Publications

December 2021 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Troverie (A)

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Lindsay N. Hyde and Olivia Graham

Six months after the August 2018 launch of Troverie, a U.S.-based online retailer of luxury watches, the average cost of acquiring a customer is much higher than originally projected, and the startup is incurring a substantial loss on each sales transaction. Could... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Luxury Goods; Customer Acquisition; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Luxury; Failure; Internet and the Web; Revenue; Fashion Industry; United States

13 Jan 2021
Blog Post

Welcome to the BEI Blog!

business that will be left untouched by the far-reaching consequences of climate change. But we also understand that business can drive solutions and that facing these challenges offers a unique set of... View Details

October 2013
Article

The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care

By: Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee

In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Value; Customer Focus and Relationships; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

Article

Stop the Meeting Madness: How to Free Up Time for Meaningful Work

By: Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun

Many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both. We can all joke about how painful they... View Details

Keywords: Time Management; Performance Efficiency; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement

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April 1998
Case

C&S Wholesale Grocers

Discusses an aggressive team that has been successful in assimilating manufacturers' and chains' distribution role on the basis of cost and performance. View Details

Keywords: Competition; Distribution; Management Teams; Food and Beverage Industry

August 2009
Supplement

The TSMC Way: Meeting Customer Needs at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (CW)

By: Willy C. Shih

When L.C. Tu receives an emergency order, he is confronted with a range of production scheduling choices, each of which has unique costs and trade-offs. The case was designed to help students understand job-shop style production and the impact of disruptions and... View Details

Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Disruption; Customer Focus and Relationships; Cost; Cost Management; Business or Company Management; Time Management; Network Effects; Production; Hardware; Manufacturing Industry; Semiconductor Industry; Taiwan

2009
Working Paper

Clusters of Entrepreneurship

By: Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr and Giacomo A.M. Ponzetto

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Entrepreneurship; Cost; Employment; Market Entry and Exit

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Research Summary

Debt Maturity: Is Long-Term Debt Optimal? (with Fabio Kanczuk)

By: Laura Alfaro

We model and calibrate the arguments in favor and against short-term and long-term debt. These arguments broadly include: maturity-term premium, tax smoothing, rolling over risk and the cost from defaulting. We use a dynamic equilibrium model with tax distortion,... View Details

Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She leads the LIFE Special Project, dedicated to helping individuals make purposeful life choices while gathering insights that will... View Details

February 1995 (Revised August 1995)
Case

Siemens Rolm Communications Inc.: Integrated Logistics Core Process Redesign (ILCPR)

In the late 1990s, Rolm realized significant losses and needed to significantly reduce its costs and redesign its logistics process. View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Logistics; Telecommunications Industry

26 Jun 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Contracting in the Self-reporting Economy

Keywords: by Romana L. Autrey & Richard Sansing; Accounting

2020
Working Paper

Party-State Capitalism in China

By: Margaret Pearson, Meg Rithmire and Kellee Tsai

The “state capitalism” model, in which the state retains a dominant role as owner or investor-shareholder amidst the presence of markets and private firms, has received increasing attention, with China cited as the main exemplar. Yet as models evolve, so has China’s... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; State Capitalism; Economic Systems; China

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August 1998 (Revised February 1999)
Case

Product Development at Dell Computer Corporation

By: Stefan H. Thomke, Vish V. Krishnan and Ashok Nimgade

Describes how Dell redesigned its new product development process after experiencing a major product setback and a significant decline in firm profits in 1993. Dell's new process is challenged during the development of a new line of portable computers when the incoming... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Profit; Managerial Roles; Risk Management; Product Development; Business Processes; Problems and Challenges; Risk and Uncertainty; Hardware; Computer Industry

01 Jul 2011
News

Whether to Shutter a Struggling Family Business

January 2001 (Revised August 2003)
Case

Diageo plc

A major U.K.-based multinational is reevaluating its leverage policy as it restructures its business. The treasury team models the tradeoffs between the benefits and costs of debt financing, using Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the savings from the interest tax... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Multinational Firms and Management; Capital Structure; Restructuring; United Kingdom

March 2007 (Revised May 2012)
Case

PRG-Schultz International

By: Paul W. Marshall and James Weber

PRG-Schultz will run out of cash within a couple of months unless the new CEO can reduce costs and restructure the company's debt. PRG was the dominant market leader in the audit recovery industry. The industry consisted of firms which employed accounting professionals... View Details

Keywords: History; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Restructuring; Cost Management; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Borrowing and Debt; Accounting Audits; Accounting Industry

August 2017 (Revised December 2017)
Case

Accounting for Nuclear Power Provisions at RWE

By: Paul Healy and Jonas Heese

In early 2016, RWE, a utility that operates nuclear power plants in Germany, came under scrutiny from regulators and the media over the adequacy of its provisions for costs of decommissioning and dismantling (D&D) its nuclear power plants. Accounting standards required... View Details

Keywords: Liabilities; Provisions For Long-term Obligations; Discounting; Accounting; Energy Generation; Energy Industry; Germany

17 Oct 2014
News

Can Google Express deliver on same-day shopping?

2014
Working Paper

SOX after Ten Years: A Multidisciplinary Review

By: John C. Coates and Suraj Srinivasan

We review and assess research findings from 120 papers in accounting, finance, and law to evaluate the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We describe significant developments in how the Act was implemented and find that despite severe criticism, the Act and institutions... View Details

Keywords: Laws and Statutes

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