Publications

December 2019 (Revised June 2024)
Case

The Dutch East India Company in 1612 (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci

The Dutch East India Company’s board of directors must decide what to do about an impending legal requirement to liquidate the company’s assets and return to shareholders their capital and any profits earned during a ten-year lock-up period. The charter granted to the... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Globalized Firms and Management; Organizational Structure; Laws and Statutes; Financial Markets; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Government Relations; Business History; Shipping Industry; Netherlands

01 Dec 2017
News

Case Study: The Doctor Deficit

illustration by Pablo Amargo illustration by Pablo Amargo There is a doctor shortage in the United States, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, which... View Details

Keywords: April White

August 2023
Article

Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?

By: Tom Nicholas

The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United... View Details

Keywords: Mortality; Status; Working Conditions; Rank and Position; Welfare; Well-being; Health

26 Jul 2006
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way to Go to Market

channel institutions. As a result, channel managers can evolve and change their fulfillment of customer needs without having to change channel structure all at once. Of course,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

24 Sep 2020
News

The Race for a Vaccine

Above: illustration by Matthew Roharik/Getty Images In November 2019, a team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of View Details

Keywords: April White; COVID-19; Scientific Research and Development Services

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Porter’s Perspective: Competing in the Global Economy

you decide to put together this collection of articles? Porter: In retrospect, my work divides into three major areas. The first has to do with how firms compete in industries... View Details

Keywords: Re: Michael E. Porter

01 Mar 2019
News

The One That Got Away

Kepha Partners Blinded by the Dot-Com Bust I looked at Data Domain (Series B) in 2003 and at Splunk (Series A) in 2004. At the time, we had just come through the dot-com boom... View Details

January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Pioneer Natural Resources: Enhancing the Capital Return Strategy with Variable Dividends

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Elisabeth Kempf and E. Scott Mayfield

In February 2021, Scott Sheffield, the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources (an independent oil and gas company based in Texas), was considering the possibility of enhancing the firm’s capital return strategy by introducing a variable dividend tied to cash flows in... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Finance; Cash Flow; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Value Creation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Profit; Policy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Energy Industry; United States; North America; Texas

25 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University

Prominent among them were Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and MIT. Together, they have evolved to share common institutional traits, a sort of university DNA. Much as the identity View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen & Henry J. Eyring; Education

17 Feb 2015
HBS Case

HBS Cases: The Battle for San Francisco

MBAs who had graduated as recently as a year ago and as long as 30 years ago to a series of roundtables to discuss their perspectives on inequality and the tension between the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

01 Apr 1999
News

An Eye to the East

gathered from interviews with senior executives at about five hundred major companies in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Deshpandé and his team discovered that many of the "strategic... View Details

Keywords: Alejandro Reyes

17 Jul 2000
What Do You Think?

Where Is the Microsoft Board?

number of the recent high-tech firms that have issued stock to the public. Insiders still rule. A minimum of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

November 1989 (Revised January 1990)
Case

Paul Revere Insurance Co. (C): Competing For the Baldrige Award--The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Exercise

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award requires firms to submit applications that conform to a rigorous quality-assessment system. This case consists of several parts of a service company's 1988 Baldrige application together with material from the Malcolm Baldrige... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Performance Improvement; Performance Evaluation