Publications

Teaching Interest

MBA Elective Curriculum-- Competing Through Business Models

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell

The words “business model” are inescapable in our daily fare of business news. These two ubiquitous words seemed to effortlessly rise up to prominence during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. When businesspeople, journalists, academics, and other... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Strategy; Competitive Strategy

27 Jul 2020
Book

Reflection: The Pause That Brings Peace and Productivity

whether to change career paths. At one point, he put his decision in a larger context: Life is surfing a wave. It carries you forward. You spend most of your time adjusting and trying to stay on the wave and... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

14 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Curiosity, Not Coding: 6 Skills Leaders Need in the Digital Age

their actions. They must learn to see their decisions and actions as working hypotheses that they can only validate by collecting feedback on their impact as expeditiously as possible. Leaders will be blindsided if they rely only on their... View Details

Keywords: by Linda A. Hill, Ann Le Cam, Sunand Menon, and Emily Tedards; Technology

20 Mar 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, March 20, 2018

women, three are African-American, and not one is an African-American woman. What’s going on? The authors studied the careers of the roughly 2,300 alumni of African descent who have graduated from Harvard Business School since its... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

28 Apr 2015
First Look

First Look: April 28

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Rules-Timeless-Lessons-Gates/dp/0062373951/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1427236936&sr=8-1 April 2015 Harvard Business Review Leaders as Decision Architects: Structure Your Organization's Work to... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

September 2006 (Revised November 2006)
Case

Cathy Benko: WINning at Deloitte (A)

By: Kathleen L. McGinn, Deborah M. Kolb and Cailin B. Hammer

Jim Quigley, CEO of Deloitte and Touche's consulting practice, asks senior partner Cathy Benko to lead Deloitte & Touche's much publicized Initiative for the Retention and Advancement of Women (WIN). Benko, already the Lead Client Service Partner on one of Deloitte's... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Leadership Development; Talent and Talent Management; Personal Development and Career; Gender; Consulting Industry; United States

July 2012
Case

Owen's Precision Machining

By: Ramana Nanda and James McQuade

For the second time in fourteen months, Christopher Owen, the second-generation owner of Owen's Precision Machining (OPM), found himself running out of cash. Owen wondered what he was doing wrong. How much additional money would he need to raise to get OPM through the... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Cash Flow; Mergers and Acquisitions; Decision Making; Problems and Challenges; Business Strategy; Corporate Finance; Manufacturing Industry; Massachusetts

January 2025
Article

Automatic Enrollment with a 12% Default Contribution Rate

By: John Beshears, Ruofei Guo, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and James J. Choi

We study a retirement savings plan with a default contribution rate of 12% of income, which is much higher than previously studied defaults. Twenty-five percent of employees had not opted out of this default 12 months after hire; a literature review finds that the... View Details

Keywords: Retirement Savings; Defined Contribution Retirement Plan; Automatic Enrollment; Retirement; Saving; Income; Decision Choices and Conditions

03 Oct 2023
Research Event

Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey Share Happiness Tips

there was the coronavirus, which pulled us apart. Made us-- we made decisions that permanently. Look, I mean, our campus isn't what it used to be. I came here in the fall of 2019 and I had lunch with colleagues. And I saw a lot of... View Details

Keywords: by HBS Staff

November 2013
Article

Simplification and Saving

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

The daunting complexity of important financial decisions can lead to procrastination. We evaluate a low-cost intervention that substantially simplifies the retirement savings plan participation decision. Individuals received an opportunity to enroll in a retirement... View Details

Keywords: Retirement Savings; Simplification; Procrastination; Behavioral Economics; Saving; Motivation and Incentives; Retirement

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March 2014
Article

Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life

By: Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

Work/life balance is at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth, today's senior executives will tell you. But by making deliberate choices about which opportunities they'll pursue and which they'll decline, rather than simply reacting to emergencies, leaders... View Details

Keywords: Work-Life Balance; Management Teams

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07 Feb 2017
Research & Ideas

The Right Way to Cry in Front of Your Boss

frustration or sadness. Wolf differentiates those expressions from anger directed at others. In the paper Managing Perceptions of Distress at Work: Reframing Emotion as Passion, published in the November 2016 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland

05 Aug 2014
First Look

First Look: August 5

decision score. This allows us to observe the local effect of samples in which we drop the best recipients and the worst non-recipients. Our results suggest that while receiving the grant does bring an injection of funding that alleviates... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

19 Jun 2012
First Look

First Look: June 19

making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

26 Jul 2016
First Look

July 26, 2016

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Overcoming the Outcome Bias: Making Intentions Matter By: Sezer, Ovul, Ting Zhang, Francesca Gino, and Max Bazerman Abstract—People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

August 2019 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Helena Divišová

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Helena Divišová (MBA, 2016) decided to return home to the Czech Republic after graduation to be near her father who became seriously ill soon after she started HBS. She had considered leaving HBS immediately to help run his business, but her father—who grew up in the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Czech Republic

01 Jun 2023
HBS Case

A Nike Executive Hid His Criminal Past to Turn His Life Around. What If He Didn't Have To?

shot and killed a teenager. Miller had served four years in juvenile detention for that murder and had later spent five additional years in prison for a smattering of armed robberies. Eventually, while behind bars, he had gotten his head straight and had made the... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Apparel & Accessories

September 2016 (Revised April 2020)
Case

Dwyane Wade

By: Anita Elberse and Jennifer Schoppe

In July 2016, while on his annual China tour to help promote the sportswear brand Li-Ning, basketball superstar Dwyane Wade and his long-time business manager, Lisa Joseph-Metelus, face a decision regarding one of his other business partnerships—that with the American... View Details

Keywords: Branding; Fashion; Superstar; Celebrity Endorsement; Innovation; Creative Industries; Talent; General Management; Sports; Entertainment; Brands and Branding; Marketing; Management; Strategy; Personal Development and Career; Consumer Products Industry; Fashion Industry; Sports Industry; China

June 2022
Teaching Plan

GreenLight Fund

By: Brian Trelstad and Mel Martin

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 320-053. As Tara Noland, the Executive Director (ED) of GreenLight Cincinnati, reflected on her first few years on the job. Noland had delivered on what she had been hired to do in the city: work with leading philanthropists and nonprofit... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy; Venture Philanthropy; Replication; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Venture Capital; Social Issues; Decision Making; Cincinnati