Publications

July 2007 (Revised March 2009)
Case

Berkshire Partners: Purchase of Rival Company (A)

Berkshire Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, was pleased with their recent investment in the Holmes Group, a home comfort consumer electronics company. The portfolio company was exceeding key financial targets and Berkshire Partners was confident that it would... View Details

Keywords: Private Equity; Capital Structure; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment; Acquisition; Financial Services Industry; Boston

Educators

November 2006
Article

The Flattening Firm: Evidence from Panel Data on the Changing Nature of Corporate Hierarchies

By: Raghuram G. Rajan and Julie Wulf

Using a detailed database of managerial job descriptions, reporting relationships, and compensation structures in over 300 large U.S. firms, we find that firm hierarchies are becoming flatter. The number of positions reporting directly to the CEO has gone up... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Change; Business Ventures; Compensation and Benefits; Rank and Position; Wages; Motivation and Incentives; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Jobs and Positions; United States

Read Now

11 Aug 2014
News

Politics and Dirty Data

Web

HBS Working Knowledge – Harvard Business School Faculty Research

Forman 24 OCT 2023 | HBS Case What do Steve Jobs and Sarah Breedlove have in common? Through a series of case studies, Robert Simons explores the unique qualities of visionary leaders and what today's managers can learn from their... View Details

January 2016
Case

Open Innovation at Fujitsu (A)

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey

This case study examines the open innovation journey at Fujitsu, a global information and communication technology company. The case ends with the location decision between Tokyo, Japan, downtown San Francisco or Sunnyvale, California, regarding establishing a small... View Details

Educators

Research Summary

Managers' Use of Information

William J. Bruns, Jr. is studying (with Sharon M. McKinnon of Northeastern University) managers' use of information in day-to-day and long-term management situations. The findings of this research-that managers develop and rely more heavily on personal information... View Details

January 2024
Article

Investing with the Government: A Field Experiment in China

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Bo Li and Ernest Liu

We study the demand for government participation in China’s venture capital and private equity market. We conduct a large-scale, non-deceptive field experiment in collaboration with the leading industry service provider, through which we survey both capital investors... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Private Equity; Business and Government Relations; Entrepreneurship; China

2017
Working Paper

Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna

From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity... View Details

Keywords: Multinationals; Knowledge Flows; Cosine Similarity; Gravity Model; Multinational Firms and Management; Knowledge Dissemination; Business Headquarters; Immigration

2019
Chapter

International Business and Emerging Markets in Historical Perspective

By: Geoffrey Jones

This chapter examines international business in emerging markets over the long run. It shows how the strategies of Western multinationals evolved over time. In the first era of globalization in the 19th century, Western firms sought access to resources, and they faced... View Details

Keywords: Emerging Markets; Business History; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalization

14 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Understaffed and Overworked: What Now?

challenge on her hands. Perhaps you are attempting to manage your way through a similarly exigent scenario. Trying to accomplish everything that used to be done by two or three people, you may be feeling stressed, maybe more than a bit... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Michelman

April 2008
Module Note

Improvement with Customer-Operators

By: Frances X. Frei and Dennis Campbell

Taught as the third module in a Harvard Business School course on Managing Service Operations: Understanding the Customer Operating Role (606-092). Explores how firms can systematically leverage their customer-operators in the organizational improvement process is... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Performance Improvement; Customer Focus and Relationships; Framework; Employees; Business Model; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Design

21 Feb 2012
First Look

First Look: Feb. 21

corporate archives to explore the fine details of how firms actually operated. It also includes work by those who have been influenced by evolutionary, transaction cost, and resource-based theories of the firm. The book will be an... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

03 May 2011
First Look

First Look: May 3

PublicationsThe Power of Small Wins Authors:Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer Publication:Harvard Business Review 89, no. 5 (May 2011) Abstract What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2012
Working Paper

Organization Design for Distributed Innovation

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

Systems of distributed innovation—so-called business ecosystems—have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. These entities generally encompass numerous corporations, individuals, and communities that might be individually autonomous but related through their... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Innovation and Management; Social and Collaborative Networks; Intellectual Property; Rights; Governance Controls

Read Now

29 Mar 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Entrepreneurs, Firms, and Global Wealth since 1850

Keywords: by Geoffrey G. Jones

28 Oct 2009
Lessons from the Classroom

HBS Begins Teaching Consumer Finance

financial service firms that serve them, including traditional banks, insurance companies, credit card issuers, and brokers, as well as a host of entrepreneurial ventures in this space. Q: When did you get the idea to develop such a... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson; Financial Services; Education

2020
Working Paper

Building the Professional Firm: McKinsey & Co.: 1939-1968

By: Amar Bhidé

This case history analyzes how the founders of McKinsey & Co. built one of the world's leading management consulting firms by developing a “system” of professional norms, approach to serving clients, personnel policies, organization, governance, and ownership. The... View Details

Keywords: McKinsey ＆ Co.; Company History; Professional Norms; Vision; Organizations; Business History; Business Model; Strategy; Consulting Industry