Search results

Marvel, a giant of the comic book industry, bought Fleer, a leading trading card company, a year ago. Last summer, they tapped Bill Jemas from the NBA to be the strategist responsible for developing and marketing new sports and entertainment products. From what we can see, Jemas really knows how to play his cards.

Strategic outsourcing has swept virtually every industry—especially those rightsized down to their core, value‐creating processes. Here's a report from the field.

In 1992, the mainframe market collapsed, almost taking Amdahl with it. Our reporter spends a day with top strategist Linda Alepin to learn what the company did—and is doing—to survive.

Despite books, courses, lectures, panels, and a lot of hand wringing, business ethics remains a vague and troublesome area, primarily because no one can quite figure out what it is. Is ethics making sure no laws are broken while conducting business? Expense accounts honestly reported? Strategies planned that take their effects on employees, customers, and the communities into account?

Father involvement is a salient predictor of children’s development and recent studies suggest that African American fathers who are highly involved across infancy and toddlerhood have children who enter school better prepared to succeed. Little is known, however, about the specific dimensions of fathering (e.g., language stimulation) that contribute to the positive development of African American children during the early childhood period. Even less is known about psychological and contextual barriers to positive father involvement among African American men with very young children. The first part of this chapter briefly reviews empirical research that has delineated links between multiple dimensions of father involvement and child development in African American families. The second part of the chapter explores emerging evidence on the associations between fathers’ psychological functioning, father involvement and child development, and concludes with suggestions for future research, practice, and policy.

On the evening of 22 December 1988 the world lost one of its most dedicated environmental leaders. Chico Mendes, born Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, was shot down by ranchers as he walked out of the back door of his home in Xapuri, Brazil. Although Mendes achieved worldwide recognition for his efforts to protect the Amazonian rain forest and, in fact, has been proclaimed an “eco‐martyr,” his original and foremost concern was securing workers' rights for the indigenous people of the forest and preserving the land they lived on.

This paper was written to put “on record” what, in retrospect, appear to the author to be the most significant aspects of his academic career, one that spans more than half a century.

The author begins by discussing his Wharton School experience (1957‐1964) and then traces how his activities and experiences at that time laid the groundwork for a number of career long themes (academic administration, pedagogy, and quasi‐governmental consulting) and academic interests (macromarketing, marketing history).

The author's Wharton School experiences and, more specifically, his contacts with Wroe Alderson and David D. Monieson did indeed shape his subsequent career.

This paper calls attention to certain events and research efforts that might otherwise be forgotten. It also serves as an example of one approach others might follow in preparing their own career retrospectives.

In April 2012 Bill Nichols, a financial analyst at the real estate investment firm Koenig Capital, was about to enter a unique lease renegotiation. One of Koenig's tenants, Hasperat Inc., had sixteen years left on its long-term lease of the Kelley Building, a 165,000-square-foot office building in downtown Cleveland. The lease contained a clause giving Hasperat the option to buy the Kelley Building from Koenig. When Nichols tried to place a mortgage on the property to take advantage of low interest rates, he learned that the existence of this option in the lease contract prevented lenders from offering Koenig their lowest rates. As a result, Nichols had been tasked with renegotiating the lease to remove the option clause. This unexpected event offered Nichols the opportunity to use his financial skills. He needed to calculate the fair value of the purchase option to be able to justify to his superiors by how much they should compensate Hasperat. Students will step into the role of Bill Nichols and apply real options modeling techniques to value the purchase option in Hasperat's lease.

After reading and analyzing the case, students will be able to:

• Apply real options theory to the valuation of a purchase option in a commercial real estate lease

• Identify the common mistakes in applying traditional discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis to financial problems with option components

Apply real options theory to the valuation of a purchase option in a commercial real estate lease

Identify the common mistakes in applying traditional discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis to financial problems with option components