Publications

30 Jun 2014
Blog Post

Cambridge to Nairobi

I’m sitting in the outdoor veranda of an upscale café, sipping a perfectly made cappuccino and digging into a vegetarian quesadilla for lunch. It’s a pleasant 70 degrees and sunny, and all around me, young entrepreneurs are lost in their... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Nonprofit / Government; Technology

April 2018
Teaching Note

Formlabs: Selling a New 3D Printer

By: Frank Cespedes

Teaching Note for HBS No. 817-001. Formlabs is a venture that manufactures and sells 3D printers used in a variety of industries and applications. As the young company prepares to ship its latest model, the head of Customer Development is tasked with developing a... View Details

June 2008 (Revised October 2012)
Case

Big to Small: The Two Lives of Barry Nalls

By: Noam T. Wasserman and Rachel Galper

Barry Nalls describes lessons learned during his 25-year career—his rise at GTE and shorter-lived ventures—and how these prepared him to found MASERGY, a telecommunications start-up. Even as a young boy in a family of entrepreneurs, Nalls had a reputation as a hard... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Experience and Expertise; Entrepreneurship; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career

September 2008 (Revised June 2013)
Case

Odyssey Healthcare

By: Robert F. Higgins, Virginia Fuller and Umer Raffat

In January 2001, Dick Burnham, CEO of Odyssey Healthcare, and Odyssey's Board of Directors were considering selling the hospice care company to a larger provider or making an initial public offering (IPO). With 38 hospice locations in 21 states, Odyssey had been... View Details

Keywords: Liquidity; Venture Creation/development; Hospice; Venture Capital; Financial Liquidity; Business Exit or Shutdown; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Plan; Entrepreneurship; Health Industry; United States

December 2017
Case

International Institute of Tropical Agriculture

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Sarah Mehta

It is July 2017, and Dr. Nteranya Sanginga, the director general of the Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), is making progress toward two of his primary strategic objectives for the nonprofit research Institute: 1) to scale the impact... View Details

Keywords: Scaling Technologies; Youth Unemployment; Innovation In Nonprofits; Agribusiness; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Cash Flow; Labor; Employment; Commercialization; Problems and Challenges; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Africa; Nigeria

20 Aug 2015
Blog Post

AVICII: REFLECTIONS ON MANAGING THE BRAND OF A GLOBAL SUPERSTAR

goals, and values related to our lives and careers post business school. One of my ten photos was of a young Swedish DJ named Avicii and his manager Ash Pournouri. For me this photo represented my desire to work with global superstar... View Details

Keywords: Entertainment / Media / Sports

November 2014 (Revised February 2016)
Case

DoubleDutch

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Matthew G. Preble

Lawrence Coburn and Pankaj Prasad, co-founders of the event solution startup DoubleDutch, have to make a significant decision about their young company's sales function. DoubleDutch's key product was a mobile application (app) and event management platform that... View Details

Keywords: Sales Management; Selling; Marketing Management; Strategy Implementation; Business Marketing; Sales Force Management; Salesforce Management; Marketing; Sales; Marketing Strategy; Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Technology Industry; United States; Europe; Asia

January 2004 (Revised February 2005)
Case

Timberland and Community Involvement (Abridged Version)

By: James E. Austin and James Quinn

When Jeffrey Swartz became the third generation in his family to lead the Timberland Co., he made community involvement an integral part of the company's strategy. Under Swartz's leadership, Timberland formed a close partnership with City Year, the national corps of... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Corporate Strategy; Manufacturing Industry

July 2020 (Revised September 2021)
Case

Mr. Five Percent: Calouste Gulbenkian and the Origins of Global Oil

By: Geoffrey Jones and Yazeed Al-Rashed

This case describes the business career of Calouste Gulbenkian, a skilled intermediary who was able to secure 5 percent of a vast oil concession covering much of the Middle East that was signed in 1928. Gulbenkian was an ethnic Armenian born in the Ottoman Empire,... View Details

Keywords: Oil; Globalization; Energy Sources; History; Biography; Energy Industry; Turkey; Central Asia; Middle East

22 Aug 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 23

patterns. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53100 June 12, 2017 Harvard Business Review Your Sales Training Is Probably Lackluster. Here's How to Fix It By: Cespedes, Frank V., and Yuchun Lee Abstract— U.S. View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

February 2002 (Revised May 2003)
Case

Endeca Technologies (A)

By: G. Felda Hardymon, Josh Lerner and Ann Leamon

Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca Technologies, must decide among two term sheets raising the same amount of badly needed money for his young software company. One deal is led by insiders and, is offered at a lower price. It continues a board that has worked very well and... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Cost vs Benefits; Financial Condition; Financing and Loans; Management Skills; Financial Strategy; Corporate Finance; Decision Choices and Conditions; Information Technology Industry

October 2009 (Revised August 2014)
Case

Tengion: Bringing Regenerative Medicine to Life

By: Elie Ofek and Polly Ross Ribatt

Tengion is a young biotech company that is at the frontier of regenerative medicine—a nascent field that seeks to promote the creation of new cells and tissue to repair or replace tissue or organ function lost due to age, disease, damage, or congenital defects. In late... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Crisis; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Technological Innovation; Product Launch; Product Development; Research and Development; Biotechnology Industry; United States

Vikram S. Gandhi is the Gerald P. Kaminsky Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the General Management Unit. He has developed and teaches two new courses in the Elective Curriculum of the MBA Program. The first is a finance and investing course, Sustainable... View Details

Keywords: financial services

January 2022 (Revised February 2022)
Case

Introducing EVA at ISS: A Better Way to Evaluate CEO Performance and Compensation?

By: Jonas Heese, Charles C.Y. Wang and James Weber

In early 2019, Anthony Campagna, the global director of fundamental research at ISS EVA, a unit of the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), was preparing to release ISS's analyses of public company performance and CEO compensation ahead of Say... View Details

Keywords: Jobs and Positions; Compensation and Benefits; Performance; Performance Productivity; Measurement and Metrics; Analytics and Data Science; Value; Business or Company Management; Performance Evaluation; Business and Shareholder Relations

June 2015 (Revised November 2015)
Case

Akbank: Options in Digital Banking

By: Rajiv Lal and Esel Çekin

This case discusses the digitalization strategies of a leading bank in Turkey, Akbank, and how to position its digital banking products going forward. The Turkish banking industry was undergoing a transformation prompted by the demands of the country's digitally savvy,... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Banking; Emerging Market; Regulations; Channels; Digitization; Information Technology; Competition; Brands and Branding; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Emerging Markets; Distribution Channels; Banks and Banking; Digital Transformation; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Turkey

24 Oct 2017
News

What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools

Linda A. Hill

Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative. Hill is regarded as one of the top experts on leadership and innovation. Hill is... View Details

January 2018 (Revised November 2018)
Case

Index

By: Jose Alvarez and Julia Kelley

In December 2017, Marc Freed-Finnegan and Jonathan Wall, the co-founders of retail technology company Index, had to discuss the company’s direction as they entered 2018. Five years earlier, Freed-Finnegan and Wall had founded Index after observing the technological... View Details

Keywords: Product Launch; Product Positioning; Sales; Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Retail Industry; Technology Industry