Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(6,758)
- Faculty Publications (1,387)
- January 2023
- Case
Inclusion and Diversity at Mars Petcare
By: Katherine Coffman and Tom Quinn
In 2020, the Mars Petcare Leadership Team found themselves dealing with critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Social unrest, including unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe, generated an urgency for substantive... View Details
- January 2023 (Revised August 2023)
- Case
Veeva Systems and the Transformation to a Public Benefit Corporation
By: Ranjay Gulati and Allison M. Ciechanover
Peter Gassner, the co-founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, steered the company through rapid scaling from its launch in 2007 to 2022. Year after year, the company had exceeded expectations, with its market capitalization reaching $50 billion at its peak. By 2022, the... View Details
- January 16, 2023
- Article
40 Ideas to Shake Up Your Hiring Process
By: Joseph Fuller, Nithya Vaduganathan, Allison Bailey and Manjari Raman
Many companies today are struggling to hire and retain talent, but more often than not the problem is self-inflicted: They’re simply not using a broad enough array of tools, sometimes because they don’t even know the tools exist. In this article, the authors list 40... View Details
- January 2023
- Article
Firm-Induced Migration Paths and Strategic Human-Capital Outcomes
By: Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Victoria Sevcenko
Firm-induced migration typically entails firms relocating workers to fill value-creating positions at destination locations. But such relocated workers are often exposed to external employment opportunities at their destinations, possibly triggering turnover. We... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition: Offer Your People More Than Just Flexibility
By: Mark Mortensen and Amy C. Edmondson
A lot of leaders believe that the formula for attracting and keeping talent is simple: Just ask people what they want and give it to them. The problem is, that approach tends to address only the material aspects of jobs that are top of employees’ minds at the moment,... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
State Employment as a Strategy of Autocratic Control in China
By: Jaya Y. Wen
This paper presents evidence that autocrats use state-owned firms to strategically pacify social unrest via employment provision, a role that may contribute to their favorable treatment and persistence across settings. I use variation in a regional conflict between... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Market for CEOs: Evidence from Private Equity
By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov
Most research on the CEO labor market studies public company CEOs while largely ignoring CEOs in private equity (PE) funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among U.S. companies purchased by PE firms in large leveraged buyout transactions.... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Too Many Managers: The Strategic Use of Titles to Avoid Overtime Payments
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and N. Bugra Ozel
We find widespread evidence of firms appearing to avoid paying overtime wages by exploiting a
federal law that allows them to do so for employees termed as “managers” and paid a salary above a
pre-defined dollar threshold. We show that listings for salaried positions... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Akooda: Charging Toward Operational Intelligence
By: Christopher Stanton and Mel Martin
The Akooda case describes the challenges confronting founder and CEO Yuval Gonczarowski (MBA ‘17) in 2022 as he attempts to boost sales. Launched in November 2020, Akooda was an AI company that mined 20 different sources of digital data, from tools like Slack, Google... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
KKR at CHI Overhead Doors (A)
By: Dennis Campbell and Ethan Rouen
This case examines the decision by private equity firm KKR to grant equity to every employee at portfolio company CHI Overhead Doors upon purchasing the company in 2015. The case explores whether this initiative will create shared value, growing profits through better... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Becoming a Learning Organization While Enhancing Performance: The Case of LEGO
By: Thomas Borup Kristensen, Henrik Saabye and Amy Edmondson
Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with
leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a
knowledge work context for the purpose... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Fostering Perceptions of Authenticity via Sensitive Self-Disclosure
By: Li Jiang, Leslie K. John, Reihane Boghrati and Maryam Kouchaki
Leaders’ perceived authenticity—the sense that leaders are acting in accordance with their “true self”—is associated with positive outcomes for both employees and organizations alike. How might leaders foster this impression? We show that sensitive self-disclosure, in... View Details
- December 2022
- Supplement
Freelancer, Ltd. Case Supplement
By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes
Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500 companies,... View Details
Keywords: Labor Markets; Freelancers; Change Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Globalized Firms and Management; Human Capital; Employment; Digital Platforms; Global Range; Adoption; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Growth and Development Strategy; Computer Industry; Electronics Industry; Employment Industry; Information Industry; Australia; United States; Philippines
- December 2022
- Article
Scarlet Letters: Rehabilitation Through Transgression Transparency and Personal Narrative Control
By: Erin L. Frey, Ethan Bernstein and Nick Rekenthaler
When employees commit transgressions, organizations often use tools of organizational control to prevent them from transgressing again. We investigate whether organizations can use transgression transparency to rehabilitate transgressors. Although making transgressions... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Rise of People Analytics and the Future of Organizational Research
By: Jeff Polzer
Organizations are transforming as they adopt new technologies and use new sources of data, changing the experiences of employees and pushing organizational researchers to respond. As employees perform their daily activities, they generate vast digital data. These data,... View Details
- November 2022 (Revised October 2024)
- Case
'A Marshall Plan for Africa': James Mwangi and Equity Group Holdings
By: Caroline M. Elkins, Debora L. Spar, Zeke Gillman and Julia M. Comeau
Financial Inclusion. Dignity. Trust. These were the core principles driving James Mwangi’s transformation of Equity Building Society, insolvent in 1991, into what is, today, Equity Group Holdings, East and Central Africa’s largest retail banking institution. Raised in... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
Hiring with the Community in Saint Paul
By: Mitchell B. Weiss and Sarah Mehta
This case reviews Saint Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s decision to involve the community in the process of hiring his cabinet members. Rather than relying on an executive recruiting firm or choosing cabinet heads from his own network, Carter recruited 100 community members... View Details
- November 10, 2022
- Article
5 Ways Startups Can Prepare for a Recession
By: Lou Shipley
Startups face unique challenges during economic downturns. They typically aren’t yet profitable and so are reliant on outside funding—and therefore are especially exposed when macroeconomic conditions change. To make it through a recession, startup CEOs should hit the... View Details
- November 2022
- Article
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups
By: Anjali M. Bhatt, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava
When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining... View Details
- 2022
- Case
Charting a Course for Boston: Organizing for Change
By: Lisa C. Cox, Mitchell B. Weiss and Jorrit De Jong
Michelle Wu had been elected on the promise of systemic change, but four days after her November 2021 election and just eleven days before taking office as mayor of Boston, she was still considering how best to staff and manage a range of over-arching priorities.... View Details