International Management Group (IMG)

Bharat N. Anand; Kate  Attea

Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2001 (Revised September 2002)

International Management Group (IMG)

Abstract

In 2001, International Management Group (IMG) is the dominant company in the sports management industry. Its founder and CEO, Mark McCormack, is credited with having created the industry of sports management in the early 1960s. Over the next 40 years, IMG's expansion from athlete representation into other arenas--including representing models and classical music artists, producing and broadcasting television shows, operating training academies, corporate consulting, and financial planning--has been both dramatic and successful. This case describes the company's logic behind each expansion decision, as well as several challenges that the company has had to confront, specifically, maintaining the loyalty of the agents and clients, avoiding conflicts of interest with clients by virtue of the company's broad reach, deciding where to expand next, and meeting the challenge of increased competition from other sports management conglomerates.

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Finance; Organizational Structure; Planning; Relationships; Conflict of Interests; Competition; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Sports Industry;

Format: Print

23 pages

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Citation:

Anand, Bharat N., and Kate Attea. "International Management Group (IMG)." Harvard Business School Case 702-409, November 2001. (Revised September 2002.)

For decades, American parents were warned to avoid introducing potential allergens to their babies prior to their first birthday. But two influential clinical studies caused the medical establishment to radically reverse their position. Parents were now warned that delaying the introduction of these types of foods increased a baby's risk of food allergies. Adeo Health Science was ready, with patents filed for a baby food that made it simple for parents to introduce allergens. Now, the new company had to turn its product into a brand and map its go-to-market strategy, including creating a compelling value proposition, choosing a path to market that was either direct-to-consumer, through grocery retailers, or via the physician channel, and planning its marketing communications and sales strategy. As a new startup with constrained resources, the company knew its marketing decisions would make or break the new product.

In 2005 Craig Purse, the CEO of Videojet, a company recently acquired by the conglomerate Danaher, is dealing with the unexpected failure of a new high-tech printer just launched in the market. The new product exemplified the first real instance in which the Videojet team had used the managerial processes of the Danaher Business System (DBS). Was the failure of the new printer a sign that the DBS was fundamentally inadequate for product development projects? Or was the failure instead a symptom that the Videojet team had not properly adopted the DBS? What should Purse do to correct the course of the company?

Chapter | Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience | 2018

The United States in Contemporary Perspectives: Evolving Forms, Strategy, and Performance

David J. Collis, Bharat Anand and J. Yo-Jud Cheng

BOOK ABSTRACT: In spite of surging interest in the business group organization among business scholars, economists, and historians in recent years, academic research on business groups has, to date, remained within the boundary of emerging markets. The major aim of this volume is to explore the long-term evolution of different varieties of large enterprises in today's developed economies in the West. More specifically, the volume focuses on the economic institution of the business group and aims at understanding the factors behind its rise, growth, resilience, and/or fall; its behavioral and organizational characteristics; and its contributions to national economic development. While business groups, especially those with widely diversified product portfolios, are a dominant and critical enterprise model in emerging and developing economies and have lately attracted much attention in academic circles and business presses, interestingly, their counterparts in developed economies have not been systematically examined. This contempt for business groups in mature market settings stands in sharp contrast to the intensive research that has been conducted on other major models of large modern enterprises in those economies, such as functionally organized firms with a clear product focus and multidivisional enterprises that have diversified into related product lines. The present book aims to fill in this gap in the literature by adopting a coherent approach to this elusive subject.

Citation:

Collis, David J., Bharat Anand, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng. "The United States in Contemporary Perspectives: Evolving Forms, Strategy, and Performance." Chap. 15 in Business Groups in the West: Origins, Evolution, and Resilience, edited by Asli M. Colpan and Takashi Hikino. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. View Details

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