for each side of the transaction. Therefore, a unique element of the case is negotiating the terms of acquisition in an environment of asymmetric information. The case is relatively simple and provides a first exercise in the negotiation of an acquisition. It could also be taught in the usual case-discussion fashion instead of the intended joint-negotiation exercise

We discuss the challenges of implementing an Internet-based platform for creating collaborative supply chains using a case study in the retail sector. The case presents how an Internet-based collaboration platform was implemented to address the strategic issue of increasing shelf availability and customer service in grocery retailing, an issue that has emerged as one of the major confrontations for the whole sector over the past years. The case presented shows the challenges of executing such strategic collaborative supply-chain initiatives which, although arguably beneficial, can be hindered by IT adoption failures. A longitudinal view of the case is presented, from an initial pilot back in 2001 to the final success in 2005. We discuss the particular challenges of the execution of Internet-enabled collaborative supply-chain initiatives as well as possible managerial actions through a simple framework we develop based on the lessons from the case.

Just when John Penman thought Nodal Logistics Corporation (NLC or "Nodal") was ready to move into Brazil, a new hurdle was thrown in his path. Only a few days ago-on December 11, 2007-he had finally obtained approval from the U.S.-based company's executive board to invest $45 million in an 800,000 square foot industrial property project in São Paulo, Brazil. But that was before yesterday's phone call from the legal department. Nodal's legal staff had received confirmation from their São Paulo-based associate that under Brazilian law, commercial real estate contracts must be denominated in Brazilian reais. One of Nodal's basic operating practices which had been so important to its international success had been to write all industrial real estate agreements in U.S. dollars. This posed a serious problem, as most industrial leases ranged from as short as five years to more than 12, and that was a very long time to be exposed to the Brazilian currency. John now had to delve into the multitude of strategies and derivatives that might allow the company to manage the currency risk; otherwise, the deal was dead.

Chris Warner led a team of experienced mountain climbers on an expedition to reach the summit of K2-the second-highest in the world. After failing to succeed on their first few attempts, Warner and his team brought together other teams hoping to reach the summit, and representing eight different countries, to work together for success. Their story is a narrative full of examples, where in some instances, a leadership point of view was taken, and other times it was not. The successes and failures of the expedition's approach makes for a story bursting with real-world examples and offers an exciting framework to house theoretical concepts about team-building and leadership. Although grounded in the written cases, the series also includes an optional a multimedia supplement offers compelling photos and video for students and instructors. The A case presents a challenging moment in the climbers' trek: After the tragic death of another team's Sherpa, Warner must decide case whether his team should abandon its summit push or continue forward.

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, has purchased the Dow Jones & Company, which includes the Wall Street Journal, from the Bancroft family after many family discussions about the sale. At issue is whether Murdoch, known for his involved and hands-on management style, will impose his will on the editorial personnel and policies of the WSJ and risk destroying the very intellectual capital he has just acquired.

The Scotts Miracle-Gro company is the world's largest marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products, with a full range of products for professional horticulture as well. Headquartered in Marysville, Ohio, the company is a market leader in a number of consumer lawn and garden and professional horticultural products. The case describes a series of decisions regarding the ownership and organization of the assets used to manufacture fertilizer spreaders. This case is intended to illustrate the application of and tradeoffs between financial, strategic and operations perspectives in a relatively straightforward manufacturing "make-buy" decision. The case involves a well-known, easily-described product that most students would assume is made overseas. Sufficient information is provided to roughly estimate the direct financial cost associated with internal (domestic) production, offshored (non-domestic) production and outsourced production. In addition, information is included that may be used to estimate potential transaction costs as well as costs associated with foreign exchange risk.

Samsung Electronics, a successful global company based in South Korea, aspires to "Tier One" status among its competitors through mastering the less tangible, more intuitive qualities of superior design. This case study takes students through Samsung's rise in little more than three decades from a small OEM producer of generic TV sets to a giant in numerous product categories, from components (such as LCD displays) to ubiquitous consumer devices (such as cell phones). During the past decade, this engineering-driven company has given way to an innovative, design-driven company, without any less emphasis on R&D. Nevertheless, despite worldwide design awards and engineering accolades, the "iconic" product (such as Apple's iPod) eludes them. After a detailed introduction to Samsung's design operation, students are asked to develop a strategic direction that will lead Samsung to the next level.