Publications

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12 Feb 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors

Keywords: by Susan Helper & Rebecca Henderson; Auto

04 May 2007
What Do You Think?

How Do Managers Think?

medicine allow doctors to be hands-on today with what will be their job tomorrow . Will future managers have the privilege to experience and acquire practical understanding within real-life companies (as a) complementary device to... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

20 Nov 2006
Research & Ideas

Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation

communities we see a vast degree of openness in which everybody can participate, but also the practice of broadcasting your work to everybody else. People continually broadcast their problems, others broadcast solutions, and the person... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

Article

Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors

By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson

General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the U.S. market fell from 62.6% to 19.8%, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Design; Management Practices and Processes; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; United States

07 Jun 2004
What Do You Think?

How Important are Big Ideas?

in a world where patents can be practically replicated through careful innovation. On a third front, however, Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak argue in What's the Big Idea? that the successful implementation of management concepts can... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

March 2006
Module Note

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Module 3: Expanding Diversity

By: Alan D. MacCormack

Describes the third module of the 30-session Harvard Business School elective course Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World. The course helps students understand the challenges that uncertainty implies for innovation and how to overcome them. The course emphasizes... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Projects; Risk and Uncertainty; Product Development; Managerial Roles; Opportunities; Perspective; Expansion; Goals and Objectives

Research Summary

Overview

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang

Start Up Strategy and Management
Bussgang’s research focuses on applying Lean Startup principles to early-stage technology companies as well as the challenges and opportunities when scaling startups. His work led to the creation of the MBA elective... View Details

26 Aug 2024
Research & Ideas

Can AI Match Human Ingenuity in Creative Problem-Solving?

When ChatGPT and other large language models began entering the mainstream two years ago, it quickly became apparent the technology could excel at certain business functions, yet it was less clear how well artificial intelligence could handle more creative tasks. Sure,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Information Technology; Information; Technology

May 2011
Article

Extreme Productivity

By: Robert C. Pozen

A veteran top executive at two giant mutual fund companies, the author has also been an attorney, a government official, a law school professor, and a business school professor-sometimes simultaneously. Over the years, he has devised a number of principles and... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Roles; Time Management; Performance Capacity; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity; Personal Development and Career

02 Jan 2001
Research & Ideas

Can Japan Compete? [Part One]

considered exemplary policies and practices by government. By looking more closely, however, Porter, Takeuchi, and Sakakibara also began to discover what they call "another Japan." While the country did boast a number of strong... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace & Hilah Geer

Research Summary

Overview

Start Up Strategy and Management

Bussgang’s research focuses on applying Lean Startup principles to early-stage technology companies as well as the challenges and opportunities when scaling startups. His work led to the creation of the MBA elective course... View Details

Article

The Economy of Fear: H.P. Lovecraft on Eugenics, Economics and the Great Depression

By: Sophus A. Reinert

The early twentieth-century weird writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft is today best remembered for his genre defining style of academic noir pulp fiction. Yet in focusing on certain tropes of his work, such as the many memorable monsters he created to populate his... View Details

Keywords: H.P. Lovecraft; Society; Economics

24 Jan 2012
First Look

First Look: Jan. 24

estimates of corruption and study its relationship with organizational ownership. Book: http://www.cmi.no/research/project/?1473=the-international-handbook-on-the-economics-of Knowledge-based Innovation: Emergence and Embedding of New View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2018
Book

Kissinger the Negotiator: Lessons from Dealmaking at the Highest Level

By: James K. Sebenius, R. Nicholas Burns and Robert H. Mnookin (with a forward by Henry A. Kissinger)

As professors and practitioners with careers devoted to negotiation, we are often asked “Who are the world’s best negotiators? What makes them effective?” Inevitably Henry Kissinger’s name comes up as an elite, if controversial, negotiator from whom we can learn a... View Details

Keywords: History; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Tactics; Personal Development and Career; Negotiation Style; United States

April 2021 (Revised January 2022)
Case

SA Taxi: A Vehicle for Empowerment? (A)

By: Nien-he Hsieh, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and F. Christopher Eaglin

SA Taxi was a vertically integrated business that operated in South Africa’s distinctive taxi industry. Despite being plagued by violence, informal structures, unsafe road practices and lack of government support, the taxi industry had grown to become South Africa’s... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Accountability; Ownership; Ownership Stake; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Equality and Inequality; Race; Situation or Environment; Transportation Industry; South Africa; Africa

Educators

21 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Altruistic Capital: Harnessing Your Employees’ Intrinsic Goodwill

is the traditional private-sector approach," Ashraf says. "The assumption is that if you don't give someone a stake in the profits of the organization they won't feel that they have a mission." The practical problem with the theory is... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

29 Sep 2011
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Leveraging Intellectual Property

Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions To Be Answered What are the keys to monetizing IP? How should I think about file-sharing and copyright protection? Are... View Details

Keywords: Re: Multiple Faculty

30 May 2000
Lessons from the Classroom

Entrepreneurship’s Wild Ride

business phenomenon. And any links between the two—has academic inquiry affected practice, or have evolving practices influenced study of the field? Perhaps the best place to start is with your own view of... View Details

Keywords: by William Mahoney

2011
Working Paper

How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools

By: Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura and Marion Fourcade

The question of institutional change has become central to organizational research (Powell, 2008). Recent scholarship has demonstrated, often through carefully researched cases, that institutions can and sometimes do change. According to this research, there are two... View Details

Keywords: Change; Business Education; Business History; Organizations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Relationships; Behavior