Publications

August 2023
Case

WayCool: Reimagining the Food Supply Chain

By: Paul Gompers and Kairavi Dey

Founded in 2015, WayCool, is an Indian agri-tech start-up that built a B2B operation acquiring fruits and vegetables from product-specific agriculture companies and small-holding farmers. It sold them to business customers, such as local retail stores, restaurants, and... View Details

Keywords: Agribusiness; Digital Transformation; Operations; Business Strategy; Supply Chain; Performance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Technology Industry; Web Services Industry; Asia; South Asia

05 Jul 2022
What Do You Think?

Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?

(iStockphoto/aydinmutlu) Logistics issues have taken on unexpected and possibly unwanted “glamour” among those who study business and economics, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and its global aftermath. It’s a throwback to the days when railroad View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Manufacturing; Shipping; Transportation

September 1991
Case

All American Pipeline

By: Timothy A. Luehrman

Goodyear is nearing its first major capital commitments for the largest investment project in its history, the All American Pipeline. The pipeline will transport heavy crude oil from California to Texas. It is the centerpiece of a major program by Goodyear to diversify... View Details

Keywords: Capital; Financial Strategy; Business Startups; Diversification; Valuation; Standards; Supply Chain; Resource Allocation; Cash Flow; Mining Industry; California; Texas

18 Apr 2000
Research & Ideas

Learning in Action

layout that would optimize product flow and plant capacity — critical to reducing process time — and made extensive use of simulations to generate insights. They created Cardboard City, a three dimensional model of a manufacturing cell... View Details

Keywords: by David A. Garvin

May 2011
Article

Consequences and Institutional Determinants of Unregulated Corporate Financial Statements: Evidence from Embedded Value Reporting

By: George Serafeim

I analyze Embedded Value (EV) reporting by firms with life insurance operations to assess the impact of unregulated financial reporting on transparency and to examine the institutional characteristics that promote unregulated reporting. Under EV accounting the present... View Details

Keywords: Financial Statements; Mergers and Acquisitions; Financial Reporting; Cash Flow; Contracts; Equity; Profit; Value; Corporate Disclosure; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business Earnings

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April 1986 (Revised May 1988)
Case

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (B)

By: Kim B. Clark

Dissects the manufacturing process and procedures of a high-end computer manufacturer. The main issue is how to introduce new products and ramp them up quickly in a competitive environment where time-to-market is crucial. Focuses on engineering change orders--how they... View Details

Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Time Management; Product Launch; Production; Business Processes; Competitive Strategy; Computer Industry

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June 2013
Case

Ron Ventura at Mitchell Memorial Hospital

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Heide Abelli

Mitchell Memorial Hospital is a 750-bed regional academic medical center in Ohio. Andy Prescott, Chief of the Cardiovascular Center, is reviewing the performance evaluations of his star vascular surgeon Ron Ventura. The evaluations, the result of a 360-degree... View Details

Keywords: Performance Expectations; Conflict Management; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Organizational Culture; Resignation and Termination; Health Care and Treatment; Performance Evaluation; Health Industry; Ohio

21 Aug 2006
Research & Ideas

How Europe Wrote the Rules of Global Finance

The United States has been both credited and criticized for its powerful role in promoting global financial liberalization—the flow of capital across country borders. But research by Harvard Business School Professor Rawi Abdelal has... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

02 May 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research: May 2, 2017

showing a passenger being dragged from a plane. Of all the U.S. air carriers, United should have known the power of social media and public outrage. It had learned years earlier in a prominent case about how fast viral content spreads and... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

March 2008 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Transparent Value LLC

By: Sharon P. Katz, Krishna G. Palepu and Aldo Sesia, Jr.

Leading index company Dow Jones recently signed a license and joint marketing agreement with Transparent Value LLC, the creator of a new fundamentals-based valuation methodology. The agreement allowed Dow Jones to offer a family of indexes based on the Transparent... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Stocks; Price; Performance Expectations; Mathematical Methods; Valuation

August 2022
Case

Air Wars: Deregulating the U.S. Airline Industry

By: Tom Nicholas and James Weber

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. government assisted in the development of an airline industry by subsidizing the delivery of mail and allowing mail carriers to also fly passengers. Because the government awarded mail routes to the lowest... View Details

February 1992 (Revised April 1993)
Case

Acid Rain: The Southern Co. (A)

By: Forest L. Reinhardt

The Southern Co., an electric utility, is planning its compliance with the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The Act established a system of tradeable permits for sulfur dioxide emissions. The company must decide whether to install pollution control equipment and... View Details

Keywords: Energy Generation; Business Strategy; Environmental Sustainability; Cost vs Benefits; Financial Management; Strategic Planning; Investment Return; Government Legislation; Wastes and Waste Processing; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; United States

June 2016
Article

Task Segregation as a Mechanism for Within-Job Inequality: Women and Men of the Transportation Security Administration

By: Curtis K. Chan and Michel Anteby

What could explain inequality within a given job between groups of workers, particularly between women and men? Extant workplace inequality scholarship has largely overlooked as a source for inequality the job’s work content—the actual tasks workers perform. It is... View Details

Keywords: Inequality; Work; Mechanisms And Processes; Stratification; Labor Process; Qualitative Methods (General); Case Method; Field Research; Equality and Inequality; Working Conditions; Gender; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Air Transportation Industry

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09 Dec 2013
Research & Ideas

Cultural Disharmony Undermines Workplace Creativity

Conflicts in Social Environment Undermine Creativity, a paper published this month in the Academy of Management Journal. Multicultural teams may need managerial nurturing to overcome frictions. Photo: iStockPhoto "A lot of times when we... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

April 2002 (Revised September 2002)
Background Note

Capital Controls

By: Rawi E. Abdelal and Laura Alfaro

Only in the waning years of the 20th century did international financial markets begin to enjoy the freedom from government regulation that they had experienced before the first world war. By 2002, international capital markets had grown to be enormous--$1.2 trillion... View Details

Keywords: History; Policy; Business and Government Relations; Change Management; Cost vs Benefits; Governance Controls; Governance Compliance; Emerging Markets; Financial Markets; Network Effects; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

process redesign. Over the years, the CIO job has remained a hot seat in business and has, in turn, become a key management position in executing a company's competitive cost structure and strategy. It has become a key senior View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2014
Working Paper

The Unfairness Trap: A Key Missing Factor in the Economic Theory of Discrimination

By: Jordan I. Siegel, Naomi Kodama and Hanna Halaburda

Prior evidence linking increased female representation in management to corporate performance has been surprisingly mixed, due in part to data limitations and methodological difficulties, and possibly to omission of a fairness factor in the economic theory of... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Roles; Fairness; Performance Productivity; Gender; Japan