Management of Johnson & Johnson desperately needs a strategic plan to save its Tylenol[1]business, but first some background. According to Johnson & Johnson,

Johnson & Johnson has been a part of people's lives for 128 years and a valuable part of their investments for approximately 70 years. Founded in 1886, we listed our shares on the New York Stock Exchange for public investors in 1944.

During our history, we have built the most comprehensive base of healthcare businesses in the world, generating approximately 70 percent of our revenues from No. 1 or No. 2 global leadership positions in our respective markets.

Our consistent performance has enabled us to deliver an exceptional track record of growth that few, if any, companies can claim: 30 consecutive years of adjusted earnings increases; and 52 consecutive years of dividend increases.[2]

In 2013, the company had revenue of $71.3 billion[3]mostly from healthcare, such as skin-care products, nutritional products, over-the-counter and prescription pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and diagnostic tools.  Johnson & Johnson products are found in virtually every home, hospital, operating room and doctor’s office in 188 countries worldwide.

In 1955, McNeil Laboratories introduced Tylenol, the first pain reliever without aspirin.  The product was so successful regionally that Johnson & Johnson acquired the company in 1959 to expand the business globally.

This morning, Amazon announced the acquisition of a small pharmaceutical company which had secretly developed and patented a pain reviver which is much more effective than Tylenol.  Although Tylenol has an excellent reputation, Johnson & Johnson cannot reformulate it.  Management needs a new strategy to combat Amazon and save the Tylenol business. Help them by answering the 13 questions starting on the following page.

1.     Describe two (no more!) important opportunities and two (no more!) important threats facing Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol business, including the individual combination of strengths/weaknesses and external factors creating each.  (10 points)​

Opening any kind of business requires a great deal of patience, dedication and perseverance. Lynn Leach jumped into the world of restaurants with both feet when she decided to open her own quick service restaurant. Truthfully, the industry is filled with stories of people who dove in, got knocked down, but pull themselves back up.

In the small town of Wilmington, Ohio, Lynn opened a Skyline Chili franchise. The town of 12,000 people has embraced the location and Lynn’s friendly business practices built upon strong customer service and delicious offerings. Recently, Lynn celebrated the restaurant’s one-year anniversary. But getting started was no easy task. “I hadn’t worked in a restaurant since high school and here I was, opening a restaurant”, she said. Skyline Chili is a Southern Ohio-based restaurant chain that serves “Cincinnati Style” chili. This rather unique blend of chili and seasonings is typically served over spaghetti and hot dogs and is a favourite in the Midwest. With over 100 stores, Lynn’s franchise is somewhat typical of their small town locations.

Lynn calls her foray into the restaurant business as a “great learning experience”. Fortunately, she had a lot support from Skyline’s corporate office. But, much of what needed to be done was driven by her. “My ultimate goal” she said, “is to help people and make them feel good – people’s careers, our customers, and the community”.

First, she had to determine just how many employees she would need before ever opening doors. “We did scores of interviews”, she said, and hired some really good people”. However, she discovered during her first year of business that some who may have interviewed well were not necessarily the best employees. After turning over about half the staff, she now feels she has the right people in place. But every employee must be properly trained. They have to learn the menu, how to properly greet and serve the guest, handle their transaction at the cash register, and keep the entire restaurant fastidiously clean. In addition to hiring, she had to plan the marketing for the grand opening and order the initial inventory for the restaurant. “All this took a great deal of planning”, she said. “From a to z, we thought things through and how best to get them done”.

Once the operation was up and running, Lynn had to pay attention to her costs as well as her staff. Form a cost standpoint, she discovered that there were some very efficient steps the restaurant could contain the expenses. One idea implemented was to stop serving half-pint cartons of milk to children. It was found that more half the carton would be wasted and thrown away. However, by serving a small amount in a glass, the restaurant wasted very little. To keep tabs on all the raw ingredients, Lynn conducts an inventory every Monday – literally counting every hot dog bun, chees, chili, onions, etc. “It’s painstaking work, but highly necessarily so we know what we have and what we don’t”, she said. The Monday inventory is how we now what we need to order and when we need it”. Lynn is not alone in her approach. Successful restaurateurs understand that counting food costs down to the penny is critical. Restaurants should look at every shift of operation with a before, during, and after approach to not only monitor inventory costs, but also identify important best practices throughout the facility.

For her team of servers, cooks, and cleaners, Lynn believes in creating a fun, yet productive atmosphere. “Positive feedback is important”, she said. “I ‘m not going to yell at an employee in front of everyone”. Instead, she counsels employees when performance is not up to par or the quality of work is suffering. “We do role-plays”, she said, where we ask each other how you would like to be treated if you were the customer”. These role-plays demonstrate the proper way to engage with customers and provide a safe training ground to fine-tune the servers’ skills. For those employees who go above and beyond with their service – whether to customers or to co-workers – Lynn provides a gift card. “When an employee goes out of her way to serve the customer”, she said, “they should be rewarded”.

QUESTION :

Which of Katz’s managerial skills (technical, human, and conceptual) does Lynn seem to use most often? Why?

Q1. Read the extract carefully and apply the problem-solution pattern of analysis to it.

Electronics Industry Warns of Palladium Shortage

Warning was given yesterday of a severe shortage of palladium, a metal essential for some components of portable electronic equipment such as mobile telephones and laptop computers, as well as for catalytic converters that remove pollutants from car exhausts.

“Palladium use continues to grow very strongly but production lags behind. Soon after 2000 we could be in a difficult situation unless industrial users take attention now,’ said Mike Steel, research director at Johnson Matthey, the world’s biggest platinum and palladium marketing group. He said consumers had been relying on Russia’s palladium stocks to fill a substantial gap between demand and supply.  JM believes these stocks will run out soon after the end of the century.

Mr. Steel said there had been a preview of potential trouble earlier this year when Russia, which exports 70 per cent of the world’s palladium, stopped exporting the metal for six months. This helped to drive the price to its highest level for eighteen years… Although it has fallen back since Russian Exports restarted, the price remains roughly double its level at this time last year.

1. What is the starting situation?
2. What is the problem?  
3. What is the underlying cause of the problem?
4. What solution has been proposed?
5. How successful is the solution?

Q2. Please apply SWOT framework to analyze the following Case study, try to find out 2 strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then write 150 words in essay format.

The Swedish clothing company Hennes Mauritz, also known as H&M, opened their first store in 1947 in Västerås and was founded by Erling Persson. At that time, the company name was Hennes because they were only selling womenswear. During the following ten years the company opened several stores in Sweden, and in 1964 they took their company abroad when they opened up in Norway. In 1968 the company changed their name to Hennes & Mauritz when the selling of men’s and children’s clothes begun. A few years later, in 1974, the company was listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Between 1976 and the 1990s H&M continued to expand in Europe.

In 1998 they started selling their clothes online in Sweden, and soon in other European countries. In 2000 the first H&M store opened up on Fifth Avenue in New York. To differentiate H&M from other cheap clothing companies they started to do collaborations with designers as Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Madonna, Jimmy Choo and David Beckham. In 2007 the first Asian stores opened in Hong Kong and Shanghai. This year they also launched a new store concept called COS. To develop the store concept even more and penetrate the market, H&M launched H&M Home in 2009. Since the start up in 1947 H&M has made a big expansion at the global market, with approximately 2600 stores in 44 different markets.

For some companies the brand name can be a problem when they go international, since differences in the language can give the brand name another meaning, For H&M this hasn’t been a problem. But religious differences can in many ways be a problem for a clothing company like H&M. In Sweden there’s no problem for women to wear short skirts and dresses, but in countries with a strong religious view it may not be accepted for women to show their legs and dress provocative. This can also be an obstacle in H&Ms advertising.

We think that it is important to adapt the advertising to the different countries to maximize the profit. When it comes to material culture it is important for a company like H&M to be aware of which materials will work in which country. In Sweden, many people are against fur and because of that it would be a bad idea to launch a clothing line only made of fur in Sweden. But in other countries, like China where people are not that against fur, it could be a success.

H&M value to have good relationships with their suppliers to lower their production costs. In that way it will be possible for H&M to sell fashionable clothes to a low price to the customers. 60 percent of the goods are produced in Asia and 40 percent are produced in Europe. Even if H&Ms clothes are cheap, they still have a gross profit of 53 percent. They have also set up a growth target for the company to increase the number of stores by 10-15 percent per year.

Write a response commenting on their report and asking a question about the report, including questions about the scientists who performed the research and the organisms under discussion. Please make sure to answer all questions in reply to your report in detail.

1st comment

A brief summary of the ethical concerns surrounding this topic.

Designer babies is the idea of creating babies with disease free and super authentic or smart by using technology to manipulate genetic. In fact, parents can choose to screen embryos created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) for sex or diseases, a process known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. It’s reported recently about a method of extracting defective mitochondria, the energy powerhouses of cells, from a woman's egg and replacing them with healthy mitochondria from a donor egg. With new tests, scientist can detect fetal DNA circulating in a woman's blood stream early on in pregnancy, determining sex or catching errors in the number of chromosomes which cause Down syndrome. However, scientists still hesitate to adapt this technique into the reality, especially with sex selection since it can cause a huge problem in sex discrimination against women in society. Additionally, giving parents the ability to choose and control genetic traits of their F1 could potentially affect the bond between the parents and their descendants. According to Murray, he states "one of my concerns is if we let parents think they are actually choosing and controlling [their child's outcome], then we set up all that dynamic of potentially tyrannical expectations over what the child will do or be.”

2. Your own well-supported personal viewpoint on this issue and how you would defend your viewpoint to a person who disagrees with you

Although I like the idea of preventing babies from any type of diseases before they are even born, I disagree with the concept of choosing genetic traits. I think the whole process should be natural and ordinary. We can create babies but we should not control them. We give them lives but we can force them how to live it. This type of manipulations should not be supported because it can lead to other major problems. In fact, in many Asian countries, societies value boys more than girls that leads to sex discrimination against women. Also, this is a very expensive process, so not all of families can afford the technology cost. The most accurate sex-selection methods are the most expensive (tens of thousands of dollars) and often mean you have to undergo invasive infertility treatments and take fertility drugs with potential side effects. As the result, there would be racist among the kids who are chosen better traits than others. There are so many reasons to convince me that the term of designer babies is not human being. We should not hinder the natural process of variation.

2nd comment

Giving parents the ability to select genetic traits for their offspring could damage the relationship they could have with their kids because of the predetermined notions of what they wanna be or who they should be through the DNA selection. Also by choosing and controlling the child's outcome then we set up the dynamic of potentially tyrannical expectations over what the child will do or be.

The ethical concerns would be the damage done to the children by forcing the individual into a predetermined life but deciding his or her Abilities or Mental Capacity... All things that come naturally and almost picked at random would now be like taking your kid to build a bear and deciding what you want from hair to height to every.

I don't think to make sure a child a healthy and removing certain disease traits that get passed down from the child are bad but the damage done to the parent-child relationship could be. Even in today's Era parents have to hate or disdain for their kids for not being what they want. A kid having a different outlook after being biologically altered to fit his or her parent's needs and still deciding to be something else in life could destroy the relationship beyond repair.

If there is a non-profit center that provides free after school and low-cost summer programs for students from grades 3-12 then should it use an organic or mechanistic organisational structure?

How can it implement the structure?

8. Business schools have historically had syllabuses that, according to Willman (2014), are ‘opportunistic, eclectic, fragmented and derivative’.
Explain what Willman means by this statement.
Critically assess the value of such a syllabus for the business school student.

Explain the theory of the business cycle. What is the empirical evidence on this theory? Select any three countries to highlight your answer. Do your results support the classical/neoclassical or modern political economy school of thought?

You are the parent of a child who is enrolled in an elementary school. You are discussing the controversial topic of vaccination with another parent, who argues against it. How do you respond? Support all your assertions with evidence.