Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (291)
- December 2004 (Revised April 2006)
- Case
Managing a Public Image: Rob Thomas
By: Robin J. Ely and Ingrid Vargas
Rob Thomas describes some of the challenges he has faced as a white, middle-aged man who is managing director of a mid-size consulting firm where he is committed to increasing staff gender and racial diversity. Unwilling to risk the disapproval of any constituency,... View Details
- September 2004
- Case
Valhalla Partners Due Diligence
By: William A. Sahlman and Dan Heath
The Valhalla Partners venture capitial firm introduced a new approach to the due-diligence process. An internal due-diligence report analyzes Telco Exchange, a startup company in the IT software space. An extended excerpt examines the trade-offs involved in the new... View Details
- March 2004 (Revised May 2005)
- Case
Foreign Exchange Hedging Strategies at General Motors
By: Mihir A. Desai and Mark Veblen
How should a multinational firm manage foreign exchange exposures? Examines transactional, translational, and competitive exposures. Describes General Motors' corporate hedging policies, its risk management structure, and how accounting rules impact hedging decisions.... View Details
- December 2003 (Revised October 2006)
- Case
Globalizing the Cost of Capital and Capital Budgeting at AES
By: Mihir A. Desai and Douglas Kurt Schillinger
With electricity generating businesses around the world, AES Corp. is seeking a methodology for calculating the cost of capital for its various businesses and potential projects. In the past, AES used the same cost of capital for all of its capital budgeting, but the... View Details
- November 2003 (Revised March 2006)
- Case
Dow Chemical's Bid for the Privatization of PBB in Argentina
By: Mihir A. Desai and Alexandra de Royere
What price should Dow Chemical bid for PBB, a petrochemical complex that is being privatized by the Argentine government? To answer this question, students are forced to consider the role of country risk, the underlying currency exposure of the business, and how to... View Details
- November 2003 (Revised May 2016)
- Case
Weetman Pearson and the Mexican Oil Industry (A)
By: Geoffrey Jones and Lisa Bud-Freirman
Taught in the MBA Evolution of Global Business course, a business history course on the growth of multinationals. Explores the role of the British entrepreneur Weetman Pearson in developing the Mexican oil industry before 1914. Shows this entrepreneur's evolution from... View Details
- August 2003 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Fighting the Battle of the Bulge—Evaluating Do Good/Do Well Innovations in Morbid Obesity Treatment
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and John McDonough
Many health care innovations appear successful; but fail. This is the first case in the Innovating Health Care course that investigates how to create successful health care innovations. It is part of the first module in the course. This module focuses on how to... View Details
- 2003
- Conference Paper
Follow the Money: What Really Drives Technology Innovation in Construction
By: John D. Macomber
Technology enthusiasts, academics, and software companies remain concerned about the slow pace of innovation in the construction industry. Tools are widely available that seem to provide eminently sensible and clearly apparent improvement to the process of design and... View Details
- February 2003 (Revised March 2007)
- Case
Safe to Say at Prudential Financial
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Corey B. Hajim
The CEO initiated a cultural change process at Prudential Financial to support a major business reorientation. Prudential, historically a privately held ("mutual") insurance company, went public in 2001. The cultural change was intended to prepare the organization to... View Details
- February 2003 (Revised January 2006)
- Case
AIT Group Plc
By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon
A U.S. venture capital firm has just learned that the deal structure for purchasing an illiquid U.K. software firm is unacceptable to institutional investors. The group must decide if it still wants to go through with the deal. This decision hinges on whether the... View Details
- October 2002 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Group Process in the Challenger Launch Decision (A)
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Laura Feldman
The night before the launch of the Challenger shuttle, officials from Morton Thiokol (Solid Rocket Booster manufacturer) and NASA participated in a teleconference to discuss whether to postpone the shuttle launch due to predicted low temperatures at Kennedy Space... View Details
- September 2002 (Revised August 2003)
- Case
Genzyme's Gaucher Initiative: Global Risk and Responsibility
By: Christopher A. Bartlett and Andrew N. McLean
In Egypt, Genzyme's humanitarian commitment to treat all sufferers of the rare Gaucher disease worldwide first confronts its commercial imperative to recoup the huge investment required to bring the drug Cerezyme to market. Here Tomye Tierney must decide how to balance... View Details
- April 2002 (Revised February 2003)
- Module Note
Teaching Project Finance: An Overview of the Large-Scale Investment Course
By: Benjamin C. Esty
Large-Scale Investment is a case-based course about project finance for second-year MBA students. Project finance involves the creation of a legally independent project company financed with nonrecourse debt for the purpose of investing in a single-purpose industrial... View Details
- February 2002 (Revised September 2002)
- Case
Competition in Japanese Financial Markets, 2002
By: Tarun Khanna and Louis P. DiLorenzo, Jr
In early 2002, Japan, the world's largest economy, had been mired in a decade-long recession. A range of stimulus packages had failed to work their magic. The "Big Bang" financial deregulation reforms announced in 1998 had not quite produced the economic boom that the... View Details
- January 2002 (Revised October 2007)
- Case
Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., 2001
By: Joshua Musher and Andre F. Perold
Asset manager GMO underperforms the market during the 1996-2000 stock market bubble because of the focus on absolute risk. After suffering significant client withdrawals, performance again shines when the bubble collapses. Did they win the battle only to lose the war?... View Details
- December 2001 (Revised April 2003)
- Case
Poland's A2 Motorway
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Michael Kane
Autostrada Wielkopolska S.A. (AWSA) is a consortium of 18 firms that won a concession to build and operate Poland's first private toll road. In June 2000, AWSA's chief financial officer, Wojciech Gebicki, is preparing for a meeting with the projects' lead bankers to... View Details
- 2001
- Working Paper
Bank Capital and Risk Management: Issues for Banks and Regulators
By: Kenneth A. Froot
Banks and financial firms are in the process of evolving away from primary warehousers of risk to diversified originators and distributors of financial services. These changes are important for the way that financial firms think about their needs for economic... View Details
- February 2001 (Revised April 2001)
- Case
Merrill Lynch: Integrated Choice (Abridged)
By: F. Warren McFarlan and James Weber
Merrill Lynch, a full-service brokerage firm with $1.5 trillion in client assets, is under attack from both discount and electronic brokerage firms. It responds with Integrated Choice, a suite of products designed to capture clients, from the do-it-yourself investor... View Details
- February 2001 (Revised March 2001)
- Case
Apax Partners and Dialog Semiconductor: March 1998
By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner, Antonio Alvarez-Cano and Borja Martinez
Apax Partners is considering a complex buyout of a semiconductor manufacturer. The firms must assess in a compressed timeframe the complex technological, financial, and operational risks that the proposed transaction poses. View Details
- December 2000
- Background Note
Online Market Makers
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Chris Hackett
Describes the business model for online market makers, firms that use the Internet to organize a marketplace, providing participants with a virtual "place" to trade, rules to govern their exchanges, and infrastructure to support trading. First it proposes a definition... View Details