Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,740)
- Faculty Publications (484)
- Article
Values, Purpose, Meaning, and Expectations: Why Culture and Context Matter
The "rational person" standard, based on assumptions of economic self-interest, has long prevailed in legal reasoning. But understanding of decision making, behavioral choices, and possibilities for action must be enlarged to include a variety of factors that give... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Learning from Customers: Individual and Organizational Effects in Outsourced Radiological Services
By: Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
The ongoing fragmentation of work has resulted in a narrowing of tasks into smaller pieces that can be sent outside the organization and, in many instances, around the world. This trend is shifting the boundaries of organizations and leading to increased outsourcing.... View Details
- Article
On the Origin of Shared Beliefs (and Corporate Culture)
This article shows how corporate culture, in the sense of shared beliefs and values, originates (often unintentionally) through screening, self-sorting, and manager-directed joint learning. It shows that such culture will be stronger among more important employees and... View Details
- 2010
- Book
Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution
By: Robert L. Simons
To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organization's competitive strategy into day-to-day actions that will enable your company to win in the marketplace. This means channeling resources into the right efforts, striking a balance between innovation and... View Details
- October 2010
- Article
Organizational Designs and Innovation Streams
By: Michael Tushman, Wendy K. Smith, Robert Chapman Wood, George Westerman and Charles A. O'Reilly III
This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firm's ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams—incremental innovation in existing products as... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Performance Tradeoffs in Team Knowledge Sourcing
By: Bradley R. Staats, Melissa Valentine and Amy C. Edmondson
This research examines how teams organize knowledge sourcing (obtaining access to others' knowledge or expertise) and investigates the performance trade-offs involved in two approaches to knowledge sourcing in teams. One approach a team can take is to specialize, such... View Details
- August 2010 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
Leaders Who Make a Difference: Joel Klein Brings Accountability to NYC DOE: Day 1
By: Joseph L. Bower and Sonja Ellingson Hout
Joel Klein took over the NYC Department of Education in 2002 and radically transformed the strategy and organization remarkably with improvements in performance. Day 1 of the two case series focuses on the steps taken by Klein over his eight year tenure. Supplementary... View Details
- August 2010 (Revised July 2012)
- Supplement
Leaders Who Make a Difference: Joel Klein Brings Accountability to NYC DOE: Day 2
By: Joseph L. Bower and Sonja Ellingson Hout
Joel Klein took over the NYC Department of Education in 2002 and radically transformed the strategy and organization remarkably with improvements in performance. Day 2 focuses on Klein as a strategist, organization builder and driver of performance. Supplementary... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
Star Power: Colleague Quality and Turnover
By: Boris Groysberg and Linda Eling-Lee
In this article, we argue that the existence of greater organizational resources, in the form of higher quality colleagues, acts as a retention mechanism. We test our hypotheses using a panel data set of securities analysts in 24 securities firms over a 9-year period.... View Details
- April 2010
- Course Overview Note
Managing Human Capital
By: Boris Groysberg
Managing Human Capital, a second-year elective course at Harvard Business School, seeks to create business leaders who understand human resources practices essential to firm performance and who think strategically about managing their own careers. This Managing Human... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised March 2010)
- Supplement
Leading Change at Simmons (E)
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Susan Thyne
This case updates the “Leading Change at Simmons” series by examining Simmons' increasing debt under the ownership of Thomas H. Lee, a private equity firm. Charlie Eitel, the former CEO, wonders what the company's, and his, legacy will be after declaring bankruptcy... View Details
- January 2010
- Case
Pratham - Every Child in School and Learning Well
By: Srikant M. Datar, Stacey M. Childress, Rachna Tahilyani and Anjali Raina
The case focuses on how Pratham, a non-governmental organization, provided quality education to underprivileged children in India by collaborating with the government. It focuses on the problem Madhav Chavan, the founder, is trying to solve, the contributing factors... View Details
- 2010
- Article
An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms
By: Robin J. Ely and Debra E. Meyerson
This case study of two offshore oil platforms illustrates how an organizational initiative designed to enhance safety and effectiveness created a culture that unintentionally released men from societal imperatives for "manly" behavior, prompting them to let go of... View Details
- Article
Recent Advances in the Empirics of Organizational Economics
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We present a survey of recent contributions in empirical organizational economics, focusing on management practices and decentralization. Productivity dispersion between firms and countries has motivated the improved measurement of firm organization across industries... View Details
Keywords: Economics; Management Practices and Processes; Performance Productivity; Geographic Location; Motivation and Incentives; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Competition; Human Capital; Markets; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Multinational Firms and Management; India; Brazil; United States
- 2010
- Chapter
Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership
By: Joel Podolny, Rakesh Khurana and Marya Hill-Popper
During the past 50 years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has... View Details
- December 2009 (Revised September 2014)
- Case
TD Canada Trust
By: Dennis Campbell and Brent Kazan
The case illustrates the role of performance measurement and analytics in translating TD-Canada Trust's service model of "comfortable banking" into operational terms. In 2000, in a banking market where consumers and regulators were typically hostile to mergers and... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
International Differences in the Size and Roles of Corporate Headquarters: An Empirical Examination
By: David J. Collis, David Young and Michael Goold
This paper examines differences in the size and roles of corporate headquarters around the world. Based on a survey of over 600 multibusiness corporations in seven countries (France, Germany, Holland, UK, Japan, US, and Chile) the paper describes the differences among... View Details
Keywords: Business Headquarters; Size; Organizational Structure; Culture; Japan; France; Germany; Netherlands; United Kingdom; United States; Chile
- winter 2009
- Article
Creativity, Improvisation, and Organizations
By: Colin M. Fisher and Teresa M. Amabile
'Improvisational creativity' involves simultaneously identifying new challenges and generating responses, with little or no time to prepare. View Details
- December 2009
- Article
Hiding the Evidence of Valid Theories: How Coupled Search Processes Obscure Performance Differences Among Organizations
By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Jan Rivkin
Theorists argue that an organization's high-level choices, such as its organizational design or the attributes of its top management team, should influence its performance, yet empirical researchers have struggled to detect such influence. The impact of high-level... View Details
- October 2009 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Ingrid Johnson and Nedbank Business Banking
By: Michael Tushman and David Kiron
This case discusses the issue of leading change at the business banking division of Nedbank, a prominent South African bank, between 2005 and 2009. (This timeframe, beginning just 11 years after Apartheid's end, covers Ingrid Johnson's leadership of this division... View Details