Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(2,332)
- Faculty Publications (551)
- February 2019 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Scandal at Steinhoff
By: Kristin Mugford and Phil Caruso
- February 2019 (Revised September 2019)
- Case
Theranos: The Unicorn That Wasn't
By: Joseph B. Fuller and John Masko
In 2003, 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded a startup dedicated to making blood testing easier and more affordable. By 2015, her company, Theranos, was worth $9 billion. It boasted a star-studded board and contracts with national pharmacy and supermarket chains... View Details
Keywords: Theranos; Blood; Lab Testing; Fraud; Holmes; Balwani; Shultz; Carreyrou; Securities And Exchange Commission; Food And Drug Administration; FDA; SEC; Health Testing and Trials; Corporate Accountability; Organizational Culture; Misleading and Fraudulent Advertising; Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry
- February 2019 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
Theranos: Who Has Blood on Their Hands? (A)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Christina R. Wing, Emilie Fournier and Anna Resman
This case covers the rise and fall of Theranos, the company founded by Elizabeth Holmes in 2004 to revolutionize the blood testing industry by creating a device that could provide from a small finger prick the same results and accuracy as intravenous blood draws. As... View Details
- 2019
- Article
CEO Materialism and Corporate Social Responsibility
By: Robert Davidson, Aiyesha Dey and Abbie Smith
We study the role of individual CEOs in explaining corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores. We find that CEO fixed effects explain 59% of the variation in CSR scores, whereas firm fixed effects explain 2% of the variation in CSR scores. Specifically, firms led by... View Details
- January–February 2019
- Article
Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance
By: Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim
We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of U.S. companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised August 2022)
- Teaching Note
Revenue Recognition at HBP
By: Siko Sikochi and Paul Healy
In early 2014, Corporate Learning, one of three business units at Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), was in the process of revamping its flagship product, Harvard Manage-Mentor (HMM) from version 11.0 (HMM11) to version 12.0 (HMM12). The revamped software would be... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
Zenefits Board of Directors (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
In early 2018, the time seemed right for Zenefits investor and director Lars Dalgaard to reflect on whether Zenefits had the right board of directors to shepherd the company through its next stages of growth. For the company whose name combined the words “benefits,”... View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Business Model; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Leadership; Risk Management; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California
- October 2018
- Supplement
Zenefits Board of Directors (B)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Business Model; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Leadership; Risk Management; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California
- October 2018
- Supplement
Zenefits Board of Directors (C)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Supplements the (A) case. View Details
Keywords: Ethics; Business Model; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Leadership; Risk Management; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California
- October 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
Rio Tinto vs. the Securities and Exchange Commission
By: Aiyesha Dey, Krishna G. Palepu and Sarah Gulick
Keywords: Coal Mining; SEC Enforcement; FCPA; Mining; Fraud; Acquisition; Financial Reporting; Mergers and Acquisitions; Non-Renewable Energy; Ethics; Financial Management; Investment; Corporate Governance; Laws and Statutes; Lawsuits and Litigation; Risk Management; Risk and Uncertainty; Energy Industry; Mining Industry; Financial Services Industry; Mozambique; United States; Australia; England
- October 2018 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
Stock-Based Compensation at Twitter
By: Jonas Heese, Zeya Yang and Mike Young
Olivia Nash, an analyst at leading hedge fund BlueShark Capital Management, had just finished listening to the hour-long earnings call for Twitter’s Q4 2017 results. Was Twitter doing well? That depended on which numbers she chose to believe. According to Generally... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
African Bank Investments Limited (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- October 2018
- Supplement
African Bank Investments Limited (B)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Teaching Note
Intuit: Turbo Tax PersonalPro - A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs
By: Joseph Fuller, Shikhar Ghosh and Monica Baraldi
Teaching Note for HBS No. 816-048. The case tells the story of a product manager within Intuit who develops an idea for a new product that spans two of the company's existing business units—professional tax software, sold to accountants, and the consumer focused... View Details
- September 2018
- Case
Sealed Air Corporation: Deciding the Fate of VTID (Abridged)
By: Elie Ofek
In mid-2010 the Sealed Air Corporation has to decide on next steps for its novel video tracking technology (called VTID) after unsuccessful attempts to market it in three different industry settings. The company must determine whether its most recent target market, the... View Details
- Article
Navigating Talent Hot Spots
By: William R. Kerr
Innovation clusters like San Francisco and Boston have long had an outsize impact on the global economy, and their influence keeps growing. In 2017, for instance, America’s ten largest tech hubs accounted for 58% of U.S. patents. Globally, cities such as Tokyo, Paris,... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby, Tom Nicholas and Stefanie Stantcheva
This paper studies the effect of corporate and personal taxes on innovation in the United States over the 20th century. We use three new datasets: a panel of the universe of inventors who patent since 1920; a dataset of the employment, location, and patents of firms... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised July 2020)
- Case
Revenue Recognition at HBP
By: Paul Healy and Siko Sikochi
In early 2014, Paul Bills, CFO of Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), sat down with David Wan, the company’s CEO, to discuss budget preparations for the coming year. Bills noted that the performance of Corporate Learning, one of HBP’s three business units, would be... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised April 2023)
- Case
Facebook—Can Ethics Scale in the Digital Age?
By: George A. Riedel and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has built a phenomenally successful business at global scale to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world. The revelation of Cambridge Analytica events in March 2018, where 78 million users' information was leaked... View Details
- March 2018
- Module Note
Module Note for Instructors: Responsibilities to Society
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
This note outlines a framework to help managers discern and deliver on their responsibilities to society that has been taught in the “Responsibilities to Society” module in Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA), a semester-long, first-year required course for... View Details