Search results

Shows how a regional family company threatened by national competition must make changes to its structure and way of doing business or face extinction or sale.

Doris, the Executive Director of the JCC, had a Board of Directors that lacked the requisite skills, perspective, behaviors, and willingness to change policies and practices in order to meet external environmental opportunities and threats or to address internal competencies and competitive capabilities. Changes in the external environment were exacerbating the JCC's internal deficiencies. In addition, the Board created impediments to the professional staff's efforts to implement good managerial practices and policies. The current management team was acutely aware of the changes in the external environment, how these changes impacted the JCC's operations and what the JCC needed to do in order to meet these challenges. The management team was frustrated by a Board that did not provide leadership, fulfill their responsibilities, hold each other accountable and undermined management by intervening in day-to-day operations. The staff was passively hostile to the Board and to the management team. As consumers, the members' expectations were higher and more demanding. Doris and her management team had to resolve a myriad of strategic and operational issues that confronted the organization.

Intergenerational transmission is a paramount managerial and patrimonial issue. Although planning and governance tools are being developed and spread in business, the handling of emotions often remains the key to a successful process. It is within the framework of the paternalistic Moroccan society that we are led to question the psychology and emotions of the stakeholders in the transmission of this small services business.

Masters students in Family Business, Management Science, Entrepreneurship, Small Business Management.

After 19 years of existence, Moroccan Shipping is confronted at the beginning of 2010 to the issue of the sustainability of the family business. The founder directs his affair with an iron fist, and his sons, who were educated abroad, are determined not to get fooled. The father claims he wishes to be relieved from daily operations and handover part of his responsibilities to his second son. At the same time, the youngest doesn't feel like he fits in the present firm's configuration and is ready to quit.

This case study will lead users to work on several managerial dimensions of small family businesses in emerging economies. At first, the entrepreneur's traits might be highlighted, as they deeply affect the way the succession process may be handled. However, as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) specificity, the Moroccan family system will be taken into consideration to better analyse both the incumbent and the successor behaviours. Management tools may then be discussed to help with the transfer of both power and ownership in family businesses.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

Marketing Management, Business Strategy and Promotion & Advertising.

Associated degree, undergraduate and graduate students as well as executives from profit-making organizations.

Groupon is the world's largest daily-deal Web site and a pioneer in the group-buying industry. The major feature of the company's business model is that merchants use Groupon as a platform to offer coupons with a discounted price, and the coupon buyers can then redeem these coupons. Groupon has done business in over 50 countries and, by 2012, had over 39.5 million subscribers received its daily news. It had a 59.1 per cent share of the daily-deals market in 2013. Groupon is a publicly listed company on the NASDAQ in the USA, trading under the ticker symbol of “GPRN”.

The students' business knowledge and skills will be sharpened by working through this case, and students will be challenged to identify solutions to the marketing concerns: specifically, how the driving approach of its daily-deal business model enabled the company to adopt a growth strategy that will confront the difficulties of the emergent “golden age” of the daily-deal industry in the twenty-first century. In addition, it will also be of help to the students to take the active roles of thinker, analyst, evaluator, decision-maker and implementer to evaluate the continuing changes in a competitive environment and consider how Groupon can seize available opportunities to predict future performance by comparing data from 2008 and 2012.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.