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- 2022
- Chapter
Redirecting Rawlsian Reasoning Toward the Greater Good
By: Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang and Max Bazerman
In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls employed the ‘veil of Ignorance’ as a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial thinking. By imagining the choices of decision-makers who are blind to biasing information, one might see more clearly the organizing... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Are Experts Blinded by Feasibility?: Experimental Evidence from a NASA Robotics Challenge
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Zoe Szajnfarber, Jason Crusan, Michael Menietti and Karim R. Lakhani
Resource allocation decisions play a dominant role in shaping a firm’s technological trajectory and competitive advantage. Recent work indicates that innovative firms and scientific institutions tend to exhibit an anti-novelty bias when evaluating new projects and... View Details
- May 8, 2020
- Article
Which Covid-19 Data Can You Trust?
By: Satchit Balsari, Caroline Buckee and Tarun Khanna
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a tidal wave of data, but how much of it is any good? And as a layperson, how can you sort the good from the bad? The authors suggest a few strategies for dividing the useful data from the misleading: Beware of data that’s too broad... View Details
- May 4, 2020
- Article
Your CEO Succession Plan Can't Wait
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng, Boris Groysberg and Paul M. Healy
CEOs tend to be older, putting them at greater risk of COVID-related illness, and adding to the urgency, succession planning has long been a blind spot for most boards. From 2015 to 2016, the authors conducted a global survey to better understand the experiences,... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised May 2020)
- Case
Keroche (A): Fighting for Share in the Kenyan Alcoholic Drinks Market
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Pippa Tubman Armerding
This case discusses the challenges faced by Kenyan alcoholic drinks producer Keroche Industries Limited in 2003, when the Kenyan government accused the company of manufacturing and selling substandard alcoholic drinks, revoked its liquor licenses, and shut down its... View Details
Keywords: Keroche; Alcohol; Wine; Manufacturing; Informal Market; Regulation; Illicit; Illegal; Shutdown; Factory; Low-income Consumers; Multinational; Local; Government; Allegations; Accusations; Negative Press; EABL; Tusker; Beer; SAB; Chang'aa; Naivasha; Rift Valley; East Africa; Lawsuit; Legal Battle; Business Ventures; Business Exit or Shutdown; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Production; Safety; Quality; Distribution; Small Business; Family Business; Crime and Corruption; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decisions; Income; Demographics; Geographic Scope; Geographic Location; Goods and Commodities; Government Legislation; Growth and Development; Business History; Lawsuits and Litigation; Laws and Statutes; Lawfulness; Goals and Objectives; Consumer Behavior; Market Entry and Exit; Problems and Challenges; Social Issues; Poverty; Strategy; Competition; Entrepreneurship; Manufacturing Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Kenya; Nairobi; Africa
- September 21, 2018
- Article
Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn't It?
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Boris Groysberg
Corporate directors and executives alike recognize that today’s pace of change continues to accelerate and that firms need to innovate to stay ahead. But are boards doing enough to support innovation, as they should? We conducted a survey of over 5,000 board members... View Details
- Article
How a Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team for Long-Term Success
By: Frank V. Cespedes and David Mattson
It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses—and it’s hard to fault them. The biggest problem with a... View Details
- September–October 2017
- Article
GE's Global Growth Experiment: The Company Pushed Cross-Business Collaboration
By: Ranjay Gulati
Like many other companies, GE under Immelt had to figure out how to balance serving local needs with the economies of worldwide scale. Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati looks at how it tackled the challenge. He identifies several important takeaways for other... View Details
- 2017
- Article
The Impact of Training Informal Healthcare Providers in India: A Randomized Controlled Trial
By: Jishnu Das, Abhijit Chowdhury, Reshmaan Hussam and Abhijit Banerjee
Health care providers without formal medical qualifications provide more than 70% of all primary care in rural India. Training these informal providers may be one way to improve the quality of care where few alternatives exist. We report on a randomized controlled... View Details
- January 2016
- Article
Blind Loyalty?: How Group Loyalty Makes Us See Evil or Engage in It
By: John Angus D. Hildreth, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman
Loyalty often drives corruption. Corporate scandals, political machinations, and sports cheating highlight how loyalty's pernicious nature manifests in collusion, conspiracy, cronyism, nepotism, and other forms of cheating. Yet loyalty is also touted as an ethical... View Details
- Article
Ethical Blind Spots: Explaining Unintentional Unethical Behavior
By: Ovul Sezer, F. Gino and Max H. Bazerman
People view themselves as more ethical, fair, and objective than others, yet often act against their moral compass. This paper reviews recent research on unintentional unethical behavior and provides an overview of the conditions under which ethical blind spots lead... View Details
- November 2015
- Article
Why Organizations Don't Learn: Our Traditional Obsessions—Success, Taking Action, Fitting In, and Relying on Experts—Undermine Continuous Improvement
By: F. Gino and B. Staats
For any enterprise to be competitive, continuous learning and improvement are key—but not always easy to achieve. After a decade of research, the authors have concluded that four biases stand in the way: we focus too heavily on success, are too quick to act, try too... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Blinded by Experience: Prior Experience, Negative News and Belief Updating
By: Bradley R. Staats, Diwas S. KC and Francesca Gino
Traditional models of operations management involve dynamic decision-making assuming optimal (Bayesian) updating. However, behavioral theory suggests that individuals exhibit bias in their beliefs and decisions. We conduct both a field study and two laboratory studies... View Details
- July–August 2014
- Article
Becoming a First-Class Noticer: How to Spot and Prevent Ethical Failures in Your Organization
By: Max Bazerman
We'd like to think that no smart, upstanding manager would ever overlook or turn a blind eye to threats or wrongdoing that ultimately imperil his or her business. Yet it happens all the time. We fall prey to obstacles that obscure or drown out important signals that... View Details
- March 2014 (Revised September 2017)
- Case
salaUno: Eliminating Needless Blindness in Mexico
By: Richard Hamermesh, Regina Garcia Cueller and Valeria Moy
In May 2013 the co-founders and co-CEOs of salaUno, Javier Okhuysen and Carlos Orellana, were encouraged by the results of their fledgling start-up. salaUno was founded as a for-profit enterprise in order to have the capital needed for rapid growth and to fulfill its... View Details
Keywords: Medical Services; Developing Countries; Developing Markets; Health Care Industry; Health Services; Healthcare Ventures; Healthcare Startups; Health Care and Treatment; Health; Business Startups; Developing Countries and Economies; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Mexico; Mexico City
- April 2013 (Revised February 2018)
- Case
Norway: The Embarrassment of Riches
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Forest Reinhardt and Senny Munthe-Kaas
In early 2013, Norway was by many accounts the world’s most developed country; it topped various indices for everything from democracy to happiness, had a comprehensive welfare state, and massive oil revenues endowed it with a substantial, and growing, Sovereign Wealth... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Ethical Breakdowns: Good People often Let Bad Things Happen. Why?
By: Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel
Companies are spending a great deal of time and money to install codes of ethics, ethics training, compliance programs, and in-house watchdogs. If these efforts worked, the money would be well spent. But unethical behavior appears to be on the rise. The authors observe... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Why Leaders Don't Learn from Success
By: Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
We argue that for a variety of psychological reasons, it is often much harder for leaders and organizations to learn from success than to learn from failure. Success creates three kinds of traps that often impede deep learning. The first is attribution error or the... View Details
- 2011
- Book
Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It
By: Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel
When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability... View Details