Publications

01 May 2017
Research & Ideas

Bad At Your Job? Maybe It's the Job’s Fault

Source: Geber86 When a worker struggles to meet the demands of a particular position, the problem may not be with the employee—maybe it’s the job’s design that is wrong. A poorly designed job can work... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

11 Jul 2017
First Look

First Look at New Ideas and Research, July 11

take many years to design and build and then have decades of useful life. This means that it needs to understand now what sorts of missions it may be required to perform in 10, 20, or 30 years and what assets and infrastructure it will... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

August 2000 (Revised August 2018)
Case

The Atchison Corporation (A)

By: Joseph L. Bower

A new general manager uses a profit-center-based system to shake up an old line company. He then faces the task of placating a board member upset by the human consequences. A rewritten version of an earlier case. View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Profit; Human Resources; Change Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Design

18 Sep 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Modularity, Transactions, and the Boundaries of Firms: A Synthesis

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

16 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Why Technology Alone Can't Solve AI's Bias Problem

However, the researchers found smaller increases when using fair ranking for the shopping and event staffing tasks—with jumps between 2.5 and 13 percent—and they say that might be because participants associated these tasks with women.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

December 2009
Article

Restructuring Within an Academic Health Center to Support Quality and Safety: The Development of the Center for Quality and Safety at the Massachusetts General Hospital

By: Richard Bohmer, Jonathan David Bloom, Elizabeth Mort MD, Akinluwa Demehin and Gregg Meyer MD

Recent focus on the need to improve the quality and safety of health care has created new challenges for academic health centers (AHCs). Whereas previously quality was largely assumed, today it is increasingly quantifiable and requires organized systems for... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Performance Improvement; Quality; Safety; Massachusetts

21 Jan 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Learning from Customers in Outsourcing: Individual and Organizational Effects

Keywords: by Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman & Bradley R. Staats

April 2023
Case

Burning the Sails to Save the Ship: The Pilati Family Dilemma

By: Lauren Cohen, Hao Gao, Jiawei Ye and Grace Headinger

Octavian Graf Pilati, rising generation member of an Austrian princely family, prepared to sell the palace his family had held for over three hundred years. In recent years, the Pilati family lands had been leveraged as loan collateral for an international venture that... View Details

Keywords: Family Office; Family; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Agribusiness; Family Business; Property; Identity; Culture; Ethics; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Governance; Crisis Management; Family and Family Relationships; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Real Estate Industry; Austria

December 2021
Case

Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-free Online Insurance Platform

By: Amit Goldenberg, Max Bazerman and Ruth Page

"Slice Labs: Creating a Fraud-Free Online Insurance Platform" engages students with the challenge of how to influence other parties to not engage in fraud in the context of digital insurance. The case is centered around Slice, a digital insurance company that was... View Details

Teaching Interest

Scaling Minority Businesses

By: Archie L. Jones

Scaling Minority Businesses (SMB) is a field course designed to leverage the intellectual power and community of Harvard Business School to address the vital needs of Black-owned enterprises as they face the twin tasks of surviving and growing. The course... View Details

February 12, 2021
Article

The Commercial Space Age Is Here

By: Matt Weinzierl and Mehak Sarang

In May of 2020, SpaceX made history as the first private company to send humans into space. This marks not only a tremendous technological achievement, but also the first indication that an entirely new “space-for-space” industry—that is, goods and services designed to... View Details

Keywords: Space Economy; New Markets; Emerging Markets; Opportunities; Entrepreneurship; Commercialization; Aerospace Industry

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March 2010 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Cognizant 2.0: Embedding Community and Knowledge Into Work Processes

By: Robert G. Eccles and Thomas H. Davenport

Knowledge management has been a high priority for Cognizant Technology Solutions since its inception since its global delivery model requires the global sharing of knowledge. Its first major tool was called the Knowledge Management Appliance but as Web 2.0 tools came... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Management; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Product Development; Service Delivery; Business Processes; Organizational Structure; Cooperation; Information Technology Industry

April 2021
Exercise

Valuing Employment Exercise

By: George Serafeim, Ethan Rouen and Katie Panella

The Valuing Employment exercise can be used to show the importance of impact measurement in designing incentives and contracts. The exercise has two phases. In the first phase, participants play the role of managers at the State of Massachusetts Infrastructure... View Details

Keywords: Bid Evaluation; Workforce; Impact Measurement; Bids and Bidding; Contracts; Design; Measurement and Metrics

September 2009
Module Note

Leading Teams Note

By: Jeffrey T. Polzer

This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Sharing; Leadership; Business Processes; Groups and Teams

February 2003
Background Note

Leading Teams

By: Jeffrey T. Polzer

This note which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams... View Details

Keywords: Communication; Decision Making; Leadership; Managerial Roles; Performance Effectiveness; Groups and Teams

June 2021
Article

The Role of Beliefs in Driving Gender Discrimination

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Christine L. Exley and Muriel Niederle

While there is ample evidence of discrimination against women in the workplace, it can be difficult to understand what factors contribute to discriminatory behavior. We use an experiment to both document discrimination and unpack its sources. First, we show that, on... View Details

Keywords: Gender Discrimination; Behavioral Decision Making; Gender; Attitudes; Prejudice and Bias; Economics; Behavior; Decision Making