Publications

February 2021 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Board Director Dilemmas—Back the SPAC?

By: Suraj Srinivasan, David G. Fubini and Amram Migdal

This case focuses on a board director of a diversified holding company. The firm’s longtime CEO had always exhibited a cautious, methodical approach to growth. Now, the CEO is raising the idea of joining with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to spin off... View Details

Keywords: Board Director; Strategy; Change Management; Decision Making

March 2016 (Revised March 2022)
Teaching Note

Express Scripts: Promoting Prescription Drug Home Delivery (A) and (B)

By: John Beshears

The pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) sector processes prescription drug claims on behalf of companies that offer a prescription drug benefit to their employees. The case associated with this teaching note follows Bob Nease, chief scientist at Express Scripts, as he... View Details

Keywords: Pharmaceuticals; Prescription Drugs; Pharmacy Benefit Manager; PBM; Healthcare; Behavioral Economics; Choice Architecture; Active Choice; Service Delivery; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Behavior; Distribution Channels; Health Care and Treatment; Service Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry

March 1997 (Revised July 1998)
Case

SOS-Kinderdorf International: Caring for Orphaned Children

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

SOS-Kinderdorf, founded in 1949, has grown rapidly into one of the largest orphanages in the world with children's villages, kindergartens, schools, youth facilities, and other complementary programs in 130 countries. This case describes the evolution of the... View Details

Keywords: Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Mission and Purpose; Problems and Challenges; Nonprofit Organizations; Strategy; India; Norway; United States

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24 Oct 2024
Blog Post

Trailblazing Success with Global Reach and Impact: Scott Wallinger (AMP 82, 1979)

years of forestry business experience. HBS was transformative. For the first time, I was learning about international business and gaining insights from people across different industries. The case method... View Details

Article

Assent-maximizing Social Choice

By: Katherine A. Baldiga and Jerry R. Green

We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Theory; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Society

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21 Jan 2009
News

Harvard Business School Students Immersed in Experiential Learning

November 2020 (Revised March 2022)
Teaching Note

Social Salary Setting at Spiber

By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 920-050. The case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their... View Details

Keywords: Compensation; General Management; Employee Benefits; Incentives; Motivation; Compensation and Benefits; Fairness; Motivation and Incentives; Management; Happiness; Negotiation; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Japan

January 2004 (Revised February 2005)
Background Note

A Note on Methodological Fit in Management Field Research

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Stacy McManus

To use in doctoral-level management courses on the design of field research methods. Advocates the importance of fit, or internal consistency, among the different elements of a field research project. Although the scientific method provides an essential framework for... View Details

Keywords: Management; Research

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03 Sep 2024
News

Welcoming the MBA Class of 2026 to Harvard Business School

31 Oct 2023
HBS Case

Checking Your Ethics: Would You Speak Up in These 3 Sticky Situations?

look for the line, you never want to be in the ZIP Code of the line.” Here’s a look at three sticky situations, along with Fubini’s advice about how to handle them. The case of the freeloading associate: A client grants a per-diem stipend... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consulting

12 Nov 2015
Blog Post

3 Facts About HBS Discussion Groups

Reading cases is an integral part of the HBS experience. The case method was pioneered at HBS, and 80% of the cases published each year are... View Details

November 1986 (Revised August 1989)
Case

Paul Revere Insurance Co. (A)

The Paul Revere Insurance Co. lost its number one position in disability insurance, its main product, and formulated a strategy to regain the lead through a comprehensive quality improvement effort. The case describes the forces influencing the strategic direction of... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Performance Productivity; Competitive Advantage; Insurance Industry; United States

September 2012
Supplement

Industrial Metrology: Getting In-Line? (B)

By: Willy Shih

Rainer Ohnheiser, the President of Carl Zeiss's Business Group Industrial Metrology (IMT), was focused on the threat that in-line metrology posed to Carl Zeiss IMT's core business. Historically, coordinate measurement machines (CMMs) that employed tactile measurement... View Details

Keywords: Performance Trajectories; Emerging Technologies; Manufacturing Tools; Carl Zeiss; Go-to-market Strategy; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Production; Performance Improvement; Measurement and Metrics; Manufacturing Industry; Germany

2020
Article

Fast Exact Matrix Completion: A Unified Optimization Framework for Matrix Completion

By: Dimitris Bertsimas and Michael Lingzhi Li

We formulate the problem of matrix completion with and without side information as a non-convex optimization problem. We design fastImpute based on non-convex gradient descent and show it converges to a global minimum that is guaranteed to recover closely the... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

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August 2021 (Revised February 2023)
Case

Fair Park Covid-19 Mass Vaccination Site (A)

By: Willy Shih

This case is an opportunity to apply the methods of the Toyota Production System (TPS) to the analysis of an everyday service application: administering Covid-19 vaccines. It describes the start-up of a drive-up Covid-19 mass vaccination site at the Texas State Fair... View Details

Keywords: Operations Improvement; Operations And Processes; Toyota Production System; COVID-19 Pandemic; Operations; Service Operations; Health Pandemics; Problems and Challenges; Goals and Objectives; Measurement and Metrics; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; United States; Texas

September 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Helmy Abouleish: Making a Desert Bloom

By: Geoffrey G. Jones and Maxim Pike Harrell

This case examines the history of prominent Egyptian-based social enterprise SEKEM from its foundation in 1977 until the COP27 conference held in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2022. Led by father and son team Ibrahim and Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM turned desert into farmland using... View Details

Keywords: Agribusiness; Climate Change; Values and Beliefs; Social Enterprise; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Egypt

Teaching Interest

Overview

I taught for five years in the first-year MBA course, Business, Government, and the International Economy. I now teach Globalization and Emerging Markets to second-year MBAs, as well as an executive education module on global economics in the Owner/President Management... View Details

2012
Article

Exploring Re-Identification Risks in Public Domains

By: Aditi Ramachandran, Lisa Singh, Edward Porter and Frank Nagle

While re-identification of sensitive data has been studied extensively, with the emergence of online social networks and the popularity of digital communications, the ability to use public data for re-identification has increased. This work begins by presenting two... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Analytics and Data Science; Social and Collaborative Networks