Norman T. Sheehan

• Ph.D, FCPA, FCMA, CGA, ICD.D
• Professor at University of Saskatchewan

Facing pressure from institutional investors and other stakeholders an increasing number of executives are investing in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives to improve the environmental and social performance of their companies. The paper argues that unique CSR implementation challenges impede the successful implementation of CSR initi...

Whether corporations voluntarily reduce their negative impacts on the environment and society depends upon management advocacy. As future corporate leaders, accounting students will have a critical advocacy role, but they have been taught that shareholder value should not be sacrificed to reduce the externalized environmental and social costs cause...

Improving corporate ESG performance starts with recognizing that not every dollar of earnings is created equally as some profit may be earned at the cost of damaging the environment or harming stakeholder relationships. These costs are often invisible to corporate employees as they are not recorded. To earn corporate profits that are environmentall...

With the rise of the #MeToo movement, workplace harassment has become an important board issue. Despite this, little has been written on the role that boards, and governance in general, should play in reducing the potential for employee harassment in the workplace. This compact, in‐class teaching case, which is based on an actual employee lawsuit i...

Purpose The global pandemic provides boards and executives an opportunity to evaluate if their organizations’ risk management systems were up to the challenge. Organizational risk management systems act like the body’s immune system, protecting the organization from threats. Most organizations struggled to deal with the crisis caused by global pand...

Corporate governance is a set of rules and processes that help ensure that firms are effectively run for the benefit of their stakeholders. Good corporate governance is predicated on having directors fulfill their fiduciary duties while acting as stewards of the corporation. The fact that good corporate governance is essential to a well‐functioning...

One of directors’ key fiduciary duties is to set the firm's direction and then vet the strategy proposed by the CEO. Despite this, McKinsey reports that the majority of directors feel they do not understand their firm's strategy, and even if they do understand it, they do not feel they have the desired impact on their firm's strategy. This article...

This article offers an innovative graphical approach to facilitating an interactive discussion about identifying and assessing potential growth opportunities. Our approach, circle mapping, visually conceptualizes growth as occupying space, where market space is defined by a set of concentric circles. The circle presently occupied by the firm is def...

With increasing calls for a greater connection between management education and practice, teaching cases play a vital role in the business curriculum. Cases not only allow instructors to expose students to practical problems but also let educators contribute to the scholarship of teaching and learning. An important reason why faculty members may re...

The paper argues that organizational capabilities are comprised of two fundamental components: resources and activities. The starting point of the argument is that resources are best conceptualized by Barney’s (1991) and others’ research on the resource-based view, while activities are best conceptualized by Porter’s (1985) writings on the activity...

A well-functioning management control system is essential to ensure the organization's strategy is executed as planned. While accounting students are provided many opportunities to master the design of management control systems, students are provided fewer opportunities to practice applying management control systems. This interactive role play al...

Ethical failures in business have led many to question the role and efficacy of ethics training in business schools. Some scholars (e.g., Gosenpud & Werner, 2009; Lund Dean & Beggs, 2006; Taft & White, 2007) argue that instructing accounting students to behave ethically has a minimal effect on their future professional behavior. So instead of lectu...

Managers often struggle to determine why their firm is underperforming relative to its rivals. This article outlines how managers and consultants can use an existing strategy tool, Kim and Mauborgne's strategy canvas, to robustly test whether their firm is underperforming because it is (1) properly executing the wrong value proposition's delivery o...

Purpose – The authors show how organizations can best ensure that employees act in accordance with the corporation’s values. The key action is to develop a set of principles that amplify and fully define the values so leaders can communicate them more effectively. Principles that supply operational guidance help employees internalize the corporatio...

While business students are typically comfortable identifying and extrapolating trends uncovered during competitive analyses, they often fail to take the Red Queen Effect into account when formulating new competitive strategies. This competitive strategy exercise employs Kim and Mauborgne’s (2005) strategy canvas to help students to anticipate riva...

Purpose – As a result of the many governance failures in the past decade, new legislation, increased regulation, and best practices have been adopted by boards in an effort to improve corporate governance. Unfortunately, not all of the changes, such as increasing the number of external directors, have favorably impacted the quality of board governa...

This article describes a new pedagogical tool, text-to-video animation software, that accounting instructors can adopt to easily generate quality videos that address a variety of accounting learning objectives. Although this tool can be used to enhance traditional pedagogical methods, such as case analysis and discussion, it can also be used to add...

THE SHORT, GRAPHIC CASE INVOLVES DESIGNING A MANAGEMENT CONTROL SYSTEM for a recently incorporated group of superheroes who sell their unique, creative crime-fighting services to a large, crime-ridden metropolis. While the superheroes have managed to reduce the metropolis’s crime rate, they also have caused significant collateral damage to its citi...

JENSEN PHARMA IS A role-play that explores governance and ethical issues where shareholder demands and stakeholder considerations are in direct conflict. Board members and the members of the firm’s management team attending the meeting are asked to act out a broad range of issues, including concern for Jensen Pharma’s shareholders, its stakeholders...

Dr. PC is a 50-80-minute, in-class management control case. The case asks students to develop a management control system for a small computer repair business. Informed initially by personal experiences, and then from viewing a consumer affairs video that depicts an employee repeatedly violating his firm's code of conduct, students work together to...

Purpose The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is widely applied as a performance measurement and strategy implementation tool by organizations. Research has revealed that the term “balanced scorecard” may be understood differently by managers both within as well as across organizations implying that the performance measurement systems implemented in organiz...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to locate different value creation logic contingencies within the resource management framework. While Sirmon et al. discuss how external environmental contingencies, such as environmental munificence, impact resource management, this paper aims to discuss a second key contingency; that is how the firm's choice...

Purpose This article integrates strategy mapping, risk management and management control into a risk‐based approach to strategy execution. It uses strategy mapping as a tool to visually depict the firm's strategy and then assess its risks. Based on this risk assessment, the firm's management control system is designed to manage those risks which ar...

Porter's (1985, 1998) activity level analysis tool, the value chain, is widely cited by academics, taught in classrooms, and applied by practitioners. Porter (1985, 1991) claims that drivers within the value chain are central to gaining firm-level competitive advantage; however, he does not consider reputation as a driver. This paper seeks to recon...

The management accounting field has called for work which crosses academic boundaries, such as the field of strategic management. On the other side, the strategic management field has called for conceptual work on the foundations of organizational capabilities. Given that the strategy field lacks a comprehensive explanation as to how managers can e...

The objective of management control is to encourage an organization’s employees to undertake the activities which lead to strategy implementation (Anthony, 1965). Management control systems accomplish this goal in two different ways: By encouraging employees to do the right things, and by discouraging employees from doing the wrong things (Simons,...

Value chain analysis is widely taught in business schools and applied by practitioners to improve business performance. Despite its ubiquity, many students struggle to understand and apply value chain concepts in practice. JetFighter uses a complex manufacturing process (making intricate paper planes) to provide students an opportunity to enhance t...

This case introduces students to building and implementing a balanced scorecard (BSC) in a setting with which they are familiar — cleaning, maintenance, management, and construction of a university's buildings and grounds. Students are asked to construct or critique a BSC for the facilities management division of a university. This may lead to a di...

This role play is a short, in-class interactive exercise that places students in the role of a factory worker who is asked to commit to a future production amount. The role play demonstrates why employees may be tempted to lie when asked to reveal their future productive capacities. The experiential exercise illustrates the tension between using bu...

The strategic management field has called for conceptual work on the foundations of capabilities. Given that the strategy field lacks a comprehensive explanation as to how managers can entice their employees to effectively deploy their capabilities, we draw on the management control literature. The paper moves beyond discussing incentives to a disc...

Purpose Porter's activity‐based view of the firm is a comprehensive strategic framework which analyzes firm‐level competitive advantage. Although Porter's activity‐based view is widely cited by academics, taught to students, and applied by practitioners, little is known about its intellectual roots. Given that a framework's intellectual antecedents...

This case requires accounting students to shift their focus from learning about the practice of auditing to learning about the business of auditing. It describes the strategy, vision, and mission of a medium-sized, Canadian audit firm and the external and internal challenges the firm faces as it looks to improve its profitability. Students should r...

Purpose Researchers Kim and Mauborgne argue that firms seeking to grow in mature markets need to create new buyer value, thereby entering Blue Ocean markets, where they don't have rivals. In contrast, firms fighting rivals in bloody, Red Oceans will struggle to remain profitable. To facilitate the search for Blue Oceans the paper aims to offer mana...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to propose a process which ensures boards make risk pay off by identifying and selecting opportunities which more than compensate for the risks assumed. Organizations are increasingly under threat from factors such as globalization, regulations, and technology. Given this, the biggest challenge boards' face...

The case describes how Richard Brown, EDS’ former CEO and chairman, effectively manipulated EDS’ management control system to encourage its employees to aggressively chase and win billions of dollars of mega-outsourcing contracts. The new contracts boosted EDS’ revenues at the same time as Brown cut staff and costs, leading to exceptional short ter...

Managers use management control systems to actively steer their organizations towards strategic success. The Coffee Pot is a short, in-class exercise that provides a hands-on opportunity for students to diagnose and solve an organization’s management control issues using Simons’ Levers of Control Framework. The exercise features a chain of coffee s...

Purpose – Almost since the inception of the resource-based view (RBV), critics have complained that the view is weak in the prescriptive dimension. A recent statement of this critique is by Priem and Butler, who argue that the RBV does not address value creation. One aspect of this is that the link between resources and value creation is black-boxe...

Purpose Assists senior managers with generating new business models by mapping the competitive space occupied by knowledge intensive organizations and outlining strategic positioning options. Design/methodology/approach Provides a conceptual paper based on studies of knowledge intensive organizations. Findings Based on four strategic positioning...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe four levers that managers can use to effectively implement strategy. Design/methodology/approach Draws on the performance management literature, in particular Simons' levers of control framework, to describe and illustrate practical examples of diagnostic, belief, boundary, and interactive controls....

We look at reputation effects in firms which create value by finding valuable objects, which we label search shops. The paper examines and validates different measures of value creation and reputation in search shops and finds partial support for our hypothesis that higher reputation is associated with higher value creation. The negative findings a...

The resource-based view is a strategic framework for understanding why some firms outperform others. Its importance is reflected in its wide inclusion in strategy texts as a tool for assessing a firm’s internal strengths and weaknesses. This article outlines an experiential exercise that demonstrates how different bundles of resources and capabilit...

Purpose Knowledge‐intensive firms are growing in importance yet there are few tools to help managers to analyze and improve their performance, which this paper aims to describe. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds on Michael Porter's strategic frameworks for industrial firms. It outlines how his frameworks, in particular the five forces...

Most, if not all, management control tools were formulated for firms employing an industrial value creation logic (i.e., Ford, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart). We argue that given the growth, both in number and importance, of firms employing a knowledge value creation logic (i.e., Accenture, Goldman Sachs, and Clifford Chance) and firms employing a netwo...

E-tailing business models and consumer expectations have evolved considerably since Amazon.com first burst on the scene in 1995. The coming generation of e-tailers will compete by offering consumers a seamless integration of online and offline shopping, which can be achieved through an integrated chain approach or an e-cooperative approach. The foc...

This case requires you to consider the complexities of transfer pricing. The case is based on an actual situation that occurred between a customer sales representative and a client at an auto dealership. In this case, you will be asked to assume several different roles and attempt to resolve transfer-pricing issues for which there are no “clear-cut...