Publications

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July 2008 (Revised February 2011)
Supplement

Sanford C. Bernstein: The Fork in the Road (B)

By: Boris Groysberg and Geoff Eckman Marietta

Update on the (A) case. View Details

Keywords: Knowledge; Business or Company Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Competitive Advantage; Valuation; Financial Services Industry

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May 2001 (Revised January 2003)
Case

Calpine Corporation: The Evolution from Project to Corporate Finance

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Michael Kane

In early 1999, Calpine Corp.'s CEO Pete Cartwright adopted an aggressive growth strategy with the goal of increasing the company's aggregate generating capacity from approximately 3,000 to 15,000 megawatts (MW) by 2004. He believed there was a fleeting opportunity to... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Cost of Capital; Project Finance; Adaptation; Profit; Financial Strategy; Corporate Finance; Energy Industry; United States

February 2000 (Revised January 2008)
Case

Merrill Lynch: Integrated Choice

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Marie Bell

Merrill Lynch, a full-service brokerage firm with $1.5 trillion in client assets, is under attack from both discount and electronic brokerage firms. It responds with Integrated Choice, a suite of products designed to capture clients from the do-it-yourself investor who... View Details

Keywords: Distribution Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry

March 1996
Case

Ernst & Young United Kingdom (A) (Abridged)

By: John J. Gabarro and Samantha Graff

Intended to be a robust example of the challenges encountered during the early stages of a large-scale organizational transformation effort in a professional service firm. Describes a massive change program initiated and led by the new managing partner along with a... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Leading Change; Management Teams; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Restructuring; Problems and Challenges; United Kingdom; London

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01 Dec 2013
News

Batteries and Chocolates

Illustration by Adam Niklewicz/theispot.com by Debora L. Spar In 1991, when I joined the HBS faculty, men outnumbered women by two to one in the student body and four to one among the senior faculty. Back then, male students saw nothing wrong in circulating sign-up... View Details

Keywords: Spar, Debora; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

February 2024
Teaching Note

Accelerating with Caution: Forecasting and Managing birddogs' Growth (A) and (B)

By: Mark Egan

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 224-023 and 224-024. As 2017 was drawing to a close, birddogs’ founder and CEO, Peter Baldwin, was working with his CFO Jack Sullivan to prepare for 2018. A nascent direct-to-consumer apparel brand, birddogs had carved its niche in men’s... View Details

Keywords: Inventory Management; Forecasting Demand; Financial Constraints; Apparel; Startups; Corporate Finance; Forecasting and Prediction; Working Capital; Financing and Loans; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Demand and Consumers; Apparel and Accessories Industry; United States

April 29, 2014
Column

Corporate Reporting in the Big Data Era

By: George Serafeim

Advancements in information technology can improve corporate communication with shareholders, but not through incessant data dumps. Instead, companies will more likely be poised for continued success if they use digital platforms for long-term oriented engagement and... View Details

Keywords: Integrated Reporting; Big Data; Corporate Reporting; Sustainability; Corporate Social Responsibility; Corporate Governance; Accounting; Reporting; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Corporate Accountability; Analytics and Data Science; Information Technology; Communication; Financial Reporting; Business and Shareholder Relations

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September 2013 (Revised June 2017)
Supplement

IBM and the Reinvention of High School (B): Replicating & Scaling P-TECH and Partners

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone

IBM's Corporate Citizenship office created an innovation in public education through a business-school partnership for widespread replication and diffusion. In 2012, while P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School) was still in its first year operating,... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Partnerships; Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Partners and Partnerships; Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Business and Community Relations; Innovation and Invention; Growth Management; Chicago; Idaho

August 2007 (Revised June 2020)
Case

Trouble with a Bubble

By: Tom Nicholas

Examines technology, firm performance, and the stock market during the 1929 Great Crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The 1920s was an extraordinary period of technological progress marked by a strong run-up in stock market prices. Firms invested heavily in... View Details

Keywords: Bubble; Stock Market; Great Depression; Irving Fisher; Information Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation; History; Financial Markets; Performance; Labor and Management Relations; Equity; Financial Crisis; Innovation and Invention; United States

March 2007
Teaching Note

Understanding Customer Profitability at Charles Schwab (TN)

By: Francisco de Asis Martinez-Jerez

Teaching note to 106002. View Details

Keywords: Customers; Profit; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Decision Making; Cost; System; Transformation; Budgets and Budgeting; Performance Evaluation; Financial Services Industry; Web Services Industry

January 2002 (Revised November 2010)
Case

Strategic Planning at NFTE

By: Allen S. Grossman and Daniel F. Curran

The National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), is a successful nonprofit poised on the verge of explosive growth. The senior management contracted with McKinsey consultants to help guide the process. The founders of NFTE brought it from a small program... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Partners and Partnerships; Nonprofit Organizations

01 Jun 2020
News

Post-Office

Image by John Ritter On March 8, in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Stack Overflow, the world’s largest online community for software developers and technologists, announced that its nearly 250-employee workforce would be going all-remote. It was a... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; Remote work; COVID-19; Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management

03 Sep 2020
Op-Ed

Why American Health Care Needs Its Own SEC

excellent model. The business community should embrace this model to help solve its long-standing, unresolved issues with health care costs, quality, and access. A version of this commentary was first published by Bloomberg and adapted... View Details

Keywords: by Regina E. Herzlinger; Health

13 Aug 2024
Blog Post

Leading With Curiosity: Mayowa Kuyoro (MBA 2015)

Things Fall Apart and talked about being rigid versus having a set of tools that can enable you to adapt to change,” she recalled. “The reason why that has stuck with me is that the pace of innovation and the pace of change has been so... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

27 Nov 2017
Blog Post

Joining a Start-up: 10 Lessons Along the Way

cynic in me. I'm part of the fifth generation in my family to work in the diamond industry, and while it's an exciting industry, it is also one of the slowest to adapt and innovate. Working on a way to bring it into the 21st century is... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Consumer Products / Retail

07 Aug 2017
Blog Post

A Summer Internship with the City of Boston

two-clicks, the City might create apps and alerts that let you, say, get that pot-hole filled, pay a parking meter, or move your car on street-cleaning days before it gets towed. Just like Google builds sites that are colorful, easily navigable, and instantly View Details

Web

From Classroom to Workplace - Business Education For Women At Harvard University | Harvard Business School

adapted to changing times and attitudes toward working women. As W. K. Jordan, historian and fourth president of Radcliffe College, observed, "Mr. Whitehead and his colleagues have most wisely kept their thinking and their methods fluid.... View Details

15 Feb 2017
Op-Ed

What Africa Can Teach the United States About Funding Infrastructure Projects

could teach the richest nation on earth about how to finance infrastructure. But, there are important lessons in multiple examples of roads, power, ports, and water projects that actually get built, thanks to successful funding models. Their success is founded on their... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction

October 2012
Case

GSK's Acquisition of Sirtris: Independence or Integration? (Abridged)

By: Toby Stuart and James Weber

An executive from pharmaceutical company GSK must choose how much to integrate a recently acquired biotechnology firm, Sirtris. Moncef Slaoui, GSK's global head of R&D, championed the acquisition of Sirtris to gain access to its potentially revolutionary science.... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Resource Allocation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Research and Development; Science-Based Business; Integration