Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,585)
- Faculty Publications (1,042)
- May 2011 (Revised July 2015)
- Case
Ford Motor Company: Strengthening the Dealer Network
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Katharine Lee and Marie Bell
The case describes a five-year effort (2006-2011) of distribution rationalization and consolidation at Ford. The financial crisis in the second-half of 2008 forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. Having completed the distribution overhaul work by 2011, its senior... View Details
- May 2011
- Article
The Power of Small Wins
By: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer
What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and... View Details
Keywords: Creativity; Interpersonal Communication; Employee Relationship Management; Leadership; Performance Effectiveness; Emotions; Motivation and Incentives; Groups and Teams; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Working Conditions; Management Practices and Processes; Management Skills; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Performance Productivity; Attitudes; Behavior; Happiness; Perception; Trust; Time Management; Resource Allocation; Business or Company Management; Goals and Objectives; Managerial Roles
- April 2011 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
Talismark
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Talismark, which helped its customers manage their waste, was considering re-engineering its business fundamentals to dramatically increase profitability by changing its sales and information processes. Implementing the changes would be expensive and would interrupt... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised July 2014)
- Case
Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd.: Driving Change Through Internal Communication
By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind
Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity
By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery
This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Strategies for Learning from Failure
By: Amy C. Edmondson
Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons)--and that learning from it is pretty straightforward. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. In organizational life, she says, some... View Details
- March 2011
- Case
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Company in 2011
By: Willy Shih and Jia Cheng
When David Wang took over as the CEO of SMIC, he knew that if he was to capitalize on the company's strategic location in the China market, he would have to transform the company mindset and its operating structure from its roots in the manufacturing of DRAMs to the... View Details
- March 2011
- Case
Insight Communications
By: Rajiv Lal and Natalie Kindred
After undertaking a multi-year, metrics-driven operational and cultural overhaul, in April 2010 Insight Communications was planning the next phase of its development. Insight was a New York-based provider of cable, landline phone, and high-speed Internet service to... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
Cheaper Patents
By: Tom Nicholas
The 1883 Patents Act in Britain provides perspective for modern patent policy reforms because it radically changed incentives for inventors by reducing filing fees by 84 percent. Patents increased 2.5 fold after the reform, which was evenly distributed across the... View Details
Keywords: Patents; Global Range; Distribution; Demand and Consumers; Organizational Structure; Business Processes; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Fluctuation; Motivation and Incentives; Distribution Industry; United States; Great Britain
- February 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
Utilis: Designing, Producing, and Selling Rapid Deployment Shelters for a Troubled World
By: Herman B. Leonard, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Simon Harrow
How can a company that supplies disaster response and humanitarian agencies best handle the intrinsically unpredictable and highly volatile demand for its products? Utilis is a French supplier of rapid-deploy high-end tent solutions for civilian and military uses (such... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
Marlin & Associates and the Sale of Riverview Technologies
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Riverview Technologies was a Stockholm, Sweden-based company that had developed software hedge funds. After spending more than a year in an organized sale process, the winning bidder had become increasingly difficult to work with and the closing had been substantially... View Details
- February 2011 (Revised September 2013)
- Case
Sound Group China: Urban Waste Entrepreneurs
By: John D. Macomber, Chad M. Carr and Fan Zhao
Private sector entrepreneur in China with advanced solid waste management capability competes with state owned enterprises and also government policies supporting a rival technology. Wen Yibo has used engineering expertise and political savvy to build a major privately... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Risky Trust: How Multi-entity Teams Develop Trust in a High Risk Endeavor
By: Faaiza Rashid and Amy C. Edmondson
This paper explicates the challenge of risky trust, which we define as trust that exists between parties vulnerable to high economic, legal, or reputational risks at individual or organizational levels. Drawing from analyses of data collected in a grounded case study... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
Aardvark
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Alison Berkley Wagonfeld and Lauren Barley
Aardvark is an online social search service that allows users to pose questions and receive answers from other users in their extended social network. The case explores the process that Aardvark's founders used to design and develop their product based on intensive... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
Dropbox: 'It Just Works'
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Michael Pao and Lauren Barley
Dropbox is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2006, that provides online storage and backup services to millions of customers using a "freemium" (free + premium offers) business model. The case recounts Dropbox's history from conception through... View Details
- January 2011
- Case
The Risk-Reward Framework at Morgan Stanley Research
By: Suraj Srinivasan and David Lane
The case describes the Risk-Reward framework that Morgan Stanley analysts use as a systematic approach to communicate a broader range of fundamental insights about a company rather than the traditional single point estimates. The goal of the framework is to focus the... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
National Public Broadcasting
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
Bob Williams, the CEO of National Public Broadcasting (NPB), was considering an unsolicited offer to purchase the company in the early spring of 2006. The company was a media underwriting representative for public television and radio stations throughout the United... View Details
- January 2011 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Triangulate (A)
By: Thomas Eisenmann and Lauren Barley
In October 2010, Triangulate's founder/CEO must determine what product features to develop and what marketing programs to pursue in order to boost the odds of successfully raising another venture capital round for his nine month-old Facebook dating application. The... View Details
- 2011
- Teaching Note
Beyondsoft Co., Ltd. (A) (TN)
By: F. Warren McFarlan, Donghong Li and Hong Zhang
In the past two decades, along with China's rapidly growing economy and its integration into the world economic system, the Chinese software outsourcing industry has also risen from zero to being fairly significant in the world IT market. It is currently growing much... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Do U.S. Market Interactions Affect CEO Pay? Evidence from UK Companies
By: Joseph J. Gerakos, Joseph D. Piotroski and Suraj Srinivasan
This paper examines the extent that interactions with U.S. markets impact the compensation practices of non-U.S. firms. Using a sample of large U.K. companies, we find that the total compensation of U.K. CEOs is positively related to the extent of the firm's... View Details