Publications

09 May 2017
What Do You Think?

Should Management Be Primarily Responsible to Shareholders?

value. The rationale for this includes the arguments that managers can be held legally accountable while shareholders “have no legal duty to protect or serve the companies whose shares they own,” View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

June 1997 (Revised February 2000)
Case

Walker and Company: Profit Plan Decisions

By: Robert L. Simons and Ramsey Walker

Ramsey Walker, a second-year MBA student, must decide how to control a family business as an absentee owner. After providing background details on the publishing industry, the case requires the reader to: 1) make a product segmentation decision; 2) prepare a profit... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Structure; Family and Family Relationships; Market Design; Management Systems; Planning; Profit; Performance Evaluation; Segmentation; Corporate Strategy; Investment Return; Publishing Industry

02 May 2011
Research & Ideas

Casino Payoff: Hands-Off Management Works Best

ensure that the casinos' best customers return to play another day. “It's not absolute freedom—it's freedom within a framework" —Francisco de Asís Martinez-Jerez And it turns out that casino hosts are ideal subjects to gain insight into... View Details

Keywords: by Dennis Fisher; Entertainment & Recreation

October 2008
Article

It's Time to Make Management a True Profession

By: Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana

In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Education; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Management; Trust; Value Creation

Find at Harvard

30 Apr 2024
Book

When Managers Set Unrealistic Expectations, Employees Cut Ethical Corners

in place by management – can corrupt the behaviour of both individuals and the organisation as a whole. At Sears, for example, management implemented a new goal-setting View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

March 2020
Case

China's Management of COVID-19 (A): People's War or Chernobyl Moment?

By: Meg Rithmire and Courtney Han

In late 2019, a novel respiratory virus appeared in a province in central China. Government officials in Wuhan, Hubei province had to respond to the new virus in the shadow of the 2002–2003 outbreak of SARS in China and within the context of the country’s public health... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Pandemics; Public Health; COVID-19 Pandemic; Health Pandemics; Government Administration; Social Issues; Policy; Decision Making; China

06 Mar 2013
What Do You Think?

Who Should Manage Our Work Time?

of the self-created time management systems they put together as young adults." Suggested remedies were varied, with responsibilities for their implementation in the hands of both individuals View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

May 2015
Article

Admitting Mistakes: Home Country Effect on the Reliability of Restatement Reporting

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Aida Sijamic Wahid and Gwen Yu

We study the frequency of restatements by foreign firms listed on U.S. exchanges. We find that the restatement rate of U.S. listed foreign firms is significantly lower than that of comparable U.S. firms and that the difference depends on the firm's home country... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Restatements; Home Country Enforcement; Earnings Management; Globalized Firms and Management; Law; Financial Reporting; Financial Markets; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues

SSRN

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2014
Teaching Note

Fine Harvest Restaurant Group

By: Clara X. Chen, Kenneth A. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and Wim Van der Stede

The Fine Harvest Restaurant Group cases A and B examine a company's design of a new system to evaluate the performance (and determine the bonuses) for its restaurant managers. Fine Harvest had traditionally evaluated restaurant managers based on store margins and had... View Details

Keywords: Incentive Systems; Relative Performance Evaluation; Restaurant Industry; Accounting; Economics; Human Resources; Measurement and Metrics; Labor; Performance; Salesforce Management; Retail Industry; North and Central America

17 Feb 2003
Research & Ideas

Rating Fund Managers by the Company They Keep

Many tools for rating the performance of mutual funds and their managers rely heavily on past performance. But what about the future? Now comes a system devised by Randolph B.... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

Article

A Blueprint for Pharmacy Benefits Managers to Increase Value

By: William Shrank, Michael E. Porter, Sachin H. Jain and Niteesh K. Choudhary

Pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) have a unique opportunity to promote public health and generate value in the healthcare system. However, PBMs are largely evaluated on their ability to control costs rather than improve health. PBMs should be evaluated along three... View Details

Keywords: Opportunities; Health; System; Cost Management; Partners and Partnerships; Motivation and Incentives; Value; Innovation and Invention; Performance Effectiveness; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

Find at Harvard

29 Jul 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Learning from the Kursk Submarine Rescue Failure: The Case for Pluralistic Risk Management

Keywords: by Anette Mikes & Amram Migdal

2015
Other Unpublished Work

Do Managers Have a Role to Play in Sustaining the Institutions of Capitalism?

By: Rebecca Henderson and Karthik Ramanna

In a capitalist system based on free markets, do managers have responsibilities to the system itself? If they do, should these responsibilities shape their behavior when they engage in the political processes that structure the institutions of capitalism? The... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Lobbying; Leadership; Economic Systems; Managerial Roles; Business and Government Relations

Read Now

July 1996 (Revised December 2001)
Case

Becton Dickinson--Designing the New Strategic, Operational, and Financial Planning Process

By: Robert L. Simons, Antonio Davila and Afroze A Mohammed

Describes management's attempts to design and install a sophisticated planning and control system in an international company as it changes its strategy. Issues of strategy implementation, accountability, and performance measurement are at the core of the analysis, as... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Business or Company Management; Corporate Accountability; Governance Controls; System; Performance Evaluation

11 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

The New International Style of Management

characterizes the U.S. model of management as focused on immediate outcomes and results and generally accustomed to having its way. But it has an added feature that enables it... View Details

Keywords: by Garry Emmons

02 Nov 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

Keywords: by Rogelio Oliva & Noel H. Watson

October 2021 (Revised June 2022)
Case

PittaRosso: Artificial Intelligence-Driven Pricing and Promotion

By: Ayelet Israeli

PittaRosso, a traditional Italian shoe retailer, is implementing an AI system to provide pricing and promotion recommendations. The system allows them to implement changes that would affect both the top of funnel and bottom of funnel activities for the company: once... View Details