Publications
Publications
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(5,213)
- Faculty Publications (1,860)
- November 2020
- Case
Truebird—An AlleyCorp Venture
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
In December 2018, Kevin Ryan and Wendy Tsu faced an important decision – to finalize the CEO candidate for Truebird, an innovative, automated coffee café concept. Like many of AlleyCorp and Ryan’s companies, Truebird started with the observation of an unmet need – an... View Details
- November 2020
- Case
The 1,000-Year Plan: Lee Kum Kee and Sustaining a Family Culture
By: Lauren Cohen, Dawn H. Lau and Billy Chan
The Lee family, whose Hong Kong-based Lee Kum Kee company has established itself as a legend within the Chinese and Asian sauce world, sets out to create a daring new vision of what family legacy means. With the family business having been established in 1888, and by... View Details
- Article
Corporate Headquarters in the Twenty-first Century: An Organization Design Perspective
By: Sven Kunisch, Markus Menz and David J. Collis
The corporate headquarters (CHQ) of the multi-business enterprise, which emerged as the dominant organizational form for the conduct of business in the twentieth century, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. As the business environment undergoes a... View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case
By: Robin Ely and David A. Thomas
Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company’s performance. This article critiques the popular... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Intertemporal Altruism
By: Felix Chopra, Armin Falk and Thomas Graeber
Most prosocial decisions involve intertemporal tradeoffs. Yet, the timing of prosocial utility flows is ambiguous and bypassed by most models of other-regarding preferences. We study the behavioral implications of the time structure of prosocial utility,... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Women Entrepreneurs and Tech Ecosystems: One City, Two Realities, and Four Diverse Women
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Joyce J. Kim
Four diverse women entrepreneurs launched their ventures in a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem that was part of a shift to a creative technology-driven economy for Miami. Although Miami was rated the #1 U.S. city for startups in 2017, the region contained structural... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
Twiga Foods: Revolutionizing African Retail (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Pippa Tubman Amerding and Wale Lawal
Twiga is a leading agricultural produce supplier in Kenya offering services to mostly informal retailers. Under Peter Njonjo, a co-founder and Twiga’s new CEO, the company is considering multiple options for expanding its business, including offering packaged foods and... View Details
- October 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Francisco Partners Private Credit Opportunity Fund
By: Luis M. Viceira, John D. Dionne, Soracha Prathanrasnikorn and Ari Sunshine
In April 2020, Scott Einsenberg, the Head of Credit at the private equity firm Francisco Partners, is deciding whether to go ahead with extending a private lending agreement to Eventbrite, Inc. (NYSE: EB), a leading global event management and online ticketing... View Details
- Fall 2020
- Article
Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa
Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from... View Details
- Article
Does Your Company Need a Chief Medical Officer?
By: Tsedal Neeley
With the Covid-19 pandemic still raging but businesses trying to remain operational, organizations now have a life or death role to play in protecting the health of employees, customers, and the public. That means they need a new executive in the C-suite: a chief... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Reverse Information Sharing: Reducing Costs in Supply Chains with Yield Uncertainty
By: Pavithra Harsha, Ashish Jagmohan, Retsef Levi, Elisabeth Paulson and Georgia Perakis
Supply uncertainty in produce supply chains presents major challenges to retailers. Supply shortages create frequent disruptions in terms of promised delivery times, quantity and quality delivered. To alleviate these challenges, dual sourcing--a strategy in which... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Blackstone: Crocs Investment
By: Victoria Ivashina, John D. Dionne and Terrence Shu
This case follows Prakash Melwani (HBS MBA '86), CIO of Blackstone's Private Equity Group, and his teams’ investment in the footwear company Crocs. Instead of a traditional secondary offering, Crocs opted for a unique deal structure by taking Blackstone's cash in a... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Moderna (A)
By: Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Hannah Mayer and Kerry Herman
In summer 2020, Stephane Bancel, CEO of biotech firm Moderna, faces several challenges as his company races to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The case explores how a company builds a digital organization, and leverages artificial intelligence and other digital... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 6 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 1: Mapping Functional Relationships
Organizations are formed in a free economy because an individual or group perceives value in carrying out a technical recipe that is beyond the capacity of a single person. Technology specifies what must be done, what resources must be assembled, what actions taken in... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 7 The Value Structure of Technologies, Part 2: Strategy without Numbers
Functional analysis as set forth in the last chapter decomposes a technical system into functional components that do things to advance the system’s purpose and the goals of its designers. Functional analysis in turn can be used to construct value structure maps... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Hitachi Rail Limited (A)
By: David J. Collis, Akiko Kanno and Nobuo Sato
Hitachi must decide whether to make a British executive, who has successfully built its European rail business from scratch, head of its global rail division even though the bulk of revenues for the unit still come from Japan. The case describes the history of Hitachi... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Supplement
Hitachi Rail Limited (B)
By: David J. Collis, Akiko Kanno and Nobuo Sato
This supplement describes the strategy and organisation changes made by British executive, Alistair Dormer, after he is made head of Hitachi Rail's global business. The company acquires an Italian company, continues to win contracts in the UK, but struggles to bring... View Details
- September 2020
- Case
Summit Partners: Independent Vetcare
By: Victoria Ivashina and Terrence Shu
This case follows Summit Partners, a leading growth equity firm, as it evaluates an investment opportunity in IVC, a veterinary care group in the U.K. market. The case allows students to articulate and evaluate the investment thesis of this transaction. Additionally,... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Design and Analysis of Switchback Experiments
By: Iavor I Bojinov, David Simchi-Levi and Jinglong Zhao
In switchback experiments, a firm sequentially exposes an experimental unit to a random treatment, measures its response, and repeats the procedure for several periods to determine which treatment leads to the best outcome. Although practitioners have widely adopted... View Details
- August 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
Latam Airlines and COVID-19: Seeking Bankruptcy Protection in the United States
By: Laura Alfaro, Mauricio Larrain, Carlos Vilches and Sarah Jeong
On May 26, 2020, Latam Airlines became the largest airline in the world to be driven to bankruptcy by COVID-19. With a complex debt structure and international investor composition, the company decided to file for bankruptcy protection in the United States, which... View Details