Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(5,094)
- Faculty Publications (1,216)
- February 2022 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Sekisui House and the In-Home Early Detection Platform
By: John D. Macomber and Akiko Kanno
To address an aging population and sales declines, a major Japanese homebuilder considers pivoting to provide and support an in-home health detection platform, in competition with tech companies. This case considers the point of view of major builders regarding how... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
Paul Polman
By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Youngme Moon and Susie Ma
Over his 40-year career, Paul Polman had led some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, making his biggest mark as CEO of Unilever—a multi-national corporation that produced everything from soap to soup. Polman was also well-regarded as a leader in corporate... View Details
- February 11, 2022
- Article
Skills-Based Hiring Is on the Rise
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Christina Langer and Matthew Sigelman
Two decades ago, companies began adding degree requirements to job descriptions, even though the jobs themselves hadn’t changed. After the Great Recession, many organizations began trying to back away from those requirements. To learn how the effort is going, the... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised January 2024)
- Supplement
Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (C)
By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco
In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting—and... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Electoral Turnovers
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Vincent Rollet
In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Supplement
Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (D)
By: Robert L. Simons and Carolyn Deller
This three-page case is the third update to Henkel: Building a Winning Culture (A). In this supplement, dated 2021, a new CEO has taken over Henkel and implemented a new strategy. His changes to the original performance management system are presented as a new... View Details
- 2022
- White Paper
The Emerging Degree Reset: How the Shift to Skills-Based Hiring Holds the Keys to Growing the U.S. Workforce at a Time of Talent Shortage
By: Joseph B. Fuller, Christina Langer, Julia Nitschke, Layla O'Kane, Matthew Sigelman and Bledi Taska
Employers are resetting degree requirements in a wide range of roles, dropping the requirement for a bachelor’s degree in many middle-skill and even some higher-skill roles. This reverses a trend toward degree inflation in job postings going back to the Great... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of Campaign Finance Rules on Candidate Selection and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from France
By: Nikolaj Broberg, Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French departmental and municipal elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement if they obtain... View Details
- February 2022
- Case
Toto Wolff and the Mercedes Formula One Team
By: Anita Elberse and David Moreno Vicente
In December 2021, Toto Wolff, team principal and chief executive officer of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team (the ‘Mercedes team’) is preparing for the start of the 2021 Formula One (‘F1’) season’s last Grand Prix, in the United Arab Emirates. Everything the... View Details
- January 2022
- Case
Tomorrow.io Goes to Space
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Abhishek Nagaraj and James Barnett
This case study explores the evolution of Tomorrow.io, a weather forecasting technology company, as it pivoted toward building and launching space-based weather radar satellites. This strategic shift was driven by the company's ambition to overcome data limitations in... View Details
- 2022
- Conference Presentation
Organizational Competition: A Catalyst for Workplace Diversity and Desires for Uniqueness
By: Samantha N. Smith, Edward H. Chang, Erika L. Kirgios and Katherine L. Milkman
Competition is prevalent in organizations. For example, people often compete against their colleagues for status and recognition in the workplace or for opportunities for advancement. Workers also compete against others to get hired into organizations in the first... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Rethinking Explainability as a Dialogue: A Practitioner's Perspective
By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Dylan Slack, Yuxin Chen, Chenhao Tan and Sameer Singh
As practitioners increasingly deploy machine learning models in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and policy, it becomes vital to ensure that domain experts function effectively alongside these models. Explainability is one way to bridge the gap between... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Win from Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage
By: James Heskett
There is significant evidence that an effective organizational culture provides a major competitive edge—higher levels of employee and customer engagement and loyalty translate into higher growth and profits. Many business leaders know this, yet few are doing much to... View Details
- December 21, 2021
- Article
How to Become a Better Listener
By: Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg
Listening is a skill that’s vitally important, sadly undertaught, and physically and mentally taxing. In the aftermath of COVID-19, particularly with the shift to remote work and the red-hot job market, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—for leaders to be... View Details
- December 2021
- Case
Burning Glass Technologies: From Data to Product
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Amy Klopfenstein
In May 2021, Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a company that provided labor market analytics for a variety of markets, navigates his company’s transition from data company to product company. Burning Glass originated as a service that used artificial... View Details
Keywords: Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Expansion; Business Strategy; Labor; Employment; Human Capital; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Job Search; Human Resources; Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Employees; Retention; Competency and Skills; Experience and Expertise; Talent and Talent Management; Analytics and Data Science; Business Model; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States
- December 10, 2021
- Editorial
Go Ahead and Ask for More Time on That Deadline
By: A.V. Whillans and A.V. Whillans
Unrealistic deadlines don’t help anyone—and yet more often than not, employees avoid asking for extensions even when they know more time would help them do a better job. Through a series of studies with more than 4,000 working adults, the author illustrates how despite... View Details
- December 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Collaboration Wars: Slack vs. Microsoft Teams
By: David B. Yoffie, Kriti Gupta, Mehek Punatar, Poonam Sacheti and Poorvi Vijay
In 2021, Slack was acquired by Salesforce. While widely viewed as the best corporate collaboration and messaging software, Slack was being challenged by Microsoft, which was giving away its competitive product, Microsoft Teams, for free with a subscription to... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight
By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that... View Details
- December 2021
- Article
Negativity Spreads More Than Positivity on Twitter after Both Positive and Negative Political Situations
By: Jonas Paul Schöne, Brian Parkinson and Amit Goldenberg
What type of emotional language spreads further in political discourses on social media? Previous research has focused on situations that primarily elicited negative emotions, showing that negative language tended to spread further. The current project extends existing... View Details
- November 22, 2021
- Article
Manage Your Talent Pipeline Like a Supply Chain
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Sigelman
In supply-chain management, you get what you plan for. Companies understand that principle when it comes to the goods that they consume and produce, but not when it comes to the people they hire and train. For decades, companies have adopted a short-term, ad hoc... View Details