Publications

August 1993 (Revised April 1998)
Case

Filene's Basement

By: David E. Bell and Dinny Starr

Filene's Basement is in the process of deciding where, and if, to locate two new stores in its new Chicago area of operations. The existing Chicago area stores have been performing well, however, management is concerned with over saturation of the market. At the time... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Growth Management; Marketing Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Business Processes

August 2007 (Revised September 2007)
Case

Gome: Bidding for China Paradise

Gome, China's largest electronics retailer, has the opportunity to acquire China Paradise, the number three player in the Chinese electronic retailer industry. This happened in the general context of a great market development and potential consolidation of the... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Trade; Market Entry and Exit; Performance; Opportunities; Competition; Consolidation; Corporate Strategy; Electronics Industry; Retail Industry; China

September 2021 (Revised June 2023)
Supplement

Serving Bud Moore (B)

By: David G. Fubini and Patrick Sanguineti

In only his third year at a Leading Strategy Consulting firm (LSC), Gregory Davis has been assigned to a select group tasked with advising General Motors (GM), one of the largest companies in the world by revenue, on how to reorganize their entire North American... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Relationships; Outcome or Result; Groups and Teams; Management Skills; Restructuring

January 2018 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Giving Birth to Ovia Health

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Julia Kelley

In late 2016, Paris Wallace, the CEO of Ovia Health, and the rest of the company’s co-founders faced a difficult decision about the best way to grow Ovia Health’s revenue. Founded in 2012, Ovia Health specialized in mobile and web applications in the women’s health... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

15 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

Solving the Search vs. Display Advertising Quandary

a few clicks of a mouse, companies can tell how successful a particular ad was in making a purchase decision. "A lot of companies have put more and more money into online marketing because online marketing... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Advertising

13 Jun 2014
Op-Ed

World Cup Soccer: 770 Billion Minutes of Attention

attention is power concentrated. Football's ability to emotionally connect with audiences in huge numbers in real time has made it a lucrative business in the market for attention. Ironically, the very value... View Details

Keywords: by Thales Teixeira; Sports

13 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Global Investments Are Still a Good Bet

capacity in global markets to provide capital in an economy, and that increases their ability to absorb risk.” Thus, diversification becomes self-reinforcing, making global financial markets more stable, at... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

September–October 2017
Article

The Surprising Power of Online Experiments: Getting the Most Out of A/B and Other Controlled Tests

By: Ron Kohavi and Stefan Thomke

In the fast-moving digital world, even experts have a hard time assessing new ideas. Case in point: At Bing, a small headline change an employee proposed was deemed a low priority and shelved for months until one engineer decided to do a quick online controlled... View Details

Keywords: Experiments; A/B Testing; Research; Consumer Behavior

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18 Nov 2009
HBS Case

Customer Feedback Not on elBulli’s Menu

six months that elBulli, his restaurant, is open. The world is beating a path to Chef Ferran Adrià's door, but why? "Creativity comes first; then comes the customer," he has said. So what can HBS students learn about marketing... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

15 Nov 2011
First Look

First Look: November 15

referring users to all manner of other sites, and in light of striking market concentration among search engines. Read the paper: http://www.nls.ac.in/ojs-2.2.3/index.php/IJLT/article/viewFile/92/72 Measuring the Prevalence of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

January 2007 (Revised May 2008)
Case

Henry Luce and the American Century

By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony Mayo and Logan Wilcox

Henry Luce, founder of the publishing company which produced Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, created the largest media company in the world by the mid-20th century. Luce's flagship magazine, Time, was able to gross over $20 million in sales during its... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Leadership Style; Emerging Markets; Publishing Industry; United States

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January 2011
Supplement

Matrix Capital Management (B)

By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane

Ben Balbale, a partner at hedge fund Matrix Capital, must decide whether to exit their investment in Rovi Corporation, a company with a diverse portfolio of patents used primarily for digital interactive guides. Rovi's shares are up over 50% from the time Balbale... View Details

Keywords: Public Ownership; Cash Flow; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Investment Funds; Financial Strategy; Valuation; Partners and Partnerships; Markets; Performance Efficiency; Patents; Stock Shares; Decisions; Financial Services Industry

Research Summary

Overview

In industries characterized by extreme dynamism, complexity, and uncertainty, formal structure often “falls behind” actual work processes. The nature of work in these environments evolves continuously while formal structure can only do so at specific times in discrete... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Organizational Identity; Identity Work; Strategy; Strategic Change; Collaboration; Cross-functional Integration; Cognition; Organizational Evolution; Organizational Alignment; Social Media

08 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

A Bold Proposal for Investment Reform

For companies to redeem credibility with investors, argue Harvard Business School professors Paul Healy and Krishna Palepu, "fundamental and even radical reforms must be made to the way America's markets process the flows of... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen; Financial Services

January 2011 (Revised January 2015)
Case

Matrix Capital Management (A)

By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane

Ben Balbale, a partner at hedge fund Matrix Capital, must decide whether to exit their investment in Rovi Corporation, a company with a diverse portfolio of patents used primarily for digital interactive guides. Rovi's shares are up over 50% from the time Balbale... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Asset Management; Cash Flow; Stock Shares; Financial Markets; Investment Funds; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Strategy; Valuation; Financial Services Industry

24 Oct 2023
HBS Case

From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Who Changed the World

What makes a leader great? A dose of luck, for sure. But specific leadership traits mark extraordinary individuals time and time again and help elevate the standouts from the vast middle. That’s the... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

September 2021
Case

Ensuring Your Family’s Future: The Alagil Family Office

By: Lauren Cohen, Esel Çekin and Fares Khrais

Muhammad Alagil was a second-generation leader in the well-known Alagil Family Group of businesses in Saudi Arabia and co-founder and chairman of its family office, Jarir Company for Commercial Investments (Jarir Investments). The case opens in 2021 with Alagil... View Details

Keywords: Family Office; Second-generation; Third-generation; Investments; Philanthropy; Family Business; Investment; Finance; Financial Markets; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Saudi Arabia; Middle East

March 2021 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Resident

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones

Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Business Growth and Maturation; Operations; Entrepreneurship; Competitive Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Decisions; Marketing Strategy; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers

June 2005
Case

CarMax

By: Rajiv Lal and David Kiron

Carmax is the largest multi-market used car dealer in the U.S., and has no format-to-format competitor in the $375 billion used car market. CarMax is trying to do what some analysts believed to be impossible: sell used cars profitably on a national scale, and at the... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Brands and Branding; Digital Platforms; Segmentation; Auto Industry