OB78
Jeffrey Pfeffer
2010
Pay and promotion discrimination for women continues in the United States. Women earn less than similarly qualified men, tend to work in occupations and job titles that pay less, and are underrepresented in senior management ranks, including CEO and…
SM190
Robert A. Burgelman, Robert Eric Siegel, Morgan Hallmon
2010
In 2010, First Solar was the global leader in photovoltaic (PV) modules and looked to dominate the market going forward. The company’s strong market position was largely predicated on its proprietary Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) cell technology, which had…
SM181A
Sara Leslie, Jesper Sorensen
2010
Peter Löscher became CEO of Siemens in July, 2007. It was one of the most turbulent times in the company’s history as the company was reeling from a compliance scandal involving hundreds of millions of Euros in suspected bribes, and had to pay billions…
OIT96
Gretchen Daily, Sara Leslie, Erica Plambeck
2010
This case focuses on an opportunity that American Electric Power (AEP) has to invest, with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), in one of the world’s first projects for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). The proposed plan was…
E381A
William Barnett, Sara Leslie
2010
Paul Coletta, a senior customer experience manager, and Floyd Morgan, a principal software engineer, had worked on the TurboTax tax preparation product at Intuit for several years. They had always gravitated toward the new product mindset and with Web 2…
E381B
William Barnett, Sara Leslie
2010
Paul Coletta, a senior customer experience manager, and Floyd Morgan, a principal software engineer, had worked on the TurboTax tax preparation product at Intuit for several years. They had always gravitated toward the new product mindset and with Web 2…
E370
Andrew Rachleff, Bethany Coates
2010
Late one evening in October 2008, Andy Rachleff, the president and CEO of kaChing, stepped out of the office for a walk around the block. The 8-member team at kaChing, an online social investing start up that planned to automate the practice of emulating…
HR36
Hayagreeva Rao, Thomas J Friel
2010
As one of the world’s largest producers of industrial electronics components, Chemrad Corporation generated annual sales in excess of $1 billion. A public company listed on the NYSE, Chemrad had been a favorite of analysts for two decades for its strong…
IB88
William Barnett, Mi Feng, Xiaoqu Luo
2010
By 2008, Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba.com Inc., was in a position to consider how to fortify Taobao’s dominant position in China’s online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market. Ma and his company had come a long way since May 2003, when they first launched the…
HR37
Hayagreeva Rao, Thomas Friel
2010
Manutech Corporation was a global manufacturing company focused primarily on contract manufacturing for many of the world’s leading computer industry original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Manutech, founded in the late 1970s, operated manufacturing…
E386
H. Grousbeck, Aimee LaFont Leifer, Tjarko Leifer, Lisa Sweeney
2010
This is an updated version of the Search Fund Study that is done every approximately every two years. The study briefly explains the concept of a Search Fund and surveys all known Search Funds to determine demographics, financial results, and other…
L15
Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton, Isaac Waisberg
2009
In 2007, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals’ manufacturing organization faced a number of challenges, requiring that it revolutionize the way its 17,000 people operated. The case describes alternative methods of systemic change considered by Wyeth, the approach they…
HR35
David Hoyt, Hayagreeva Rao, Robert Sutton
2009
Mozilla launched its Firefox web browser in November 2004, when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had a market share of over 90 percent, and was giving its browser away. Five years later, Firefox had a 25 percent share, and more than 300 million people were…
E346
H. Grousbeck, Claire Magat
2009
This case follows Peter Kingston, the CEO of Vector Healthcare, through the process of 1) forming a partnership, 2) launching a search fund, 3) acquiring a company in the health insurance space and 4) selling the company through an auction. It explores…
E333
H. Grousbeck, Jocelyn Hornblower
2009
The case follows Andy Laats, a recent graduate from the Stanford GSB, and his business partner Chad DiNenna as they launch and grow an action sports watch company, Nixon, Inc. It covers their inspiration for the business idea and the process they went…
SM176
Robert Burgelman, David Hoyt, Amanda Silverman, Christof Wittig
2009
In September 2008, Google and its Open Handset Alliance (OHA) partner, T-Mobile, launched the first Android-enabled smartphone in the U.S. market. Android was a new, open source, operating system for the wireless industry, developed by the OHA, a group…
OD6B
Glenn Carroll, Victoria Chang
2009
By 2008, GlobeOp was a leader in technology-enabled middle- and back-office support services and fund administration for hedge funds, fund managers, family wealth managers, and institutional investors, serving more than 160 clients worldwide (55 percent…
OB69
Jesper Sorensen
2009
Many people are skeptical of the idea that organizational cultures exert any real effects on individual and organizational behavior. One reason for this suspicion is that people often use the word “culture” as a catch-all category for “the way things are…
OB73
Jeffrey Pfeffer
2009
Zia Yusuf, a Pakistani graduate of Harvard Business School in 1998, joined SAP, a high technology software company, in 2000 after working first at Goldman Sachs. Although Yusuf had no technical background nor ever worked in sales, marketing, or software…
OB75
Jeffrey Pfeffer
2009
In July, 2009, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, received an e-mail. The two co-founders and joint co-CEOs and their colleagues at Orange Kimono Software were struggling with their pay system. Orange…
OB73V
Jeffrey Pfeffer
2009
Zia Yusuf, a Pakistani graduate of Harvard Business School, joined SAP, a high technology software company, in 2000. Although Yusuf had no technical background nor had ever worked in sales, marketing, or software development, he moved up rapidly at SAP…
OB72
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Megan Anderson
2009
Kimberly-Clark in the Andean region had hit a performance plateau. Five years prior, Sergio Nacach had taken over as general manager for the region and had embarked on a cultural transformation to build a winning culture centered on the people who worked…
SM175
Robert Burgelman, Andrew Grove, Debra Schifrin
2009
The case covers and analyzes the major players in the Electric Car Industry, with a focus on the United States and China. The case looks at start-ups and incumbent automakers, battery makers, retrofitters, utility companies and the government. In 2009…
SM183
Robert Burgelman, Andrew Grove, Debra Schifrin
2009
This case covers the coal industry and clean coal initiatives in the Unites States and China. Coal is a crucial source of global energy, but coal-fired plants are environmentally unfriendly and are a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. One way…
