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Dell Online
by Marie Bell V. Kasturi RanganDell started online commerce for its PCs in 1996, and by 1997 had achieved a sales rate of $3 million a day. The case describes the internal process that led to these dramatic results and poses the question of how the firm should leverage this activity to meet Michael Dell's goal of achieving 50% of the company's anticipated $20 billion in sales by the year 2000 via Internet channels.
Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground
by V. Kasturi Rangan Navid MojirThe case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion -- the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company's business strategy and its go-to-market operations.Michael Dell founded Dell Inc. in 1984 to assemble PCs. The company quickly became the market share leader by the end of the century. By 2008 (before the recession), Dell had expanded into servers, networking and storage, as well as services. Still, the hardware market was beginning to commoditize, with the trend accelerating after the recession. EMC, founded in 1979, had a similar story. It became the dominant player in data storage through early 2000 only to find that new technologies and nimble competitors were putting its business under severe commodity pressure by the turn of the century. Thus in 2015, when Dell made a $67 billion acquisition of EMC, many knowledgeable IT industry observers found it hard to comprehend the logic of two commodity/hardware players coming together. By then, most enterprises, large and small, were eyeing digital transformation. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud seemed to be serving their needs. Thus, Michael Dell had to carefully construct a strategic position for the newly constituted Dell company in the rapidly evolving IT market space. In addition, Dell and EMC also had to decide how to merge their Go-to-Market operations to gain the synergies promised by the merger. Dell had over 365,000 customers and EMC nearly 430,000. Dell had 17,000 salespeople and EMC, 7,000. Each had over 10,000 channel partners. Adding a wrinkle to the merger was a third actor, VMware, an independently listed cloud software company, 80% owned by the new Dell Technologies entity. Integrating their software capability would be an exciting opportunity and a challenge.
Dell's Working Capital
by Aldo Sesia Richard S. RubackDell Computer Corp. manufactures, sells, and services personal computers. The company markets its computers directly to its customers and builds computers after receiving a customer order. This build-to-order model enables Dell to have much smaller investment in working capital than its competitors. It also enables Dell to more fully enjoy the benefits of reduction in component prices and to introduce new products more quickly. Dell has grown quickly and has been able to finance that growth internally by its efficient use of working capital and its profitability. This case highlights the importance of working capital management in a rapidly growing firm.
Deloitte & Touche (A): A Hole in the Pipeline
by Jane Roessner Rosabeth Moss KanterDeloitte & Touche was losing talented women, and CEO Mike Cook wanted to stop the loss, especially as the accounting and consulting fields became more competitive. The firm commissioned an analysis of the situation; now it had to consider the results and develop a plan change.
Deloitte & Touche (B): Changing the Workplace
by Jane Roessner Rosabeth Moss KanterDeloitte & Touche women's initiative changed the workplace culture at the firm, solved retention problems, and brought external benefits. Now a new CEO must decide how to take this a step further as competition for talent was even stronger, young people had different needs and aspirations, and the firm's global offices had not yet embraced this U.S. initiative.
Deloitte & Touche Consulting Group
by David M. Upton Christine SteinmanExamines two dilemmas often faced by an operations consultant. First, the dual responsibility to both client and consulting firm. Second, the management of the often competing pressure to deliver immediate results, at the same time laying the foundation for long-term performance improvement.
Deloitte's Pixel (A): Consulting with Open Talent
by John Winsor Kerry Herman Michael L. TushmanDeloitte Consulting's General Manager Balaji Bondili, head of Pixel, considers how best to grow Deloitte Consulting's use of open (on-demand) talent, as consulting companies and their clients face transformative change in the way client engagements and projects get done. Pixel, started in 2014, helps facilitate open (or on-demand) talent and crowdsourcing for Deloitte Consulting client engagements, to access specific, difficult-to-find expertise, collaborate to develop new products and/or insights, and to design, build, and test new digital assets. Bondili has found some avid users-and evangelists-of Pixel's services among Deloitte Consulting's principals, however uptake across the broader organization has been slow, and in some pockets has met with deep resistance.
Delphi Corp. and the Credit Derivatives Market (A)
by Stuart C. Gilson Victoria Ivashina Sarah L. AbbottIn 2005 Jane Bauer-Martin, a hedge fund manager, is considering what she should do with the fund's large investment in the publicly traded bonds of Delphi Corp., a financially troubled auto parts supplier. Delphi is General Motor's key auto parts supplier, and, like GM, it is burdened with large pension and other retiree liabilities that threaten to push it into bankruptcy. Bauer-Martin is considering using various credit derivatives (credit default swaps, credit-linked notes, credit default swap indices, total return swaps, etc.) to hedge her position in Delphi debt, or to speculate on future Delphi bond prices.
Delta Air Lines (A): The Low-Cost Carrier Threat
by Jan W. Rivkin Laurent TherivelIn the 'Delta Air Lines (A): The Low-Cost Carrier Threat' case, the top management of Delta Air Lines must decide how to respond to the threat posed by low-cost carriers such as Southwest and JetBlue. Among the options considered is the launch of a low-cost subsidiary by Delta itself. Prior efforts to launch a low-cost subsidiary, by Delta and by other full-service airlines, have failed. Can Delta devise a better response?
Delta Blues: U.S.-Vietnam Catfish Trade Dispute (A)
by Regina AbramiExamines the growing tensions between strategies of national development and the rules of international business. At issue is how increasing globalization is changing the rules of national development for both developing and developed countries. The comparative focus on aquaculture, and the catfish industry in particular, also offers a window into a growing international industry and its potential as a source of poverty alleviation around the globe. Also discusses the U.S. antidumping policy and its processes of investigation.
Delta Blues: U.S.-Vietnam Catfish Trade Dispute (B)
by Alan W. Tu Regina AbramiAn abstract is not available for this product.
Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South (Making the Modern South)
by Jeannie WhayneIn Delta Empire: Lee Wilson and the Transformation of Agriculture in the New South Jeannie Whayne employs the fascinating history of a powerful plantation owner in the Arkansas delta to recount the evolution of southern agriculture from the late nineteenth century through World War II. After his father's death in 1870, Robert E. "Lee" Wilson inherited 400 acres of land in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Over his lifetime, he transformed that inheritance into a 50,000-acre lumber operation and cotton plantation. Early on, Wilson saw an opportunity in the swampy local terrain, which sold for as little as fifty cents an acre, to satisfy an expanding national market for Arkansas forest reserves. He also led the fundamental transformation of the landscape, involving the drainage of tens of thousands of acres of land, in order to create the vast agricultural empire he envisioned. A consummate manager, Wilson employed the tenancy and sharecropping system to his advantage while earning a reputation for fair treatment of laborers, a reputation -- Whayne suggests -- not entirely deserved. He cultivated a cadre of relatives and employees from whom he expected absolute devotion. Leveraging every asset during his life and often deeply in debt, Wilson saved his company from bankruptcy several times, leaving it to the next generation to successfully steer the business through the challenges of the 1930s and World War II. Delta Empire traces the transition from the labor-intensive sharecropping and tenancy system to the capital-intensive neo-plantations of the post--World War II era to the portfolio plantation model. Through Wilson's story Whayne provides a compelling case study of strategic innovation and the changing economy of the South in the late nineteenth century.
The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi's First Winery
by Di RushingAfter graduating from Mississippi State University in 1976, Di Rushing and her husband, Sam, found themselves back on their family farm near Merigold, Mississippi, with 350 acres and no real clue what to do. The couple decided to open the first winery in Mississippi, and with it, a successful business was born. Six years later, a small restaurant joined the Delta winery. Both businesses were thriving by 1990, with eight national award-winning wines, a beautiful vineyard, and a successful restaurant.But in March of 1990, a series of unforeseen events rocked the operation. After the Rushings discovered one of the tour guides, Ray Russell, selling drugs in the winery parking lot, they fired him. He responded with a terrorizing vengeance that persisted over the next nine months. In the early morning hours, the former guide broke into the winery, crept into the wine cellar, and released the entire inventory—nearly a quarter of a million dollars’ worth—down the drain. Fortunately, his incompetence thwarted his most destructive intention to blow up the restaurant. In his rampage, he broke all the windows, which allowed the gas from the kitchen oven to escape, sparing the premises. Though the Rushings rebuilt with the help of their community, Russell continued to stalk and threaten the young family. As his menacing behavior continued to escalate, the Rushings closed their business of fourteen years and moved to Ouray, Colorado, where they began rebuilding their lives. Culminating in the sudden, violent murders of Russell, his wife, and his father twenty-five years later, this book tells a story of both shock and resilience, charting Mississippi history in the process.Intertwined with the true crime narrative, The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery details author Di Rushing’s life in and out of Mississippi, including growing up in 1960s Greenville, attending university, traveling overseas, and the relationships she cultivated along the way.
Delta Lake: Modern Data Lakehouse Architectures with Data Lakes
by Denny Lee Tristen Wentling Scott Haines Prashanth BabuReady to simplify the process of building data lakehouses and data pipelines at scale? In this practical guide, learn how Delta Lake is helping data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts overcome key data reliability challenges with modern data engineering and management techniques.Authors Denny Lee, Tristen Wentling, Scott Haines, and Prashanth Babu (with contributions from Delta Lake maintainer R. Tyler Croy) share expert insights on all things Delta Lake--including how to run batch and streaming jobs concurrently and accelerate the usability of your data. You'll also uncover how ACID transactions bring reliability to data lakehouses at scale.This book helps you:Understand key data reliability challenges and how Delta Lake solves themExplain the critical role of Delta transaction logs as a single source of truthLearn the Delta Lake ecosystem with technologies like Apache Flink, Kafka, and TrinoArchitect data lakehouses with the medallion architectureOptimize Delta Lake performance with features like deletion vectors and liquid clustering
The Delta Model
by Arnoldo C. HaxStrategy is the most central issue in management. It has to do with defining the purpose of an organization, understanding the market in which it operates and the capabilities the firm possesses, and putting together a winning plan. There are many influential frameworks to help managers undertake a systematic reflection on this issue. The most dominant approaches are Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy" and the "Resource-Based View of the Firm," popularized by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. Arnoldo Hax argues there are fundamental drawbacks in the underlying hypotheses of these approaches in that they define strategy as a way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This line of thinking could be extremely dangerous because it puts the competitor at the center and therefore anchors you in the past, establishes success as a way of beating your competitors, and this obsession often leads toward imitation and congruency. The result is commoditization - which is the worst outcome that could possibly happen to a business. The Delta Model is an extremely innovative view of strategy. It abandons all of these assumptions and instead puts the customer at the center. By doing that it allows us to be truly creative, separating ourselves from the herd in pursuit of a unique and differentiated customer value proposition. Many years of intense research at MIT, supported by an extensive consulting practice, have resulted in development of powerful new concepts and practical tools to guide organizational leaders into a completely different way of looking at strategy, including a new way of doing customer segmentation and examining the competencies of the firm, with an emphasis on using the extended enterprise as a primary way of serving the customer. This last concept means that we cannot play the game alone; that we need to establish a network among suppliers, the firm, the customers, and complementors - firms that are in the business of developing products and services that enhance our own offering to the customer. Illustrated through dozens of examples, and discussion of application to small and medium-sized businesses and not-for-profits, the Delta Model will help readers in all types of organizations break out of old patterns of behavior and achieve strategic flexibility -- an especially timely talent during times of crisis, intense competition, and rapid change.
The Delta of Chinese Management: Guanxi, Rule of Law and the Middle Way
by Jane Jian ZhangThis book explores the differential mode of people management in the Chinese context. Based on years of ethnographic research, this book illustrates how and why the guanxihu phenomena exist across different organisations and thus, the guanxi-hu could break the ‘organisational laws’ (e.g. structure and system; rules and regulations; policies and procedures). By focusing on personnel practices within organisations, the book provides an outlook for keeping indigenous management with Chinese characteristics. Most importantly, this book offers significant insights into how to ‘manage people’ in the private and public sectors within the Chinese cultural and institutional environment. The delta of Chinese management will appeal not only to academics and researchers who have an interest in management and Chinese studies, but also to expatriates and practitioners who are engaged in doing business and managing people with/in China.
Deltas in the Anthropocene
by Robert J. Nicholls W. Neil Adger Craig W. Hutton Susan E. HansonThe Anthropocene is the human-dominated modern era that has accelerated social, environmental and climate change across the world in the last few decades. This open access book examines the challenges the Anthropocene presents to the sustainable management of deltas, both the many threats as well as the opportunities. In the world’s deltas the Anthropocene is manifest in major land use change, the damming of rivers, the engineering of coasts and the growth of some of the world’s largest megacities; deltas are home to one in twelve of all people in the world. The book explores bio-physical and social dynamics and makes clear adaptation choices and trade-offs that underpin policy and governance processes, including visionary delta management plans. It details new analysis to illustrate these challenges, based on three significant and contrasting deltas: the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Mahanadi and Volta. This multi-disciplinary, policy-orientated volume is strongly aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as delta populations often experience extremes of poverty, gender and structural inequality, variable levels of health and well-being, while being vulnerable to extreme and systematic climate change.
Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving
by Kris Putnam-WalkerlyHow you give matters. Discover philanthropic strategies for creating transformational change. Whether you regularly donate to charity, run a small family foundation, or are responsible for millions of dollars in grants, you are a philanthropist. Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving looks at how you can create transformational change. It reminds us that how we give is as important as the amount we give. The author describes common practices that hinder transformational change and explains how to avoid them, ensuring that your gifts help create the impact you seek. Delusional Altruism—a set of all-too-common errors in philanthropic strategy—can derail a program of giving and result in a loss of efficiency and effectiveness. This book asks philanthropists and charitable organizations to consider whether they have fallen under the spell of Delusional Altruism. Are you cutting out impactful giving in order to save money or avoid uncertainty? Is your philanthropic approach unnecessarily restricted by traditional thinking? This book will help you answer these questions and determine how you can achieve better outcomes through the process of Transformational Giving. Ask questions that spur learning and fuel innovation Believe that investment in yourself and your operation is important Increase the speed of your actions to increase the impact of your giving Give in ways that create lasting, sustainable change Follow strategies to make your philanthropy unstoppable Although enhanced opportunities for philanthropic giving are on the horizon, changes to philanthropic practice are needed to prevent this philanthropy boom from becoming under-leveraged. Implementing updated approaches now can lead to positive change for the future. Read Delusional Altruism to learn how you can transform reality with strategic giving.
Delusions of Competence: The Near-Death of Lloyd’s of London 1970--2002 (Palgrave Studies in Economic History)
by Robin PearsonThis book examines the crisis at the famous insurance market, Lloyd's of London, during the late twentieth century, which nearly destroyed the 300-year-old institution. While rapid structural change resulting from system collapse is less common in insurance than in the history of other financial services, one exception was the Lloyd’s crisis. Hitherto, explanations of the crisis have focused on the effects of catastrophic losses and poor governance. By drawing on contemporary accounts of the crisis, the author constructs the first comprehensive scholarly analysis of the public and political response. The book applies theoretical concepts from behavioural economics and economic psychology to argue that multiple delusions of competence were at work both within and outside the Lloyd’s market. Arrogance, elitism and defence of vested interests comprised endogenous elements of the crisis. Entrenched ideas about the virtues of self-regulation and faith in insider experts also played a role. The result was a misdiagnosis by both insiders and politicians of what ailed Lloyd’s and a series of reforms that failed to address the underlying causes of its disease. This book offers a salutary lesson from recent history about the importance of the transparency, accountability and effective monitoring of financial institutions. It is of interest to academics and students of economic and financial history, business, insurance, political economy and history.
Delwarca Software Remote Support Unit
by Roy D. Shapiro Paul E. MorrisonDelwarca Software provides business software to large corporate clients around the world. The firm serves customers who prefer to assemble corporate solutions using a combination of software programs from various suppliers rather than implementing a single enterprise resource planning system. Consequently, Delwarca must provide telephone support services for complex software-hardware interaction and performance problems in addition to the typical software support issues around software installation and upgrades, malware attacks, and processing failures. The manager of the remote support unit implemented a new triage program for customer calls hoping to reduce customer wait time, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce costs. After one year, customer dissatisfaction is at an all-time high and he must perform a quantitative analysis of the current process, considering wait times for customers as well as cost per call, before making a final recommendation. This case can be used in a first-year MBA course in Service Management or Operations Management or a course in industrial engineering. It can also be used to introduce simple queuing theory.
Demand
by Adrian Slywotzky Karl WeberIn DEMAND: Giving People What They Love Before They Know They Want It (Crown Business; October 2011), Adrian Slywotzky, named by Industry Week one of the world's six most influential management thinkers, provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications--not just for people in business but also for social activists, governments leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators. They all need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why very good != magnetic; how what you don't see can make or break a product; the art of transforming fence sitters into customers; why there's no such thing as an average customer; and why real demand comes from a 45-degree angle of improvement (rather than the five degrees most organizations manage).From the Hardcover edition.
Demand and Supply (Routledge Revivals)
by Ralph TurveyFirst published in 1971, Demand and Supply is an introduction to the economics of resource allocation, often known as micro-economics. Ralph Turvey examines how the economy really works and does not just give the economists’ textbook version, which oversimplifies technology and exaggerates the importance of prices in adjusting supply and demand. Instead of offering theoretical diagrams and imaginary examples, he refrains from expounding those ideas that cannot be simply demonstrated or applied. But he includes sections on retail margins, urban land values, and the value of time – topics rarely dealt with in beginner’s books. Some examples of the examples are: university teachers’ pay; cotton spinning costs; pricing of tin cans; demand for farm tractors; newspaper economics; competition in the bus industry. This is the kind of economics used in practice and rests on down to earth fact finding. This book will be useful for both general readers and A- level and first year university students.