Publications

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30 Jul 2019
Working Paper Summaries

‘Organizing’, ‘Innovating’, and ‘Managing’ in Complexity Space

Keywords: by Michael C. Moldoveanu

04 Dec 2024
News

Redefining Learning: Celebrating 10 Years of Harvard Business School Online

January 2007 (Revised August 2007)
Case

Fulton County School System: Implementing the Balanced Scorecard

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Monica Nah Lee

Illustrates the adaptation and implementation of a private sector management tool, the Balanced Scorecard, to a public school district. As part of a continuous improvement initiative, the Director of Planning and Policy facilitates the development of a strategy map and... View Details

Keywords: Education; Governance; Leadership; Balanced Scorecard; Performance Improvement; Strategy; Education Industry

Earl Sasser is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and has been a member of the faculty there since 1969. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Duke University in 1965, an MBA from the University of North Carolina in 1967, and a Ph.D. in... View Details

August 2024 (Revised March 2025)
Case

DBS' AI Journey

By: Feng Zhu, Harold Zhu and Adina Wong

Headquartered in Singapore, DBS Bank, one of Asia's leading financial services groups, embarked on a multi-year digital transformation under CEO Piyush Gupta in 2014. It was then that DBS also began experimenting with AI to drive value for the business and customers.... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation; Risk Management; Value Creation; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Asia; Singapore

March 2008
Article

When Growth Stalls

By: Matthew S. Olson, Derek C. M. van Bever and Seth Verry

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. An abrupt and lasting drop in revenue growth is a crisis that can strike even the... View Details

Keywords: Growth Strategy; Revenues; Crisis Management; Revenue; Growth and Development Strategy

June 1991 (Revised June 1993)
Background Note

The Decline of the British Cotton Industry (Abridged)

Supplements the general argument concerning the decline of the British economy by showing how vertical specialization, horizontal competition, and entrenched job control combined to create incentives for management to adapt to changing international conditions by... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Business Cycles; Organizational Structure; Consumer Products Industry; Great Britain

Find at Harvard

2022
Working Paper

Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development

By: Michael Beer

This paper presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Learning; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Management Practices and Processes

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November 2016 (Revised December 2020)
Case

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in Motion

By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott

Evan Siddall, newly appointed CEO of Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation, a governmental organization focused on the residential housing market, is charged with leading change at the organization. The case follows this process of change step by step and looks at the... View Details

Keywords: Leadership, Personal Strategy ＆ Style; Government Organizations; Performance Management; Organizational Change And Transformation; Culture; Leading Change; Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Government Administration; Risk Management; Restructuring; Leadership; Performance; Change Management; Financial Services Industry; Canada

April 2008 (Revised July 2011)
Background Note

Strategic Decline

By: David J. Collis and Jan W. Rivkin

This note first documents the facts around the sustainability of competitive advantage. It then observes that the demise of a previously successful strategy, in the first instance, often comes from some change in the external environment. It, therefore, characterizes... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Strategy; Situation or Environment; Organizational Change and Adaptation

March 2014 (Revised October 2015)
Case

Teach For China and the Chinese Nonprofit Sector

By: William C. Kirby and Erica M. Zendell

Teach For China was founded in 2008 with the mission of expanding educational opportunity across China. By 2013, Andrea Pasinetti's lofty dream had taken flight: over 300 graduates from top American and Chinese universities were participating in its 2-year teaching... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit; China; Business And Government Relations; Business And Poverty; Business And Society; Emerging Market Entrepreneurship; Emerging Market; NGO; Education; Entrepreneurship; Social Enterprise; Emerging Markets; Non-Governmental Organizations; Nonprofit Organizations; Education Industry; China

September 2022
Case

BancoSol: Financial Inclusion in the Perfect Storm

By: Michael Chu and Carla Larangeira

In the pandemic, financial inclusion icon BancoSol faces a government-mandated year-long deferral of all loan payments, followed by the sudden Covid death of its CEO. In a Bolivia mired in political turmoil following a failed presidential election, with clients not... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Crisis Management; Management Succession; Business Strategy; Innovation Leadership; Risk and Uncertainty; Financing and Loans; Restructuring; Financial Services Industry; Latin America; Bolivia

September 2014 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Belk: Towards Exceptional Scheduling

By: Ethan Bernstein, Saravanan Kesavan, Bradley Staats and Luke Hassall

With 24,000 staff and over 300 stores, Belk Inc. sought to replace its entirely manual labor scheduling system with an automated software solution from Reflexis. Belk hoped the upgrade would simplify scheduling, reduce time employees spent in non-customer-facing roles,... View Details

24 Oct 2023
HBS Case

From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Who Changed the World

stories contain pearls of management wisdom for today’s executives looking to lead with excellence. “Without exception, all these people are opportunity seekers,” says Simons of the leaders profiled, which include former British Prime... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

2022
Working Paper

Machine Learning Models for Prediction of Scope 3 Carbon Emissions

By: George Serafeim and Gladys Vélez Caicedo

For most organizations, the vast amount of carbon emissions occur in their supply chain and in the post-sale processing, usage, and end of life treatment of a product, collectively labelled scope 3 emissions. In this paper, we train machine learning algorithms on 15... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Climate Change; Environment; Carbon Accounting; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Digital; Data Science; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Environmental Accounting

SSRN

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Julian De Freitas is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit, and Director of the Ethical Intelligence Lab, at Harvard Business School. He earned his PhD in psychology from Harvard, masters from Oxford, and BA from Yale. He teaches... View Details

Keywords: advertising; automotive; consumer products; e-commerce industry; insurance industry; marketing industry; nonprofit industry; software; transportation; video games

Research Summary

Overview

By: Dutch Leonard

Professor Leonard's research focuses on understanding the role of leadership in the development of strategy and processes for execution in private sector and socially-oriented organizations, including an emphasis on innovation, uncertainty, building successful adaptive... View Details

Keywords: Strategy And Leadership; Social Business; Social Capital; Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Risk Management; Crisis Management

September 2016
Case

Hewlett Packard Enterprise: The Dandelion Program

By: Gary P. Pisano and Robert D. Austin

This case describes Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s “Dandelion Program," which has developed a new service offering for the company’s clients by drawing on the special talents of people with autism. The company has deployed “pods” organized around 8 or 9 employees with... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Behavior; Information Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership; Talent and Talent Management; Service Operations; Training; Diversity; Innovation and Invention; Technology Industry