Publications

11 Jun 2012
Research & Ideas

When Business Competition Harms Society

UCLA Anderson School, and Michael W. Toffel of Harvard Business School. In the quest to discover whether competition breeds unethical behavior, the researchers examined the vehicle emissions testing program in New York State, one of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Auto

15 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Political Dysfunction Makes America Less Competitive

results of surveys of global business leaders and the general public, says the US is “failing the test of competitiveness.” Overall prosperity may be growing slowly—but only for a small slice of the population. Large companies and highly... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

March 2023
Case

MrBeast: Building a YouTube Empire

By: Anita Elberse and Oliver Band

Wednesday November 16, 2022 was a historic day in the ascent of Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, to the top echelon of YouTube creators. That day he became the YouTuber with the most subscribers ever—a total of 112 million. The meteoric rise of the 24-year-old... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Power and Influence; Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry

February 2016 (Revised June 2016)
Case

The Maggi Noodle Safety Crisis in India (A)

By: Karthik Ramanna and Radhika Kak

The local government in Delhi has ordered a ban on Nestlé's flagship product in India—Maggi Noodles—citing excessive lead content per government lab tests. Nestlé disputes the government tests, noting that internal and third-party tests show the product to be safe.... View Details

Keywords: Multinationals; Regulation; Customer Relations; Business And Government; Crisis Management; Leadership; Multinational Firms and Management; Globalization; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Safety; Customer Relationship Management; Business and Government Relations; India; Europe; Switzerland

February 2003
Exercise

Restructuring the U.S. Steel Industry: Spreadsheet Exercise

By: William E. Fruhan Jr.

Description of an EXCEL spreadsheet exercise to test the impact of changes in wage rates on the value of debt and equity securities. View Details

Keywords: Equity; Debt Securities; Valuation; Wages; Restructuring; Steel Industry

Teaching Interest

Strategy For Entrepreneurs

By: Rembrand M. Koning

Strategy for Entrepreneurs (SFE) helps students develop better strategies for the ventures they start, the startups they will join, and the new companies they might invest in. The course pushes students to write down a theory of value and then design and run... View Details

November 2015
Article

The Highest Form of Intelligence: Sarcasm Increases Creativity for Both Expressers and Recipients

By: Li Huang, F. Gino and Adam D. Galinsky

Sarcasm is ubiquitous in organizations. Despite its prevalence, we know surprisingly little about the cognitive experiences of sarcastic expressers and recipients or their behavioral implications. The current research proposes and tests a novel theoretical model in... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Cognition and Thinking

Read Now

October 2004 (Revised January 2006)
Tutorial

Introduction to Responsibility Accounting Systems

By: David F. Hawkins, V.G. Narayanan, Jacob Cohen and Michele Jurgens

Responsibility accounting systems generate financial and related nonfinancial information about the actual and planned activities of a company's responsibility centers--organizational units headed by managers responsible for a unit's performance. The principal... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Cost Accounting; Governance Controls; Financial Reporting; Performance Evaluation; Budgets and Budgeting; Planning

2016
Book

Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work

By: Joseph L. Badaracco

Part of a manager's job is making tough calls, and the hardest challenge can be resolving "gray area” problems—situations in which analysis of the numbers, facts, and data fails to provide a clear answer. Gray areas test not only managers’ skills but also their... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Decision Choices and Conditions

2013
Working Paper

Visualizing and Measuring Enterprise Application Architecture: An Exploratory Telecom Case

By: Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack and Stephan Aier

We test a method for visualizing and measuring enterprise application architectures. The method was designed and previously used to reveal the hidden internal architectural structure of software applications. The focus of this paper is to test if it can also uncover... View Details

Keywords: Communication Technology; Complexity; Applications and Software; Product Design; Telecommunications Industry

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August 19, 2015
Article

The Slow Decay and Quick Revival of Self-deception

By: Zoe Chance, Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely

People demonstrate an impressive ability to self-deceive, distorting misbehavior to reflect positively on themselves—for example, by cheating on a test and believing that their inflated performance reflects their true ability. But what happens to self-deception when... View Details

Keywords: Self-deception; Cheating; Self-enhancement; Positive Illusions; Motivated Reasoning; Perception; Behavior; Ethics

Read Now

February 2022 (Revised April 2022)
Case

CVS Health: Prescription for Transformation

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Tuna Cem Hayirli

In 2021, new CEO Karen Lynch (named the most powerful woman in business) considered the next transformation phase for CVS Health (a Fortune 5 corporate giant. The 2018 acquisition of Aetna insurance brought her to the company as part of its long evolution from a... View Details

Keywords: COVID; Caregiving; Healthcare; Access; Change; Retail; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Transformation; Health Industry; Retail Industry

2020
Book

Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments

By: Stefan Thomke

Don’t fly blind. See how the power of experiments works for you. When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition,... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Experiments; Market Research; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Customers; Research

December 2009
Article

Estimation and Empirical Properties of a Firm-Year Measure of Accounting Conservatism

By: Mozaffar N. Khan and Ross L. Watts

We estimate a firm-year measure of accounting conservatism, examine its empirical properties as a metric, and illustrate applications by testing new hypotheses that shed further light on the nature and effects of conservatism. The results are consistent with the... View Details

September 2007
Case

Nonverbal Communication: Distinguishing Truth and Lies

By: Michael A. Wheeler

This video-based coursework illuminates the importance--and difficulty--of judging whether people are trustworthy. Students can test their skills at assessing whether contestants in a high-stakes game show will cooperate or defect. View Details

Keywords: Nonverbal Communication; Competency and Skills; Moral Sensibility; Emotions; Trust

July 2007 (Revised January 2008)
Case

Andrea Jung: Empowering Avon Women (A)

By: William W. George, Diana Mayer and Andrew N. McLean

In October 2005 Andrea Jung is coping with a 30% decline in Avon's stock price--the biggest test of her leadership since she became CEO in 2000. View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Price; Stocks; Crisis Management; Gender

23 Jul 2018
Working Paper Summaries

The Creative Consulting Company

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan, Richard Nolan, and David P. Norton; Consulting

May 1993
Case

Patient Transfusion Services Lab of Central Blood Bank

By: James L. Heskett

The vice president of the Lab and Clinical Services at Central Blood Bank is faced with the challenge of convincing a hospital to use economical shared patient transfusion testing services. View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Quality; Service Operations; Mathematical Methods; Customer Satisfaction; Health Industry

January 2020
Case

Celata Bioinnovations

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In December 2019, Jon Hu (HBS ‘19) and Dr. Samantha Dale Strasser, co-founders of Celata Bioinnovations, were raising $1 million to launch their company. They had founded Celata less than six months earlier with the aim of redefining the drug discovery process.... View Details