Publications

February 2004 (Revised March 2004)
Case

Ockham Technologies: Living on the Razor's Edge

By: Noam T. Wasserman

Describes the issues facing a founder-CEO regarding building a board of directors, assembling an executive team, managing tension between co-founders, and outsourcing system development work. View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Conflict Management; Governing and Advisory Boards; Employees; Management Teams; Product Development; Technology Industry

January 2003 (Revised August 2005)
Case

CareGroup

By: F. Warren McFarlan and Robert D. Austin

Describes the circumstances leading to the three-and-a-half-day collapse of a major hospital group's IS capabilities. Identifies the technical reasons for the failure, management steps in dealing with the problem short term, and the long-term lessons they believe they... View Details

Keywords: Information Management; Information Technology; Safety; Crisis Management; Infrastructure; Health Industry

12 May 2021
Book

The Hard Truth About Being a CEO

told by one group, but also going back and having confirmative conversations with others. Others will go a few layers below the senior management team and engage middle-management, who are often willing to be absolutely candid and have a... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

May 1998 (Revised February 1999)
Case

Diamond in the Rough (A)

By: Thomas J. DeLong and Catherine M. Conneely

Diamond Technology Partners, a consulting firm based in Chicago, was founded in 1994 by Mel Bergstein and Chris Moffitt, with investment from founding partners and Safeguard Scientifics. In April 1996, just after fiscal year-end, the two largest clients withdrew from... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Entrepreneurship; Going Public; Crisis Management; Finance; Consulting Industry; Chicago

March – April 2009
Article

Market Research and Innovation Strategy in a Duopoly

By: Dominique Lauga and Elie Ofek

We model a duopoly in which ex-ante identical firms must decide where to direct their innovation efforts. The firms face market uncertainty about consumers' preferences for innovation on two product attributes and technology uncertainty about the success of their R&D... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Innovation and Management; Demand and Consumers; Duopoly and Oligopoly; Research and Development; Competitive Strategy

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02 Sep 2008
First Look

First Look: September 3, 2008

victim of wrongdoing or the actual harm caused. Yet in four laboratory studies, we show that these factors have a systematic effect on how people judge the ethicality of the perpetrator of an unethical action. Specifically, we find that identifiability of the victim of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 1991 (Revised December 1994)
Case

Steve Mariotti and NFTE

Less than three years ago, Steve Mariotti created NFTE, a nonprofit organization for teaching entrepreneurship to disadvantaged youths. The organization has gained national recognition, and offers a variety of programs on a budget of nearly half a million dollars. It... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Nonprofit Organizations; Growth Management; Business Growth and Maturation; Teaching; Business Startups

Summer 2018
Article

CSR needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics

By: Thomas Lyon, Magali A. Delmas, John W. Maxwell, Pratima Bansal, Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline, Patricia Crifo, Rodolphe Durand, Jean-Pascal Gond, Andrew King, Michael Lenox, Michael W. Toffel, David Vogel and Frank Wijen

Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Communication; Policy; Business and Government Relations

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February 2011
Article

Bounded Ethicality in Negotiations

By: Max Bazerman

Routine and persistent acts of dishonesty prevail in everyday life, yet most people resist shining a critical moral light on their own behavior, thereby maintaining and oftentimes inflating images of themselves as moral individuals. We overview the psychology that... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Values and Beliefs; Strategy; Goals and Objectives; Reputation; Negotiation; Moral Sensibility

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20 Aug 2007
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Using Investor Relations Proactively

this is a very formidable task. Beyond meeting the objective of providing better information for decision-making, this could also open a completely new perspective and prestige for the IR function. It would allow the IR people to become... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

Web

A New Vision – The Human Relations Movement – Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Historical Collections

Company’s Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois. Ultimately, though, many managers and scholars regarded this comprehensive study, the results of which were published in 1939 in the midst of the Great Depression under the title View Details

13 Sep 2011
First Look

First Look: September 13

(category demand expansion or market share stealing). To help brand managers make informed marketing mix decisions, it is essential that marketing mix models appropriately measure the different effects of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 2011 (Revised June 2011)
Supplement

Arck Systems (C)

By: Ian Larkin

The Arck Systems series of cases describes the dilemmas faced by a senior sales manager in determining a sales compensation plan at an enterprise software company. The existing compensation plan is aggressive and highly rewards "star" performers. The cases track a... View Details

Keywords: Change; Framework; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Management; Organizational Design; Outcome or Result; Performance Evaluation; Sales; Motivation and Incentives; System; Applications and Software

2021
Working Paper

Studying the U.S.-Based Portfolio Companies of U.S. Impact Investors

By: M. Diane Burton, Gurveen Chadha, Shawn A. Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Laura Kelley, Josh Lerner, Jaime R. Diaz Palacios, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the reliance on market-based solutions to social and environmental problems around the world (Barman 2016; Horvath and Powell 2020). The growth of impact investing is a vivid example of this trend and, although there have... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Impact Portfolio Companies; Investment; Social Issues; Environmental Sustainability; Investment Portfolio; Business Ventures; Analytics and Data Science; Performance; United States

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06 Dec 2010
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Doing Business in Emerging Markets

Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions To Be Answered: How do I identify opportunities in emerging markets? How important are relations with the host country?... View Details

12 Apr 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Productivity Suffers When Employees Are Allowed to Schedule Their Own Tasks

managers to make decisions about pricing, product displays, or brand-related social media content. On one hand, that makes good sense because they are more informed about local conditions and customers than... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

2020
Working Paper

Anchors Aweigh: Analysis of Anchor Limited Partner Investors in Impact Investment Funds

By: Shawn A. Cole, T. Robert Zochowski, Fanele Mashwama and Heather McPherson

This note describes results from a survey of “anchor investors” in impact funds. Anchor investors are described as “generally the first investor to make a substantial capital commitment to a fund,” (according to the Global Impact Investing Network, “GIIN”) and their... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investment Funds; Anchor Investors; Investment; Surveys; Analysis