Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(12,144)
- Faculty Publications (3,309)
- December 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Boortmalt: The Master Maltster
By: Forest Reinhardt, Jose B Alvarez, Damien McLoughlin, Lena Duchene and Emer Moloney
By May 2023, Boortmalt was the world’s leading producer of malt, with a production capacity of 3 million tonnes, 15% of global market share, and 27 malting plants across five continents. It had recently acquired a major competitor and had sustained an EBITDA growth of... View Details
Keywords: Plant-Based Agribusiness; Mergers and Acquisitions; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Values and Beliefs; Financing and Loans; Employee Relationship Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Knowledge Sharing; Leadership Style; Business or Company Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Style; Resource Allocation; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategic Planning; Environmental Sustainability; Organizational Culture; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Belgium; Europe
- December 8, 2023
- Article
What Makes a Company Great at Producing Leaders?
By: Sarah Abbott, Robin Abrahams and Boris Groysberg
GE is well known as an “academy company”—a talent incubator that exports effective leaders to other organizations and even industries. To better understand which companies are top talent incubators today, the authors worked with the Official Board, a firm that provides... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Yellow Corporation: On the Verge of Bankruptcy
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Yellow Corporation, one of the country’s oldest and largest less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers, was nearing its 100th anniversary in 2024. Whether it would reach that milestone, however, was uncertain as the company was attempting to restructure its operations to... View Details
- December 2023
- Case
Food & Life Companies
By: Forest L. Reinhardt and Akiko Saito
Founded in 1984 in Japan, Food & Life Companies Ltd. (F&LC) operated Sushiro, the largest conveyor belt sushi restaurant chain in Japan, and other types of restaurants that offered sushi and fish cuisine. F&LC was committed to offering high-quality sushi at an... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised August 2024)
- Case
Monsters in the Machine? Tackling the Challenge of Responsible AI
By: Paul M. Healy and Debora L. Spar
In November of 2022, the small tech company OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot which quickly captured the public’s imagination—becoming the world’s fastest-growing consumer application within months of its release. Though observers from across... View Details
- December 2023 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Research In Motion: Launching and Scaling the World's First Smartphone Empire (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad
In 2005, Research In Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry smartphone was a sensation. After its launch in 1999, the groundbreaking BlackBerry had captured the hearts and minds of corporate America through its secure wireless email service. The device was so addictive and... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Innovation and Management; Technological Innovation; Business or Company Management; Management Style; Product Development; Managerial Roles; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; United States; Canada
- November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
BiomX: Bringing Phage Back to the Stage
By: Paul A. Gompers, Elie Ofek, Orna Dan and Emilie Billaud
In the spring of 2023, and following the favorable results of a trial involving its phage cocktail for treating lung infections among cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, the leadership of BiomX had several critical issues to wrestle with. First, given its precarious... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
From Imitation to Innovation: Zongshen Industrial Group (Abridged)
By: Willy Shih and Nancy Dai
Like other small shops based in Chongqing, China, Zongshen Industrial Group started by assembling motorcycles from "standard" parts. The quality of its early products was good enough for rural Chinese buyers, though wealthier consumers usually purchased premium... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
Infarm: Betting the (Indoor) Farm on Food Security
By: Elie Ofek
In the summer of 2023, the co-founders of Infarm, a controlled environment agriculture (CEA) company, were contemplating a major pivot going forward. While Infarm had successfully shown it could grow over 75 products—mainly herbs, leafy greens and mushrooms—in modular... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Swanson Health: Becoming a Super Seller
By: William R. Kerr, Daniel O'Connor and Paige Boehmcke
Founded in 1969, Swanson Health sold vitamins, supplements, natural health products, and organic foods. Over the years, the company had successfully navigated multiple industry transitions as it expanded from a print catalog to sell products on its own... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised February 2025)
- Background Note
Corporate Climate Targets
By: Willy C. Shih, Michael W. Toffel and Kelsey Carter
Companies that are addressing climate change by mitigating their greenhouse gas emissions often set reduction targets. This note describes several types of widely used carbon reduction targets, including carbon neutral, science based, net zero, real zero, and carbon... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised December 2023)
- Background Note
Talent Incubator Rankings
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
In 2023, The Official Board surveyed 853 executives on the topic of talent incubators/academy companies. Executives were asked to list the top three academy companies within their function, industry, and country. They were also asked: what practices differentiate these... View Details
- November 2023
- Case
Chai Point
By: Rembrand Koning, Daniel W. Elfenbein and Kanika Jain
Chai Point was an Indian food and beverage company focused on chai. It started in 2010 as a retail store network but soon expanded to corporate offices by developing an IoT-enabled automatic tea and filter coffee machine. By 2023, Chai Point had 170 stores and 5000... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Celsius Network Inc.: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the Brave New World of Crypto Bankruptcy
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
In July 2022, Celsius Network filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. CEO Alex Mashinsky acknowledged that Celsius had grown its assets “faster than the Company was prepared to deploy [them]” and as a result had made “certain poor asset deployment decisions.” Two months after... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Prime Coalition: Estimating Climate Impact
A case on CRANE, a tool to help investors and green technology companies estimate the future climate impact of new technologies and products, called emissions reduction potential (ERP). The case includes material on CRANE’s methodology for estimating future carbon... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Veeva Systems: The Next Frontier
By: Satish Tadikonda and William Marks
Born out of a desire to bring technological advances in enterprise software into the healthcare vertical, Peter Gassner and Matt Wallach founded Veeva to bring life sciences companies into the digital age for data management in both the commercial and R&D sectors. Over... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Hey Jane: Delivering Abortion Pills to the Doorstep
By: Rembrand Koning, Geraldine Pena-Galea and Sarah Mehta
This case tells the story of Hey Jane, a telehealth clinic founded in 2020 that provides virtual medication abortion services to eligible patients in nine U.S. states. By January 2023, the company had served more than 20,000 patients and raised nearly $10 million in... View Details
- October 2023 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
KOKO Networks: Bridging Energy Transition and Affordability with Carbon Financing
By: George Serafeim, Siko Sikochi and Namrata Arora
The problem was massive: two million hectares of African forests were lost annually to charcoal production for cooking, an area equivalent to 13 times Greater London, resulting in one billion tons of carbon emissions yearly. At the same time, an estimated 700,000... View Details
Keywords: Clean Tech; Digital; Carbon Credits; Carbon Offsetting; Climate Change; Entrepreneurship; Energy Sources; Environmental Sustainability; Health; Market Design; Business Startups; Transition; Environmental Regulation; Policy; Energy Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Africa; Kenya; Rwanda
- October 26, 2023
- Article
How to Connect Employees to Your Company’s Purpose
By: Hubert Joly
We know making a noble corporate purpose — that is, one aimed at doing something good in the world — come to life is both important and hard. Emerging practices from leading companies show that the journey is not about top-down messaging. If anything, it’s about... View Details
- October 24, 2023
- Article
10 Beliefs That Get in the Way of Organizational Change
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. Their final strategy is to execute your plan with a sense of urgency. They argue that most... View Details