Publications

February 2008 (Revised May 2008)
Case

Lincoln Financial Group (A)

Lincoln Financial Group (LFG) reorganizes its business in order to improve customer intimacy. However, to implement the strategy, they need to effect significant changes in the skills of their salespeople. This case series straddles human resource management, corporate... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Customer Relationship Management; Training; Selection and Staffing; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Evaluation; Sales; Corporate Strategy

September–October 2022
Article

The Essential Link Between ESG Targets and Financial Performance

By: Mark R. Kramer and Marc W. Pfitzer

Despite heightened attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, surprisingly few companies are making meaningful progress in delivering on their commitments. Most firms are not integrating ESG factors into internal strategy and operational decisions... View Details

Keywords: ESG; Environmental Sustainability; Social Issues; Governance; Financial Strategy; Decision Making; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Organizational Structure

Web

Strategy Execution Online Course | HBS Online

Execution Participant Design new structures and systems to manage the core tensions of strategy execution and meet business goals. I’ve found HBS Online's courses to be immediately applicable to my work, and they’ve made me a more... View Details

16 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow

management strategy for nonprofits is still relatively uncommon. Wei-Skillern noticed that each unit of Mass Audubon operated quite independently. A new CEO tried to align the units better on a day-to-day basis by instituting a new regional View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

08 Mar 2022
Blog Post

Recalling My First Cold Call: A Conversation with Second-Year Students

to discuss the support he would need. When class started, the professor announced that the ed rep would be starting the class discussion. I was stunned! It took me a moment to realize that I was being cold called. I was asked a question regarding a country’s... View Details

October 1997 (Revised June 1998)
Case

Woolworths South Africa

By: David B. Yoffie and Anthony St. George

Woolworths South Africa is one of the most successful retail chains in the country, modeled on Marks and Spencer of the United Kingdom. This case focuses on the sources of Woolworth's competitive advantage within South Africa and the challenges of growth in the wake of... View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Growth Management; Global Strategy; Industry Structures; Marketing Strategy; Strategy; Business or Company Management; Retail Industry; South Africa

February 2022 (Revised March 2022)
Case

Hertz in Bankruptcy: A Wild Ride in Pandemic Times

By: Samuel Antill, Stuart Gilson and Kristin Mugford

Hertz filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to asset-backed securities (ABS) obligations and the COVID-19 pandemic. Enthusiastic Robinhood investors and shrewd negotiating tactics helped Hertz stabilize. Roughly nine months into the bankruptcy, Hertz received... View Details

Keywords: Bankruptcy Reorganization; COVID-19 Pandemic; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Health Pandemics; Valuation; Capital Structure; Negotiation; Private Equity; Travel Industry; United States

12 Jun 2018
Research & Ideas

In a Landscape of 'Me Too' Drug Development, What Spurs Radical Innovation?

portfolios. They examined all companies that held at least one drug patent on the market as of 2003. The researchers focused mainly on small-molecule drugs, not biologics. That’s because of how the compounds are structured chemically. The... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Health; Pharmaceutical

January 2021 (Revised February 2021)
Case

TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Malini Sen

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India’s most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector,... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Organizational Structure; Change Management; Transformation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Customer Satisfaction; Information Technology Industry; India; Asia; United States; Europe

Portrait Project

Aman Kumar

being alive. And for the times we choose to forge ahead, we make the rules. The structures we are empowered and constrained by are designed only by people, and thus can be improved by other people. I choose to spend my life where these... View Details

17 Jan 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Price Coherence and Adverse Intermediation

Keywords: by Benjamin G. Edelman & Julian Wright; Consumer Products

Research Summary

Overview

Yanhua Bird's research encompasses two streams: (1) entrepreneurship and social innovation — how the design and structure of alternative forms of enterprises influence their activities and success, with a focus on peer-to-peer markets and social enterprises, and (2)... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Strategy; Social Evaluation; Entrepreneurship; Social Innovation; Social Movements; Non-market Strategy; Corporate Sustainability

Research Summary

How Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Economic Growth? Exploring the Effects of Financial Markets on Linkages (with Areendam Chanda, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan and Selin Sayek)

By: Laura Alfaro

The empirical literature finds mixed evidence on the existence of positive productivity externalities in the host country generated by foreign multinational companies. We propose a novel mechanism, which emphasizes the role of local financial markets in enabling... View Details

2018
Article

Cracking the Organizational Challenge of Pursuing Joint Social and Financial Goals: Social Enterprise as a Laboratory to Understand Hybrid Organizing

By: Julie Battilana

While in recent decades the social and business sectors have evolved on fairly separate tracks, today companies are increasingly expected to generate social value in addition to profit. As a result, they also increasingly face the distinct challenge of pursuing social... View Details

Keywords: Hybrid Organizations; Hybrid Organizing; Multiple Goals; Social Enterprise; Goals and Objectives; Organizational Design; Organizational Culture

Read Now

March 2025
Case

The Changing Climate on Wall Street

By: Clayton S. Rose, Maxim Pike Harrell and Michael Norris

Increasing and conflicting regulatory requirements and political pressures regarding climate change tested the leaders of U.S. financial institutions, as they struggled to determine how best to comply while managing their business and its risks. In October 2024,... View Details

22 Feb 2022
News

Breaking News

business models and journalism, to support news organizations, and raise the capital to effect large-scale structural change in the industry, says Hansen Shapiro. Currently a senior research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; illustration by Dana Smith; News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information

April 2020 (Revised October 2020)
Case

Unilever's Response to the Future of Work

By: William R. Kerr, Emilie Billaud and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej

In February 2020, Nick Dalton, executive vice president HR business transformation at Unilever, reflected on the changing nature of work marked by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation. Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Human Capital; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Structure; Transformation; Human Resources; Consumer Products Industry; Europe

Research Summary

THEME #1: BUILDING CAPABILITIES THROUGH TEAM FAMILIARITY

Are organizational capabilities simply the aggregation of individual skills and experience, or do they also depend on particular connections between individuals developed through prior work experience? Since a capability consists of the accumulated... View Details

March–April 2021
Article

Network-biased Technical Change: How Information Management Tools Overcome Some Biases but Exacerbate Others.

By: Gerald C. Kane and Lynn Wu

Organizations have long sought to improve employee performance by managing knowledge more effectively. In this paper, we test whether the adoption of digital tools for expertise search and access within an organization, often referred to as a support to an... View Details

Keywords: Digital Tools; Social Media; Social Networks; Transactive Memory Systems; Augmented Intelligence; Artificial Intelligence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Technology Adoption; Knowledge Management; Performance Improvement; Power and Influence; Organizational Change and Adaptation