Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,240)
- Faculty Publications (657)
- 2016
- Working Paper
Through the Grapevine: Network Effects on the Design of Executive Compensation Contracts
By: Susanna Gallani
Effective design of executive compensation contracts involves choosing and weighting performance measures, as well as defining the mix between fixed and incentive-based pay components, with a view to fostering talent retention and goal congruence. The variability in... View Details
- August 2015 (Revised February 2017)
- Background Note
The Whys and Hows of Feedback
By: Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams
Performance feedback is crucial to a career in the information-rich global economy. However, feedback is psychologically stressful to both give, and hear. This teaching note explains why feedback is both valuable and difficult, and goes on to summarize research on... View Details
- June 2015
- Supplement
Generating Higher Value at IBM (A): EPS Forecasting Model
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Scott Mayfield
This case analyzes IBM's financial performance and its capital allocation decisions over a 10-year period from 2004-2013, during which IBM returned more than $140B to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share repurchases. During this time, CEO Sam... View Details
- June 2015 (Revised September 2017)
- Supplement
Generating Higher Value at IBM
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Scott Mayfield
This case analyzes IBM's financial performance and its capital allocation decisions over a 10-year period from 2004-2013, during which IBM returned more than $140B to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share repurchases. During this time, CEO Sam... View Details
- May 2015 (Revised September 2017)
- Case
Generating Higher Value at IBM (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield
This case analyzes IBM's financial performance and its capital allocation decisions over a 10-year period from 2004-2013, during which IBM returned more than $140B to shareholders through a combination of dividends and share repurchases. During this time, CEO Sam... View Details
- May–June 2015
- Other Article
HRM at a Crossroads: Comments on 'Evolution of Strategic HRM Through Two Founding Books: A 30th Anniversary Perspective on Development of the Field'
By: Michael Beer
I agree with Bruce Kaufman's evaluation of the HRM field and the danger to its relevance if change does not take place in the field's almost exclusive use of normal science, lack of focus on organizational change and development and indifference to the development of... View Details
- Article
Team Scaffolds: How Mesolevel Structures Enable Role-based Coordination in Temporary Groups
By: M. Valentine and A. C. Edmondson
This paper shows how meso-level structures support effective coordination in temporary groups. Prior research on coordination in temporary groups describes how roles encode individual responsibilities so that coordination between relative strangers is possible. We... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Kanz and Leora Klapper
This paper uses a series of experiments with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of performance incentives on risk assessment and lending decisions. We first show that while high-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Scalable Detection of Anomalous Patterns With Connectivity Constraints
By: Skyler Speakman, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
We present GraphScan, a novel method for detecting arbitrarily shaped connected clusters in graph or network data. Given a graph structure, data observed at each node, and a score function defining the anomalousness of a set of nodes, GraphScan can efficiently and... View Details
- Article
The Disintermediation of Financial Markets: Direct Investing in Private Equity
By: Lily Fang, Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner
We examine twenty years of direct private equity investments by seven large institutions. These direct investments perform better than public market indices, especially buyout investments and those made in the 1990s. Outperformance by the direct investments, however,... View Details
- March 2015 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
CV Ingenuity (A): How to Evaluate the Commercial Viability of New Health Care Technologies
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Andrew Otazo
Duke Rohlen (HBS MBA ’01) hoped to win over a prominent venture capital investor for Series B financing of his firm CVI that was creating a drug-eluting balloon (DES) to treat peripheral arterial disease. As a second-mover, Duke felt he was more likely to acquire... View Details
Keywords: CV Ingenuity; CVI; Drug Eluting Balloon; DEB; Drug Eluting Stent; Angioplasty Balloon; FoxHollow; Medical Device; Medical Device Startup; Premarket Approval; PMA; Lutonix; Stellarex; LEVANT; ILLUMENATE; Clinical Trials; Peripheral Arterial Disease; PAD; Healthcare Startups; Covidien; Health Care and Treatment; Health Testing and Trials; Business Startups; Commercialization; Health Industry; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States; Europe
- February 2015
- Case
Sarah Sullivan at Greater Marketing Solutions (GMS)
By: Thomas J. DeLong, Paul McKinnon and Rebecca McCue
Sarah Sullivan, the new Managing Director of Greater Marketing Solutions, faces the difficult challenge of letting seven professionals go within a short span of time. In doing so she faces two greater challenges: figuring out which individuals to let go and getting her... View Details
- 2015
- Case
Fine Harvest Restaurant Group (cases A and B)
By: Clara (Xiaoling) Chen, Kenneth A. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and Wim A. Van der Stede
The Fine Harvest Restaurant Group cases A and B examine a company's design of a new system to evaluate the performance (and determine the bonuses) for its restaurant managers. Fine Harvest had traditionally evaluated restaurant managers based on store margins and had... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
Clusters, Convergence, and Economic Performance
By: Mercedes Delgado, Michael E. Porter and Scott Stern
This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in regional industry performance. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining in... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity
By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda
Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments... View Details
- December 2014
- Other Article
Private Equity, Jobs, and Productivity—Online Appendix
By: Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Kyle Handley, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda
Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments... View Details
- Article
The Allure of Unknown Outcomes: Exploring the Role of Uncertainty in the Preference for Potential
By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala and Michael I. Norton
Influence practitioners often highlight a target's achievements (e.g., "she is the city's top-rated chef"), but recent research reveals that highlighting a target's potential (e.g., "she could become the city's top-rated chef") can be more effective. We examine whether... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Search for Peer Firms: When Do Crowds Provide Wisdom?
By: Charles M.C. Lee, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
In knowledge-based economies, many business enterprises defy traditional industry boundaries. In this study, we evaluate six "big data" approaches to peer firm identifications and show that some, but not all, "wisdom-of-crowd" techniques perform exceptionally well. We... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
Hidden Structure: Using Network Methods to Map System Architecture
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack and John Rusnak
In this paper, we describe an operational methodology for characterizing the architecture of complex technical systems and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network graphs, which allows us to... View Details
- October 2014
- Article
Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy
By: Frank Cespedes
Research indicates that relatively few firms execute their strategies effectively, and, on average, companies deliver just 50% to 60% of the financial performance that their strategies promise. One reason is a disconnect between strategic goals and field implementation... View Details