Publications

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2022
Working Paper

Gender Inequality and the Direction of Ideas: Evidence from the Weinstein Scandal and #MeToo

By: Hong Luo and Laurina Zhang

How do the Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo affect women’s likelihood of working in male-dominated domains and the types of ideas developed in Hollywood? To discern these events’ impact, we exploit the variation in whether a producer previously collaborated with... View Details

Keywords: Gender Inequality; Gender Segregation; Social Movement; Direction Of Innovation; Creative Industries; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Social Issues; Creativity; Film Entertainment

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October 2011 (Revised April 2017)
Teaching Note

Raleigh & Rosse: Measures to Motivate Exceptional Service (Brief Case)

By: Robert L. Simons and Michael Mahoney

Teaching Note for 4353. View Details

Keywords: Control Systems; Performance Measurement; Goal Setting; Compensation; Incentives; Motivation; Sales Compensation; Strategy And Execution; Motivation and Incentives; Goals and Objectives; Salesforce Management; Organizational Culture; Accounting; Performance Evaluation; Compensation and Benefits

September–October 2021
Article

Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details

Keywords: Smart Pricing; Pricing Algorithm; Machine Bias; Discrimination; Racial Disparity; Social Inequality; Airbnb Revenue; Revenue; Race; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Price; Mathematical Methods; Accommodations Industry

SSRN

Teaching

Overview

By: Brian L. Trelstad

My teaching focuses on innovation and effectiveness in the social sector. My principal course is on Social Entrepreneurship & Systems Change, and it tries to understand how small teams launch new initiatives to solve big, global, systemic problems. I also teach... View Details

October 2022
Case

Sustainable Finance at Itau BBA

By: George Serafeim, Maria Loumioti and Benjamin Maletta

As of August 2022, the Itau BBA had structured dozens of sustainability linked bonds, which made future interest payments a function of the borrower meeting a target for a sustainability metric, and had solidified its reputation as a pioneer of sustainable finance in... View Details

Keywords: Sustainable Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility; Environmental Sustainability; Growth Strategy; Debt Contracting; Performance Metrics; Risk Assessment; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Financial Instruments; Risk Management; Debt Securities; Measurement and Metrics; Banking Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Latin America

Edward McFowland III is an Assistant Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches the first-year TOM course in the required curriculum.

Professor McFowland’s research interests – which lie at the... View Details

Brian L. Trelstad

Brian Trelstad is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School in the General Management Unit and the Faculty Chair of the Advanced Leadership Initiative. He teaches elective courses on Social Entrepreneurship and Systems... View Details

Keywords: education industry; health care; service industry; emerging market private equity; private equity (other); venture capital industry

2010
Book

Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism

By: Peter Wehner and Arthur C. Brooks

Popular opinion would have us believe that America's free market system is driven by greed and materialism, resulting in gross inequalities of wealth, destruction of the environment, and other social ills. Even proponents of capitalism often refer to the free market as... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Economic Systems; Ethics; Moral Sensibility

October 2022
Case

Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim

Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to... View Details

Research Summary

Overview

My research is centrally concerned with aspects of social cognition writ large, i.e., organizational identity, learning, creativity, intelligence, and leadership, as well as its social embeddedness in larger systems of meaning arising from organizational fields, market... View Details

September 1960 (Revised August 1995)
Case

Slade Co., The

Describes a conflict between the values and norms of a segment of an internal social system and those of management and the wider culture. View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Conflict and Resolution

21 Jan 2022
News

Professor Kash Rangan: Enlightening

01 Sep 2013
News

Who Are We?

SOCIAL MEDIA James Kondo Managing Director, East Asia, Twitter M. James Kondo 103 alumni work in social media 41 at Facebook 31 at LinkedIn 7 at Twitter High Tech: 135 at Google 104 at Microsoft 23 at Apple... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons; Julia Hanna; Dan Morrell; social media,; Twitter; SodaStream; consulting; consultant; CEO; farming; News, Library, Internet, and Other Services; Information; Agriculture; Food Manufacturing; Manufacturing; Rail Transportation; Transportation

2010
Chapter

Understanding and Coping with the Increasing Risk of System-Level Accidents

By: Dutch Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt

The world has seen a number of recent events in which major systems came to a standstill, not from one cause alone but from the interaction of a combination of causes. System-level accidents occur when anomalies or errors in different parts of an interconnected system... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Globalization; Risk Management; Boundaries; System Shocks

January–February 2018
Article

Inclusive Growth: Profitable Strategies for Tackling Poverty and Inequality

By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat

More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change.
Instead of trying to fix local problems,... View Details

Keywords: Inclusive Growth; Sustainability; Social Impact; Business Strategy; Shared Value; Impact Investing; Inequality; Corporate Governance; Balanced Scorecard; Strategy Execution; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Investment

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December 1992 (Revised September 1994)
Background Note

Note on Organizational Effectiveness

By: Michael Beer

Discusses what is meant by organizational effectiveness. First, the concept of organizations as social systems is introduced. Second, a model of organization effectiveness is introduced and discussed. View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Performance Efficiency

Keywords: Green Building; LEED Rating System; Economic And Environmental Performance; Program Evaluation And Assessment; Tradeoffs Between Process- And Performance Standards; Buildings and Facilities; Business Headquarters; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Standards; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Improvement; Environmental Sustainability; Pollutants; Green Technology Industry

September 2009 (Revised September 2010)
Case

Genzyme Center (A)

By: Michael W. Toffel and Aldo Sesia

Genzyme Corporation is in the midst of planning its new corporate headquarters, which incorporates many innovative green building features. After learning that the building as planned would likely earn a LEED Silver rating, an intermediate score in the LEED green... View Details