Publications

Educators

26 Sep 2023
Book

Digital Strategy: A Handbook for Managing a Moving Target

to the new digital context. ” Enthusiasts and advocates of the digital revolution would submit that digital transformation changes everything, from product design to how value is built and captured in the market. In some cases,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Information Technology; Technology

July 2004 (Revised September 2004)
Case

Novell: CEO-led Turnaround and Growth Strategy

By: Richard L. Nolan and Robert D. Austin

Novell CEO Jack Messman tried to return the company to its leadership position in the software industry through a strategy that embraces Linux and other open source software. This case serves as an introduction to open source software and strategies based on open... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Value Creation; Open Source Distribution; Applications and Software; Intellectual Property; Business Strategy; Information Technology Industry

16 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

The Outside-In Approach to Customer Service

According to a new book by Harvard Business School's Ranjay Gulati, it is customer-centric firms—those with a so-called outside-in perspective—that are most resilient during turbulent markets. An outside-in perspective means that companies aim to creatively deliver... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Consumer Products

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

Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where she teaches the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of... View Details

2017
Book

Geography, Location, and Strategy

By: Juan Alcácer, Bruce Kogut, Catherine Thomas and Bernard Yin Yeung

Changes in both technology and global political economy have vastly accelerated the pace of globalization in the last 40 years, eroding barriers that limited firms' geographic scope and unleashing a seemingly unlimited set of new threats, challenges, and opportunities... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Global Strategy; Value Creation

06 Oct 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

18 Tips Managers Can Use to Lead Through COVID's Rising Waters

managing through the pandemic. The topics: people and personal management, strategy, marketing, and organizational design. PEOPLE AND PERSONAL MANAGEMENT Tip: Guide your team to create new norms, protocols, and purpose. Leaders need to... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2022
Working Paper

Institutional Emplacement and the Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Ryann Noe

This study reveals how actors leverage physical place as an asset to facilitate organizational adaptation and industry evolution. Through a longitudinal, qualitative analysis of the U.S. independent bookselling industry from 1995 to 2019, we outline how dispersed... View Details

Keywords: Industry Growth; Small Business; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business Processes; Retail Industry; Publishing Industry; United States

12 Dec 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Bottlenecks, Modules and Dynamic Architectural Capabilities

Keywords: by Carliss Y. Baldwin

2012
Book

Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

By: Amy C. Edmondson

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. I show that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those... View Details

Keywords: Change; Interpersonal Communication; Learning; Values and Beliefs; Innovation and Invention; Management; Performance Improvement; Groups and Teams; Research; Strategy; Complexity; Value

September 2005
Article

Managerial Foresight and Attempted Rent Appropriation: Insider Trading on Knowledge of Imminent Breakthroughs

By: Gautam Ahuja, Russell W. Coff and Peggy M. Lee

In order to establish a competitive advantage, firms must acquire or create resources at a price below their value in use. Absent pure luck, this requires managers to exercise foresight about a resource's future value and/or complementarities with pre-existing... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Knowledge Use and Leverage

05 Feb 2018
What Do You Think?

Should Companies Disclose Employee Compensation?

litigation." He added that it "is helpful in two ways: it quantifies what value the company puts on each function (and) it allows employees to get a clear idea about where they are within their compensation band." Those... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Financial Services

Summer 2014
Article

Delegation in Multi‐Establishment Firms: Adaptation vs. Coordination in I.T. Purchasing Authority

By: Kristina Steffenson McElheran

This paper conducts one of the first large-scale, establishment-level empirical studies of delegation within firms. Recent contributions to a rapidly growing theory literature have focused on the tradeoff between adaptation and coordination in determining... View Details

Keywords: Integration; Leadership; Management Practices and Processes; Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Adaptation

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Benjamin C. Esty

I created and teach a course called Strategies for Value Creation (SVC). It is designed to be a capstone course in the Elective Curriculum (EC or second year of the MBA program) that integrates and further develops concepts developed in several Required Curriculum (RC... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Finance; Value Creation; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Financial Management

December 2004 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Mavens & Moguls: Because Marketing Matters...

By: Myra M. Hart, Kristin Lieb and Victoria Winston

Mavens & Moguls is a virtual marketing-consulting firm of approximately 40 professionals. Examines the processes by which Paige Arnof-Fenn (an HBS grad with deep industry experience)draws on her experience and her network to create a high-quality marketing consulting... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Values and Beliefs; Business Growth and Maturation; Organizational Structure; Marketing; Entrepreneurship; Experience and Expertise; Growth and Development Strategy; Consulting Industry

2024
Working Paper

The Impact of Culture Consistency on Subunit Outcomes

By: Jasmijn Bol, Robert Grasser, Serena Loftus and Tatiana Sandino

We examine the association between subunit culture consistency—defined as the congruence between the organizational values espoused by top management and those perceived and practiced by subunit employees—and subunit outcomes. Using data from 235 subunits of a... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Creativity; Satisfaction

February 2009 (Revised September 2011)
Case

Big Spaceship: Ready to Go Big?

By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

Big Spaceship, a digital marketing agency, faced a rather big challenge: How to scale the distinctive culture that was essential to its competitive strategy? Renowned for the cutting-edge websites that it developed to market major Hollywood movies and leading consumer... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Management; Human Capital; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Groups and Teams; Competitive Strategy; Value Creation

Educators

24 Apr 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Corporate Social Entrepreneurship

Keywords: by James E. Austin & Ezequiel Reficco

2014
Working Paper

Learning from the Kursk Submarine Rescue Failure: the Case for Pluralistic Risk Management

By: Anette Mikes and Amram Migdal

The Kursk, a Russian nuclear-powered submarine, sank in the relatively shallow waters of the Barents Sea in August 2000 during a naval exercise. Numerous survivors were reported to be awaiting rescue, and within a week, an international rescue party gathered at... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Groups and Teams; Crisis Management