Video Shorts New V2 Simulations Cases, Articles, Chapters,
p. 2 Coming Soon & eLearning
p. 2 p. 4
TEACHING MATERIALS
NEWSLETTER
Case Collection Grows with
Addition of New Partners
HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING has long been a major distributor of cases from
eminent case-writing institutions. Over the last few years, Harvard Business
Publising has added hundreds of cases from content partners, including our newest
partner collection, NACRA—the North American Case Research Association.
NACRA is a nonprofit organization of approximately 500 researchers, case
writers, and teachers, primarily in business disciplines. It provides a forum for
members’ ideas on case teaching and their latest case projects, including the
quarterly Case Research Journal.
For several reasons, NACRA cases are highly valued by case method instructors.
Nearly all cases are based on field research, not public material. All cases undergo
a double-blind peer review process involving at least two academics. Most cases
have been class-tested by their authors. Finally, every NACRA case comes with a
Teaching Note—also subjected to a double-blind peer review.
Harvard Business Publishing has recently added to its catalog more than 50
NACRA titles in a range of disciplines, including Entrepreneurship, Finance,
Strategy, Accounting, Marketing, and Social Enterprise. A number of the cases
focus on ethical issues. Nearly all have been published since 2005.
New partners will be added to the case collection in coming months. Check the
Educators’ web site for updates: hbsp.harvard.edu.
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New Online Course:
IT for Management
back cover
SPRING 2012
Partner Case Collections
The Harvard Business Publishing
case catalog has added hundreds of
cases from partner case collections.
Collections include:
Babson College
More than 100 cases with a strong emphasis on
Entrepreneurship, General Management, Organiza-
tional Behavior, and Strategy. The collection covers
smaller businesses well, and many cases reflect a
multidisciplinary approach.
Business Enterprise Trust
A small group of cases on social responsibility topics.
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia
More than 1,000 cases from a leading case-producing
institution. The Darden collection spans all major
disciplines but is notable for the large number of
recent cases in Finance and current Industry and
Background Notes.
Design Management Institute
A small set of cases focused mainly on topics
related to industrial design.
Global Health Delivery/Harvard Medical School
A set of cases, each under 20 pages, focused on
real issues in global health situations. Available at no
cost to registered Premium Educators on our web
site, these cases are designed to increase access to
training in global health delivery.
Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Approximately 400 titles that emphasize political
and governmental contexts. Many cases are appli-
cable to standard business disciplines, including
International Business, General Management, and
Strategy, as well as Social Enterprise.
See more collections on p. 3.
 COMING
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FREE VIDEOS TO SHOW IN CLASS
V2 Simulations
VIDEO SHORTS are free videos, all under 10 minutes long, that illustrate a case’s central ENHANCED TEACHABILITY
learning objective. Intended solely for displaying inside the classroom, the streaming
video is available at no cost to registered Premium Educators at hbsp.harvard.edu.
Harvard Business Publishing
is improving some of its most
popular simulations.

NEW DESIGN: The user experience is updated

so that students can analyze information and
make decisions quickly and easily.

Popular cases with Video Shorts include: NEW TEACHING MATERIALS: Updated Teach-
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FINANCE
Millegan Creek Apartments Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service
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Real Property Negotiation Game:
OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
Lender Case, Porus Bank Strategic Innovation Simulation:
Big Bazaar
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Students must balance financial goals with
GENERAL MANAGEMENT the need to innovate while guarding against
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
HCL Technologies (A) disruptive technologies. #7015
#408004
Anne Mulcahy: Leading Xerox
Through the Perfect Storm (A)
McKinsey & Co.: Managing #405050 Supply Chain Management
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#396357
King Arthur Flour
#407012 Students play four roles in a root beer supply
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STRATEGY
Buckman Laboratories (A)
#800160
Academia Barilla
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CareGroup Segments and Customers V2
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Tanishq: Positioning to Capture
Students develop a business-to-business
the Indian Woman’s Heart
#507025 marketing strategy by targeting specific
MARKETING customer segments. #7018
Aqualisa Quartz: Simply a Better See a full list of cases with Video Shorts:
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2 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter

Partner Case Collections
...continued from p. 1

HEC Montréal Kellogg School of Management, “

A small set of cases in MIS/Information Northwestern University IN THIS ISSUE
Technology. More than 300 titles covering all major
disciplines, with a strong concentration in 01 CASE COLLECTION GROWS
IESE Business School, University of Navarra Marketing and many titles in Finance,
Approximately 80 titles, most focused on Operations, and Strategy.
01 PARTNER CASE COLLECTIONS
European firms, with strong emphasis in
General Management, Marketing, Strategy, NACRA Case Research Journal
and Organizational Behavior. Most are More than 50 titles in disciplines including 02 NEW V2 SIMULATIONS
accompanied by a Teaching Note. Entrepreneurship, Finance, Strategy,
Accounting, Marketing, and Social Enterprise.
02 VIDEO SHORTS
IMD (International Institute for A number focus on ethical issues. Nearly all
Management Development) have been published since 2005 and all have
More than 200 titles, most focused on Euro- Teaching Notes. 04 NEW CASES, ARTICLES & BOOKS
pean companies, with special emphasis on
Social Enterprise Knowledge 04 Accounting
General Management, Organizational Behavior,
and Strategy. Many cases are relatively brief Network (SEKN) 05 Business Ethics
and most have a Teaching Note. These cases in Social Enterprise were
06 Business & Government Relations
developed by member schools in the Latin
Indian Institute of Management— American Case Consortium. Most cases 07 Economics
Bangalore are available in both English and either
A small collection of cases on India and sur- Spanish or Portuguese and nearly all have 08 Entrepreneurship
rounding countries. IIMB cases are especially Teaching Notes.
09 Finance
notable for presenting the perspectives
of companies and protagonists based in Stanford Graduate School of Business 10 General Management
the India region, as opposed to the more Nearly 1,000 titles with special emphasis on
11 Human Resource Management
common view of Western firms attempting modern technology firms, with many cases
to build businesses abroad. All come with a in Strategy, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and 11 Information Technology
Teaching Note. Supply Chain Management. The Stanford
collection also contains many Background 12 International Business
INSEAD and Industry Notes.
13 Marketing
A small collection of cases, many focused on
European businesses, emphasizing General Thunderbird School of Global Management 15 Negotiation
Management, Organizational Behavior, and More than 100 cases, the vast majority 16 Operations Management
Strategy. Several cases explicitly facilitate complemented by Teaching Notes. The
analysis via the perspective explained in the collection emphasizes International Business 17 Organizational Behavior
best-selling Harvard Business Review Press and most are under 20 pages.
book Blue Ocean Strategy.
18 Sales
Tsinghua University 19 Service Management
Ivey School of Business, A small, developing collection of materials
University of Western Ontario 19 Social Enterprise
from a premier business school in China,
More than 1,500 titles, nearly two-thirds focused on Chinese companies. 20 Strategy
complemented by Teaching Notes, covering
the full range of academic disciplines. Many University of Hong Kong
are focused on Canadian firms but a growing 23 CONTACT INFORMATION
More than 400 titles spanning all major
proportion of titles cover Asia. Many are disciplines. Most cases examine Asian
appropriate for undergraduates. businesses and many are notable for BC IT FOR MANAGEMENT ONLINE
coverage of business-government relations COURSE
and international and cross-cultural issues.
Roughly 80 percent of the cases have
Teaching Notes.

See a full list of partner case

collections:
hbsp.harvard.edu/list/partners

hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 3
NEWLY
RELEASED
ACCOUNTING
Alfred Brooks Menswear Limited
James E. Hatch, Steven Cox
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #989B55 (18 pages)N
The treasurer of a Toronto menswear manu-
facturer attempts to negotiate bank financing
for his company. The task is made more com-
plex by the need to purchase material from
Hong Kong and by sales made to the United
States and Italy.
The IASB at a Crossroads: The
Future of International Financial
Reporting Standards
Karthik Ramanna, Karol Misztal,
Daniela Beyersdorfer
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #111084 (32 pages)
What are the major challenges to the contin-
ued growth of IFRS worldwide? Should coun-
tries be encouraged to pursue “full adoption”
of IFRS, or should each country determine its
own IFRS “convergence” strategy? Given the
limitations of governance and information-
intermediation institutions worldwide, should
IFRS limit the use of fair value accounting?
How should the IASB respond to the growing
power of emerging markets such as China in
international standard setting? What lessons
can be learned from the growth and develop-
ment of IFRS for international harmoniza-
tion of corporate governance standards more
broadly? This case first describes the IASB’s
major accomplishments over the 2001–2010
period and then outlines the major challenges
to the continued growth of IFRS as it enters
its second decade.
4 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
Kanebo Ltd. (A)
David F. Hawkins, Suraj Srinivasan,
Akiko Kanno, Lizzie Gomez
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #111037 (16 pages)
The case speculates how Japanese companies
might implement IFRS, with particular
emphasis on consolidation accounting.
Leadership in Corporate Reporting
Policy at Tata Steel
Karthik Ramanna, Rachna Tahilyani
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product # 111028 (22 pages)
The case describes the challenges faced by
Tata Steel, India’s largest private-sector steel
company, as it transitions from Indian GAAP
to IFRS. It first describes those challenges in
the context of the institutional voids that make
IFRS adoption difficult in India. The case
then focuses on how companies in emerging
markets might represent their interests at the
IASB, the standard-setting body for IFRS.
Mike Mayo Takes on Citigroup (A)
Suraj Srinivasan, Amy Kaser
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #112025 (23 pages)
The case details the conflict between Mike
Mayo, an influential banking analyst, and
Citigroup about what Mayo considers aggres-
sive accounting policies. Mike Mayo questions
Citigroup’s lack of a valuation allowance
against its deferred tax assets despite Citi’s
recent losses. The case discusses the economics
of and accounting for deferred tax assets. It
also focuses on management-analyst relations
and challenges faced by analysts in providing
a negative opinion on companies. The inclu-
sion of deferred tax assets in Tier 1 capital
and implications for regulatory capital are
also discussed.
ÎC ASES
ÎA RTICLES
ÎC HAPTERS
Îe LEARNING
Risk Management at Wellfleet Bank:
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
Anette Mikes
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #110011 (16 pages)
Inspired by one of the few banks that suc-
cessfully weathered the 2007–2009 credit
crisis, the case illustrates risk management in
the world of corporate lending. Chief execu-
tive Alastair Dawes has to decide if the risk
governance process is adequate to uncover
mega-risks, based on reflections on the risk
assessment and sanctioning of a $1 billion
credit proposal. Students are invited to assess
and review the risks in the proposal, prepared
by the bank’s sales organization on behalf of
a large gold-mining company, and to arrive at
a decision (whether Wellfleet should accept it
or not). At the same time, students will learn
that gray-area risk decisions and, in particular,
risk-adjusted performance measurement
can rarely be automated. Risk governance
requires executives to strike a balance
between risk modeling and qualitative
business judgment—a holistic (rather than
silo-based) view of risks.
Supply Chain Partners: Virginia
Mason and Owens & Minor (A)
V.G. Narayanan, Lisa Brem
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #110063 (17 pages)
Owens & Minor (O&M) performed lean
inventory services for Virginia Mason (VM)
as its alpha vendor, but the outdated industry
pricing model created perverse incentives
and could not capture O&M’s costs. Together,
O&M and VM created an activity-based pric-
ing model called the total supply chain costs
(TSCC), which incented both companies to be
more efficient and to streamline their distribu-
tion activities. After beta testing the TSCC for
one year, VM’s Daniel Borunda and O&M’s
Michael Stefanic believed that TSCC was a
better and more cost-effective pricing model,

but could they convince their companies to
continue to invest in TSCC?
Tough Choices for the Illinois
Pension System
Robert C. Pozen, Brij Khurana
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #311139 (19 pages)
This case describes the precarious fiscal situ-
ation of the Illinois public pension system
in the spring of 2009 and the accounting
of pension plans by nonfederal municipali-
ties more generally. In February 2009, in
the midst of a recession, recently appointed
Governor Quinn had to lay out his budget for
the coming fiscal year and tackle the state’s
underfunded public pension, its largest
liability. Immediately, the governor needed
to raise funds to make the state’s annual
contribution to the pension plan, and at the
same time he needed to come up with a plan
for pension reform to prevent the future
insolvency of the state. Governor Quinn had a
number of levers he could employ, including
changing the asset allocation of the pension
funds; directly tackling entitlements through
a defined benefit or defined contribution
plan; or implementing a package of pension
bonds, taxes, and employee contributions.
Through this case, students should more fully
understand pension accounting and the hard
choices that many states will face because of
their outstanding pension liabilities.
Why It’s Not Fair to Blame
Fair Value
Mary E. Barth
IESE-Insight Magazine Article
Product #IIR041 (7 pages)
The debate surrounding the financial report-
ing measurement approach known as fair
value was already in full swing by the time
the recent economic crisis hit. That event only
served to add fuel to the fire, as some critics
charged that fair value measures of heav-
ily discounted assets during an exceptional
period of distress sales actually made the situ-
ation worse. The author questions this analy-
sis. Far from being the culprit, she argues,
fair value is a rather robust measurement
approach that embodies several core princi-
ples underpinning the accounting framework.
As well as highlighting the relative merits of
fair value, the author responds to the chief
concerns put forward by the critics, showing
TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE
that whether one holds up estimation error,
holding gains and losses, earnings volatility,
stewardship, or diligence, fair value proves
its worth. In many cases, the old favorite of
historical cost-based measures leaves much to
be desired. Until the International Accounting
Standards Board (IASB) and the United States
Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
finalize their joint conceptual framework
project, this article helps clarify some of the
contentious issues that continue to dog the
profession. Rather than battling against it,
accounting experts would be better off devoting
their energies to making sure that fair value is
used in the most effective way possible.
BUSINESS ETHICS
Disability Accommodations and
Promotions at Bunco
Katherine E. Breward
North American Case Research Association
TN Product #NA0074 (7 pages)
This case highlights the dilemma of Nicholas,
an accounting executive, who must decide
whether to promote a disabled employee,
Paul, to a management role. Paul is a strong
performer; however, he is frequently required
to work at home on a laptop in order to
manage the symptoms of Crohn’s disease.
Nicholas needs to decide whether this
presents a barrier to Paul’s ability to take on
greater degrees of responsibility. He struggles
with the legal and ethical implications of his
decision. The impact of his decision on the
rest of his team is also considered.
Ethics Hold the Key to Network
Contradictions
Antonino Vaccaro
IESE-Insight Magazine Article
Product #IIR052 (7 pages)
Today’s Internet-based world has certainly
made it easier for companies to acquire,
store, and transmit detailed information like
never before. But with these gains in speed
and efficiency have come more complex
and sometimes-contradictory expectations
about how companies should collect, retain,
and disclose that information. Consumers,
employees, and other stakeholders are access-
ing and exchanging all manner of information
related to individual habits, personal prefer-
ences, and privately held beliefs, all of which
ACCOU N TIN G — B U SIN ESS ET HICS
used to be kept under lock and key but are
now largely out of our hands. Given how radi-
cally virtual networks have transformed the
nature of our social interactions—including
those that connect firms with their stakehold-
ers—experts have started to stress the need
for an ethical framework that is uniquely
conceived to tackle the complexity of the
phenomena at play under this new scenario.
This article addresses “network ethics”—an
integrated vision of ethical problems as
associated with the management of Internet-
driven networks—and highlights the need
for carefully analyzing not only financial and
relational drivers but also ethical ones. Sound,
conscious, careful ethical judgment becomes a
fundamental tool for managers to understand
the appropriateness of stakeholders’ ethical
claims and then build fruitful relationships
with those stakeholders based on trust.
A Global Leader’s Guide to
Managing Business Conduct
Lynn S. Paine, Rohit Deshpande,
Joshua D. Margolis
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #W1109A (7 pages)
An extensive global survey by three Harvard
Business School professors finds that employ-
ees agree on core standards of corporate
behavior. But meeting those standards will
require new approaches to managing business
conduct. The compliance and ethics programs
of most companies today fall short of address-
ing multinationals’ basic responsibilities,
let alone such vexing issues as how to stay
competitive in markets where rivals follow
different rules. Companies must bring to the
management of business conduct the same
performance tools and concepts that they use
to manage quality, innovation, and financial
results.
Kitchen Best: Ethics When Doing
Cross-Boundary Business in
Southern China
Say Goo, Grace Loo
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product #HKU948 (15 pages)
Kitchen Best is a Hong Kong–based electrical-
appliance company. The company has a
manufacturing facility in China and sells its
wares to customers around the world.
Henry Chan, the newly appointed CEO, has
ambitious plans for the business. However,
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 5
BU S IN E SS & G OV E R NM ENT RELATI O NS

a series of instances of misconduct and
unethical behavior makes him realize that the
business is suffering from a lack of internal
control. What type of internal control mecha-
nisms should he put in place to ensure the
future success of the company?
BUSINESS &
GOVERNMENT
RELATIONS
Barack Obama and the Bush
Tax Cuts (A)
Matthew C. Weinzierl, Eric Werker
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #709037 (28 pages)
As his inauguration approached, President-elect
Obama faced a financial sector meltdown, a
costly bailout, and massive government defi-
cits. With the economy in recession, interest
rates near zero, and joblessness on the rise,
Obama needed to decide whether, and how
much, to use fiscal stimulus to resuscitate
the economy. To help students understand
Obama’s options, the case reviews both the
recent tax cuts under President George W.
Bush, including the supply-side and demand-
management justification given for them,
and the broad history of fiscal policy in the
United States.
BP’s Macondo: Spill and Response
Julio J. Rotemberg
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #711021 (21 pages)
BP’s payments, the case depicts the payments
made by Exxon after the Exxon Valdez spill.
The U.S. regulatory regime is then briefly
compared with regimes in other countries.
After a brief description of the way the fund
set up by BP sought to distribute funds and of
the temporary moratorium that followed the
spill, the case ends with discussion of possible
regulatory responses.
Brazil: Leading the BRICs?
Arthur A. Daemmrich, Aldo Musacchio
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #711024 (24 pages)
Brazil’s new president, Dilma Rousseff, had
announced plans to sustain GDP growth
above 5 percent annually and continue the
country’s leadership role among emerging
economies. Between 2003 and 2010, Brazil
benefited from strong economic growth and
stable policies under the Lula administra-
tion. Brazil also increasingly led the BRICs
(the fast-growing countries of Brazil, Russia,
India, and China) in multilateral negotiations,
notably in the World Trade Organization’s
Doha Round. Yet Brazil’s actions to enforce a
compulsory license of a patented therapy for
HIV/AIDS and its victory in a long-standing
WTO dispute with the United States over
cotton subsidies had created tensions with
major trading partners. Entering office in
January 2011, Rousseff had the opportunity to
outline a new agenda for international trade.
Specifically, she had to decide whether to seek
completion of the Doha Round, which was in
a stalemate due to disputes over global intel-
lectual property rules and agricultural subsi-
dies and tariffs, or to instead pursue regional
trade agreements in South and Central
America. Rousseff also pledged active govern-
ment involvement in the economy, described
in the case as “Brazilian capitalism,” but it was
unclear whether fiscal expansion coupled with
conservative monetary policies would reduce
bottlenecks to growth and further temper
Brazil’s high inequality.
China “Unbalanced”
Diego Comin, Richard H.K. Vietor
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #711010 (27 pages)
In 2010, Wen Jiabao looked back at the
financial crisis with some satisfaction. Using
aggressive fiscal and monetary policy, China
had weathered the crisis successfully, growing
8.7 percent annually in 2010. Most of the
unemployed workers had returned to work,
often demonstrating for higher wages or
better working conditions. Wen, however, was
really focused on his new development strat-
egy—shifting away from export-led growth
to ease domestic and international pressures.
But many institutional challenges seemed
to hamper domestic demand, and Wen
was particularly concerned with pressures
from America on China’s policies for trade,
exchange rates, energy, and investment.

This case starts by reporting various factors

that may have contributed to the massive
Macondo oil spill, noting that BP, its partners,
and the government all made decisions that
helped cause the accident. It then discusses
the response to this spill by BP and the
government. This helps provide some context
for the decision by the Obama administra-
tion to request $20 billion for a fund from
BP and for BP’s willingness to go along with
this request. The case also depicts BP’s safety
record before this spill, which may also have
contributed to the creation of this fund. After
this, the case describes the various ways in
which the U.S. government is involved in
offshore oil, including the leasing of tracts, the
regulation of drilling, and the assessment of
fines and damages. To provide contrast with
ECONOMICS
Managerial Economics
Concepts and Principles
By Donald N. Stengel, California State University,
Fresno
This eight-chapter book addresses the application
of microeconomics to business decisions. Chapters AVAILABLE ONLY IN CHAPTERS
cover key relationships among price, quantity, cost, Business Expert Press
revenue, and profit for an individual firm, as well as Product #BEP069–BEP076
the economics of consumer demand and production.
The economics of organization, market price,
quantity equilibrium, competitive behavior, and the
role of market structure in market equilibrium and
competition are also addressed.

6 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter

 B U SIN ESS & GOVER N MEN T R ELATION S — ECON OMICS

Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are
You Doing About It?
Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. Leonard,
Lynn S. Paine
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1109H (9 pages)
higher-tech exports could recapture U.S.
market share and make headway in Europe
and Latin America.
Securities Lending After the
Financial Crisis
a board director to Morgan Stanley, a company
in which CIC had directly invested close to $6
billion and held 9.9 percent ownership. Addi-
tionally, the case discussed SWFs generally and
their rights and responsibilities to the global
community.

Market capitalism, a system that has proven to
be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, is
poised for a breakdown. That sounds dire, and
it is. Increasing income inequality, migration,
weaknesses in the global financial system,
environmental degradation, and inadequate
government and international institutions are
just a few of the forces that threaten to disrupt
global market capitalism in the decades ahead.
In conversations with business leaders around
the world, the authors found that virtually
all of them shared a deep concern for the
sustainability of the market system, but their
beliefs about how to respond varied widely.
Some said that changing their behavior would
be unnecessary or even inappropriate. Others
were unsure how to deal with issues seldom
thought to be the responsibility of individual
firms. The authors call for business to be
both innovator and activist in protecting and
strengthening market capitalism. Instead of
seeing themselves as narrowly self-interested
players in a system that is overseen by others,
business leaders must spearhead entrepre-
neurial activity on a massive scale—devising
strategies that provide employment for the
billions now outside the system, inventing
business models that make better use of
scarce resources, and creating institutional
arrangements for coordinating and governing
neglected and dysfunctional aspects of market
capitalism.
Mexico: Crisis and Competitiveness
Aldo Musacchio, Richard H.K. Vietor,
Regina Garcia-Cuellar
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product # 710058 (28 pages)
In 2010, the bicentennial anniversary of
Mexico’s revolution against Spain, Mexican
President Felipe Calderon hoped he could
orchestrate several crucial reforms that Mexico
needed. Mexico had not grown much over
the course of the last decade, losing competi-
tiveness to China and other Asian countries.
Several of its institutions, including labor,
education, healthcare, energy, and antitrust,
seemed uncompetitive. But with a weaker
peso and greater governmental attention to
infrastructure, Calderon hoped that Mexico’s
Robert C. Pozen, Gayle Hameister
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #311130 (24 pages) ECONOMICS
In April 2009, Wendy Jefferson had just
returned to her office following a whirlwind
Give Your Workers Something
day of meetings with her newest client, to Smile About
Star Advisor. Jefferson, a financial services Bruno S. Frey
consultant, was eager to dig into the informa- IESE-Insight Magazine Article
tion provided to her and her team about the Product #IIR024 (7 pages)
Star mutual funds and the income the funds
Economics is undergoing a remarkable
earned from securities lending. Securities
new development that may even be called
lending involved temporarily transferring
revolutionary. This development is likely to
securities from mutual funds managed by
change economics substantially in the future.
Star Advisor to short sellers and other inves-
New insights from happiness research are
tors. Income from these loans had been a
slowly being accepted in standard economics,
small but secure component of Star mutual
a field that is traditionally conservative. If the
fund returns for decades.
goal of most human beings is to be happy,
then a fuller understanding of the factors that
Two Key Decisions for China’s contribute to well-being is critical, especially if
Sovereign Fund recent findings on what determines happiness
Robert C. Pozen, Xiaoyu Gu are at variance with standard economic
Harvard Business School Case theories. Happiness research is even more
TN Product #311137 (27 pages) important in helping to determine which
institutional forms best enable individuals to
The China Investment Corporation (CIC)
increase their life satisfaction.
was China’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF),
established with $200 billion of registered
capital in September 2007 to diversify China’s
How to Win Investors Over
foreign exchange holdings and increase risk- Baruch Lev
adjusted returns on those assets. CIC was Harvard Business Review Article
unusual in that it had a strictly commercial Product #R1111B (10 pages)
orientation and market-driven investment
Providing earnings guidance—publicly
mandate to invest in foreign assets but also
releasing managerial forecasts of a company’s
served as the parent company of a 100 percent-
profits—has become a highly controversial
owned subsidiary, Huijin, that invested solely
practice, with critics ranging from Warren
in key state-owned financial institutions in
Buffett to a McKinsey team to the U.S. Cham-
China. Moreover, the fact that CIC was an
ber of Commerce. Yet more than a thousand
SWF presented broader political challenges
U.S. corporations issue such forecasts each
for it, its shareholder the Chinese govern-
year. Are they making a mistake? On the
ment, its direct investments and their govern-
contrary, argues Lev, an accounting professor
ments, and the world economy generally.
at NYU Stern: investors want more informa-
This case involved two decisions CIC faced in
tion, and they will reward companies that
early 2011: the first was how to best and most
make it available. Conventional wisdom
accurately articulate the relationship among
notwithstanding, Lev maintains that investors
CIC, Huijin, and Industrial and Commercial
care a lot about what drives a company’s long-
Bank of China (ICBC) to the Federal Reserve
term growth; however, they often need help
Board (the Fed) so that ICBC could expand its
understanding what the drivers are. Guidance,
business in the United States while exempt-
non-GAAP pro forma earnings statements,
ing CIC and Huijin from certain types of Fed
and executive conference calls with inves-
oversight. The second was whether to appoint
tors and analysts after the release of earnings

TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 7

E CO N O M I C S — E N T R E P RENE URS H I P
statements are potent tools. Done right, they
can bring higher stock prices, lower volatility,
and reduced cost of capital, and they may also
temper shareholder litigation and its con-
sequences. Some guidance for guiders is in
order: offer guidance only if your predictions
are consistently better than analysts’ consen-
sus forecasts. Don’t stand out as a “guidance
refusenik” in a sector where guidance is
prevalent. Maintain credibility and don’t duck
the truth—manipulating expectations so that
reported earnings will comfortably exceed
them breeds mistrust. Resist legal advice to be
cryptic or bland, and don’t overlook the value
of “soft” information; executives’ narrative
and tone color many investors’ decisions and
account for most stock price changes in the
wake of financial reports. These are not easy
times to be an executive dealing with financial
markets. But running away from disillusioned
investors only makes things worse. Far better
is to figure out what they value and to shape
your financial reporting and communications
strategies accordingly.
Managerial Economics: Concepts
and Principles 1: Introduction to
Managerial Economics
Donald N. Stengel
Business Expert Press
Product #BEP069 (5 pages)
Managerial Economics: Concepts and Principles,
written by Donald N. Stengel of California
State University, Fresno, is an eight-chapter
book published by Business Expert Press.
The text addresses the core of manage-
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The Other Side of Innovation
Solving the Execution Challenge
By V.G. Govindarajan and Chris Trimble
“The Other Side of Innovation shows—using
practical examples and ideas and clear writing—
how to marry the company’s core business
with new activities. With its emphasis on the
importance of implementation, the book provides
a wonderful complement to the emphasis on
creativity and discovery so common in the
innovation literature.”
–Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor, Stanford Graduate
School of Business
8 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
rial economics, which is the application of
microeconomics to business decisions. Key
relationships among price, quantity, cost,
revenue, and profit for an individual firm are
discussed, as are elements from the econom-
ics of consumer demand and production.
The economics of organization, market price,
quantity equilibrium, competitive behavior,
and the role of market structure in market
equilibrium and competition are addressed.
Finally, the text considers market regulation in
terms of generic problems that create the need
for regulation, as well as possible remedies for
those problems. Chapter 1 introduces the con-
cept of managerial economics at a broad level.
The vital relationship between economics and
business management is addressed.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurs at Twitter: Building
a Brand, a Social Tool, or a Tech
Powerhouse?
Ken Mark
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910M28 (10 pages)
Twitter has become an incredibly popular
micro-blogging service since its launch in
2006. Its founders have ambitious plans for
the service and are backed by $155 million of
venture capital funding that valued the com-
pany at $1 billion in 2009. Twitter seems to
attract a diverse audience of users, including
TEACHING RESOURCE
AVAILABLE ONLINE:
hbsp.harvard.edu/list/syllabi
AVAILABLE IN CHAPTERS
Harvard Business Review Press
Product #13219
ISBN 978-1-4221-6696-3
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political organizers looking to disseminate
information to their followers and businesses
looking to reach out in real time to potential
customers, and it serves social networking
purposes. The company charges consumers
nothing for its service. By 2009, competitors
have emerged—some of whom have deep
pockets. Yet it remains unclear—at least to
observers—whether the company will ever
make money from its service.
FreshTec: Revolutionizing Fresh
Produce
Jose B. Alvarez, Ryan Johnson
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #511059 (24 pages)
An entrepreneurial produce packaging firm
that has developed a disruptive technology
that keeps fresh produce and flowers fresh
for significantly longer faces strategic growth
decisions. CEO Bob Wright must decide how
best to bring his company’s unique packaging
product to market. The technology holds
promise after a long development phase, but
the packaging is expensive and Wright and his
team must convince the industry stakeholders
of the packaging’s value.
Humble Abode Music and The
Mammals: Not Your Grandpa’s
String Band
Michael J. Merenda, William Naumes,
Margaret J. Naumes
North American Case Research Association
TN Product #NA0021 (17 pages)
The three founding members of The Mam-
mals—Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, Ruth Ungar,
and Mike Merenda—were facing a major deci-
sion. In the year just ending, the string band
specializing in folk rock music had played
over 160 concerts, earning approximately
$100,000 in gross revenues but leaving little
time to write or prepare new music. Signa-
ture Sounds Records had offered the group
a recording contract. They needed to decide
whether to accept the record deal and leverage
Signature Sounds’ financial and marketing
resources or to remain independent. Would
the record label want them to tone down their
sometimes-controversial songs and com-
promise their artistic values? They also had
questions as to the role of their two backup
musicians, Mike’s brother and a childhood
friend. Should they join The Mammals on a
permanent basis? The case presents informa-

tion on the music industry in general and the
folk segment in particular.
PremiumSoft: Managing Creative
People
Neale O’Connor, April Yu, Melissa Moi
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product #HKU937 (10 pages)
PremiumSoft had been a competitive player
in the SQL software market for 10 years. Like
many software companies, PremiumSoft’s
business model required that it continuously
evolve its current successful product lines
through research and development. At the
core of the business were its creative people:
they were the company’s largest asset. Premi-
umSoft had created a team-centric, informal
work environment that promoted creativity
and innovation and attracted the best candi-
dates. As a small company, PremiumSoft had
a mix of formal and informal controls when
dealing with recruiting, retention, roles, and
responsibilities. It had achieved success with
hiring, retaining, and managing its current
employees and wanted to ensure that it could
maintain this success with future growth. In
2010, PremiumSoft’s owners were looking to
grow the business through the development
of new software. This growth required an
expansion of its staff by 25 percent and the
addition of a new product line.
Primedic—Providing Primary Care
in Mexico
Richard G. Hamermesh, Regina Garcia
Cuellar, Lauren Margulies
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #811040 (27 pages)
Primedic is a Mexican start-up that aims to
deliver affordable primary and preventative
healthcare to those at the base of the economic
pyramid. The company is about to exhaust its
first round of venture capital funding, and the
business model has yet to gain traction. How
should the business model be changed, and
should the venture capitalists continue to fund
the company?
TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE
RevenueWire.com: Growing in a
Competitive Affiliate Industry
Rebecca A. Grant
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #W11054 (16 pages)
After three years of rapid growth in a
relatively young industry, the affiliate and
payment processing company RevenueWire.
com found itself operating in a very different
environment. Sales growth in the com-
pany’s affiliate network service had leveled
off, and orders for Q1 2010 looked just like
those for Q1 2009. New competitors, low
entry barriers, and a plateau in the affiliate
market meant few opportunities for growth
across the industry. Despite those conditions,
the company’s owners had set aggressive
revenue targets for 2010 to 2012. The general
manager must evaluate options for growth,
including new markets and new products, to
determine how to meet her targets. Because
RevenueWire.com’s competitors are privately
held, there is little public data on the state of
their finances or the size of various markets.
The general manager has learned how to use
surrogate data to gauge the market and make
strategic decisions, and the students must do
the same to develop an effective three-year
plan that will meet or exceed the owners’
expectations. The case exposes students to
decision making in a global industry domi-
nated by privately held companies. It also
exposes students to the affiliate marketing
industry from the viewpoint of an entrepre-
neurial company that serves as an interme-
diary between merchants and affiliates. It
describes many of the challenges facing an
intermediary in an industry that includes
not only legitimate merchants but also a vast
array of scam artists and phony products.
FINANCE
Developing Financial Insights: Using
a Future Value (FV) and a Present
Value (PV) Approach
Mark E. Haskins
University of Virginia Darden School Case
TN Product #UV5137 (12 pages)
This case has two aspects. First, it provides
a tutorial on the basic concepts associated
with straightforward time-value-of-money
scenarios. The topics of future value (FV) and
EN TR EPR EN EU R SHIP — F IN A N CE
present value (PV) are discussed and exempli-
fied for both lump sum and recurring cash
flow situations. In this vein, the derivation
and use of four useful time-value-of-money
reference tables are presented to highlight the
underlying logic, connections, and mechan-
ics of determining FVs and PVs. Second,
this case provides students with several
simple vignettes in which they can apply the
foregoing time-value-of-money insights and
techniques. The case can be effectively used
in degree and nondegree programs, and it
requires no additional reading materials. It is
well suited for one 90-minute class period,
and all or selected subsets of the vignettes
contained in it may be assigned. A Teaching
Note is available to registered faculty.
INTELFRA Ltd.: Pricing Telecom
Infrastructure in a Monopolistic
Market
Ashok Banerjee, Indranil Bose,
Debashis Saha, Minyi Huang
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product #HKU929 (18 pages)
Indian Telecom Infrastructure Ltd. (INTEL-
FRA) is about to develop a proprietary basic
telecom infrastructure and deliver that infra-
structure on demand to the customers in Lake
East, India. Using the telecom infrastructure
(TI) services provided by INTELFRA, custom-
ers will no longer need to incur the high fixed
costs of building the required infrastructure
on their own or commit to long-term fixed-
price outsourcing contracts. Though the
business is promising, TI services required
significant ex ante development and start-up
costs, and the demand was uncertain because
Lake East is an upcoming township compris-
ing both residential and commercial spaces.
Pricing became a difficult yet crucial business
decision for INTELFRA. High prices could
drive customers away, but low prices would
not be profitable, possibly even insufficient
to cover the high investment costs. This case
addresses the critical pricing issues facing
telecom infrastructure services providers.
Joseph Vigneault and the Capital
Pool Company Program
Colette Southam, Jeff McDonald
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #W10015 (8 pages)
Joseph Vigneault and his entrepreneurial
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 9
F I N A N C E — G E N E R A L M ANAGE M ENT
FINANCE
Winning Investors Over
Surprising Truths About Honesty, Earnings
Guidance, and Other Ways to Boost Your
Stock Price
By Baruch Lev
“Winning Investors Over offers solutions for
managers who face difficult questions from
investors about financial performance. Based on
scholarly research in accounting, finance, and
economics, Baruch Lev’s advice is both practical
and practicable.”
–Katherine Schipper, Professor, Fuqua School
of Business, Duke University
partners wanted to raise $500,000 through
the purchase of a currently existing com-
pany in the $4 million to $5 million price
range in order to pursue a new venture. A
boutique investment bank introduced them
to the features of the Capital Pool Company
(CPC) program. Vigneault must decide if a
CPC is an option he and his partners should
consider. He must consider the effect on their
ownership stake in the company and calculate
the return on their investment. The case is
focused on the quantitative and qualitative
decision factors that go into deciding how to
finance a new business venture and exposes
students to the unique CPC program offered
by the TSX Venture Exchange.
Valuing Wal-Mart 2010
James E. Hatch, Cyrus Zahedi
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #W11058 (14 pages)
An equity analyst uses a variety of methods to
value Wal-Mart shares, with a view to making
a buy/sell or hold recommendation for the stock.
10 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
Harvard Business Review Press
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Water Funds: Financing Nature’s
Ability to Protect Water Supplies
Erica Plambeck, Gretchen Daily,
David W. Hoyt
Stanford University Case
TN Product #OIT104 (13 pages)
Nature plays an important role in maintaining
the flow and purity of water. Human activities
often degrade the quality and/or quantity of
water flowing to downstream users, but the
maintenance of natural ecosystems and the
sound conservation management by those
living upstream in watersheds can help
provide a clean, reliable supply of water for
downstream water users. Water funds are a
way for downstream water users to preserve
their water supply, by paying to restore and
conserve natural ecosystems. They also enable
upstream and downstream communities to
work together for mutual benefit, preserving
or restoring nature’s ability to improve water
quality and reliable flow while providing
economic opportunities for upstream com-
munities. This case introduces the concept
of ecosystem services (the role that natural
ecosystems play in sustaining and fulfilling
human life) and payment for ecosystem
services (PES), in which stakeholders pay
in order to preserve or restore the ability of
nature to provide these services. It describes
water funds and other PES arrangements,
as well as some of the challenges that water
funds face. Several examples are provided of
water funds and other PES programs.
GENERAL MANAGEMENT
A Bomb in Your Pocket? Crisis
Leadership at Nokia India (A)
Charles Dhanaraj, Monidipa Mukherjee,
Hima Bindu
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910M64 (11 pages)
This case addresses the theme of crisis
leadership in a multinational enterprise in a
powerful way to help students internalize the
critical challenges of a multinational company
in an emerging market. In August 2007, a
routine product feedback and defect analysis
process identified a defective batch of batteries
supplied by a Japanese vendor, Matsushita.
India happened to be the recipient of the larg-
est proportion of the defective batch. Nokia’s
corporate communications team, based in
Finland, in cooperation with the Indian team,
responded with a customary global product
advisory. Instructions were made available on
the Internet for customers to diagnose a defec-
tive battery and get a free replacement. Nokia
was shocked to see the antagonistic response
from the Indian press to the product advisory
and the ensuing mayhem that spread quickly
through the country. The head of Nokia India
and his team had to act swiftly to preserve the
company’s hard-earned reputation and market
share. Case A is set at a midnight strategy ses-
sion at Nokia’s Indian headquarters to chart
the way forward. Case B is a short version of
what actually happened: how Nokia and the
team successfully steered the organization
through the crisis and not only survived but
also used the situation to create new organiza-
tional capabilities.
From Score to System: How the Net
Promoter Score (NPS) Grew from a
Metric to a Management System
Fred Reichheld, Rob Markey
Harvard Business Review Press Chapters
Product #8573BC (20 pages)
In 2003, when loyalty economics expert Fred
Reichheld created the Net Promoter Score
(NPS) as a new way of measuring how well
an organization generates customer loyalty,
no one could have predicted how swiftly
this easy-to-understand, open-source metric
would catch on. Thousands of innovative
companies—Apple, American Express,
 GE NE RAL M ANAGEMEN T — HU MA N R ESOU R CE MA N AGEMEN T — IN FOR MATION T ECHN OLOGY
Zappos, Intuit, eBay, Southwest Airlines,
and Facebook, to name just a few—adopted
the Net Promoter Score as a way to track the
loyalty, engagement, and enthusiasm of their
customers. Then, over time, these same com-
panies discovered new methods to expand the
impact of NPS—using it to build employee
engagement and customer loyalty—and it
became something much bigger: a manage-
ment system capable of transforming entire
organizations. In this powerful introductory
chapter, Reichheld and his Bain colleague Rob
Markey share the back story of NPS. You’ll
learn how the “S” in NPS came to stand not
only for a score but also for a system and a
spirit of leadership—a distinctive philosophy
that inspires organizations to enrich the lives
of those they touch. You’ll also be introduced
to The Ultimate Question—“On a zero-to-ten
scale, how likely is it that you would recom-
mend us to a friend or colleague?”—and to
the three categories of customers who respond
to it: promoters, passives, and detractors. The
impact of this chapter is best summed up in
Reichheld’s own words: “The Net Promoter
system will help you run a better business, do
more satisfying work, and build relationships
that yield a more fulfilling life.” This chapter
was originally published as the introduction
to The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and
Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Compa-
nies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World.
Introduction: The Role of Business
in the Future of Market Capitalism
Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. Leonard,
Lynn S. Paine
Harvard Business Review Press Chapters
Product #8615BC (19 pages)
The spread of capitalism worldwide has
made people wealthier than ever before. But
especially in the wake of the 2008 financial
meltdown, capitalism’s future is far from
assured. As Europe’s economies teeter, as
income inequality incenses those struggling
to make ends meet, and as mass migrations
alter world demographics, a question arises:
can capitalism be sustained? In this intro-
ductory chapter, Harvard Business School
professors Joseph Bower, Herman Leonard,
and Lynn Paine set forth a radical proposi-
tion: that business must begin taking a more
active role in assuring capitalism’s health and
sustainability and that government cannot
be capitalism’s savior. The authors provide a
TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE
working definition of “market capitalism” and
its key features as well as a brief overview of
how capitalism varies across global markets.
They then describe a series of forums they
organized in order to ask business leaders
in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the
United States what they believed to be the
threats to the capitalistic system in the future.
This chapter describes those forums and dis-
cussions as a basis for a broader examination
of the current and future state of the market
system as a whole. This chapter was originally
published as chapter 1 of Capitalism at Risk:
Rethinking the Role of Business.
HUMAN RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT
Combating the Effects of Turnover:
Military Lessons Learned from
Project Teams Rebuilding Iraq
Charles Y. Murnieks, Scot T. Allen,
Claudia J. Ferrante
Business Horizons/Indiana University Case
Product #BH451 (11 pages)
The literature concerning turnover has
traditionally been composed of studies and
analyses that assume that turnover rates are
malleable and can be reduced. The authors
take the opposite position and contend that
turnover rates for certain organizations are
not variable but rather remain fixed. Is it pos-
sible, then, to reduce the deleterious effects of
turnover without reducing the actual churn of
individuals? To answer this question, we draw
from experiences of the U.S. military during
Operation Iraqi Freedom in order to learn
from that operation’s methods of dealing with
high personnel turnover during the manage-
ment of projects. Specifically, the authors offer
four best practices that reduce the negative
effects of turnover while allowing the rate
itself to remain constant. These best practices
aim toward sharing the knowledge and mental
models critical for sustained operations in
order to insulate the organization against the
departure of key personnel. Herein, the case
demonstrates how efficient operations can be
maintained amid high churn rates.
Managing Transitions Chapter 1: It
Isn’t the Changes That Do You In
William Bridges
Perseus Press
Product #PER067 (8 pages)
Managing Transitions is a book of nine chap-
ters written by William Bridges and published
by Perseus Books Group. The business world
is continuously transforming as layoffs, bank-
ruptcies, mergers, and restructurings occur
every day. These situational shifts present
psychological challenges to both individuals
and organizations, and many of us respond in
unhealthy ways. The author describes healthy
responses to these challenges, providing prac-
tical, step-by-step strategies for minimizing
the disruptions caused by workplace change.
Chapter 1 describes the difference between
change, which is situational, and transition,
which involves psychological response to
change. The author argues that transition is a
process comprising three stages: the ending,
the neutral zone, and the new beginning. He
describes the life cycle of properly managed
transitions and shows how mismanaged tran-
sitions can go wrong.
INFORMATION
TECHNOLOGY
Binnj on the Apple iPad
Derrick Neufeld, Ken Mark
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910E24 (24 pages)
In this dialogue-styled situation, Binnj’s CEO
has assembled a team of people for a 100-day
“science experiment” to determine whether
a new high-tech business venture is worth
pursuing. He is focused on an untapped
market—a new kind of restaurant menu
service built on the Apple iPad platform.
Members of the team are excited and have
been furiously working on the project while
retaining their full-time jobs. They have
developed a prototype of the technology and
business offering, pitched the idea to several
clients, and generated significant interest.
The case is set at the end of the first 100 days,
when the CEO must decide on the next steps.
This case introduces students to information
technology entrepreneurship, technology
development approaches, service pricing
issues, virtual project management techniques
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 11
I N FOR M AT I O N T E C H N O LO GY — I NTE RNATI O NAL BUSIN ESS
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and tools, brainstorming revenue generation
opportunities, and the challenges of prioritiz-
ing decisions.
Brand Equity
Chris A. Higgins, Jodie Whelan
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910E23 (3 pages)
A marketing company has collected a large
dataset on brand equity for the fast-food and
travel sectors. They have come up with their
way of measuring brand equity. Various statis-
tical techniques are used to assess the concept
of brand equity. These include descriptive
statistics, crosstabs, ANOVA, and MANOVA.
Innovating in Uncertain Markets:
10 Lessons for Green Technologies
Paul J.H. Schoemaker, George S. Day
MIT Sloan Management Review
Product #SMR389 (9 pages)
Talking about green technology gets people
excited. It’s thrilling to think that a new wave
of inventions and discoveries will revolution-
ize the way we live, halt the degradation of
our planet, and conserve resources for future
generations. And it’s more than just talk:
investors are committing real dollars. As the
level of activity increases, however, discus-
sions about green technology raise as many
questions as they answer. Addressing the key
questions is complicated by the fundamen-
tal uncertainties that are at the heart of the
green technology market. The evolution of
this market space depends on forces that are
beyond the control of any individual entrepre-
neur or investor: government policies; avail-
ability of capital; and wild cards such as oil
price volatility, geopolitical conflicts, the rate of
economic growth, and public attitudes toward
warnings of global climate change. History
shows that the road to technological innova-
tion is a long and winding one. Between 2005
and 2007, runaway enthusiasm led to the pro-
liferation of hundreds of new green technol-
12 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
ogy ventures, many of which ran into trouble
during the great recession. Green technology
companies need to develop staying power. In
addition to understanding the opportunities,
they need to get ahead—and stay ahead—of
competitors.
What Every CEO Needs to Know
About the Cloud
Andrew McAfee
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1111J (10 pages)
Cloud computing is a sea change in the way
companies use technology; it’s as inevitable
and significant as the shift from steam power
to electricity on the factory floor. Because criti-
cisms of the cloud have gotten a lot of hype,
however, many companies are hesitant to
explore it. In this article, McAfee, a principal
research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital
Business, debunks commonly cited concerns
about the cloud. When it comes to cost, reli-
ability, and security, he says, the cloud prom-
ises to equal or better on-premise computing.
Moreover, as the experiences of companies
like 3M, the global contractor Balfour Beatty,
and the consulting firm CSC show, cloud
computing offers sizable benefits, such as
improved productivity, easier collaboration,
the ability to mine data for insights, and
higher capacity without major capital invest-
ment. Here, McAfee walks readers through
the three basic categories of cloud computing:
infrastructure-as-a-service (the leasing of raw
computing capacity), platform-as-a-service
(the leasing of computers ready for software
development), and software-as-a-service (the
hosting of applications for users). Arguing
that CEOs and senior managers need to take
the lead on the shift to the cloud, McAfee then
outlines how companies can get started.
INTERNATIONAL
BUSINESS
The CEO of Heinz on Powering
Growth in Emerging Markets
Bill Johnson
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1110A (5 pages)
The developing economies are now a primary
focus for consumer-oriented businesses,
says Johnson, who put together Heinz’s first
long-term strategy for those markets soon
after becoming CEO in 1998. The strategy
emphasizes four As: applicability (the product
must suit the local culture), availability (sales
channels must be relevant to the local popula-
tion), affordability (very small packages of a
product may be crucial for these customers),
and affinity (local customers and employees
must feel close to your brand). Sometimes
Heinz takes its brands into a market and
tries to grow them organically; more often it
looks to acquire solid brands with good local
management that will get it into the right
channels. That means a second layer of due
diligence regarding how the company goes to
market, the tax system, the regulatory envi-
ronment, currency trends, and the political
climate in comparison with what exists in the
United States.
Coca-Cola and Huiyuan (A):
Antitrust Barriers to Buying Top
Chinese Brands
Ping Lin, Wen Zhou, Penelope Chan
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product #HKU946 (38 pages)
The Coca-Cola Company (Coca-Cola)
announced a plan in September 2008 to
acquire China’s biggest domestic juice manu-
facturer, China Huiyuan Juice Group Limited
(Huiyuan). This acquisition will boost the
market share of Coca-Cola from 12.7 percent
to 20.2 percent in the country’s juice market
that year. Because Huiyuan-brand fruit juice is
one of China’s prominent homegrown brands,
this news has triggered a public outcry rooted
in patriotic nationalism against Coca-Cola’s
acquisition. Local juice manufacturers have
also protested, claiming that Coca-Cola’s
enhanced market position would drive them
out of business. China’s antitrust officials plan
to conduct a public hearing in late December
2008. Coca-Cola’s senior executives are mull-
ing over the best strategies to convince the

authorities that this acquisition benefits the
consumers and the society at large. Factors
of considerations may include the rationale
of regulatory control of M&A; synergies of
the merging companies; and the potential
effects of merging on competition, consumer
interests, and industry development. (Note:
Case B covers the ruling by China’s antitrust
authorities on Coca-Cola’s case and its impli-
cations for foreign companies trying to expand
business in the country through acquisition of
top domestic brands.)
KFC’s Radical Approach to China
David E. Bell, Mary L. Shelman
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1111K (6 pages)
Global companies face a crucial question
when they enter emerging markets: how far
should they go to localize their offerings?
Typically they try to sell core products or
services pretty much as they’ve been sold in
Europe or the United States, with headquar-
ters calling all the shots—and usually with
disappointing results. The authors, both of
Harvard Business School, examined why KFC
China has been able to find fertile ground in
a market that is notoriously challenging for
Western fast-food chains. KFC’s executives
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believed that the dominant logic behind the
chain’s growth in the U.S.—a limited menu,
small stores, and an emphasis on takeout—
wouldn’t produce the kind of success they
were looking for in China. KFC China offers
important lessons for global executives
seeking guidance in determining how much
of their existing business model to keep in
emerging markets—and how much to
throw away.
Mercedes-Benz India
Nicole R.D. Haggerty, Shankar
Venkatagiri, Ramasastry
Chandrasekhar
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #W11084 (13 pages)
In December 2007, the management of
Mercedes-Benz India (MBI), a fully owned
subsidiary of Daimler AG, the 12th-largest
automobile manufacturer in the world,
decided to relocate to a new facility near
Pune in western India. In overseeing the
installation of information technology (IT)
infrastructure at the new premises, the com-
pany’s CIO is dealing with some managerial
choices pertaining to IT architecture, IT tools,
and IT skill sets of the company. Each choice
Product Reviews: Marketing Simulation – Managing Segments and Customers
Managing Segments and Customers:
Teachable:
B2B Simulation
July 18, 2011
This was an exciting, challenging, and highly relevant simula-
Relevant: tion for students that engaged their interest and skills levels.
The teaching materials were very useful and well laid out.
Student Friendly:
The best feature is the ability to customize the weightings each
teaching period to reflect the
Marion
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Years Teaching: 5 to 9 yrs 0 0
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involves several trade-offs. The CIO’s decision
on each will have a major effect on the rev-
enues, margins, and competitive positioning
of MBI in the Indian automotive industry.
MARKETING
Adding Social Media to the
Marketing Mix
Guillermo Armelini, Julian Villanueva
IESE Insight Magazine Article
Product #IIR051 (8 pages)
Social media have rapidly gained share and
attention among all kinds of consumers and
companies, often at the expense of traditional
media. Companies have started to redefine key
aspects of their marketing mix. With advertis-
ing and online word of mouth competing for
shrinking marketing budgets, many compa-
nies regard having an active presence in social
media as a viable alternative to traditional
advertising. Yet the authors believe this would
be a mistake, because the two strategies are
complementary rather than substitutive.
A comparison of advertising and word of
mouth shows that social media obey very dif-
ferent rules than does traditional advertising.
he current market place.
Product Reviews: Marketing Simulation – Managing Segments and Customers
Report
orrt inappropriate
inappropriate content
Post Comment Simulation for Graduate Students
August 5, 2011
Teachable: I used this simulation for a graduate Channels and Distribution
Strategy class and used it as an individual assessment. We
Relevant: started with a practice round and then had four competing
rounds, each getting more and more difficult. Segmentation
strategy, cumulative profit and customer service were weighted
Student Friendly:
more than total revenue. Created a very competitive class
environment.
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M A RK E T I N G
Social media can start conversations or build
brand recognition, but the results are much
more difficult to predict or measure. With
that in mind, the authors recommend how to
define a social media plan, citing examples
of companies that got it right—and offering
cautionary tales of those that got it wrong.
Dacia Duster SUV
Marina Apaydin, Hantuile Oana
Nicoleta
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910A31 (14 pages)
Driven by the 2009 global economic crisis,
Dacia Romania designed and built the Dacia
Duster sport utility vehicle (SUV) to be the
ideal SUV at an affordable price. After the
successful introductions of the cheapest
modern sedan on the international market
in 2004 and among the cheapest modern
seven-seaters in 2006, Dacia planned to
introduce what it hoped would become the
cheapest modern SUV on the international
market. The main challenges Dacia was facing
in 2009 were how to sell the car to existing
customers and how to conduct an extensive
public communication campaign in order to
convince other drivers to change their cars for
the cheaper, more efficient Dacia SUV that
was going to be available in spring 2010.
Forecasting Denosumab
Aggarwal Nayna, Tim Calkins
Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern Case
Product #KEL531 (15 pages)
This case looks at an important business task:
forecasting a new product. The case can be
used to teach finance, marketing (new product
introduction), and healthcare strategy. The
product is one of Amgen’s most important
new products: denosumab. On the surface,
the case is fairly easy: students simply have to
do some simple mathematical calculations.
However, the challenges of forecasting quickly
become apparent: every forecast depends on
some critical assumptions, and the answer
can vary dramatically.
14 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
Herborist: A Chinese Personal Care
Brand Goes Abroad
Kevin Zhou, Grace Loo
University of Hong Kong
TN Product # HKU927 (24 pages)
Herborist, a high-end Chinese personal care
brand, had been steadily expanding its share
in global markets since 2008. The brand
distinguished itself by integrating traditional
Chinese medicine with modern biotechnol-
ogy and emphasizing its green and organic
ingredients. Whereas the Chinese were
familiar with the concept, how would Herbor-
ist sell it to consumers outside mainland
China who were used to using established
Japanese brands, such as Shiseido and SK-II,
or Western brands, such as Estée Lauder and
Sisley? In 2001, Herborist chose to enter the
Hong Kong market and test its product in this
very competitive market that was dominated
by the major Japanese and Western cosmetics
brands. The company opened two Herborist-
branded stores in major shopping centers but
was forced to close them down two years later
due to bad results. The company tried again
in 2007, this time distributing its products
through the Hong Kong personal health and
beauty chain Mannings. In 2008, Herborist
entered the Paris market with the help of the
cosmetics chain store Sephora. Results were
mixed; although some of its products became
top sellers, the overall sales figures were not
very promising. By 2011, Herborist was ready
for the next step in its international expansion
plan. Which markets should it target and what
strategy should it adopt?
Lady Gaga (A)
Anita Elberse, Michael Christensen
Harvard Business School Case
Product #512016 (28 pages)
In September 2009, Troy Carter, manager
of up-and-coming pop star Lady Gaga, has to
decide on a new course of action now that his
artist’s planned co-headlining arena tour with
hip-hop superstar Kanye West has been can-
celed. Carter knows that continuing the tour
solo comes with huge risks, but scaling it back
to smaller theaters or postponing the tour
altogether has disadvantages as well. Making
matters more complicated, Carter also has to
consider the implications for Gaga’s partners,
including the concert promoter Live Nation
and the William Morris Endeavor agency.
What is the best strategy? The case is designed
to help students understand the decisions
that helped propel Lady Gaga into one of the
entertainment world’s biggest names. Written
from the perspective of her manager, the case
provides rich insights into the artist’s touring,
recorded-music, and social media activities, as
well as supporting economic data.
The Pepsi Refresh Project: A Thirst
for Change
Michael I. Norton, Jill Avery
Harvard Business School Case
Product #512018 (24 pages)
In 2010, for the first time in 23 years, PepsiCo
did not invest in Super Bowl advertising for its
iconic brand. Instead, the company diverted
$20 million to the social media–fueled Pepsi
Refresh Project: PepsiCo’s innovative cause-
marketing program in which consumers
submitted ideas for grants for health, envi-
ronmental, social, educational, and cultural
causes. Consumers voted for their favorite
ideas, and PepsiCo funded the winners with
grants ranging from $5,000 to $250,000.
The case highlights the benefits and risks
of traditional branding and social media
branding, including a discussion of how the
Pepsi Refresh Project fits with Pepsi’s previ-
ous brand positioning. The case discussion
focuses on how the brand team should evalu-
ate the initiative’s return on investment (from
sales to social media engagement), whether
they should continue the initiative in 2011,
and whether Pepsi is the right brand for this
kind of initiative.
Procter & Gamble: Marketing
Capabilities
Rebecca Henderson, Ryan Johnson
Harvard Business School Case
Product #311117 (17 pages)
P&G had become known and recognized
as a marketing machine. It was the largest
advertiser in the world, with 2010 spending
of $8.68 billion. From the company’s early
exploitation of broadcast media (radio and
television) for its soap products to more recent
experiments in digital media for its men’s
hygiene brand Old Spice, P&G was a seasoned
marketer with strong consumer research, a
powerful innovation network, and the world’s
largest financial commitment to advertising.

Revitalize Your Business: A Brand
Reinvention Framework
Alonzo Canada, Joyce Chen
Rotman School of Management Case
Product #ROT150 (4 pages)
In the past decade, Procter & Gamble has
transformed Oil of Olay from “oil of old lady”
into Olay Total Effects—one of its strongest
brands. Is one of your brands a diamond in
the rough? The authors outline five key ques-
tions that can help you assess whether or not
to invest in brand reinvention. If a brand can
answer all of them in the affirmative, chances
are good that it has the potential to be trans-
formed from a laggard into a star. The authors
present the five components of their Brand
Reinvention Framework: proposition, target,
offerings, production, and channel, describing
in detail how to approach each element.
The U.S. Military Academy
at West Point
Anat Keinan
Harvard Business School
Product # 512012 (26 pages)
The case examines an iconic institution’s
decision on whether or not to undertake a
branding initiative. Founded in 1802, West
Point has played a key role in America’s history.
It is one of the nation’s oldest institutions of
higher learning and is well known for produc-
ing prominent military, political, and business
leaders. In the increasingly competitive envi-
ronment of higher education, the Director of
Strategic Communications at the U.S. Military
Academy is faced with a decision on whether
or not to invest resources in a rebranding
effort. Over the course of the school’s history,
several distinct logos have come into existence
and little uniformity or guidance for use
exists. Data from a recent consumer survey
offers some insight for the decision maker
to contemplate, as does the school’s recent
appearance on the cover of Forbes magazine
as the number one undergraduate institution
in the nation. Numerous stakeholders,
tradition, the competitive environment,
and resource constraints all factor into the
decision-making process.
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NEGOTIATION Negotiation in China: How
Universal?
Bidding for Hertz: Leveraged Tao Zhigang, Shangjin Wei,
Buyout Penelope Chan
University of Hong Kong Case
Susan Chaplinsky, Felicia C. Marston
TN Product #HKU956 (20 pages)
University of Virginia Darden School Case
TN Product #UV1056 (21 pages) This is a fictitious case in which Universal
Studios, a major U.S. theme parks and resorts
In August 2005, The Carlyle Group and its
company, has to negotiate with China’s central
partners must finalize the terms of a bid to
government to build its first theme park in
purchase the Hertz Corporation. The Ford
the country. Students are divided into groups,
Motor Company had put Hertz, a wholly
and each student is assigned a role as one of
owned subsidiary, up for sale in April 2005,
the negotiators or as an observer. The topics
and in June 2005 Hertz entered a dual-track
covered in the negotiation include the new
process that would result in its sale or an
theme park’s location, ownership structure,
initial public offering (IPO). The case provides
size, nature of theme zones, local employ-
detailed pro forma projections for the transac-
ment, and hospitality training programs.
tion that allow students to examine the syner-
The case allows students to experience the
gies of the deal and estimate a value and bid
difficulties of conducting negotiations in a
for Hertz. Students must consider whether
cross-cultural setting.
their bid provides an adequate return to the
sponsors, can produce a higher value for
Hertz than can an IPO, and can best the bid Palestinian Negotiating Partners:
of a rival bidding group. The case is appropri- 2010 Strategic Reassessment
ate for use in courses on corporate finance, James K. Sebenius, Shula Gilad
private equity, or deal valuation. Because of Harvard Business School Case
the rich range of issues that can be considered, Product #911025 (34 pages)
the case also works well as a capstone case or
A network of influential Israelis and Palestin-
in a case competition. For instructors wishing
ians, jointly trained in negotiation at Harvard
to provide students an overview of the role
since 2002, faces organizational, strategic, and
and practices of private equity, we recommend
funding challenges in 2010. Unlike “people to
combining the Hertz LBO case with its
people” or “Track II” initiatives, the Israeli-Pal-
companion case, Investing in Sponsor-Backed
estinian Negotiating Partners (IPNP) consists
IPOs: The Case of Hertz (UV1409). The Hertz
of relatively senior people on both sides of
IPO was announced in July 2006, just seven
the conflict who have undergone advanced
months after the LBO was completed. The two
negotiation training together and now consti-
cases cover a wide range of issues that arise
tute a unique network in the region. IPNP’s
over the course of entry and exit of private
academic sponsor, the Harvard Negotiation
equity investments.
Project, is helping to assess this unique nego-
tiation initiative and assisting the organization
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 15
O PE R AT I O N S M A N AGE M ENT
in its efforts to conduct a basic reassessment
in the face of changes in regional politics, the
conflict, and the funding environment.
OPERATIONS
MANAGEMENT
The Art of Piloting New Initiatives
Bettina Büchel, Rhoda Davidson
MIT Sloan Management Review
Product # SMR402 (8 pages)
Successful multinationals get that way by
finding progressively better ways to lever-
age good operational improvements across
the entire company. But developing such
superior processes is not easy. As few as one
in three new process initiatives succeeds.
Each failure can cost the company as much
as $10 million in development costs, not to
mention forgoing the hundreds of millions
of dollars that a successful initiative might
have generated. New operational ideas fail for
many reasons. However, the experience and
research of these authors suggests that one of
the most common reasons is not that the idea
was bad but that the developers set up a pilot
that failed to persuade managers in the units
that the process was an improvement. If the
pilot covers business units, customer types, or
products and services that the managers who
are expected to roll out the innovation don’t
see as analogous to their own unit’s situa-
tion, the working template may be viewed
as insufficient to be considered a reliable
experiment. Many of these failures can be
avoided. Specifically, the authors find that suc-
cessful pilots share three qualities: credibility,
replicability, and feasibility. The pilot location
must seem credible in that the situations and
challenges seem familiar to the managers who
are expected to eventually adopt it into their
own units. It needs to be replicable as well,
and capable of being turned into a template
that can be rapidly introduced in a variety of
locations. Finally, its results must meet the
expectations of multiple stakeholders.
China Sourcing Group: Delivering
on Time
Neale O’Connor
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product #HKU931 (9 pages)
In 2004, U.S.-based China Sourcing Group,
which specializes in premium and gift
16 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
products, established a sourcing office in
Shanghai. The Shanghai office was respon-
sible for sourcing vendors not only in China
but also in southern Asia. It played a major
role in quadrupling China Sourcing Group’s
revenues over the next four years. Despite its
contribution to the group, the Shanghai office
faced a major issue of frequent late deliveries,
especially of new products that were devel-
oped from scratch. In 2009, as the Shanghai
management team reviewed the performance
of the sourcing office, it decided that some-
thing had to be done to improve the punctual-
ity of that office’s deliveries. What should the
Shanghai office do to improve the situation?
Don’t Let Your Supply Chain Control
Your Business
Thomas Y. Choi, Tom Linton
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1112H (7 pages)
In the past 25 years, major original equipment
manufacturers have delegated the manage-
ment of their supply chains to a handful of
first-tier suppliers. Although this approach
frees OEMs from the tasks of building and
supervising supply subsystems, speeds up
product introductions, and helps manufac-
turers secure larger volume discounts, it has
gone too far. In this article, Choi, of Arizona
State University, and Linton, a former chief
procurement officer of LG Electronics, point
out the dangers of relinquishing so much
power to first-tier suppliers: it weakens an
OEM’s ability to control costs, stay on top of
critical technology developments and shifts in
demand, and ensure that suppliers are operat-
ing in a socially and environmentally sustain-
able fashion. The solution is for an OEM to
selectively establish direct relationships with
key lower-tier suppliers. Specifically, an OEM
should form close ties with vendors that have
a significant impact on the OEM’s cost of
goods sold, have strong innovation potential,
pose sustainability risks, and can provide
insights into important trends. Implementing
this approach isn’t simple—it may require
reshaping the entire purchasing function. But
it’s essential for manufacturers that want to
stay ahead of competitors.
FIJI Water: Carbon Negative?
Francesca Gino, Michael W. Toffel,
Stephanie van Sice
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #611049 (22 pages)
Seeking to go beyond global best practices in
reducing environmental impacts, FIJI Water,
a premium artesian bottled water company in
the United States, launched a carbon-negative
campaign that would offset more greenhouse
gas emissions than were released by the
company’s operations and products. The case
examines the controversies surrounding this
program as well as the program’s impacts
on the environment and FIJI Water’s brand
image. The company also faced decisions
regarding how to best manage its relationship
with the Fijian government, which recently
dramatically raised imposed export taxes
and could limit FIJI Water’s access to water,
its primary raw material. The case enables
students to better understand the challenges
of implementing an environmental strategy
and of negotiating with parties that control
raw materials, and it invites discussion of
the effectiveness of various approaches and
the general lessons for the management of
companies seeking to operate in an environ-
mentally responsible manner.
SeaMicro
Mark Leslie, Sara Rosenthal
Stanford University Case
Product #E409 (17 pages)
Launched in 2007, SeaMicro developed one
of the most innovative server products to hit
the market in over a decade. The SM10000
consumed one-quarter the power and space of
conventional server products, thereby address-
ing a significant and growing pain point, par-
ticularly among Web 2.0 companies. As these
companies increased their compute power
through the addition of tens of thousands of
servers, their data centers expanded as well,
creating major issues around the availability
and costs associated with electricity, cooling,
and physical space. Though SeaMicro’s
founders were confident that their product
would address this significant market need,
they faced initial resistance from the invest-
ment community, based largely on the recent
failures of a handful of newly emergent server
companies, combined with the oligopoly
structure of the server market dominated by
HP, Dell, and IBM. The case profiles SeaMicro’s
voyage navigating these obstacles and high-

lights the challenges that lie ahead after its
initial product commercialization.
Seven Myths to Beat Before
They Beat You
David Simchi-Levi PhD.
IESE-Insight Magazine Article
Product #IIR048 (8 pages)
Many traditional operations strategies—such
as just-in-time, lean manufacturing, and
offshoring—may not suffice in today’s trickier
global economy, which is marked by rising
labor costs in developing countries and huge
volatility in oil and other commodity prices.
Sticking to received wisdom risks doing more
harm than good by imperiling a firm’s control
over its supply chain. In this article based on
his book Operations Rules: Delivering Customer
Value Through Flexible Operations, the author
tackles seven myths that companies often
struggle with in their operations. Recognizing
these myths, he says, can help an organization
avoid potential problems. Unfortunately, some
of these pitfalls are disguised as quite-reason-
able strategic goals. But when these pitfalls are
followed, an organization is almost guaran-
teed to fail or miss opportunities. Considering
issues such as cost cutting, product character-
istics, and information technology, the author
stresses that flexibility is the key for compa-
nies to innovate their operations and supply
chain strategies and to compete successfully
in turbulent times.
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Case Study Handbook
How to Read, Discuss, and Write
Persuasively About Cases
By William Ellet
Ideal for students new to the case method,
The Case Study Handbook presents a powerful
approach for analyzing, discussing, and writing
about cases. Individual chapters are ideal for
including in a course pack. Best-selling chapters
include:
Q Analyzing a Case #2449BC
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Q How to Write a Case-Based Essay #2451BC
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OPER ATION S MA N AGEMEN T — OR GA N IZATION A L B EHAV IOR
Sunset Grill at Blue Mountain
John S. Haywood-Farmer, Dina
Ribbink, Jason Melhuish
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #910D15 (13 pages)
A partner and owner of the Sunset Grill at
Blue Mountain in the village at Blue Moun-
tain, Ontario, had very mixed emotions. The
restaurant had just finished its first year of
operation and had broken even, and had been
named Business of the Year in the counties
of Simcoe and Grey. On the other hand, the
owner knew that operations were still far from
perfect. This case was written for courses
on operations, particularly in the section on
managing capacity and demand. It could also
be used in a service management or service
operation course.
ORGANIZATIONAL
BEHAVIOR
Have You Restructured for
Global Success?
Nirmalya Kumar, Phanish Puranam
Harvard Business Review Article
Product # R1110J (7 pages)
The organizational structures of many
multinational corporations are inadequate
to the task of capitalizing on opportunities
in emerging markets. Locating customer-
facing processes in each country—and even
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using transnational structures that exploit
location-specific advantages—just doesn’t cut
it anymore. So argue Kumar and Puranam, of
London Business School. The authors show
how the growth of China and India as lead
markets and as talent pools, coupled with
advances in technology, enables companies to
optimize their organizations by segmenting
R&D both vertically and horizontally, thereby
creating T-shaped structures. The greatest
challenge of the T-shaped structure is manag-
ing integration across countries. The solution
is to allow your corporation’s center of gravity
to shift eastward. That means globalizing the
top management team, moving headquarters
outside the home country, and genuinely valu-
ing the cultural shifts that those two changes
require. Companies such as GE, Intel, and
AstraZeneca have had some success in these
endeavors, and all multinationals have the
potential to secure the advantages of deploy-
ing a T-shaped structure.
HSN’s CEO on Fixing the Shopping
Network’s Culture
Mindy Grossman
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1112A (5 pages)
When Mindy Grossman was approached to
head the parent company of Home Shopping
Network, she had no television experience,
no direct-to-consumer experience, and no
experience in most of the product categories
HSN sold. She’d never even watched a home
shopping channel. But after a crash course
consisting of channel surfing, she had an
“aha” moment: she realized that HSN needed
to become more of a lifestyle network that
would inspire people through products. That
pitch won her the job. Then she visited head-
quarters—where the staff appeared downtrod-
den and the organization seemed frozen in
time. Grossman saw that she would need to
dramatically alter the company culture, under-
stand and reposition the brand, and devise a
new product strategy. She began with white
paint and new office chairs.
Is Sony Turning Around?
Marcus Schuetz, Atsushi Sumi,
Claudia H.L. Woo
University of Hong Kong Case
Product #HKU954 (30 pages)
Instead of adopting more commonly used
standards that appeal to a consumers’ taste,
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 17
O RG A N I Z AT I O N A L B EH AVI O R — SALES
Sony’s traditional focus on its own technolo-
gies has trapped the company in the state of
“Galapagos-ization” (garapagosu-ka) that seg-
regates the company from global competition.
Since the mid-1990s, the company has been
struggling with unstable profit and sales in its
core electronics business while it aggressively
expands into the entertainment content sector.
A number of restructuring strategies had been
implemented, but the effect was not sustained
due to various internal conflicts within the
company. In mid-2005, a non-Japanese, Sir
Howard Stringer, was appointed as the first
Western CEO and chairman of Sony. Stringer
pushed forward a series of operational
restructurings and placed a greater focus on
software and content development than on
Sony’s tradition business, hardware technol-
ogy. Even though Stringer’s change efforts had
brought a blink of hope for Sony’s comeback,
the situation turned sour in early 2009 when
the company announced its first operating
loss in 14 years. While different voices about
the problems of Sony arose and the leadership
of Stringer was questioned, another round of
restructuring attempts was pushed forward
by Stringer. How could Stringer overcome the
deep-rooted internal resistance that his prede-
cessor had failed to overcome? What had gone
wrong with the iconic electronics giant? Were
all those restructuring and change efforts nec-
essary and useful to Sony’s turnaround?
Liberté, Egalité, Sororité: How Should
France Achieve Boardroom Parité?
Boris Groysberg, Hilary Fischer-Groban
Harvard Business School Case
Product #412061 (25 pages)
The French government is considering man-
dating a gender quota for corporate boards.
Other countries have approached the question
of gender equity in corporate governance in
various ways. Which model might best work
for France?
Making Yourself Indispensable
John H. Zenger, Joseph Folkman,
Scott K. Edinger
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1110E (9 pages)
Peter Drucker and other leadership thinkers
have long argued that leaders should focus on
strengthening their strengths. How should
they do that? Improving on a weakness is
pretty easy and straightforward: you can make
18 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
measurable progress by honing and practicing
basic techniques. But developing a strength
is a different matter, because simply doing
more of what you’re good at will yield only
incremental improvements. If you are strong
technically, becoming even more of a technical
expert won’t make you a dramatically better
leader. If, however, you use what the authors
call “nonlinear development”—similar to an
athlete’s cross-training—you can achieve expo-
nential results. Your technical expertise will
become more powerful if, for instance, you
build on your communication skills, enabling
you to explain technical problems both more
broadly and more effectively. The authors, all
from the leadership-development consultancy
Zenger Folkman, present a step-by-step pro-
cess by which developing leaders can identify
their strengths (through either a formal or
an informal 360-degree evaluation), select
appropriate complementary skills (the article
identifies 6–10 for each core strength), and
develop those skills to dramatically improve
their strengths, making themselves uniquely
valuable to their companies.
One Acre Fund: Outgrowing
the Board
Elliot Sherman, Anne Cohn Donnelly
Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern Case
TN Product #KEL542 (13 pages)
A young international nonprofit social
enterprise governed by friends of the founder
grows rapidly and faces increasing demands
for resources and key connections to major
potential donors, expertise in going to scale,
and managing expansion. The case presents
this issue commonly faced by new nonprofits
and details how the organization, led by the
board chair, seeks to resolve it through rede-
sign of the board and major changes in board
membership.
Social Innovation at salesforce.com
Christopher Marquis, Marley C.
Kornreich, Bobbi Thomason
Harvard Business School Case
Product # 412049 (19 pages)
Salesforce.com recently implemented an
innovative social enterprise business model
whereby the Salesforce.com Foundation funds
its operations and grant budget by selling
discounted Salesforce.com software licenses
to nonprofits and education clients. The case
recounts the development and initial stages
of this project and the trade-offs inherent in
mixing social and business goals. Further-
more, as background, the case provides detail
on Salesforce’s 1-1-1 business model whereby
the company contributes 1 percent of product,
1 percent of equity, and 1 percent of employee
hours back to the communities it serves.
SALES
Entrepreneurial Sales Strategies:
Namaste Laboratories Pursues New
Markets for Hair Care Products
Cheryl Mayberry-McKissack,
Tracey Robinson-English
Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern Case
TN Product #KEL529 (10 pages)
The Namaste case is a story of how Kellogg
alumni couple Gary and Denise Gardner
grow their Namaste-branded hair care line
from production at the family’s kitchen table
into a formidable $80 million empire within
a 14-year period. The Gardners come from
a longtime hair care business lineage, the
Soft Sheen dynasty, started by Gary’s father
decades earlier. Soft Sheen was ultimately
sold to hair care giant L’Oreal for over $100
million. Gardner claims Namaste’s growth
occurred through listening to the needs and
desires of customers for healing hair care
products that reminded them of nourish-
ing household remedies. The hair care line
became a leader in its industry but faced the
dilemma of how to expand sales in new mar-
kets, especially international markets such as
South Africa and Nigeria.
The Future of Shopping
Darrell Rigby
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1112C (12 pages)
When the dot-com bubble burst 10 years ago,
the ensuing collapse wiped out half of all
online retailers. Today, e-commerce is well
established and much digital retailing is now
highly profitable. As it evolves, digital retailing
is quickly morphing into something so differ-
ent that it requires a new name: omnichannel
retailing. The name reflects the fact that retail-
ers will be able to interact with customers
through countless channels—web sites, physi-
cal stores, kiosks, direct mail and catalogs,
call centers, social media, mobile devices,
 SA LES — SERVICE MA N AGEMEN T — SOCIA L EN T ERPRISE

gaming consoles, televisions, networked appli-
ances, home services, and more. If traditional
retailers hope to survive, they must embrace
omnichannel retailing and also transform
the one big feature Internet retailers lack—
stores—from a liability into an asset. They
must turn shopping into an entertaining,
exciting, and emotionally engaging experi-
ence by skillfully blending the physical with
the digital. They must also hire new kinds of
talent, move away from outdated measures of
success, and become adept at rapid test-and-
learn methodologies. A successful omnichan-
nel strategy should not only guarantee a
retailer’s survival—no small matter in today’s
environment—but also deliver a revolution in
customers’ expectations and experiences.
What Would Don Draper Do? Rules
for Restoring the Contemporary
Agency Mojo
David Strutton, David G. Taylor
Business Horizons Article
Product #BH450 (13 pages)
What are the timeless truths of advertising?
How can agency leaders manage their teams,
creative talent, and clients? To answer these
and other questions, the mythology of the
“Golden Age of Advertising” is examined and
analyzed herein. Specifically, using adman
Don Draper—protagonist of the fictional
but already culturally iconic television series
Mad Men—as a mythic archetype, lessons
are extracted for contemporary advertising
practitioners. Ten timeless rules are proposed
and explicated in the areas of managing
intra-agency leadership processes, manag-
ing creative processes, and managing client
relationships.
SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing,
Customer Service, and Company
Culture
Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely,
Laura Winig
Harvard Business School Case
Product #610015 (27 pages)
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately
held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and
other soft-line retail categories, learned that
Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational
online retailer, had won its Board of Directors’
approval to offer to merge the two companies.
Amazon had been courting Zappos since
2005, hoping a merger would enable Amazon
to expand and strengthen its market share in
soft-line retail categories. While Amazon’s
interest intrigued Zappos’ senior executives,
they had not felt the time was right—until
now. Amazon’s offer—10 million shares of
stock (valued at $807 million), $40 million
in cash, restricted stock units for Zappos’
employees, and a promise that Zappos could
operate as an independent subsidiary—was on
the table. Zappos’ financial advisor, Morgan
Stanley, estimated the future equity value of
an IPO to be between $650 million and $905
million; this estimate skewed the Amazon
offer—at least in financial terms—toward
the high end of Zappos’ estimated market
value. Hsieh and Lin, Zappos’ CEO and COO,
respectively, knew that much of Zappos’
growth, and hence its value, had been due to
the company’s strong culture and obsessive
emphasis on customer service. In 2009, they
were focusing on the three C’s—clothing,
customer service, and company culture—the
keys to the company’s continued growth.
Hsieh and Lin had only a few days to consider
whether to recommend the merger to Zappos’
board at their July 21 meeting.
SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
B Lab: Building a New Sector of
the Economy
Christopher Marquis, Andrew Klaber,
Bobbi Thomason
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #411047 (32 pages)
The founders of B Lab are on a mission to
create a new sector of the economy and are
specifically focused on a three objectives: 1)
building a community of Certified B Corpo-
rations (B=Benefit) that legally expand their
corporate responsibilities to include consid-
eration of diverse stakeholder interests, 2)
advancing the public policies necessary to
create a new corporate form called a Benefit
Corporation, and 3) creating an investment
rating system to help drive institutional invest-
ment to the emerging asset class of “impact
investments.” The case considers the chal-
lenges associated with achieving each one of

STRATEGY

Passion and Purpose

Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders
By John Coleman, Daniel Gulati, and W.O. Segovia

This inspiring new book draws on personal stories from recent Harvard Business School
MBAs, as well as a survey of students from top U.S. business schools, for insights about
assuming leadership after graduation. AVAILABLE IN CHAPTERS
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senior political analyst, CNN; and former presidential advisor

TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 19

S OC I A L E N T E R P R I S E — STRATEGY
these objectives, let alone all three at the same
time. Is B Lab’s tripartite strategy its secret
sauce or its albatross?
Cause-Related Marketing: 3M as a
Corporate Sponsor of the Canadian
Breast Cancer Foundation
Allison Johnson, Laurie Dudo
Richard Ivey School of Business
Foundation Case
TN Product #W11047 (18 pages)
3M Canada (3M) has been a corporate sponsor
of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
(CBCF, or the Foundation) since 2005. In sup-
port of the CBCF, 3M has produced and sold
“pink products” (products that bear the pink
ribbon, such as Post-it Notes and flag pens,
Nexcare bandages, and Scotch-Brite sponges),
with a contribution of each sale benefiting
the CBCF. This case examines the corporate
sponsorship relationship, specifically how
3M’s brand manager for Post-it–brand office
products can further activate the relationship
with CBCF. The brand manager’s marketing
campaign for 2009 was successful; however,
she now needs to determine the best approach
for her 2010 campaign.
The Test of Transition: The Case of
the Community Preservation and
Development Corporation
Alexander Von Hoffman
Harvard Kennedy School Case
TN Product #HKS123 (27 pages)
The Community Preservation and Devel-
opment Corporation (CPDC), one of the
best-known nonprofit housing development
companies in the United States, is at a time
of fundamental transition, due largely to a
new chief executive officer. The first CEO
had made a specialty of using a variety of
complicated financial arrangements to revive
assisted low-income housing projects that had
become or were at risk of becoming dilapi-
dated, crime-ridden disasters. The organiza-
tion had become famous for blazing new
trails in providing services for the low-income
residents of its housing projects, particularly
related to technology. But CPDC was a house
divided. Concerned about CPDC’s difficulties
in accounting and reporting its revenues and
expenditures, members of the board of direc-
tors became more involved in running the
organization and contributed to the departure
of the organization’s founding CEO. Funda-
20 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
mentally, CPDC was afflicted with what might
be called organizational schizophrenia, with
two different lines of business, each with its
own organizational structure, funding mecha-
nism, and supporters on the board of direc-
tors. The case presents the question of what
strategies and, ultimately, business model the
incoming CEO should adopt to keep the orga-
nization viable and fulfill its mission.
STRATEGY
Adaptability: The New Competitive
Advantage
Martin Reeves, Mike Deimler
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1107M (9 pages)
Traditional approaches to strategy assume
that the world is relatively stable and predict-
able. But globalization, new technologies,
and greater transparency have combined to
upend the business environment. In this
period of risk and uncertainty, more and more
managers are finding competitive advantage
in organizational capabilities that foster rapid
adaptation. Instead of being really good at
doing some particular thing, companies must
be really good at learning how to do new
things. Those that thrive are quick to read
and act on weak signals of change. They have
worked out how to experiment rapidly and
frequently not only with products and services
but also with business models, processes, and
strategies. They have acquired the skills to
manage complex multi-stakeholder systems
in an increasingly interconnected world. And
perhaps most important, they have learned to
unlock their greatest resource: the people who
work for them. The authors, senior partners
at the Boston Consulting Group, review these
four types of organizational capabilities, show-
ing what companies at the leading edge are
doing to create them. They also discuss the
particular implications of this fundamental
strategic shift for large corporations, many of
which have built their operations around scale
and efficiency—sources of advantage predi-
cated on an essentially stable environment.
Game Time Decision for AppDirect
Andrei Hagiu, Laura Arjona,
Emily Zhang
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #712410 (15 pages)
AppDirect is a start-up that offers small busi-
nesses software-as-a-service solutions through
a business app marketplace and portal. Daniel
Saks, cofounder and co-CEO, is faced with the
key question of deciding distribution strategy:
should AppDirect find channel partners or
create a self-branded platform? The case
describes the evolving business app market by
analyzing the strategies and business models
of competitors for both the marketplace and
portal products. The marketplace offers small
businesses search, trial, and purchase of
software-as-a-service apps for a wide range of
business needs, from customer management
to human resources, while the portal service
gives businesses the ability to manage all their
apps in one place, from user management to
single sign-on. The case encourages discus-
sion on the evolution and future direction of
this nascent market.
ICICI Bank’s Credit Card: Journey
to Asian Leadership
Arunaditya Sahay, Shilpi Jain,
Vineet Kapoor
University of Hong Kong Case
TN Product # HKU935 (28 pages)
When ICICI, an Indian private bank, entered
the retail banking market in the 1990s with
little technology infrastructure, capital, and
retail expertise, few expected it to succeed.
Public-sector banks, holding 75 percent of
deposits, were dominating the retail banking
market, and foreign giants had cornered the
market for high-net-worth individuals living in
the major cities across India. With a strategy
to offer credit cards to the middle class, abol-
ish annual fees, and enter into partnerships
with major retailers, ICICI quickly proved the
skeptics wrong. Revenues per employee grew
to over $9 million compared to about $3 mil-
lion for the Bank of India and slightly below
$160,000 for Standard Chartered. The lofty
number one position was achieved by Vaidya-
nathan, ICICI’s head of retail, and his team.
Their progressive initiatives were focused
on developing new products and improving
consumer service experiences. As the 2008–
2009 financial crisis tripled the percentage of
nonperforming assets in the Indian banking

STRATEGY
Understanding Michael Porter
The Essential Guide to Competition
and Strategy
By Joan Magretta
Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on
competition and strategy are required reading
for MBA students—but they often misunderstand
his concepts. Written by Porter’s former editor
at Harvard Business Review, this book provides
an engaging and highly readable summary of
Porter’s ideas and includes an original Q&A with
Porter, including answers to FAQs.
industry, Vaidyanathan had to plan how ICICI
would adapt to the new environment and
maintain industry leadership.
Good Capital and Better World
Books (A): A Better World for
Investing
Jamie Jones, Jennifer Yee, Wes Selke
Kellogg School of Management Case
TN Product #KEL526 (14 pages)
The purpose of this case is to introduce the
topic of socially responsible investing from
both the investor and investee perspectives.
The students will walk away with an under-
standing of 1) how to evaluate a portfolio
company on a social/environmental mission
and on traditional financial criteria, and 2)
what considerations should be top of mind
for a social venture considering accepting an
equity investment. Wes Selke is a portfolio
manager at Good Capital, an investment fund
created to increase the flow of capital to inno-
vative nonprofit and for-profit social ventures
that are using market-based solutions to solve
problems of poverty, illiteracy, and inequality.
In 2007, Good Capital is ready to make its
first growth equity investment in a for-profit
social enterprise and Selke is considering
Better World Books as the firm’s primary
target. Selke must evaluate whether or not the
firm is a financially sound investment and if
its social and environmental missions can be
preserved upon a liquidation event. If Good
Capital proceeds with the investment, Selke
must also rework some of Better World Books’
TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE
AVAILABLE IN CHAPTERS
Harvard Business Review Press
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current procedures, including fine-tuning the
philanthropic giving strategy that is the main
component of its social mission.
Grolsch: Growing Globally
Pankaj Ghemawat, Steven A. Altman
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #PG0001 (31 pages)
Grolsch reassesses its international strategy in
light of the company’s recent acquisition by
SABMiller, the world’s second-largest brewer.
Grolsch was the 21st-largest global beer brand,
sold 51.5 percent of its volume in interna-
tional markets, and exported to 70 countries.
However, its poor profitability in international
markets—four countries alone accounting for
two-thirds of foreign sales—and churn of
markets and distribution partners raised
concerns about the company’s international
strategy and execution. Grolsch’s 60 years
of history in foreign markets provide a rich
backdrop to introduce a range of interna-
tional strategy topics, including performance
assessment, rationale for expansion, market
selection, and choice of entry mode.
Haier: Taking a Chinese Company
Global in 2011
Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu,
Phillip Andrews
Harvard Business School Case
Product #712408 (23 pages)
In 2011, Haier, China’s leading appliance
manufacturer, had over $20 billion in world-
wide sales and had just been named the lead-
ing refrigerator manufacturer worldwide. The
ST RAT EGY
case describes Haier’s rise over three decades,
from a defunct refrigerator factory in China’s
Shandong province to an international player
with $5.5 billion in overseas sales. Haier had
followed a nontraditional expansion strategy
of entering the developed markets of Europe
and the United States as a niche player before
venturing into Middle Eastern and neighbor-
ing Asian markets. Looking ahead to the next
decade, Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin saw oppor-
tunities for Haier to grow through product
diversification and additional market penetra-
tion in both developed and emerging markets.
He and his colleagues would depend on their
experience of acquiring numerous companies,
entering and retaining new markets, restructur-
ing the organization, and managing hundreds
of subsidiaries around the world. They would
need to determine which of the lessons learned
from Haier’s international operations should
be implemented in China and which skills
learned at home could best be applied abroad.
How Great Companies Think
Differently
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1111C (11 pages)
Corporate leaders have long subscribed to
the belief that the sole purpose of business
is to make money. That narrow view, deeply
embedded in the American capitalist system,
molds the actions of most corporations,
constraining them to focus on maximizing
short-term profits and returns to shareholders
at the expense of worker safety and health,
the environment, and society in general. In
this article, HBS professor Kanter argues that
a very different logic informs the practices of
most high-performing and sustainable compa-
nies: an institutional logic. These companies
believe that they are more than moneymaking
machines; they are also a vehicle for advanc-
ing societal goals. They deliver more than just
financial returns; they also build enduring
institutions. At great companies, institutional
logic takes its place alongside economic logic
in research, analysis, and managerial decision
making. Six facets of institutional logic—a
common purpose, a long-term focus, emo-
tional engagement, partnering with the public,
innovation, and self-organization—radically
alter leadership and corporate behavior and
form the building blocks of a more sustain-
able competitive advantage.
hbsp.harvard.edu 1-800-545-7685 | 21
STRAT E GY
Know What Your Customers Want
Before They Do
Thomas H. Davenport,
Leandro Dalle Mule, John Lucker
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1112E (8 pages)
Shoppers once relied on familiar salespeople
to help them find exactly what they wanted—
and sometimes to suggest additional items
they hadn’t even thought of. But today’s
distracted consumers, bombarded with infor-
mation and options, often struggle to find
products or services that meet their needs.
Advances in information technology, data
gathering, and analytics are making it possible
to deliver something like the personal advice
of yesterday’s sales staffs. Using increasingly
granular customer data, businesses are start-
ing to create highly customized offers that
steer shoppers to the “right” merchandise—
at the right moment, at the right price, and in
the right channel. But few companies can do
this well. The authors demonstrate how retail-
ers can hone their “next best offer” (NBO)
capability by breaking the problem down into
four steps: defining objectives, gathering data
(about your customers, your products, and the
purchase context), analyzing and executing,
and learning and evolving. Citing success-
ful strategies in companies such as Tesco,
Zappos, Microsoft, and Walmart, they provide
a framework for nailing the NBO.
Making a Blue Ocean Strategic
Move That Discourages Imitation
W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne,
Katrina Ling
INSEAD Case
TN Product #BOS020 (12 pages)
This case is excellent for teaching both MBAs
and executives how to create a blue ocean
strategy that is hard to imitate and sustainable.
It focuses on Wikipedia versus Britannica.com
in the online encyclopedia industry. The case
teaches participants the importance of align-
ing the three strategy propositions of value,
profit, and people around both differentiation
and low cost to break the value-cost trade-off
and create a blue ocean that is hard to imitate.
22 | SPRING 2012 Teaching Materials Newsletter
Mittal Steel in 2006: Changing
the Steel Game
Pankaj Ghemawat, Ravi Madhavan
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #PG0002 (31 pages)
Mittal Steel’s remarkable rise to the top of the
steel industry spearheaded a wave of cross-
border consolidation that aimed to fundamen-
tally change the industry’s competitive and
geographic structure. This case provides the
opportunity to examine how Lakshmi Mittal
built his company’s position via international
acquisitions, to assess the logic of global
integration in the steel industry, and to think
through how Mittal can continue adding
value to its acquired operations on an ongoing
basis (i.e., post-turnaround) as a global steel
company.
Northlands Ledger (A):
Management Style, Strategy,
and Performance
Robert Dewar
Kellogg School of Management,
Northwestern Case
TN Product # KEL536 (9 pages)
Case (A) describes the situation at the North-
lands Ledger, a newspaper on its way out of
business due in large part to its publisher’s
and editors’ focus on what they do and want to
keep doing rather than on what their custom-
ers (readers and advertisers) want. The value
proposition to the reader is that they deliver
the paper reliably and provide the latest
national and international news. The value
proposition to the advertisers is that they print
ads accurately and runs them on time. Both
value propositions are outdated, and, even if
they were what the customers wanted, which
they were not, neither was being executed
well. The paper’s key performance indica-
tors—circulation, classified ads, and commer-
cial advertising—are all in decline despite the
fact that the community it serves is growing.
The senior management of the Paulus chain
that owns this paper has forced the pub-
lisher, Allison, to retire and brought another
publisher, Potter, in from one of its other
papers, The Sun Belt City Star, where Potter
was highly successful. However, he cannot
simply transfer his success formula from the
Star to the Ledger. Case (B) details his efforts
and may be used as a classic example of good
change management and leadership practices.
Potter established a clear-cut set of objectives
and formulated a new strategy of responsive-
ness to readers and advertisers that responded
to why they “hired” the paper in the first place.
To implement his new strategy he terminated
senior managers and others who he did not
feel could contribute to the new paper, and
made significant changes in key dimen-
sions of implementation: culture, structure,
information and decision support systems,
incentives, and human resources. Through-
out he used a mix of both authoritative and
participative change management—a mix that
may provoke an interesting class discussion.
Responding to the Wii?
Andrei Hagiu, Hanna Halaburda
HBS Premier Case Collection
TN Product #709448 (19 pages)
After years of gaming console industry
leadership, how should Sony respond to the
overwhelming success of competitor Nin-
tendo’s user-friendly Wii over Sony’s high-tech
PlayStation 3? It was August 2008, and Kazuo
Hirai, chief executive of Sony Computer
Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), was contemplat-
ing questions from reporters about how Sony
planned to respond to Nintendo’s Wii console,
which was dramatically leading Sony’s Play-
Station 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 consoles
in sales. The Wii’s supremacy was especially
disconcerting to Hirai, given that Sony had
dominated the video game industry and
largely defined its course since 1995. But the
tables had turned dramatically in the current
generation. Though the Wii was technologi-
cally much less advanced than were PS3 and
Xbox 360, the Wii’s ease of use, innovative
motion-sensitive controller, and simple but
fun games had made the console a hit with
all demographics: nine to 65 years old, male
and female. As a result, Nintendo had stolen a
march on its two larger rivals by appealing to
people who were traditionally not avid video
game users. Microsoft’s and Sony’s more pow-
erful machines remained targeted at the tradi-
tional “core gamer” audience: 18-to-65-year-old
males. Hirai was determined to restore that
supremacy in the current generation or the
next. He knew that whether or not he publicly
defined SCEI’s strategy as a response to Wii,
he had to find a way for his company to deal
with the new order of the video game industry
that Nintendo had created. In seeking to do
so, Hirai might find guidance in the history of
the industry, which had been marked by rapid
and frequent changes of fortune.

Social Strategies That Work
Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Harvard Business Review Article
Product #R1111H (8 pages)
Although most companies have collected lots
of friends and followers on social platforms
such as Facebook, few have succeeded in
generating profits there. That’s because they
merely port their digital strategies into social
environments by broadcasting their commer-
cial messages or seeking customer feedback.
To succeed on social platforms, says the
author, businesses need to devise social strate-
gies that are consistent with users’ expecta-
tions and behavior in these venues—namely,
people want to connect with other people, not
with companies. The author defines suc-
cessful social strategies as those that reduce
costs or increase customers’ willingness to
pay by helping people establish or strengthen
relationships through doing free work on a
company’s behalf. Citing successes at Zynga,
eBay, American Express, and Yelp, Piskorski
shows that social strategies can generate
profits by helping people connect in exchange
for tasks that benefit the company, such as
customer acquisition, marketing, and content
creation. He lays out a systematic way to build
a social strategy and shows how a major credit
card company he advised used the method to
roll out its own strategy.
Wal-Mart Update, 2011
David B. Yoffie, Renee Kim
Harvard Business School Case
TN Product #711546 (10 pages)
In 2011, Wal-Mart was the world’s largest
company, with $420 billion in sales and
operations in 14 countries. Yet it found itself
searching for the right growth strategy moving
forward. U.S. same-store sales had declined
for eight consecutive quarters, and Wal-Mart
was increasingly becoming dependent on
international sales. Meanwhile, intense com-
petition came from various players, ranging
from general discounters to dollar stores to
online retailers. What should Wal-Mart do as
its traditional markets and core competencies
no longer ensure the kind of growth that it
had enjoyed for decades in the past?
TN TEACHING NOTE AVAILABLE
ST RAT EGY
Which Strategy When?
Christopher B. Bingham, Kathleen M. CONTACT US
Eisenhardt, Nathan R. Furr
MIT Sloan Management Review Article
Product #SMR401 (7 pages) CUSTOMER SERVICE
is available Monday–Friday
Markets are changing, competition is shifting,
8 am–6 pm, ET
and businesses may be suffering or perhaps
thriving. Whatever the immediate circum-
stances, corporate managers ask the same PHONE 800-545-7685
questions: where do we go from here, and +1 617-783-7600
which strategy will get us there? To under- (outside the U.S. and Canada)
stand how to choose the right strategy at the
right time, the authors analyzed the logic
of the leading strategic frameworks used in
business and engineering schools around the TECH SUPPORT
world. They matched those frameworks with is available Monday–Friday
the key strategic choices faced by dozens of 8 am–8 pm, ET
industry leaders at different times, during
periods of stability and of change. Two
PHONE 800-810-8858
insights emerged from their analysis. First,
the frameworks divided into three archetypes: +1 617-783-7700
(outside the U.S. and Canada)
strategies of position, strategies of leverage,
and strategies of opportunity. What’s right
for a company depends on its circumstances,
its available resources, and how manage-
EMAIL
ment combines those resources. Second,
custserv@hbsp.harvard.edu
many of the assumptions about competitive
advantage didn’t hold. For example, although WEB
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strategy gurus talk about strategically valuable
resources, sometimes competitive advantage
came from very ordinary resources assembled
well. To figure out when it makes sense to
pursue strategies of position, leverage, or
opportunity, the authors advise managers
to understand their company’s immediate
circumstances, take stock of their current
resources, and determine the relationships
among the various resources. Understanding
these factors, they argue, will help managers
select the right strategic framework.
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