Meaning - Publications - Faculty & Research

October 18, 2021
Article

How to Reframe What Work Means to You

Our society often conceives of work as something we must endure so we can afford to do something else. The former CEO of Best Buy explains why this view has led to a crisis of engagement among leaders and employees alike, and offers a different model that he introduced... View Details

Keywords: Work; Meaning In Life; Employment; Attitudes; Perspective; Mission and Purpose

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Article

The (Perceived) Meaning of Spontaneous Thoughts

By: Carey K. Morewedge, Colleen Giblin and Michael I. Norton

Spontaneous thoughts, the output of a broad category of uncontrolled and inaccessible higher-order mental processes, arise frequently in everyday life. The seeming randomness by which spontaneous thoughts arise might give people good reason to dismiss them as... View Details

Keywords: Spontaneous Thoughts; Self-Insight; Meaning; Attribution; Judgment And Decision Making; Decision Making; Cognition and Thinking

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Work Group Rituals Enhance the Meaning of Work

By: Tami Kim, Ovul Sezer, Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton

The many benefits of finding meaning in work suggest the importance of identifying activities that increase job meaningfulness. The current paper identifies one such activity: engaging in rituals with workgroups. Five studies (N = 1,099) provide evidence that... View Details

Keywords: Groups; Meaningfulness; Task Meaning; Ritual; Teams; Organizational Citizenship; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Familiarity

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1 Oct 1996
Conference Presentation

Breaking Out of the Box: Meaning and Means

By: G. Zaltman

Keywords: Attitudes; Research

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Research Summary

Creating and Consuming Brand Meaning

By: Jill J. Avery

This vibrant stream explores how managers build meaning into their brands through narrative stories, and nurture, leverage, and maintain meaning over time. It also explores how consumers use this meaning embedded in brands to construct their identities and live their... View Details

Contested Meanings of Freedom

In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not pre-scribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent... View Details

summer 2001
Article

Branding Means Connecting

By: Nancy F. Koehn

Keywords: Brands and Branding; Customer Relationship Management

Citation

2010
Chapter

Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership

By: Joel Podolny, Rakesh Khurana and Marya Hill-Popper

During the past 50 years, organizational scholarship on leadership has shifted from a focus on the significance of leadership for meaning-making to the significance of leadership for economic performance. This shift has been problematic for two reasons. First, it has... View Details

Keywords: Communication Intention and Meaning; Economics; Leadership; Performance Improvement; Behavior

Citation

In my first year at HBS, a lot of the emphasis was on the Required Curriculum (RC), with courses like accounting, marketing, finance, strategy, and operations. I assumed the Elective Curriculum (EC) year would be more of that type of coursework. To be honest, I was... View Details

01 Jun 2013
News

Progression to the Mean

Mean Girls & Boys More than 80 students lent a hand to the April production of this year's HBS Show, Mean Girls & Boys—a parody of the 2004 Lindsay Lohan movie—which finds a new first-year student struggling... View Details

2019
Presentation

The Person You Mean To Be

2022
Article

The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in Third-Person Attributions of Meaning

By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent... View Details

Keywords: Experimental Philosophy; Folk Theories; Meaning In Life; Moral Psychology; Positive Psychology; Moral Sensibility; Satisfaction

06 Aug 2010
News

Shaq name means green

01 Jun 2011
News

Where Conservation Means Business

Photos by Webb Chappell Related Links Who Was George F. Baker? Priscilla Anderson demonstrating photo conservation techniques. Stepping into the workaday world of Priscilla Anderson is like taking a step back in time. While most professionals spend their days tethered... View Details

Keywords: Roger thompson

01 Mar 2010
News

The Meaning of Ramadi

leader to shoulder blame rather than search for excuses. Everything that happens is ultimately the leader’s responsibility anyway, and promptly taking ownership of a difficult situation means that you can lead your team out of it that... View Details

Keywords: Donovan Campbell; National Security and International Affairs; Government