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- 2022
- White Paper
Building from the Bottom Up: What Business Can Do to Strengthen the Bottom Line by Investing in Front-line Workers
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman
A significant number of American workers—44%—are employed in low wage jobs at the front line of industries. Despite undertaking some of the most tedious, dirtiest, and most dangerous jobs, low-wage workers are—and have long been—the most likely to be overlooked by... 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
- January 2022
- Article
Who Creates New Firms When Local Opportunities Arise?
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Davide Malacrino and Timothy McQuade
We examine the characteristics of the individuals who become entrepreneurs when local opportunities arise. We identify local demand shocks by linking fluctuations in global commodity prices to municipality level agricultural endowments in Brazil. We find that the firm... View Details
- December 22, 2021
- Article
COVID Made Some Skills Obsolete. Here's How to Make Sure Yours Stay Relevant
By: Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden
- 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 16, 2021
- Article
Avoid a One-Size-Fits-All Approach to Sales Coaching
Coaching sales reps is about clarifying relevant behaviors and whether the issue is motivation or ability. Some reps may work hard, but lack certain capabilities while others demonstrate capability but seemingly lack motivation or effort. Good coaching helps to clarify... 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 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
- Article
The Supply Chain Economy: New Policies to Drive Innovation and Jobs
By: Mercedes Delgado and Karen G. Mills
The debate in economic policymaking about the drivers of innovation and job creation has long centered on manufacturing versus services. The predominant view is that manufacturing drives innovation, wages, and growth, and that services provide less innovation and... View Details
- 2021
- Book
The Future of Executive Development
By: Mihnea C Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas
Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven by digital disruption and a widening gap between the skills that participants and their organizations demand and those provided by their executive programs. This work delves into the... 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
- October 7, 2021
- Article
How to Resolve America's Hidden-Worker Problem
By: Joseph B. Fuller
Most companies rely on recruiting systems that are superficially efficient but consistently ineffective at closing their chronic skills gaps. Is there a dearth of workers or are employers looking for talent in a self-limiting way? View Details
- October 2021
- Background Note
How to Write an Action-Planning Memo
By: Ryan Raffaelli and Akshaya Varghese
The ability to communicate an action plan through writing is essential for advancing ideas, earning credibility, and garnering support. Research has shown that leaders who write formal plans are more likely to execute successfully—written plans help members of an... View Details
- 2021
- Chapter
The Economic and Political Effects of Immigration: Evidence from the Age of Mass Migration
By: Marco Tabellini
Between 1850 and 1920, during the Age of Mass Migration, more than 30 million Europeans moved to the United States. European immigrants provided ample supply of cheap labor as well as specific skills and know-how, contributing to American economic growth. These... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
On the Bubble: Startup Bootstrapping
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Tom Quinn and Annelena Lobb
Bubble was a software company in the low-code/no-code market, making tools that allowed users without traditional programming backgrounds or technical skills to build software. The case covers cofounder Joshua Haas’s engineering background, as he experienced a high... View Details
Keywords: Business Startups; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Business Plan; Disruption; Transformation; Trends; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Relationship Management; Cost vs Benefits; Decisions; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Equity; Executive Compensation; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Job Interviews; Growth and Development Strategy; Ownership Stake; Opportunities; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry; New York (city, NY); California; France
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Demand for Executive Skills
By: Stephen Hansen, Raffaella Sadun, Tejas Ramdas and Joseph B. Fuller
We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting... View Details
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Luck of the Draw: The Causal Effect of Physicians on Birth Outcomes
By: Arlen Guarin, Christian Posso, Estefania Saravia and Jorge Tamayo
Identifying the effect of physicians’ skills on health outcomes is a challenging task due to the nonrandom sorting between physicians and hospitals. We overcome this challenge by exploiting a Colombian government program that randomly assigned 2,126 physicians to 618... View Details
- September 14, 2021
- Article
Pandemic Has Sped Up Pace that Some Work Skills Become Obsolete by 70 Percent, Survey Finds
By: Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden
- September 13, 2021
- Article
Managing Through Crunch Time—Without Burning Out Your Team
By: Flavio Serapiao, Andrew Hill and Boris Groysberg
Crunch times—the long, stressful hours of work that are often required in the final weeks before a new product launch—can have an inordinate impact on the success of businesses and they’re powerful shapers of organizational culture. Effective leaders understand that... View Details
- September 2021 (Revised June 2023)
- Supplement
Serving Bud Moore (B)
By: David G. Fubini and Patrick Sanguineti
In only his third year at a Leading Strategy Consulting firm (LSC), Gregory Davis has been assigned to a select group tasked with advising General Motors (GM), one of the largest companies in the world by revenue, on how to reorganize their entire North American... View Details