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All HBS Web
(1,965)
- People (1)
- News (430)
- Research (1,220)
- Multimedia (10)
- Faculty Publications (643)
- 04 Jan 2022
- What Do You Think?
Firing McDonald’s Easterbrook: What Could the Board Have Done Differently?
(iStockphoto/tofumax) A corporate board’s most important decision is selecting the organization’s CEO. By the same token, one could argue that a board’s most distasteful decision concerns firing a CEO. Once directors agree to release the...
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by James Heskett
- 04 Jan 2017
- What Do You Think?
How Much Bureaucracy is a Good Thing in Government and Business?
Summing Up: Are Bureaucracies Worth Improving? Several messages emerge from responses to this month’s column on the worthiness of bureaucracies. In general, there is a wide range of thinking about the value of bureaucracies and work done View Details
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by James L. Heskett
- 02 Jan 2024
- What Do You Think?
Do Boomerang CEOs Get a Bad Rap?
(AdobeStock/Vincent) The return of Robert Iger as CEO of Walt Disney followed by a poorer-than-expected company performance has rekindled the debate about whether the decision to bring back formerly successful CEOs to revitalize an...
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by James Heskett
- 01 Mar 2023
- What Do You Think?
How Much Does 'Deep Purpose' Matter to the Bottom Line?
(iStockphoto/PeopleImages) An organization’s mission is widely recognized as its reason for being. Enlightened leaders have long known and believed that the heart of an organization’s culture is described not just by “how we do things...
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by James Heskett
- 02 Aug 2020
- What Do You Think?
Is the 'Experimentation Organization' Becoming the Competitive Gold Standard?
level. Their work has been both influenced by and reported recently by several academics. Harvard Business School professors Michael Luca and Max Bazerman track experimentation in decision-making back to the...
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- 04 Oct 2022
- What Do You Think?
Have Managers Underestimated the Need for Face-to-Face Contact?
to a rubber band that snaps back toward a somewhat constant middle ground even after pandemic-level disruptions. Here’s the argument as it applies to remote work or “work from anywhere”: Remote work, already common, was first required by...
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by James Heskett
- 05 Jul 2022
- What Do You Think?
Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?
supply of “safety stock” was the order of the day for those using slower forms of transportation. "The result, of course, was what came to be known as 'just-in-time' inventory management, as championed by firms such as Toyota." One of my...
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- 05 Dec 2022
- What Do You Think?
How Would Jack Welch’s Leadership Style Fare in Today’s World?
doubt about what they think of Welch as a leader, although Cohan's is a more careful, balanced appraisal. For the Gen Zers and Millennials among us who don’t even recognize the name, this is a guy who, when he retired, was called “the CEO of the 20th century” View Details
- 01 Feb 2023
- What Do You Think?
Will Hybrid Work Strategies Pull Down Long-Term Performance?
hybrid work strategies make jobs that can be performed from the “home” more attractive by eliminating the need for some commuting. They raise productivity modestly, and provide employees more control over their personal and work lives....
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by James Heskett
- 02 May 2023
- What Do You Think?
How Should Artificial Intelligence Be Regulated—if at All?
humanity. Clearly, AI is a big deal with large potential benefits and, at the moment, largely unknown risks for society. It will get more important fast. Why? Two tech giants, Microsoft and Google, are competing for first-mover advantage along with a third competitor,...
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- 07 May 2014
- What Do You Think?
How Should Wealth Be Redistributed?
diagnoses. Others advocated tax and non-tax solutions. The case against hasty change was made by Dave: "Market based capitalism is the greatest driving force of prosperity in the world today, but if we forget this and marginalize it...
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by James Heskett
- 05 Jun 2023
- What Do You Think?
Is the Anxious Achiever a Post-Pandemic Relic?
appreciated Jenny Odell’s thesis that “doing nothing” offers us several useful “tools,” including those of repair (personal reflection and recovery), “a sharpened ability to listen”—a critical resource in a world dominated by telling and...
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by James Heskett
- 14 Nov 2023
- What Do You Think?
Do We Underestimate the Importance of Generosity in Leadership?
leader: fostering change. I don’t ever recall generosity having been emphasized in any of these discussions. I’m reminded of this by the current interest in the subject of happiness led by, among others, Arthur Brooks of this faculty....
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by James Heskett
- 12 Sep 2023
- What Do You Think?
Who Gets the Loudest Voice in DEI Decisions?
statement? Nike’s decision to feature in its ads Colin Kaepernick, an American footballer whose patriotism has been questioned, ultimately resulted in what was described by one observer as a “bold success.” On the other hand, brands like...
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by James Heskett
- 09 May 2017
- What Do You Think?
Should Management Be Primarily Responsible to Shareholders?
it) creates undue risk of moral hazard, simply because boards and senior management are often significant shareholders. If it is true that the average tenure of a CEO today is 3 years, how could any sane CEO not seek to maximize share value View Details
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by James Heskett
- 31 May 2017
- What Do You Think?
Can Amazon Do What Walmart Couldn’t, Stop the 'Wheel of Retailing'?
In 1997, a young entrepreneur visited a class at Harvard Business School taught by my colleague, Len Schlesinger. The class discussed a case based on the visitor’s fledgling online retailing company that had rapidly expanded sales to $100...
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- 01 Feb 2021
- What Do You Think?
Has the New Economy Finally Arrived?
economy characterized by high growth, increased employment, and low inflation. It was supposedly driven by the productivity gains of an economy based less on heavy industry and more on service, as well as...
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by James Heskett
- 01 Apr 2019
- What Do You Think?
Does Our Bias Against Federal Deficits Need Rethinking?
accompanied by lower inflation and interest rates—that justify deficit spending to produce both economic growth and social programs designed to improve our quality of life and reduce social inequality” (JohnfrmClevelnd). Or, it prompts...
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by James Heskett
- 14 Sep 2017
- Op-Ed
Op-Ed: Google Engineer Deserved to be Fired by the CEO
Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Credit: Steven Zimmerman/Wikipedia Commons Google software engineer James Damore’s ten-page manifesto excoriating his employer for its diversity initiatives incited a major controversy in August about...
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by Bill George
- 03 Feb 2016
- What Do You Think?
How Do You Hire an 'Impostor'?
the employment of “imposters,” a term, by the way, that was regarded as objectionable by many, most respondents implicitly rejected the notion. They pointed to the desirable qualities of imposters, people...
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by James Heskett