Publications

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07 Jun 2023
HBS Case

3 Ways to Gain a Competitive Advantage Now: Lessons from Amazon, Chipotle, and Facebook

the price, Karp notes. In some cases, a company might keep its prices lower than the amount customers might be willing to part with to earn brand loyalty or hedge against market fluctuations. Similarly, a company may pay employees or... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

15 Feb 2022
Book

When Working Harder Doesn’t Work, Time to Reinvent Your Career

fluid intelligence wanes, crystallized intelligence—a different kind of thinking marked by synthesizing and sharing knowledge—grows, writes Brooks, a professor of Management Practice at HBS. He points to Johann Sebastian Bach, a musical... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

11 Aug 2010
Working Paper Summaries

The Influence of Prior Industry Affiliation on Framing in Nascent Industries: The Evolution of Digital Cameras

Keywords: by Mary J. Benner & Mary Tripsas; Electronics

July 2000 (Revised September 2005)
Case

Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (A)

Introduces a "new-economy" company, Madison Avenue, facing challenges of mega-success. In the two years since its founding, the company's revenues have grown from zero to nearly $30 million, head count has swollen from the start-up handful to more than 200, and the... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Online Advertising; Advertising Industry

Educators

2018
Article

Overcoming Barriers to Time-Saving: Reminders of Future Busyness Encourage Consumers to Buy Time

By: A. V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Michael I. Norton

Spending money on time-saving purchases improves happiness. Yet, people often fail to spend their money in this way. Because most people believe that the future will be less busy than the present, they may underweight the value of these purchases. We examine the impact... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Choice; Sharing Economy; Opportunity Cost; Time-as Money; Well-being; Time Management; Happiness; Perception; Behavior

2013
Working Paper

An Empirical Study of the Spillover Effects of Workload on Patient Length of Stay

By: Jillian Berry Jaeker and Anita Tucker

We use two years of inpatient data from 243 California hospitals to quantify the relationship between hospital-level workload and patient length of stay (LOS), and its "spillover" effects across patient types. Patients are categorized as medical or surgical, and the... View Details

Keywords: Workload; Processing Times; Healthcare; Working Conditions; Performance Productivity; Time Management; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; California

05 May 2014
Research & Ideas

Reflecting on Work Improves Job Performance

their initial weeks of training for a particular customer account. As with the previous experiments, each group was assigned to one of three conditions: control, reflection, and sharing. Each group went through the same technical... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

Research Summary

Rethinking Brand Contamination: How Consumers Maintain Distinction When Symbolic Boundaries Are Breached"

If consumers view their brands as extensions of themselves, what happens when undesirable consumers adopt these same brands? I address this question by examining an issue that is of great concern to managers of high-status brands: the rampant spread... View Details

15 Nov 2010
Lessons from the Classroom

Connecting Goals and Go-To-Market Initiatives

In some respects, developing strategy is the easy part. Executing that strategy in alignment with strategic priorities is where real mastery of management takes place. We asked Harvard Business School senior lecturer Frank V. Cespedes,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

January 1991 (Revised March 1992)
Case

USA Today

By: Robert L. Simons

USA Today is a national newspaper struggling to achieve profitability. This case focuses on the use of management control systems to identify emerging opportunities and the formulation of new strategies. The interactive system used by top managers--the Friday... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Managerial Roles; Forecasting and Prediction; Growth and Development Strategy; Risk Management; Labor and Management Relations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Risk and Uncertainty; Journalism and News Industry; United States

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May 1994 (Revised August 1994)
Case

Motorola-Elma

By: Shoshana Zuboff and Janis Lee Gogan

Motorola's old automative electronics plant in Arcade, outside Buffalo, New York, faced the prospect of closure in the mid-1980s, but leading customers persuaded Motorola to give the plant a second chance. The new plant manager, Dennis Fiehn, recognized that existing... View Details

Keywords: Factories, Labs, and Plants; Business Exit or Shutdown; Customers; Leading Change; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Structure; Competitive Strategy; Expansion; Telecommunications Industry; New York (state, US)

Educators

March 2023
Teaching Note

Ransomware Attack at Colonial Pipeline Company

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Li-Kuan Ni

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 123-069. On the morning of May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company became aware that the company had been the victim of a malicious ransomware attack that had stolen and locked up company data. The extortionists demanded 75 bitcoins (worth... View Details

2014
Chapter

The Intensive Margin of Technology Adoption

By: Diego A. Comin

We present a tractable model for analyzing the relationship between economic growth and the intensive and extensive margins of technology adoption. The "extensive" margin refers to the timing of a country's adoption of a new technology; the "intensive" margin refers to... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Microeconomics; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Analytics and Data Science; Growth and Development Strategy; Relationships; Technology Adoption

Web

MBA Experience - Global

Curriculum Our courses and cases equip students to apply what they learn to multiple contexts, in meaningful ways. Faculty bring important business issues and management problems from around the world into the classroom. Field Immersion... View Details

November 2005 (Revised December 2016)
Case

Bally Total Fitness (A): The Rise, 1962–2004

By: John R. Wells, Elizabeth A. Raabe and Gabriel Ellsworth

From a single, modest club in 1962, Bally Total Fitness had grown to become—in management’s words—the “largest and only nationwide commercial operator of fitness centers” in the United States in 2004. Bally had faced its share of challenges, but the last couple of... View Details

Keywords: Bally Total Fitness; Fitness; Gyms; Health Clubs; Chain; Securities And Exchange Commission; Paul Toback; Weight Loss; Exercise; Contracts; Personal Training; Retention; Accounting; Accounting Audits; Accrual Accounting; Finance; Advertising; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; For-Profit Firms; Customers; Customer Satisfaction; Public Equity; Financing and Loans; Revenue; Revenue Recognition; Geographic Scope; Multinational Firms and Management; Health; Nutrition; Business History; Lawsuits and Litigation; Management; Business or Company Management; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing; Operations; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Public Ownership; Problems and Challenges; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business Strategy; Competition; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Segmentation; Trends; Cost Management; Profit; Growth and Development; Leadership Style; Five Forces Framework; Private Ownership; Opportunities; Motivation and Incentives; Competitive Strategy; Health Industry; United States; Illinois; Chicago

Educators

21 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Fighting the COVID Blues: Advice from Business Research

relationships languish? Did you give up on a dream too soon? “One of the things that I feel is really important is that people not waste this moment,” Brooks says. “When something causes you to become introspective, that should be a... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman and Danielle Kost

February 2010
Article

Conflict of Interest and the Intrusion of Bias

By: Don A. Moore, Lloyd Tanlu and Max Bazerman

This paper presents evidence of performance persistence in entrepreneurship. We show that entrepreneurs with a track record of success are much more likely to succeed than first-time entrepreneurs and those who have previously failed. In particular, they exhibit... View Details

Keywords: Conflict of Interests; Prejudice and Bias; Performance; Entrepreneurship; Market Timing; Competency and Skills; Perception; Business Startups; Resource Allocation

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09 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Unilever—A Case Study

States in the twentieth century. After 1945 Unilever's once successful business in the United States began to decline, yet the parent company maintained an arms-length relationship with its U.S. affiliates, refusing to intervene in their... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation; Food & Beverage; Manufacturing; Retail

Summer 2012
Article

Epistemic Contests and the Legitimacy of the World Trade Organization: The Brazil–USA Cotton Dispute and the Incremental Balancing of Interests

By: Arthur A. Daemmrich

The World Trade Organization (WTO) features prominently in studies of international institutions, often cast either as a tool of rich-world domination over the poorer South or as a neutral mediator facilitating a tariff-free world of economic prosperity. This article... View Details

Keywords: Organizations; Trade; Conflict and Resolution; Consumer Products Industry; Brazil; United States