Katherine Bose, Andrew Rachleff
2007
CacheFlow’s president and CEO Brian NeSmith was dumbstruck. His newly hired CFO, Bob Verheecke, had just informed him that sales productivity remained flat at $1.2 million per sales team per year (roughly 40 percent of the industry norm), despite a layoff…
Leandro Cuccioli, Steve de Bonvoisin, Raquel Gonzalez-Dalmau, Gustavo Lopes, R. McKern
2007
Based in Charlotte, North Carolina, American Colonial Heritage, Inc. (ACH) was a top-ten U.S. furniture manufacturer focused on the upper end of the indoor home furniture market. Alexandra Jones, who had earned her MBA a few years prior, worked on the…
Bethany Coates, Kathryn Shaw
2007
Alejandro Ramirez, the CEO of Cinepolis, the largest film exhibitor in Latin America, sat in the back of row of the company’s flagship movie theatre in Mexico City one evening in January 2005. The company was preparing to roll out an expensive new IT…
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
CPG Inc. is an exercise for students to perform outside of class in groups of two and was designed for a specific trial section of the Stanford GSB’s “Managing Growing Enterprises” course. The section focused on negotiations.
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
CPG Inc. is an exercise for students to perform outside of class in groups of two and was designed for a specific trial section of the Stanford GSB’s “Managing Growing Enterprises” course. The section focused on negotiations.
Katherine Bose, Joel Peterson
2007
CPG Inc. is an exercise for students to perform outside of class in groups of two and was designed for a specific trial section of the Stanford GSB’s “Managing Growing Enterprises” course. The section focused on negotiations.
Bethany Coates, Joel Peterson
2007
Chris Frederick, CEO of Cross Link Software (CLS), a human resources technology company, had just finished a meeting with John Fine, one of Cross Link’s most influential board members. As was typical with most of their interactions, Frederick and Fine…
Katherine Bose, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In June 2007, Doostang’s cofounder, Mareza Larizadeh, was over-whelmed. His invite-only online career community for twenty-somethings had seen steady growth in the two years since its launch, but Larizadeh continued to run into problem after problem…
Robert Chess, Peter Reiss, Sean Harrington, Matt Saucedo
2007
In the spring of 2007, four budding companies were in the very early phase of their development. These entrepreneurial ventures illustrate the variety and breadth of new business ideas that can be pursued, and the unique issues that need to be tackled in…
William Barnett, Ziad Mokhtar, Gabriel Tavridis
2007
Facebook, a social networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg, initially targeted the college demographic. Once openned to the general population, the site grew rapidly. In September 2006, Facebook added two features that triggered strong negative…
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Early one morning in September 1994, Marc Porat, CEO of technology start-up General Magic (GM), dropped his daughter off at elementary school and then reached for his personal intelligent communicator (PIC) to check messages. GM had created the PIC in…
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
In October 1991, Howard Charney, a co-founder of 3Com, and Bernard Daines, an expert on Ethernet and networking, began hosting brainstorming sessions for “the next big idea in networking” at Charney’s home in Los Gatos, California. Participants included…
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Will Harvey hopped onto his road bike and began pedaling up Old La Honda Road, the famously steep and windy street in Portola Valley, California. As the climb became more arduous, Harvey, the co-founder and CEO of IMVU, a company that developed 3D avatar…
R. McKern
2007
Dougal Simpson, an experienced Australian manager who had 20 years of experience with Industrial Products AG (IPAG), a large Swiss-based company in the field of industrial chemicals and plastics, accepted the position of managing director, Southeast Asia…
Leandro Cuccioli, Steve de Bonvoisin, Raquel Gonzalez-Dalmau, Gustavo Lopes, R. McKern
2007
This industry notes gives a thorough overview of the furniture market, focusing primarily on the American market. The note provides a general background, starting with market size, industry organization, and trends. It goes on to discuss manufacturers…
Patrick Arippol, George Foster
2007
The International Fight League (IFL) case describes the sports company’s formation and growth, the mixed martial arts (MMA) industry in 2007, and culminates in the dilemma of what the company should to strategically in order to survive, at that juncture…
Sean Harrington, Andrew Rachleff
2007
On June 8, 2005, Scott Cook, founder and chairman of the Executive Committee of Intuit, sat down to a meeting with CEO Steve Bennett to discuss the future of TaxAlmanac. Intuit had developed a strong business selling software to tax professionals, but…
Bethany Coates, R. Ellis
2007
In this fictional case, Jennifer Gaston, founder and CEO of mid-sized luxury jewelry company Aquamarine, was managing a couple of key hiring issues that had recently cropped up. In just six months, Gaston had brought in a new COO and was about to…
Bethany Coates, H. Grousbeck
2007
This case asks students to evaluate how to handle three general management challenges that cropped up for John Stanton, the CEO of Western Wireless Communications, during a difficult period in the company’s history (the aftermath of the Internet “bust”)…
Erica Plambeck, Joshua Spitzer
2007
“Khosla Ventures: Investing in Ethanol” presents the background and premise of Khosla Ventures’ investments in the ethanol value chain. It asks students to determine where in the ethanol value chain Khosla should consider investing, how the firm should…
Patrick Arippol, Charles Holloway
2007
The case chronicles the initial formation and growth of KongZhong, one of China’s leading players in the wireless value added service (WVAS) market. By 2007, KongZhong’s founders face the ‘perfect storm,’ given the highly dynamic nature of the WVAS…
Katherine Bose, S. Wheeler
2007
The protagonists are Lara Jackle and Lynn Graham, CEO and VP Marketing for Lightfull Foods respectively. Lightfull is a beverage start-up based in Northern California that is struggling with a major strategic decision which centers around its use and…
Mark Leslie, Patrick Arippol
2007
Set in mid-2002, this case illustrates “a day in the life” of a district sales manager of a Silicon Valley company, as the technology market faced a downturn. The case enables a polarized class discussion about the tradeoffs that a new district manager…
Bethany Coates, Andrew Rachleff
2007
Netflix, the online movie rental subscription service, did not contend with significant direct competition in online DVD rentals for six years until Blockbuster, the movie rental chain giant, entered the market in 2004 and began a price war. After that…