Publications

May 2005 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Aristotle Onassis and the Greek Shipping Industry

By: Geoffrey Jones and Paul Gomopoulos

Examines the career of Aristotle Onassis and his creation of one of the world's largest shipping companies between 1945 and 1973. Explores the role of ethnic and family networks in Greek shipping and how Onassis was able to penetrate this system despite being an... View Details

Keywords: Networks; Ethnicity; Family Business; Innovation Strategy; Management Succession; Competitive Advantage; Personal Development and Career; Entrepreneurship; Shipping Industry; Greece

01 Jun 2013
News

Lesson Plans

ISSUE FOCUS: EDUCATION INNOVATION Stacey Childress (MBA 2000) Deputy Director of Education, Next Generation Learning, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, Washington Illustrations by Peter Hoey TAILORED TEACHING "One of our anchors is personalized learning, which... View Details

Keywords: Educational Support Services; Educational Services; Elementary and Secondary Schools; Educational Services

11 Jun 2012
News

Starting Up in Brazil

Keywords: Clothing and Clothing Accessories Stores; Retail Trade; Miscellaneous Store Retailers; Retail Trade

September 2019 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Bill Connors and The Farm, a Comcast NBCUniversal Innovation Hub (Powered by Boomtown)

By: Linda A. Hill and Eric Mankin

In 2017, Bill Connors, the President of Comcast’s Central Division, launched a startup accelerator in Comcast’s new Atlanta Regional headquarters. Comcast was America's largest cable and internet service provider, having built a profitable business bundling television... View Details

May 2018 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Managing the Future of Work

By: William R. Kerr, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga

By 2019, leaders from the public and private sector had become increasingly anxious about how advanced technologies and aging global populations could affect labor markets, workplaces, and workers’ lives. Some analysts forecasted that hundreds of millions of workers... View Details

Keywords: Labor Markets; Workplace; Employment; Technological Innovation; Demographics; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Problems and Challenges; Opportunities

2011
Working Paper

Do Not Trash the Incentive! Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting

By: Alessandro Bucciol, Natalia Montinari and Marco Piovesan

This paper examines whether monetary incentives are an effective tool for increasing domestic waste sorting. We exploit the exogenous variation in the pricing systems experienced during the 1999-2008 decade by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy).... View Details

Keywords: Household; Cost Management; Consumer Behavior; Wastes and Waste Processing; Motivation and Incentives; Public Administration Industry; Italy

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November 2006 (Revised March 2007)
Case

Liz Claiborne and the New Working Woman

By: Anthony Mayo and Mark Benson

At age 47, with two decades of experience as a lead designer for a Fortune 500 fashion company, Liz Claiborne put her life savings on the line to form Liz Claiborne, Inc., a partnership that included her husband. A decade later, in 1986, Claiborne was CEO of her own... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Leadership; Gender; Brands and Branding; Personal Development and Career; Apparel and Accessories Industry

December 2001
Case

Sarah Vickers-Willis: Career Decisions (A)

By: Myra M. Hart, Lynda M. Applegate, Sarah Harden and Susan Saltrick

Sarah Vickers-Willis, HBS MBA 1999, faces a critical career decision: Does she redirect the Internet start-up she helped found or join in shaping a for-profit firm with a social mission? Sarah, a young Australian business executive, has always strived to "find space"... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Leadership; Internet and the Web; Social Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Gender; Business Startups

01 Sep 2007
News

Riding It Out

An ailing horse and an overweight Labrador retriever provided the inspiration for Becky Minard and Paal Gisholt (both MBA ’93) to launch SmartPak, a business that provides nutritional supplements, dog food, and supplies to customers devoted to their four-footed... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; dog food; pets; Food Manufacturing; Manufacturing; Food and Beverage Stores; Retail Trade

2025
Working Paper

Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI

By: Nicholas G. Otis, Solène Delecourt, Katelynn Cranney and Rembrand Koning

Generative AI has the potential to transform productivity and reduce inequality, but only if adopted broadly. In this paper, we show that recently identified gender gaps in generative AI use are nearly universal. Synthesizing data from 18 studies covering more than... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Technology Adoption; Behavior

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Forthcoming
Article

Proximate (Co-)Working: Knowledge Spillovers and Social Interactions

By: Maria P. Roche, Alexander Oettl and Christian Catalini

We examine the influence of physical proximity on between-start-up knowledge spillovers at one of the largest technology coworking hubs in the United States. Relying on the exogenous assignment of office space to the hub’s 251 start-ups, we find that proximity... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Integration; Coworking; Microgeography; Business Startups; Technology Adoption; Diversity; Interpersonal Communication; Knowledge Sharing; Geographic Location

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2021
Article

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

By: Katerina Linos, Laura Jakli and Melissa Carlson

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Communication Strategy; Civil Society or Community; Non-Governmental Organizations; Welfare; Greece

2022
Article

‘American Management’ vs ‘Swiss Labour Peace’. The Closure of the Swiss Firestone Factory in 1978

By: Sabine Pitteloud

This article focusses on the closure of the Firestone’s Swiss subsidiary in 1978. It contributes to the existing literature dealing with the ‘nationality’ of multinational companies and the impact of U.S. management style on local capitalist systems. Drawing on a... View Details

Keywords: Americanization; Capitalism; Corporate Nationality; Industrial Relations; Multinational; Narratives; Multinational Firms and Management; Nationality; Economic Systems; Labor and Management Relations; Switzerland

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2012
Working Paper

Brides for Sale: Cross-Border Marriages and Female Immigration

Every year, a large number of women migrate as brides from developing countries to developed countries in East Asia. This phenomenon virtually did not exist in the early 1990s, but foreign brides currently comprise 4 to 35 percent of newlyweds in these developed Asian... View Details

Keywords: Immigration; Gender; Developing Countries and Economies; Education; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; East Asia; Japan; South Korea; Taiwan; Singapore

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Article

Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance

By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details

Keywords: Management; Groups and Teams; Performance; Problems and Challenges; Projects; Experience and Expertise; Change; Diversity; Information Technology Industry; India

May 2009
Case

Who is the Fairest of Them All? Choosing a Leader at Deronde International

By: Nitin Nohria and Martha Spaulding

Alain Deronde, the CEO of a French personal care company, has to choose a successor to head global product development from a diverse set of candidates with different backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses. The candidates include Elise Bernier, Vice President of... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Management Succession; Diversity; Management Teams; Product Development; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; France

January 2009 (Revised November 2009)
Background Note

Adult Life Stages

By: John A. Davis

This note describes basic concepts of adult life stage theory and summarizes Daniel Levinson's research findings on the adult development of men and women. View Details

Keywords: Transition; Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Personal Development and Career; Organizational Culture; Gender