Publications

25 Jul 2023
News

Why Leaders with Big Egos Worry Wesfarmers CEO Rob Scott

In a recent profile in the Australian Financial Review, Rob Scott (AMP 179, 2010), CEO of Australian conglomerate Wesfarmers, discussed his career path and management philosophy. “I actually think that one of the biggest dangers in leadership is ego and hubris,” Scott,... View Details

March 2001 (Revised September 2005)
Case

Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (C)

By July 2000, Madison Avenue had experienced extraordinary growth in sales, employees, clients, and service offerings. From late 1999 to July 2000, the company had taken several initiatives to redesign its internal processes so that the firm could continue to grow,... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Digital Marketing; Product Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Advertising Industry

Web

Blog | Social Enterprise | Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School had a vision ... Bridging Growth across Continents: SE Summer Fellow Kartik Sahni (MBA/MPP 2025) Kartik Sahni 24 Jul 2024 The HBS Summer Fellows Program enables students to apply their... View Details

07 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

How Teams Work: Lessons from the Pandemic

understand that you need these different types of interactions to work well together as a team, can we figure out how to do them more effectively?” About the Author Kristen Senz is the growth editor of Harvard Business School Working... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

Web

Student Research - Doctoral

Management Annals Personal Growth in Organizations: A Review and Integrative Theoretical Framework By: Manjari Ganti, Susan Ashford and Grace Cormier Personal growth has interested management scholars for... View Details

March 2019 (Revised May 2019)
Case

Fetchr: A New Way of Last Mile Delivery

By: V.G. Narayanan and Eren Kuzucu

By mid-2016, five years of aggressive growth had transformed Fetchr from a small logistics startup to a 1,000-employee, full-fledged last-mile delivery company operating across four countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Already beneficiaries of the... View Details

Web

Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship | About

Company, where he put together the collaborative team that founded Fairchild Semiconductor. After moving to California in 1961, Rock and investor Tommy Davis formed Davis & Rock, which posted an extraordinary 40 percent annual growth rate... View Details

22 Feb 2024
Blog Post

It’s Time to Build: Why the MS/MBA Is Right for You!

carved out a product manager or adjacent role for me to step into. I ended up joining Starlink at SpaceX, where I had a terrific summer working on the Growth team in LA - and even overlapped with alum and now SpaceX employee Kate Sweeney... View Details

October 2024
Article

Sampling Bias in Entrepreneurial Experiments

By: Ruiqing Cao, Rembrand Koning and Ramana Nanda

Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that ‘sampling bias’—defined as the difference between a startup’s target customer base and the actual sample on which early ‘beta tests’ are conducted—has a systematic and... View Details

Keywords: Target Market; Sampling Biases; Beta Testing; Product Launch; Entrepreneurship; Gender

2022
Book

Corporate Criminal Investigations and Prosecutions

By: Leo R. Tsao, Daniel S. Kahn and Eugene F. Soltes

Over the past two decades, corporate criminal liability has developed into one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic areas of legal practice. The growth of corporate criminal enforcement has correlated with a broad shift in how the government investigates and... View Details

Keywords: Criminal Investigations; Crime and Corruption; Legal Liability

August 2022
Case

SuperRare: Turning an NFT Marketplace into a DAO

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Scott Duke Kominers and Amy Klopfenstein

In June 2021, John Crain and Jonathan Perkins, the founders of SuperRare, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), contemplate whether to transform their company into a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Crain and Perkins founded SuperRare in 2018 to... View Details

November 2021
Case

LKQ-Stahlgruber

By: Guhan Subramanian and Caeden Brynie

Through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions, LKQ Corp. became the leading aftermarket auto parts distributor in the U.S. by the early 2000s. Beginning in 2012, the company began similarly consolidating the European marketplace. However, by 2017, the... View Details

Keywords: Consolidation; Acquisition; Decision Making; Strategy; Opportunities; Europe; Germany

July 2024
Case

Freelancer, Ltd.

By: Christopher Stanton, Karim R. Lakhani, Jin Hyun Paik and Nina Cohodes

Over the course of the 2010s, the rapid advancement of mobile technologies and the rise of online freelancing platforms seemed to portend a radical transformation of labor markets into on-demand, flexible talent pools. Even though several Fortune 500... View Details

Keywords: Freelancers; Labor Markets; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Human Capital; Change Management; Globalized Firms and Management; Employment; Global Range; Employment Industry

September 2020
Case

True North: Pioneering Analytics, Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence

By: Karim R. Lakhani, Kairavi Dey and Hannah Mayer

True North was a private equity fund that specialized in the growth and buyout of mid-market, India-centric companies. The leadership team initially believed that technology was not core to traditional businesses and steered clear of new age technology-oriented... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Information Technology; Management; Operations; Organizations; Leadership; Innovation and Invention; Business Model; AI and Machine Learning; Computer Industry; Technology Industry

Article

Is it Better to Average Probabilities or Quantiles?

By: Kenneth C. Lichtendahl, Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Robert L. Winkler

We consider two ways to aggregate expert opinions using simple averages: averaging probabilities and averaging quantiles. We examine analytical properties of these forecasts and compare their ability to harness the wisdom of the crowd. In terms of location, the two... View Details

Keywords: Probability Forecasts; Quantile Forecasts; Expert Combination; Linear Opinion Pooling; Forecasting and Prediction

Find at Harvard

April 2014
Article

Who Lives in the C-Suite? Organizational Structure and the Division of Labor in Top Management

By: Maria Guadalupe, Hongyi Li and Julie Wulf

Top management structures in large U.S. firms have changed significantly since the mid-1980s. While the size of the executive team—the group of managers reporting directly to the CEO—doubled during this period, this growth was driven primarily by an increase in... View Details

Keywords: Communication; Functions; Centralization; M-form; Hierarchy; Top Management Team; C-Suite; Activities; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Diversification; Managerial Roles; Organizational Design; Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Management Teams; United States

December 2009 (Revised March 2025)
Case

Phreesia: The Patient Intake Company

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Sunaina Yarlagadda and Brian L. Walker

How should the co-founders of an organization that provides patient sign-in and billing services scale their company after five years of successfully targeting small private physician practices? Phreesia had deployed a direct mail and sales force strategy that resulted... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Social Entrepreneurship; Revenue; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

March 2000 (Revised February 2005)
Case

Hewlett Packard--Computer Systems Organization: Selling to Enterprise Customers

By: Das Narayandas and Robert C. Dudley

In late 1996, Manuel Diaz, head of Worldwide Sales for Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Computer Systems Organization (CSO), is reviewing the results of an audit of HP's enterprise customer management approach with the objective of identifying market and organizational... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Transformation; Customer Relationship Management; Cost vs Benefits; Marketing Strategy; Sales; Computer Industry

2006
Working Paper

Male Circumcision and AIDS: The Macroeconomic Impact of a Health Crisis

By: Amrita Ahuja, Brian Wendell and Eric D. Werker

Theories abound on the potential macroeconomic impact of AIDS in Africa, yet there have been surprisingly few empirical studies to test the mixed theoretical predictions. In this paper, we examine the impact of the AIDS epidemic on African nations through 2005 using... View Details

Keywords: Macroeconomics; Health Disorders; Welfare or Wellbeing; Poverty; Research; Education; Nutrition; Risk Management; Africa