Publications

2021
Working Paper

Accounting for Product Impact in the Interactive Media and Services Industry

By: DG Park, George Serafeim and Katie Trinh

We apply the product impact measurement framework of the Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative (IWAI) in two competitor companies within the interactive media and services industry. We design a monetization methodology that allows us to calculate monetary impact... View Details

SSRN

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Profile

Brittani Rettig

Your Twitter bio reads like that of a superhero ("Management consultant by day, fitness instructor & wellness blogger by night"). Can you tell us about your day and evening jobs? "By day I'm a manager at Deloitte... View Details

Keywords: Consulting; Services; Health Care

2016
Working Paper

The Reference Wars: Encyclopedia Britannica's Decline and Encarta's Emergence

By: Shane Greenstein

The experience of Encyclopædia Britannica provides the canonical example of the decline of an established firm at the outset of the digital age. Competition from Microsoft's Encarta in 1993 led to sharp declines in the sales of books, which led to the distressed sale... View Details

Keywords: Market Entry and Exit; Service Operations; Emerging Markets; Applications and Software; Books; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

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November 2005
Case

Marilyn Carlson Nelson and the Carlson Companies Renaissance

By: William W. George and Andrew N. McLean

In 2005, Marilyn Carlson Nelson, CEO and chairman of the Carlson Companies, must decide whether to outsource jobs at the risk of destroying the culture centered on the values of integrity, trustworthiness, and caring that she had painstakingly created since becoming... View Details

Keywords: History; Leadership Development; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Business or Company Management; Organizational Culture; Personal Development and Career; Family Ownership; Leadership Style; Management Teams

October 2022 (Revised September 2023)
Case

SolarWinds Confronts SUNBURST (A)

By: Frank Nagle, George A. Riedel, William R. Kerr and David Lane

On December 12, 2020, SolarWinds learned that malware had been inserted in its software, potentially granting hackers access to thousands and thousands of its 300,000 customers. General Counsel Jason Bliss needed to orchestrate the company response without knowing how... View Details

Keywords: Cyberattacks; Cybersecurity; Corporate Disclosure; Crisis Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Legal Liability; Information Technology Industry; United States

April 2021 (Revised August 2021)
Case

Borusan CAT: Monetizing Prediction in the Age of AI (A)

By: Navid Mojir and Gamze Yucaoglu

Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) and Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) seem to have bet their careers on developing Muneccim, a new predictive technology that is designed to... View Details

Keywords: Monetization Strategy; Artificial Intelligence; AI; Forecasting and Prediction; Applications and Software; Technological Innovation; Marketing; Segmentation; AI and Machine Learning; Construction Industry; Turkey

04 Sep 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Level II Negotiations: Helping the Other Side Meet Its ‘Behind the Table’ Challenges

Keywords: by James Sebenius

Web

Finance - Faculty & Research

Aparna Krishna This paper evaluates a low-cost, customized soil nutrient management advisory service in India. As a methodological contribution, we examine whether and in which settings satellite measurements may be effective at... View Details

February 1990 (Revised August 1990)
Background Note

Questionnaire Design and Development

By: Alvin J. Silk

An introduction to the design of questionnaires administered in surveys undertaken in management and social science research. Outlines a multistep process for developing a questionnaire. View Details

Keywords: Questionnaires

Snap, the disappearing message app, went public at $17 per share on March 2, 2017, making its two 20-something founders the youngest self-made billionaires in the country. Over the next three weeks, 14 analysts make investment recommendations on Snap: two with buy... View Details

01 Nov 2024
In Practice

Layoffs Surging in a Strong Economy? Advice for Navigating Uncertain Times

one-on-ones, to digital messaging. Your storytelling challenge isn’t over after one grim layoff email. Frances X. Frei is the UPS Foundation Professor of Service Management at HBS. Anne Morriss is a leadership coach. Their latest book is... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology; Information Technology

November 1990 (Revised May 1994)
Case

Microsoft Corp.: Office Business Unit

By: Marco Iansiti

Describes the development of a new word processing software package, Word for Windows. The major focus is how the development process should be improved to reduce schedule slips and cost overruns. Some of the issues raised are: the use of schedules in managing... View Details

Keywords: Communication Strategy; Cost Management; Business or Company Management; Time Management; Product Development; Programs; Projects; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Information Technology Industry

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: John A. Deighton

I teach about the ecosystem of big data, the role of data in advertising and creative industries, and customer management and personal privacy in an era of individual addressability. View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Database Marketing; Social Media; Data Analytics; Information; Advertising; Marketing; Media; Technology; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry

November 2017
Teaching Note

Reinventing Best Buy

By: John R. Wells and Gabriel Ellsworth

Teaching Note for HBS No. 716-455. On March 1, 2017, Best Buy Company, Inc., North America’s largest retailer of consumer electronics and appliances, announced a third year of comparable-store sales increases and a 20.8% increase in domestic comparable online sales.... View Details

10 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

Become a Value Creator

argues that managers who adopt a value-creating mindset hold the key to becoming truly successful leaders. "Business is a team sport. It's soccer, not golf. Nobody plays by themselves and wins in business," Hall said during a... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2023
Working Paper

The Economic and Environmental Effects of Making Electricity Infrastructure Excludable

By: Husnain Fateh Ahmad, Ayesha Ali, Robyn C. Meeks, Zhenxuan Wang and Javed Younas

Electricity theft occurs when individuals cannot be excluded from accessing services. We study the impacts of an infrastructure upgrade in Karachi, Pakistan -- converting bare distribution wires to aerial bundled cables (ABCs) -- that was intended to prevent illegal... View Details

Keywords: Infrastructure; Energy; Environmental Sustainability; Utilities Industry; Pakistan

SSRN

2019
Article

Can Big Data Improve Firm Decision Quality? The Role of Data Quality and Data Diagnosticity

By: Maryam Ghasemaghaei and Goran Calic

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, despite the large variety of data, the huge volume of generated data, and the fast velocity of obtaining data (i.e., big data), quality of big data is far from perfect. Therefore, many firms defer collecting and integrating big data as... View Details

Keywords: Big Data; Analytics and Data Science; Decisions; Quality

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September 1998 (Revised March 1999)
Case

Sun Microsystems and the N-tier Architecture

By: Richard L. Nolan and Kelley Porter

Sun Microsystems is a pioneer in networking computing. Sun's servers maintain a large market share and are considered highly scaleable. The case describes the n-tier architecture for building and managing large networks in which thousands of workers and customers are... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Technological Innovation; Business Strategy; Innovation Strategy; Information Technology Industry