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The Clarinda Company is struggling and may go under. Its main customer has just pulled out, taking a quarter of the typesetting firm's revenues with it, and David, Clarinda's president, has had to lay off 20% of his workforce. What's more, he's also had to fire Dan, his longtime partner and mentor, for drunkenness. How much of this should David share with the others in his small customer base? He'd like to get their help in selling the firm - but will they all bail if they know just how leaky the ship has become? In R0805A and R0805Z four experts weigh in on this case study, based on the author's real-life entrepreneurial travails, recounted in his recent book, Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars. Tell all, says Jim Marsh, drawing from his own experience as CEO of a division of Cable & Wireless. By sharing both financial information and a turnaround plan, Marsh gained the trust and support of major customers, who gave his unit a second chance. Don't panic, says Rick Rickertsen, a principal at a private equity firm, and don't necessarily sell the business. Share only what will become common knowledge, ask no favors, and don't mention Dan. Instead, get back on your horse and try to save the company. Don't lie, says British publishing executive Richard Charkin, but don't tell the whole truth, either. Sell, by all means: Tell customers you're looking to refinance the company (selling is a form of refinancing) and invite them to take a stake. Don't tell customers everything, says professor Kimberly D. Elsbach, who has taught Silverman's book in her first-year MBA classes at the University of California, Davis. Elsbach suggests that David is misguidedly inclined to reveal all because he is confusing competency-based trust with interpersonal trust.

The Clarinda Company is struggling and may go under. Its main customer has just pulled out, taking a quarter of the typesetting firm's revenues with it, and David, Clarinda's president, has had to lay off 20% of his workforce. What's more, he's also had to fire Dan, his longtime partner and mentor, for drunkenness. How much of this should David share with the others in his small customer base? He'd like to get their help in selling the firm - but will they all bail if they know just how leaky the ship has become? In R0805A and R0805Z four experts weigh in on this case study, based on the author's real-life entrepreneurial travails, recounted in his recent book, Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars. Tell all, says Jim Marsh, drawing from his own experience as CEO of a division of Cable & Wireless. By sharing both financial information and a turnaround plan, Marsh gained the trust and support of major customers, who gave his unit a second chance. Don't panic, says Rick Rickertsen, a principal at a private equity firm, and don't necessarily sell the business. Share only what will become common knowledge, ask no favors, and don't mention Dan. Instead, get back on your horse and try to save the company. Don't lie, says British publishing executive Richard Charkin, but don't tell the whole truth, either. Sell, by all means: Tell customers you're looking to refinance the company (selling is a form of refinancing) and invite them to take a stake. Don't tell customers everything, says professor Kimberly D. Elsbach, who has taught Silverman's book in her first-year MBA classes at the University of California, Davis. Elsbach suggests that David is misguidedly inclined to reveal all because he is confusing competency-based trust with interpersonal trust.

In January 2003, Dr. David Acheson, the new Chief Medical Officer of Health of the FDA was charged by his boss with working jointly with the EPA to develop a comprehensive set of federal guidelines for fish consumption for all Americans. The guidelines needed to balance the benefits of fish consumption with the potential risks of exposure to mercury, dioxin, and PCBs - exposures of particular concern to pregnant women and young children. The case includes an additional document entitled Mercury and Fish Consumption that provides background material and reviews of studies of mercury exposure.

"Suffolk County is experiencing elevated cardiovascular disease mortality relative to New York State," explained Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, Commissioner for the Department of Health Services of Suffolk County. Given the general affluence of the area, he finds the CVD mortality rates "a paradoxical situation. We need to determine strategies to address this high priority health issue for our county."

Facebook was one of the many social networking Web sites (such as MySpace.com) that launched in 2004. A free-access site that allowed users to connect and interact with other people, Facebook was immensely popular, having millions of active users. Of course, putting questionable content on one's Facebook page could become a source of embarrassment. In this case, consulting firm manager Miranda Shaw is trying to decide between two highly qualified applicants for a position in her company. She's leaning toward hiring one candidate until she finds photos on his Facebook page of him partaking in unsuitable activities (smoking pot, etc.) during college. Shaw is no longer certain about her decision. This case provides a brief and simple way to look at the issues, privacy and others, of social networking sites.

This case details the various issues, dilemmas, and complexities of immigration as it relates both to business and American society in general. MegaBank manager Judson Dillon is on the verge of finalizing a $65 million equity investment in the world's largest tomato greenhouse, HydroFruit, Inc., which he believes is an attractive investment opportunity. At the same time, he suspects that the company is an employer of illegal immigrants. Immigration was currently a politically, socially, and legally hot topic in the United States. Laws had been enacted to ensure that employers did not hire illegal immigrants, yet many in the United States said that getting rid of all illegal immigrants was an impossible and, for the U.S. agricultural economy, destructive move. On the surface, HydroFruit was in compliance with all minimum legal requirements, but that didn't mean that some illegals didn't slip through the cracks, and the company's CFO had admitted to Dillon one night that "Without illegals, our industry stops dead." In Dillon's mind, this comment reinforced his suspicion that HydroFruit was no different from many other employers in the agricultural industry, as well as his belief that it simply wouldn't be practical for Congress to disrupt such an important segment of the U.S. economy. Yet MegaBank could not invest in a company that it knew-or suspected of-acting illegally.

Operations network design is about where to locate your supply sources and manufacturing and distribution operations, as well as the deployment of such operations, i.e., who should be supplying whom. With the emergence of global supply and manufacturing sources and the global market, such a design will increasingly have to span multiple regions. In the design, we have to capture the quantitative impacts of such factors like fixed and variable costs of production or distribution facilities, inventory, freight, and other logistics costs. The global network requires explicit treatment of taxes, customs and duties. This case is about Renault's recent car Logan, which was designed to serve markets in emerging markets like Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The company has designed its supply chain to take advantage of the special customs and duties treaties in these regions. The case illustrates the complexities of such design decisions, and the approaches one needs to take. The case also ends with a key decision that Renault has to make - how to set up the supply chain for the new market in South Africa. Again, the customs and duties implications play a big role in such a decision.

Through the example of the high-profile Eurotunnel project, the case shows how important contracts and agreements are in project management. Seen through a retrospective lens, it allows students to analyse the relative contributions of market uncertainty, technical uncertainty, and behaviour alignment through contracts, to the performance problems of the effort to construct the first-ever undersea rail link between France and the UK.

This case focuses on the topic of strategic selection, specifically whether or not the Taj Group should invest in The Pierre Hotel in New York. The case write-up includes information about the Taj Group, the Tata Group, The Pierre Hotel, the hotel industry, the Taj's domestic and international strategies, related challenges, investment options and selection criteria. It also includes various exhibits for the user to analyse: Taj's corporate holding structure, its financial highlights, strategic planning process, organisational chart, and the company's action plan development and deployment process.

The case charts the past decade of online grocery retailing at Tesco.com and the development and launch of the non-food operation "Tesco Direct". Tesco implemented a unique fulfillment model by using its vast network of bricks-and-mortar supermarkets across the UK to pick the items ordered by online customers.

The case describes the unique business model of Rehabilitation Alliance Hong Kong (RAHK) beginning with its strategic alliance with Dairy Farm to run 7-Eleven convenience stores, with an aim to create job opportunities for its disabled members. The two managers then try out other forms of business, but they are not commercially effective. The case intends to explore the challenges of managing a cooperative relationship with a social conscience and achieving social enterprise sustainability through innovation.

In the tenth year of their business, Circles' co-founders, Janet Kraus and Kathy Sherbrooke, had completed a successful exit for their company. They had worked closely for years, building their early venture into a leading provider of concierge services with over $40 million in annual revenues. In preparing the company for exit, the two not only had to package the business for sale, but also prepare themselves for the next phases of their careers. Sherbrooke would move on to a corporate role with the acquirer, Sodexho, as the CEO of Circles, and Kraus would take on leading an early stage company, Spire, a Circles spinoff. The transition would not be just one for the company, but also one for their relationship as co-founders and true business partners.

The largest retailer of diesel fuel in the U.S., Flying J, is rethinking its growth strategy as the economy goes into a recession. Its major customer base, owner-operated truck drivers, are facing increasing costs of doing business. Yet Flying J is considering whether to increase its price of diesel fuel.

This case concerns the selection and scheduling of orders by a small industrial titanium fabricator that recently has been plagued by poor deliveries and a lack of capacity. At the time of the case, Ti-Tech must decide which of four orders to accept, with capacity making it impossible to accept all four. Each order represents a different mix of labor, revenues, and potential future work. The case forces the student to choose among the four orders, given limited capacity available, other business likely to come along, and the requirements of each order. The case is an updated version of Fabtek (A).

What caused the 1997 Korea crisis? Did the International Monetary Fund (IMF) help or hinder recovery? Did democracy help or hinder recovery? Seen as an economic miracle, Korea succumbed to the wave of currency crises sweeping Asia in late 1997. Did the same state-led export growth strategy that had brought about such spectacular success cause this financial meltdown? Conversely, what role had foreign investors played in setting up the crisis by pouring short-term capital into Korea's partially and unevenly liberalized financial system? When it arrived on the scene, did the IMF do more to help Korea recover from its economic distress, or did it just bail out foreign investors and prepare the way for Wall Street to up buy Korean banks and firms? Had Korea's long move toward democracy helped or hindered government efforts to reform its economic strategy and to resolve the current crisis? This case explains the background to explore these questions.

The protagonist ("Howard Glass") is a recent GSB graduate (2007) heading up a biomedical team start-up focused on the gastric bypass method. The case tracks Glass and team from the team foundation and idea generation phases through the company's first 6 - 7 months of operation, as Minova burns through what little money it has and actively looks to close a seed of funding.

ECCO A/S (ECCO) had been very successful in the footwear industry by focusing on production technology and assuring quality by maintaining full control of the entire value chain from "cow to shoe." As ECCO grew and faced increased international competition, various value chain activities, primarily production and tanning, were offshored to low-cost countries. The fully integrated value chain tied up significant capital and management attention in tanneries and production facilities, which could have been used to strengthen the branding and marketing of ECCO's shoes. Moreover, an increasingly complex and dispersed global value chain configuration posed organizational and managerial challenges regarding coordination, communication and logistics. This case examines the financial, organizational and managerial challenges of maintaining a highly integrated global value chain and asks students to determine the appropriateness of this set-up in the context of an increasingly market-oriented industry. It is suitable for use in both undergraduate and graduate courses in international corporate strategy, international management, international marketing, supply-chain management, cross-border strategic management and international business studies in general.

The year 2007 had to have been one of the worst in the history of British Petroleum plc (BP). In the span of four months, two separate independent reports (the first one commissioned by BP itself) had identified a deeply rooted "culture of risk" within BP where money and profits were valued above worker and environmental safety. These reports were in response to an explosion in 2005 at an oil refinery in Texas City, in the United States, which killed 15 people and injured more than 180, but the reports also referred to pipeline leaks in Alaska as well as other serious safety lapses throughout BP's global operations. The Texas City explosion was the worst but not the first major incident at a BP facility, and the revelations in the reports severely damaged the credibility the so-called super-major oil company had earned over the last decade. The job of restoring investor and stakeholder confidence as well as the firm's reputation fell to the BP board and its star group chief executive, Lord John Browne. The B case, product 908M03, examines the role played by the board with respect to the personal integrity of Lord Browne. The teaching objectives are to introduce students to examining the role of the board with respect to risk management as well as its social responsibilities to various stakeholders.

The case series illustrates the role of performance measurement and analytics in translating TD-Canada Trust's service model of "comfortable banking" into operational terms. In 2000, in a banking market where consumers and regulators were typically hostile to mergers and acquisitions, Canada's fifth largest commercial bank Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD Bank) undertook a merger with a relatively small trust company, Canada Trust, which was known for exceptional customer service. To assuage the concerns of regulators, consumer groups, and newly acquired customers, TD Bank made several public pronouncements promising to maintain Canada Trust's high customer service standards and to deliver a "comfortable banking" experience. Chris Armstrong, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, was now faced with the task of defining the comfortable banking model and consistently delivering on these promises. Armstrong and his team undertake a systematic analysis of the drivers of customer satisfaction and branch network profitability and, based on the results, must decide how to change TD-Canada Trust's branch compensation and performance reporting systems to consistently, and profitably, deliver a "comfortable banking" experience.

This industry note examines the oil and gas industry. The note first provides background information on industry financial performance, the role of OPEC, and the problems oil-producing nations have had in capitalizing on their resource wealth (i.e., the resource curse). The note then summarizes the major competitors among the integrated oil companies (IOCs), national oil companies (NOCs), and independents. The note describes the major business segments, including exploration and production, refining and marketing, natural gas, and petrochemicals. The note concludes with a discussion of industry evolution.