Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,105)
- Faculty Publications (338)
- January 2011 (Revised October 2014)
- Case
Dropbox: 'It Just Works'
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Michael Pao and Lauren Barley
Dropbox is a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, founded in 2006, that provides online storage and backup services to millions of customers using a "freemium" (free + premium offers) business model. The case recounts Dropbox's history from conception through... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
Developing an Effective Organization: Intervention Method, Empirical Evidence, and Theory
By: Michael Beer
The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)-a platform... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools
By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade
The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised December 2012)
- Case
Assembling Smartphones: Takt Time ≠ Cycle Time?
By: Willy Shih and Ethan Bernstein
The case was prepared to be used as part of a process review in the first year Technology and Operations Management course at HBS. It offers students an opportunity to discuss the context of a manufacturing process choice, and then examine actual production numbers... View Details
- June 2010
- Case
The Shaw Group Inc.: Entrepreneurial Innovation
By: Lynda M. Applegate and Edward Watson
The case describes the founding and evolution of the Shaw Group through acquisition. The case is set at the time that the company is redesigning its business processes, organization, and information technology infrastructure to support aggressive growth and increased... View Details
- March 2010 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
The Greening of DUMBO
By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and Abhijit Prabhu
The Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass (DUMBO) has seen a revitalization since the late 1970s. The neighborhood's business improvement district (BID) is charged with supplementing New York City's efforts in several areas, including... View Details
- January 2010
- Teaching Note
Transforming ASUSTeK: Breaking from the Past (TN)
By: Willy C. Shih
Teaching Note for [610041]. View Details
- December 2009
- Article
Hiding the Evidence of Valid Theories: How Coupled Search Processes Obscure Performance Differences Among Organizations
By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Jan Rivkin
Theorists argue that an organization's high-level choices, such as its organizational design or the attributes of its top management team, should influence its performance, yet empirical researchers have struggled to detect such influence. The impact of high-level... View Details
- September 2009 (Revised October 2010)
- Case
Elkay Plumbing Products Division
By: Robert S. Kaplan
The vice president of sales learns that the most profitable 1% of the division's customers generate 100% of profits, and that two of the division's largest customers lose 50% of profits. The division has just finished a project to install a time-driven activity-based... View Details
- September 2009 (Revised April 2011)
- Case
Integrated Project Delivery at Autodesk, Inc. (A)
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Faaiza Rashid
Describes Autodesk's engagement in Integrated Project Delivery—a new model of risk management, inter-firm teamwork, and multi-objective (aesthetic, cost, and sustainability) optimization in building projects. In 2008, Autodesk, Inc., the world's largest design software... View Details
- September 2009 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Colombia: Organizing for Competitiveness
By: Jorge Ramirez-Vallejo and Michael E. Porter
The case is designed to explore the process of building competitiveness, particularly in an unstable environment, with a focus on organizing for competitiveness. View Details
- September 2009
- Module Note
Leading Teams Note
This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams... View Details
- August 2009
- Supplement
The TSMC Way: Meeting Customer Needs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (CW)
By: Willy C. Shih
When L.C. Tu receives an emergency order, he is confronted with a range of production scheduling choices, each of which has unique costs and trade-offs. The case was designed to help students understand job-shop style production and the impact of disruptions and... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Calera Corporation
By: Joseph B. Lassiter III, Thomas J. Steenburgh and Lauren Barley
Brent Constantz, founder, CEO, and president of Calera Corporation, felt a surge of optimism as he gazed at the recently commissioned prototype flue gas processing line at Calera's R&D facility in Moss Landing, California. It was late May 2009, and Calera was an... View Details
- August 2009
- Case
The TSMC Way: Meeting Customer Needs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien, Chintay Shih and Jack Chang
When L.C. Tu receives an emergency order, he is confronted with a range of production scheduling choices, each of which has unique costs and trade-offs. The case was designed to help students understand job-shop style production and the impact of disruptions and... View Details
- 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
- 2009
- Book
High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage
By: Michael Beer
Integrating knowledge from strategic management, performance management, and organization design, strategic human resource expert and Harvard Business School Professor Michael Beer outlines what the high-commitment, high-performance organization looks like and provides... View Details
- July – August 2009
- Article
Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance
By: Sebastian Raisch, Julian Birkinshaw, Gilbert Probst and Michael Tushman
Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues that are fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through... View Details
- March 2009 (Revised July 2014)
- Case
PNC Financial: Grow Up Great (A)
By: Christopher Marquis, V. Kasturi Rangan and Alison Comings
In 2003, PNC Financial focused its corporate citizenship and philanthropic resources on a ten-year, $100 million investment in early childhood education called PNC Grow Up Great. The case tracks the origination of Grow Up Great, how it was developed and implemented... View Details
- February 2009 (Revised July 2012)
- Case
Jieliang Phone Home! (A)
By: Willy Shih, Ethan Bernstein and Nina Bilimoria
At Precision Electro-Tek's mobile phone manufacturing facility in southern China, thousands of operators—bright and capable young men and (mostly) women like Jieliang Hao—are motivated to improve line productivity through small innovations for faster assembly and have... View Details