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27 Jun 2007
Lessons from the Classroom

Learning to Make the Move to CEO

You're a successful senior executive with 20, 25 years of experience under your belt. You've made your mark and stand just 1 or 2 rungs from the position of CEO. Now what? As faculty chair of Harvard Business School's Advanced Management... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Education

24 Jan 2005
Research & Ideas

Rethinking Activity-Based Costing

Activity-based costing, ABC, would seem to be an accurate way for managers to assign costs to the customers and products that use a department's services. But real-world use has shown ABC loses power in... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & Steven R. Anderson

July 2004 (Revised December 2004)
Case

RelayHealth

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind

RelayHealth provides secure, online communications for doctors, patients, and health plans. The company's services include online consultations, prescription renewals, and appointment scheduling. RelayHealth's business model derives subscription revenue from doctors... View Details

Keywords: Communication Technology; Internet and the Web; Consumer Behavior; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Telecommunications Industry

July 2019 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Salary Finance

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In April 2019, Asesh Sarkar, co-founder and chief executive of Salary Finance Limited, a London-based FinTech, faced tough choices. Sarkar had founded Salary Finance with Dan Cobley and Daniel Shakhani in 2015. The company’s value proposition was quite simple: partner... View Details

Keywords: Credit; Financing and Loans; Wages; Innovation and Invention; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Decision Choices and Conditions; Financial Services Industry

Web

Business History - Faculty & Research

simplistic assumptions about business behavior also enabled business history to be highly creative and, at times, to exercise a huge impact on management studies more generally, especially strategy and the study of entrepreneurship.... View Details

January 2021 (Revised March 2021)
Case

Jumia's Path to Profitability

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Gamze Yucaoglu

The case opens in September 2019 as Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, the leading Pan-African e-commerce platform, are contemplating the company’s path to profitability in the aftermath of a fragile investor sentiment, as the company... View Details

February 1995 (Revised September 1995)
Case

The Bourland Companies

By: William J. Poorvu and John H. Vogel Jr.

Michael Bourland, the president of the Bourland Companies, needs to refinance two properties, an office building in southern New Hampshire and a retail property in Massachusetts. He is considering three alternatives: a renewal of a bank mini-perm, a 15-year mortgage... View Details

Keywords: Capital Markets; Property; Mortgages; Family Business; Financial Management; Family Ownership; Real Estate Industry; Massachusetts; North and Central America

01 Mar 2024
News

In Harmony

October 2023, news broke that filming of the book would begin in fall 2024, backed by Anonymous Content, the US production company behind Spotlight and The Revenant, and Korea’s Anthology Studios. Deeply personal and highly... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; photographs by Jun Michael Park; private equity; fiction; financial crisis; leadership; Korea

03 Mar 2008
Research & Ideas

Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

Must-have features of yesterday are today's can-live-withouts. Trusted brands are especially valued and they can still launch new products successfully, but interest in new brands and new categories fades. Conspicuous consumption becomes... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

January 1986 (Revised March 1997)
Case

Horizon Group

By: William A. Sahlman

Contains a description of a situation confronting the co-founder of a company planning to produce software for microcomputers. The company has just completed raising money from some wealthy investors by forming an R&D Limited Partnership. Development of the program (an... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Venture Capital; Partners and Partnerships; Business Plan; Outcome or Result; Research and Development; Financial Strategy; Corporate Finance; Information Technology Industry

April 2007 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Bankinter: Growing Through Small and Medium Enterprises

Surveys the overall sequence of processes needed for the success of a strategy based on customer analytics. In particular, it charts the formulation and implementation of this strategy by a Spanish bank that decided to expand into the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME)... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Data and Data Sets; Knowledge Acquisition; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Segmentation; Banking Industry; Spain

Web

Employee Welfare – The Human Relations Movement – Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Historical Collections

part in affirming the role of the worker. To inspire company loyalty, discourage high employee turnover and unionization, and present a good face to the public, corporate managers began to focus on the well-being of the employee through... View Details

20 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

The 5 Strategy Rules of Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs

the most highly valued companies in the world. But how were they able to steer their companies through the volatile ups and downs of decades of changing technologies? What did they have in common? And what can we learn from them about successful strategy? “The notion... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Computer

November 1994
Case

Pilkington Float Glass--1955

By: Kim B. Clark

The case examines the development of the float glass process at Pilkington in the mid-1950s. Pilkington has pursued the development of a radically new process for flat glass production, but has experienced serious problems at each stage of development. The senior... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Technological Innovation; Product Development; Research and Development; Commercialization; Technology

February 2020
Case

Drift: The First Sales Hire

By: Mark Roberge

David Cancel and Elias Torres, the co-founders of Drift, scaled their business to thousands of users and hundreds of thousands in revenue. However, they were falling short of the annual revenue target they communicated to the board of directors. Having scaled the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Growth Management; Salesforce Management; Selection and Staffing