Publications

25 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Rapport: The Hidden Advantage That Women Managers Bring to Teams

transactions among 76 restaurants to investigate whether the gender of managers and workers impacted a team’s ability to handle busy periods. The team also studied training and scheduling data and interviewed managers to gain insights... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Food & Beverage

June 2018
Case

Meridian Systems

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Michael J. Roberts

The Meridian Systems case focuses on a start-up in the restaurant point of sale (POS) systems market. In early 2018, Meridian is getting ready to roll out a POS system based on a new technology—a tablet-based, Wi-Fi-enabled POS system (the "tablet" system, or... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Sales; Strategy; Salesforce Management; Organizational Structure; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy

June 2020 (Revised July 2023)
Case

Time Out: The Evolution from Media to Markets

By: Kate Barasz and Eva Ascarza

In February 2020, Time Out’s chief executive officer Julio Bruno is evaluating the strategic direction of the company. Over the span of five decades, Time Out — the global media and entertainment brand — had gone from a self-published counterculture publication in... View Details

Keywords: Branding; Media Businesses; Hospitality; Hospitality Industry; Digital; Brands and Branding; Media; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United Kingdom; United States

16 Jan 2006
Research & Ideas

What Customers Want from Your Products

researcher then spent a long day in a restaurant seeking to understand the jobs that customers were trying to get done when they hired a milk shake. He chronicled when each milk shake was bought, what other products the customers... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook & Taddy Hall; Consumer Products

December 2019
Case

Noiler

By: José B. Alvarez and Natalie Kindred

In 2019, Nigerian entrepreneur Dr. Ayoola (Ayo) Oduntan is accelerating distribution of Noiler, a genetically optimized breed of poultry, to smallholder farmers across Nigeria. The bird was bred to be productive as a source of both meat and eggs and to thrive in the... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Animal-Based Agribusiness; Poverty; Health; Growth and Development Strategy; Nigeria

25 Apr 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, April 25

inspections. Download working paper: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52570 Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit By: Luca, Dara Lee, and Michael Luca Abstract—We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2023
Working Paper

Rapport in Organizations: Evidence from Fast Food

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Parker Howell, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

Common identity often provides a foundation for workplace rapport. Though gender is perhaps the most frequently studied dimension of identity among workers, little is known about how gender match between managers and their workers might affect team performance. Using... View Details

Keywords: Management; Relationships; Gender; Labor and Management Relations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry; Colombia

Read Now

23 Jul 2013
First Look

First Look: July 23

Restaurant Hygiene Inspections and Online Reviews By: Kang, Jun Seok, Polina Kuznetsova, Yejin Choi, and Michael Luca Abstract—Restaurant hygiene inspections are often cited as a success story of public disclosure. Hygiene grades... View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

17 Feb 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

How Entrepreneurs Can Find the Right Problem to Solve

the role that your product might fill in the future. If you were coming up with a new restaurant reservation system, this may involve a phone conversation with the party needing a reservation and having you do the actual booking for them,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

24 Mar 2022
Research & Ideas

Rituals at Work: Teams That Play Together Stay Together

lunch from a local restaurant (we cycle 5 restaurants per week with one restaurant per day). Since there are five of us, each one of us gets to pick a View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

28 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

Forget Cash. Here Are Better Ways to Motivate Employees

creating peer-to-peer recognition programs in which employees are provided monthly reward points that they can give away to colleagues for work-related wins. Employees who earn a certain number of points can redeem them for various perks, such as a View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Research Summary

A major area of Professor Torfason's research is the behavior of individual social network structures. He studies the violation of norms – specifically the use of excessive force in conflict situations – within the empirical context of a large online... View Details

2019
Working Paper

The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details

Keywords: Customer Compatibility; Satisfaction; Profitability; Customer Relationship Management; Service Operations; Customer Satisfaction; Banking Industry; Retail Industry