Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(847)
- Faculty Publications (288)
- 2009
- Chapter
Creating Superior Customer Value in a Connected World
By: Ranjay Gulati
"In the early twenty-first century, customers are more demanding than ever, and difficult economic times make them all the more so. As customers tighten their wallets and increase their demands, firms face greater pressure to provide superior customer value. Reducing... View Details
- March 2009
- Case
Barbara Norris: Leading Change in the General Surgery Unit
By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria and Deborah Bell
Barbara Norris struggles to address the many problems facing her as a recently promoted nurse manager in the General Surgery Unit (GSU) at Eastern Massachusetts University Hospital (EMU). She has inherited a unit with the lowest employee satisfaction scores and highest... View Details
- February 5, 2009
- Comment
In Praise of Marketing
By: John A. Quelch
Many dismiss marketing as manipulative, deceptive, and intrusive. Marketing, they argue, focuses too much of our attention on material consumption. More recently, Benjamin Barber, in his 2007 book Consumed, claims that marketing is "sucking up the air from every other... View Details
Keywords: Marketing; Consumer Loyalty; Local Vs. Global Branding; Multi-national Brands; Misleading and Fraudulent Advertising; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Satisfaction; Globalized Economies and Regions; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalized Markets and Industries; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Product Positioning
- January 2009 (Revised June 2014)
- Case
CityCenter (A): Vision and Design
By: A. Eugene Kohn, John D. Macomber and Ben Creo
CityCenter is a $9 billion project for MGM MIRAGE. The project's star architects have a major disagreement about a critical design issue. Bill Smith, head of the MGM MIRAGE Design Group, must resolve this issue to the satisfaction of all the project's stakeholders.... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
Cisco Systems (2001): Building and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture
By: Ranjay Gulati
Customer centricity has been an important part of the culture at Cisco Systems since its inception. While part of this is attributable to values put in place by the founders and retained by subsequent management, it is also closely interwoven with its organizational... View Details
- Article
From Wealth to Well-Being? Money Matters, but Less than People Think
By: Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton and Elizabeth W. Dunn
While numerous studies have documented the modest (though reliable) link between household income and well-being, we examined the accuracy of laypeople's intuitions about this relationship by asking people from across the income spectrum to report their own... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage
By: James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser Jr. and Joe Wheeler
Hundreds of large organizations worldwide have used the groundbreaking Service Profit Chain to improve business performance. Now The Ownership Quotient reveals the next generation of the chain: customer and employee "owners" of your business. Employee-owners exhibit... View Details
- Article
Strong Leadership and Teamwork Drive Culture and Performance Change: Ohio State University Medical Center 2000–2006
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger, Fred Sanfilippo, Neeli Bendapudi and Anthony Rucci
Several characteristics of academic health centers have the potential to create high levels of internal conflict and misalignment that can pose significant leadership challenges.
In September 2000, the positions of Ohio State University (OSU) senior vice... View Details
- July 2008 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (A)
By: Tsedal Neeley and Thomas J. DeLong
Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers
By: Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman
Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised October 2008)
- Case
TD Canada Trust (A): The Green and the Red
By: Dennis Campbell and Brent Kazan
The case series illustrates the role of performance measurement and analytics in translating TD-Canada Trust's service model of "comfortable banking" into operational terms. In 2000, in a banking market where consumers and regulators were typically hostile to mergers... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
TheLadders (A)
By: Peter A. Coles, Benjamin Edelman, Brian J. Hall and Nicole Bennett
Despite strong appeal among job seekers and outside recruiters, TheLadders' corporate job listings seem to lag. Could raising prices help solve the problem? TheLadders considers this strategic paradox. View Details
- April 2008
- Exercise
Exercise: Customer-Operator Letter Writing
By: Frances X. Frei
The exercise involves having students write letters to an organization of their choice describing their operating experience at a detailed level. The companies' responses are paired with the students' letters and the entire collection is made available to the class.... View Details
- April 2008
- Module Note
Service Design in the Context of Customer-Operators
By: Frances X. Frei
Taught as the second module in a Harvard Business School course on Managing Service Operations: Understanding the Customer Operating Role (606-092). Addresses the design and management of service operations with significant customer operating roles. The focus is on... View Details
- February 2008
- Case
Cincom Systems, Inc.
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
Tom Nies, charismatic CEO of Cincom Systems, is considering a public offering of his software enterprise, but the 1987 stock market crash checks his plans. Nies reflects that capital for expansion will keep Cincom at the frontier of technological development in a... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Comcast New England: A Journey of Organizational Transformation
By: Michael Beer and Anita Arun
This case describes how Kevin Casey, Comcast's New England Region general manager, transformed a low commitment and performance organization. When he took charge of this Comcast region he inherited an organization that was bureaucratic, had low customer satisfaction,... View Details
- December 2007 (Revised February 2017)
- Case
Vegpro Group: Growing in Harmony
By: David E. Bell, Brian Milder and Mary Shelman
Vegpro, a horticulture company, is Kenya's largest exporter of fresh vegetables and flowers to top supermarkets in the U.K. and Europe. In 2007, Vegpro's business is threatened by growing consumer concern about the environmental impact of food production and transport,... View Details
- July 2007 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Central Bank: The ChexSystemsSM QualiFile® Decision
By: Dennis Campbell, Francisco de Asis Martinez-Jerez, Peter Tufano and Emily McClintock
The "Central Bank" series analyzes the use of information and product design for managing the counterparty risk of newly acquired customers. Central Bank, a mid-sized regional U.S. bank, was attempting to grow its customer base by increasing the number of new checking... View Details
- July 2007 (Revised February 2010)
- Case
Launching Telmore (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Celso Fernandez and Moritz Jobke
When the Danish mobile phone service provider Telmore entered the market in October 2000, few people took notice. Its business model was not perceived as particularly aggressive or threatening to the industry. Less than three years later, Telmore's creative adaptation... View Details
- May 2006 (Revised November 2006)
- Case
Willa Seldon at Tides Center (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Stecker
Willa Seldon, an African-American woman with 16 years of for-profit experience, was hired as executive director of Tides Center, a nonprofit in San Francisco, CA. Tides Center was a fiscal sponsor dedicated to supporting individuals and groups working toward social... View Details