Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,534)
- Faculty Publications (769)
- September 26, 2018
- Article
Ownership and Power Structure: Together at Last
By: Laura Alfaro, Nicholas Bloom, Paola Conconi, Harald Fadinger, Patrick Legros, Andrew Newman, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Economists have largely ignored the deep interdependency between integration and delegation. This column describes a new theory of integration and delegation choices aimed at shedding light on how these distinct elements of organizational design interact. Contrary to... View Details
- September 2018
- Case
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice at 40
By: Josh Lerner, Abhijit Tagade and Terrence Shu
In 2018, private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice celebrated its 40th anniversary and its 20th year under the leadership of CEO Don Gogel. In those decades, CD&R showed solid portfolio performance and generated strong returns for its investors - accomplishments... View Details
- September 2018 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS: Selecting Impact Funds
By: Vikram Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Nathaniel Schwalb
After much internal debate, THE VELUX FOUNDATIONS of Denmark have decided to allocate a small percentage of their investment portfolio to impact investments. Cambridge Associates, one of the leading investment advisory firms in the world, has been engaged to assist... View Details
- Article
Navigating Talent Hot Spots
By: William R. Kerr
Innovation clusters like San Francisco and Boston have long had an outsize impact on the global economy, and their influence keeps growing. In 2017, for instance, America’s ten largest tech hubs accounted for 58% of U.S. patents. Globally, cities such as Tokyo, Paris,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Incentive Power and Knowledge Sharing Among Employees: Evidence from the Field
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
There is consensus, both in the literature and in practice, about knowledge sharing within organizations being a key determinant of success. However, organizations struggle to sustain employees’ engagement in knowledge sharing. One challenge lies in the fact that,... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Knowledge Sharing; Employee Driven Innovation; Innovation Appropriability; Contract Design; High-powered Incentives; Low-powered Incentives; Incentives; Pay-for-Performance; Rank-and-file; Employees; Knowledge Sharing; Innovation and Invention; Motivation and Incentives; Creativity; Performance
- 2018
- Book
Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business
By: Sunil Gupta
Disruption and transformation get a lot of hype and for good reason. Digital technologies have disrupted entire industries and incumbents have often struggled in this new world. Typical approaches used by legacy players such as using technology to improve efficiency,... View Details
- July 2018
- Case
Leading Open Innovation at BT
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Jean-François Harvey and Johnathan R. Cromwell
This case focuses on the genesis and development of the open innovation unit at BT, the strategic value of the unit, and its operating model. As the business environment becomes increasingly dynamic and firms are pressured to achieve faster innovation rates, there may... View Details
- July–August 2018
- Article
When Technology Gets Ahead of Society
By: Tarun Khanna
New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don’t yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and... View Details
- June 2018 (Revised July 2023)
- Case
John Chambers, Cisco, and China: Upgrading a Golden Shield
By: Geoffrey Jones and Emily Grandjean
This case examines the role of Cisco led by John Chambers in facilitating web filtering in China. It begins by tracing the origins of Cisco as a pioneer of networking equipment. John Chambers, who had worked as a sales manager at IBM and Wang Laboratories, joined Cisco... View Details
- June 2018
- Case
Relax (Boston): Innovating and Growing an Entrepreneurial Business
By: Paul Marshall and Carole Carlson
The Relax case traces the history of a massage services company from its founding in 2007 to mid-2017, when it is considering the best strategy for growth and an acquisition. The company's owner and top managers wonder how the firm should reorganize to cope with the... View Details
- Summer 2018
- Article
CSR Needs CPR: Corporate Sustainability and Politics
By: Thomas Lyon, Magali A. Delmas, John W. Maxwell, Pratima Bansal, Mireille Chiroleu-Assouline, Patricia Crifo, Rodolphe Durand, Jean-Pascal Gond, Andrew King, Michael Lenox, Michael W. Toffel, David Vogel and Frank Wijen
Corporate sustainability has gone mainstream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own environmental performance. But while corporate political actions such as lobbying can have a greater impact on environmental quality, they are ignored in... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
The Strategic Imperative of Psychological Safety and Organizational Error Management
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Paul Verdin
Despite discussion in the management literature about agile organizations or learning organizations, many large organizations are top-down, slow to change, and fraught with obstacles to learning. We describe “strategy-as-learning” to contrast with the traditional... View Details
- May–June 2018
- Article
Layoffs That Don't Break Your Company: Better Approaches to Workforce Transition
By: Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta
Today layoffs have become companies’ default response to the challenges created by advances in technology and global competition. Yet research shows that job cuts rarely help senior leaders achieve their goals. Too often, they’re done for short-term gain, but the cost... View Details
- April 2018
- Case
Cisco Systems and OpenDNS: Strategic Integration
By: Andy Wu, George Gonzalez and David Wang
With more than 72,000 employees and revenues approaching the $50B mark, Cisco Systems is one of the largest information technology and networking firms globally. As the company grew and expanded into different lines of businesses, Cisco consistently looked outwards for... View Details
- April 2018 (Revised May 2018)
- Case
Goldman Sachs: Making an Imprint in Impact Investing
By: Shawn Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Lynn Schenk
Goldman Sachs acquired Imprint Capital Advisors, a small firm that specialized in advising clients on environmental/social/governance (ESG) and impact investments. The founders sold Imprint with the belief that joining a global financial firm would help to scale impact... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Britain: Global Legacy and Domestic Persistence
By: Geoffrey Jones
This chapter explores the British experience in a volume which examines the historical evolution of business groups in developed Western economies. The chapter argues that during the nineteenth century British merchant houses established business groups with... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
The United States in Contemporary Perspectives: Evolving Forms, Strategy, and Performance
By: David J. Collis, Bharat Anand and J. Yo-Jud Cheng
BOOK ABSTRACT: In spite of surging interest in the business group organization among business scholars, economists, and historians in recent years, academic research on business groups has, to date, remained within the boundary of emerging markets. The major aim of... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised October 2018)
- Case
Wellington Global Impact
By: Shawn Cole and Lynn Schenk
Wellington Global Impact is one of the first public equities impact investing strategies in the market. The case explores how the strategy was developed at Wellington, including an analysis of the culture that supported its development. It also explores the difficulty... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
ArcelorMittal and the Ebola Outbreak in Liberia
By: Sophus A. Reinert, Sarah Nam, Sisi Pan and Eric Werker
During the summer of 2014, Alan Knight, general manager of corporate responsibility at the integrated steel and mining company ArcelorMittal, observed the unfolding of an Ebola epidemic in Liberia and other countries in West Africa with great concern. On the one hand... View Details
Keywords: Ebola; Epidemics; Ebola Private Sector Mobalization Group; EPSMG; Civil War; Sovereignty; Change Management; Judgments; Development Economics; Geopolitical Units; Globalized Firms and Management; Emerging Markets; Business and Community Relations; Business and Government Relations; Safety; War; Wealth and Poverty; Welfare; Crisis Management; Mining Industry; Liberia
- November 2017
- Editorial
Facebook, BlackRock, and the Case for Purpose-Driven Companies
By: George Serafeim
Purpose-driven companies have been shown to outperform their peers over the long term. But purpose-driven companies are also hard to come by. Why is that? Because purpose is costly. At the very least, it requires a credible commitment to that purpose. And credible... View Details