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In an ever-changing world, certain topics-such as sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and gender-still are hot-button items for many people. This series of vignettes covers many diversity topics, primarily in the workplace, and should promote engaging and intense debate. In reading them, students should try to see each vignette from the different perspectives presented.

This case describes a 21-factor, 56-recipe multivariable test (MVT) conducted by Progressive Insurance with the help of QualPro, a leading MVT consulting firm. The object of the test was to improve Progressive's direct-mail retention campaign. The results of the test are available in a spreadsheet for students to analyze (UVA-S-M-0762.xls).

In July 2007 Joris Brinckerhoff, founder and owner of Costa Rica Entomological Supplies (CRES), must decide whether to accept an offer from RBA, a publications firm in Barcelona, Spain, to sell mounted butterflies or "deadstock" as part of RBA's "collectibles" program for schoolchildren. Joris had always avoided the deadstock business which he considered to be low margin and unstable. The business proposed by RBA would also require additional investment and increased overhead. Nevertheless, he thought that the RBA offer might be attractive to CRES and its many suppliers in rural areas throughout the country. Currently, the oversupply of butterfly pupae was adversely affecting not only his business, but also the livelihoods of dozens of breeders, many of whom had been low-income rural families, endangering the social gains that had been made over the past years.

Susan Reynolds, a successful auditor with a big-six public accounting firm, was hired as controller in the accounting department of a medium-sized, highly profitable motion picture company. Believing that she had been performing adequately, Susan found herself in a complete state of shock upon receiving her first annual employee evaluation. Although during her evaluation interview, Anita Lockwood, Susan's immediate supervisor, had acknowledged that Susan was a valuable addition to the department, a written review that accompanied the interview indicated that she was severely lacking in the interpersonal skills she needed to experience continued success in her present position as controller. The case ends with a hurt and highly dissatisfied Susan wondering whether she should make an effort to achieve the level of interpersonal skills needed to function effectively in her current managerial position, or to simply seek employment elsewhere.

In June 2001, Empresa Editora El Comercio (EEEC) had launched a new popular newspaper, Trome, for low-income families. Although several studies had preceded this launch, sales in following months failed to reach expected levels and actually displayed a decreasing trend. Trome embodied the company's effort to expand its news coverage to new population segments that were not served by its other newspaper, El Comercio, a market leader that had served as the foundation for the company itself. Six months after Trome's launch and faced with dropping sales, company managers had met to discuss their options. This case describes management team members' dilemmas at that meeting: "Should the new paper's style and contents be changed? Should Trome focus more on sex and violence-related issues, as its competitors did? Would it be convenient to replace the silverware promotion chosen to support launching? Was the channel conflict adequately managed? Were intended readers' needs truly and fully understood? Should the company re-launch Trome or would it be wiser to just give up on this project?

Rajeev Samant, founder of Sula Vineyards, was a pioneer in the nascent Indian wine industry. After selling off a minority equity stake to private investors in 2005 to raise funds for expansion of his winery, Rajeev in mid 2007 again faced the challenge of deciding whether or not and if so, at what rate to grow Sula to meet forecasted rapid growth in demand for Indian wines. He developed financial projections to present to Sula's board. Rajeev now needed to decide on the appropriate plan to present to his board as well as the anticipated level and sources of funding needed to support this plan. In seeking new funding, Rajeev was mindful of the tradeoffs inherent in new equity financing, which could lead to a further dilution of ownership control, versus new debt financing, which would place additional claims on future cash flows and increase Sula's financial risk.

These three short vignettes depict investment professionals considering difficult financings for companies in their portfolios. For one reason or another, each company has under-performed expectations. Should the protagonist recommend that the firm participate or not, or should he try to revise it? Can the firm exercise any influence, and are the potential gains worth the time and effort that will be required?

Enables a thorough analysis of the Amazon.com business model and its evolution from 1994 to 2001. The case ends with the company poised on the brink of bankruptcy, and enables discussion of how to turnaround the company and leverage proprietary assets.

Describes the launch and initial results of the (PRODUCT) RED campaign, a social marketing initiative conceived of by U2's Bono and Bobby Shriver to combat AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. The company licensed the (RED) brand to partner companies, which initially included Gap, Apple, Motorola, Armani, and American Express. The business model was structured to benefit partner companies by increasing consumer purchases - of (RED)-branded products such as red iPods and phones - while also resulting in increased donations to the Global Fund.

Alex Sharpe's Portfolio provides an introduction to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), portfolio diversification and risk management. Sharpe currently holds the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, but is considering a more active management strategy. Students must assess the risk of the two stocks she is considering adding to her portfolio. Students are provided with monthly stock returns and must calculate the standard deviations of the individual stocks and of the portfolios when one of the stocks is added to it. Students must calculate the stock's beta using regression and will learn that beta is the appropriate measure of risk to use in decision making since risk-averse investors do not hold stocks in isolation.

In 2007, PCCW had to formulate a strategy for growth of its successful NOW TV platform and its quadruple play implementation outside of Hong Kong. Launched in September 2003 by PCCW (Hong Kong's largest telecommunications operator), NOW TV had swiftly become the world's most successful commercial IPTV deployment. By the end of June 2007, the service had an installed subscriber base of almost 820,000 and offered a choice of 143 TV channels, 71 of which were exclusive. However, opportunities for growth were inherently limited to Hong Kong (7 million inhabitants), which meant PCCW had to find ways to expand its NOW platform or seek to license parts of it internationally.

Corey Leibow eased his car back onto Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California. As president and CEO of Mercado, a company that provided the search and merchandising technology to power retail web sites, he had just met with another venture capital (VC) firm in an effort to raise a $26-million Series E round of financing. It was June 2008 and Mercado currently offered both on-premise and on-demand or "software as a service (SaaS)" versions of its applications. Despite the fact that revenue from both solutions was projected to grow in excess of 80 percent that year, Leibow found that investors generally pushed back on the company's hybrid approach to distribution. Some VCs wanted Mercado to focus solely on its traditional enterprise business based on a perpetual, on-premise licensing model. Other investors preferred to see Mercado morph into a pure play SaaS company. Leibow knew that he had to make a decision quickly in order to raise the capital the company needed, but he also wondered if it was possible to continue pursuing both angles. The choice he made would significantly affect Mercado's sales force and R&D team as well as which customers the company targeted and how it would attract and retain them.

This case analyzes Infosys' innovative approach to measuring performance in client relations. Infosys' strategy is evolving to build transformational partnerships from its original position as an outsourcer of end-to-end IT projects. A transformational partner helps clients to devise and implement strategies that will allow them to achieve a competitive advantage. The traditional paradigm of service-level agreements (SLAs), while sufficient for Infosys' needs early on, is not able to achieve the level of understanding that transformational partnerships require. Infosys applies the principles of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to produce a feedback mechanism that allows the partnership to grow to the benefit of both parties.

ASUSTek Computer was the world's largest manufacture of PC motherboards, yet when it tried to launch its new sub-notebook Eee PC, the organization faced challenges in doing things outside of its established processes. Though many of the team members had worked together for years, they had to find new ways of working as they tried to launch the new mobile Internet device category without undermining its existing notebook PC business.

The Blue Bulls rugby team enjoyed a fanatical fan base and had been performing well in local and international competitions recently. As a leading South African rugby franchise, the Blue Bulls faced a social and political environment that emphasized racial transformation. An up-and-coming Afrikaans musician had become best-seller with his De La Rey song, which was about a Boer soldier who calls on General De La Rey to lead the Afrikaner people to victory in the second South Africa War between the Boer Republic and colonial Britain. Given the emotive theme of the song and the response by some to view it as a reassertion of Afrikaner nationalism, the song had attracted significant media coverage and controversy. As part of the entertainment at the Vodacom Super 14 rugby game between Western Force and the Vodacom Blue Bulls, De La Rey was played over the stadium loudspeakers. This delighted most of the mainly White Afrikaans spectators. As the evening progressed, the acting head of the Blue Bulls Company, the organization that managed the Blue Bulls rugby team and the Loftus Versveld stadium, received a number of complaints from supporters about the playing of the De La Rey song and thus decided to remove the song from the official stadium playlist. By Monday morning, a media frenzy had erupted about this decision and the acting head was faced with a number of options of how to respond. The case is written for a first-year MBA module and is designed to explore the following themes: 1) race, identity and language as consumer behavior variables 2) spectator, supporter and consumer processes within sports marketing 3) sports brand development and sponsorship relationships.

In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold Military.com to. Within its first year of operations, Affinity Labs launched eight vertical portals including PoliceLink, NursingLink, TechCommunity, and IndiaOn. While the company was well ahead of its original plan to release four portals in 2007, Michel still faced a number of challenges. He had learned a great deal from Military.com and Affinity Labs' first launches, but in the case of each new community, was faced with how best to construct the vertical and attract a sufficiently large audience. While the model seemed highly scalable because each vertical used the same core technology, every sector had its unique features. In the fall of 2007, executives from Monster opened up a dialogue with Michel about selling the company or expanding their relationship. Michel wondered if the time was right to sell or if he should grow Affinity Labs further with the hope of creating a company that could command the high valuations seen recently by a number of social networking concerns.

The case covers Bob Nardelli's 6-year tenure at Home Depot from 2000-2006. During this time, he posted impressive numbers as well as changed Home Depot's strategic orientation. He failed however to improve the company's share price. This difficulty, allied to Nardelli's pay package (negotiated at a time of economic euphoria when he was one of the two most wanted executives in America), severely strained his relationship with the company's shareholders. The case traces their deteriorating relationship through the lens of the annual general meetings. These were transformed from "lovefests" under his predecessor into increasingly fractious occasions - culminating with a disastrous meeting in May 2006 that indirectly led to Nardelli's resignation at the beginning of 2007. The case considers Nardelli's relationship with two key stakeholders - the board and the shareholders - as well as issues of self-management. At first view, this case can be read as a story of greed and weak corporate governance - an excessively greedy CEO/Chairman who manipulates the board into giving him high compensation and reducing performance pressures. While acknowledging some of these aspects, we are proposing a different take on the situation, focusing instead on the self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing nature of the dysfunctional dynamic between the CEO and the shareholders - and on the inability of the board to offset it. We concentrate on the psychological and behavioral processes that drove the parties toward a perfectly avoidable collision. Learning objectives: The core issue is Bob Nardelli's growing difficulties in dealing constructively with the company's shareholders - and their misunderstanding of his role (as a change agent) and motivation (assuming it is only about money). It is also a case about a board that does not understand how to help a CEO that it rates very highly. The case allows discussion of the role of the board in helping the CEO to overcome such problems.

September 2007. For both founding fathers of the Happy Shrimp Farm, it had been a hectic three years. What started as a simple market research on co-siting for the Rotterdam Port Authority (RPA) in April 2004 had rapidly developed into an international multi-million euro business proposition that literally took over their lives. Their research had identified interesting business opportunities. RPA agreed to support them on a case-by-case basis, starting with the Happy Shrimp Farm. Initial challenges included getting a residual energy contract to heat the shrimp production ponds and external funding for the venture. Construction started in September 2006. With its energy recycling and urban revival themes, Happy Shrimp generated extensive press coverage. Greiner and Curtessi were already looking ahead: Could the concept be replicated in Germany and Canada? Could it be applied to seaweed production as well? How sustainable was sustainability as a business concept? Happy Shrimp International needed to take shape fast. Could they manage all this growth? And handling the multiple stakeholders was still a headache... Learning objectives: Managing multiple stakeholders in a sustainable project development. Understanding the economic drivers of cradle-to-cradle, recycling projects. Discuss sustainability as a business model.

This case provides students with a deeper understanding of commodity futures markets in general and natural gas markets in particular. It also provides an introduction to hedge funds and insight into the largest hedge fund collapse in history. Third, it introduces such concepts as liquidity risk, value-at-risk, spread trades and the use of derivatives. As of the case date, Amaranth had not publicly disclosed the positions that led to $6 billion in losses during the month of September 2006. The case was written using public information and provides key pieces of data to allow students to reverse engineer possible positions Amaranth may have held.

Since its foundation in 1902, Bocconi has been a teaching institution with a dominant domestic presence. The case examines the currently unfolding attempt at transforming Bocconi University into a research powerhouse with the ambition to build a strong position among Europe's leading business schools. The case offers a detailed analysis of Bocconi's transformational journey, and illustrates the challenges of changing the mindset of a large portion of the faculty.