Responsibilities To Customers - Publications - Faculty & Research

17 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

Who is Boss in the Sharing Economy?

When is a company not a company? A modern-day Zen koan, maybe, but the evidence is all around us—Airbnb, Elance-oDesk, Handy, HourlyNerd, TaskRabbit, Uber. These businesses seem much more like conglomerations of independent professionals that connect View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Service; Technology

06 May 2002
What Do You Think?

What’s Driving the “New Marketing?”

'Partner' I mean both the customers (who help define the value) as well as the enabling partners (who help in delivering the value)." Perhaps we should be encouraged that the ideas excerpted from Marketing Moves (always at the risk... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

14 May 2012
Research & Ideas

Breaking the Smartphone Addiction

be available. Our respondents were caught in what we have come to call the cycle of responsiveness. The pressure to be on usually stems from some seemingly legitimate reason, such as requests from clients or... View Details

Keywords: by Leslie A. Perlow

05 Jul 2017
What Do You Think?

Can Innovation Save Us From Ourselves?

Summing Up Do We Need to Give More Attention to the Dark Side of Innovation? Innovation may be able to help us deal with problems such as famine, pollution, and even global warming. But unless it can prove to be just as effective in combating destructive human traits... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Technology

06 Mar 2013
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Women MBAs at Harvard Business School

Radcliffe College, indicating a personal commitment to educating women well before they were officially admitted into the full two-year MBA Program. In 1965, the School hired an administrative assistant to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

10 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Prospective Students Steer Clear of Schools Rocked by Scandal

think about which college to attend,” Luca says. Rolling Stone has been responsible for three long-form articles about campus scandals in the past decade, including the Dartmouth incident; a 2006 case at... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Education

25 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

Will Machine Learning Make You a Better Manager?

think about binge-watching The Good Place. “You look for prior patterns and use them to discover what the future may hold,” says Teodorescu. As algorithms have become increasingly advanced, they may start knowing us better than we know... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information Technology

08 Jan 2001
What Do You Think?

Have We Extended the Boundaries of the Firm Too Far?

Summing Up "What we are looking at is a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about which corporate structures work," commented Daniel Hayes in response to the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

15 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Amazon Prime Day: The Logic Behind a Retailer’s Made-up Holiday

Amazon.com is taking an interesting approach to its birthday this year. The company is throwing itself a party where all its Prime customers get the gifts. Amazon Prime Day is slated for July 15th, "a... View Details

Keywords: Re: Sunil Gupta; Retail

19 Dec 2005
Research & Ideas

The Regional Slice of Your Global Strategy

was directed at Latin America—about ten times Latin America's share of world FDI. Europe's much larger regional economy was pushed into second place as a destination for Spanish capital. Finally, it's important to remember that the... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat

10 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

The Surprising Winners and Losers in the Retail Revolution

brick and clicks are Home Depot and Pet Smart. What did Home Depot do right? Rajiv Lal: Home Depot thought about the challenges facing their business very strategically. They've gone category by category and asked: What is the best way to... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

23 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Setting the Stage: A Young Scholar at HBS

little, if any, time on. Yet teaching comprises an enormous part of the responsibilities of a professor. I long ago realized that watching a master teacher like Tedlow really is the only way to learn the... View Details

Keywords: by Laura Linard; Banking; Financial Services

09 Jul 2001
Research & Ideas

Does Misery Love Companies? How Social Performance Pays Off

to pressure firms to be more responsive to social problems. Examples range from TIAA-CREF's board diversity initiatives (Carleton, Nelson &... View Details

Keywords: by Joshua D. Margolis & James P. Walsh

30 Jan 2017
Research & Ideas

Vanguard, Trian And The Problem With 'Passive' Index Funds

are fully aware of their significant influence on capital markets, as well as their responsibilities to their investors and to capital markets—and View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

18 Dec 2007
First Look

First Look: December 18, 2007

banks understand the tradeoffs that the public is willing to accept in terms of unemployment for inflation, at least in terms of keeping the average level of one particular emotion (contentment) constant. An alternative use of these data... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

29 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater

that groups create by thinking, talking, and collaborating. Artful Making Any activity that involves creating something entirely new requires artful making. Whenever you have no blueprint to tell you in detail what View Details

Keywords: by Rob Austin & Lee Devin

19 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

Alfred Chandler on the Electronic Century

Consider the title. "The Electronic Century" is the twenty-first century. The "inventing" refers to the creation of the technological and institutional foundations—the "infrastructure"—during the latter... View Details

Keywords: by Alfred D. Chandler, Takashi Hikino & Andrew Von Nordenflycht; Computer; Consumer Products; Electronics; Manufacturing; Technology

19 Feb 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Amazoned: Is Any Industry Safe?

Made-up Holiday The company is throwing itself a party where all its Prime customers get the gifts. How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com Independent bookstores managed to survive... View Details