Publications

August 1998
Case

Record Masters

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Laurence E. Katz

Kent Dauten, a former general partner at the Chicago private equity firm of Madison Dearborn Partners, has engaged in a search to personally sponsor a buyout in which he can play an active management role. He has received a selling memorandum for Record Masters, a... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Leveraged Buyouts; Valuation; Negotiation Deal; Investment

01 May 2013
News

How to Negotiate with VCs

08 Jun 2013
News

Schumpeter: Too much of a good thing

January 2010 (Revised November 2012)
Case

Savage Beast (A1)

By: Noam Wasserman and LP Maurice

For several months, things had been spiraling downwards at Savage Beast, the music-recommendation company started three years before by Tim Westergren. The company's founder-CEO recently left due to pressures both at home and within the venture. Dozens of investors... View Details

Keywords: Business Exit or Shutdown; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Financing and Loans; Lawsuits and Litigation; Management Teams; Partners and Partnerships

November 1994
Case

Spectrum Equity Investors, L.P.

Brion Applegate and Bill Collatos had already started a fund-raising campaign for their new venture-capital fund when the principals of a prestigious Wall Street investment bank asked them to become the two senior partners of an in-house $150 million fund. The case... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Personal Development and Career; Entrepreneurship

30 Nov 2015
News

Five Ways to Give Better Gifts (Backed by Science)

2022
Book

Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know

By: J.S. Nelson and Lynn A. Stout

An authoritative and practical guide to business ethics, written in an accessible question-and-answer format. In today's turbulent business climate, business ethics are more important than ever. Surveys of employees show that misconduct is on the rise. Cover stories... View Details

Keywords: Business Ethics; Organizational Behavior; Ethics; Governance Controls; Lawfulness

Find at Harvard

Web

HBS Working Knowledge – Harvard Business School Faculty Research

a Big Management Decision? Start by Asking What Really Matters by Dina Gerdeman 15 APR 2024 | Book Leaders must face hard choices, from cutting a budget to adopting a strategy to grow. To make the right... View Details

Research Summary

Evaluating Transactions

I also study how people judge potential transactions. We often think of purchase decisions as straightforward: a consumer buys a product if he expects the benefits to outweigh the price, sometimes after shopping around for the best deal. In practice,... View Details

February 2012 (Revised June 2012)
Case

Rospil.info

By: Paul Healy, Karthik Ramanna and Matthew Shaffer

What should business leaders do about corruption? In December 2011, four HBS alumni met to debate how to engage the unprecedented protests against Vladimir Putin's corrupt government, which had erupted in Russia in response to alleged fraud in the recent parliamentary... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Crime and Corruption; Government and Politics; Social and Collaborative Networks; Blogs; Information Industry; Russia

11 Mar 2022
News

HBS Professor Linda Hill Says Leaders Must Engage with Emotions as Never Before

June 2021
Supplement

Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (D)

By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green

Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a... View Details

Keywords: Reverse E-auctions; Bids and Bidding; Auctions; Complexity; Cost vs Benefits

June 2021
Supplement

Reversing Course on a Reverse E-Auction (B)

By: Kym Lew Nelson, James K. Sebenius and Alex Green

Global consumer products powerhouse LSP has found enormous savings in a trial run of a new competitive bidding tool for their procurement organization known as a reverse e-auction. But when Jen Baldwin is asked to achieve the same savings from her suppliers for a... View Details

Keywords: Reverse E-auctions; Bids and Bidding; Auctions; Complexity; Cost vs Benefits

28 May 2021
Blog Post

Taking Measure on Memorial Day

On Memorial Day 2010, LTC Jamie Leonard, the most senior female U.S. military officer to be killed in combat, penned a compelling piece for her local paper titled “A soldier’s view on Memorial Day.” Specifically, Jamie wrote, “Take... View Details

April 2019 (Revised February 2025)
Case

Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc.: Extending a History of Life-Changing Innovations (A)

By: Ryan Raffaelli, David G. Fubini and Aldo Sesia

This case examines the leadership challenges associated with maintaining a culture of innovation in established organizations. It asks students to step into the shoes of a leader faced with making several tough decisions about when to invest (or to stop investing) in... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Organizational Culture; Innovation Leadership; History; Technological Innovation; Investment; Decision Making

March 2016 (Revised February 2023)
Teaching Note

Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades

By: Michael Luca, Weijia Dai and Hyunjin Kim

Advertising Experiments at RestaurantGrades is an exercise in which students are asked to analyze and make a recommendation on the basis of simulated experimental data. The setting is a hypothetical restaurant review company called RestaurantGrades (RG), which shows... View Details

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Marketing; Digital Marketing; Analysis; Performance Effectiveness

December 2016 (Revised December 2017)
Case

Faber-Castell

By: Ryan Raffaelli and Christine Snively

By 2016, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell had led the 255-year-old pencil manufacturer Faber-Castell through waves of technological change. The pocket calculator decimated Faber-Castell’s slide rule business in the 1970s, and computer aided design technology... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Style; Leading Change; Family Ownership; Manufacturing Industry; Germany

July 1990 (Revised August 1990)
Case

Kaiser Steel Corporation, 1950

By: Timothy A. Luehrman and William Schiano

Examines Kaiser Steel's initial equity offering in 1950. The first case in a sequence that will trace the history of corporate restructurings that occurred 30 to 40 years later, in the 1980s. Subsequent cases examine foreign competition and labor unrest, hostile... View Details

Keywords: Business History; Competition; Initial Public Offering; Capital Structure; Restructuring; Capital Markets; Ownership; Steel Industry; United States

October 2014
Supplement

Quiet Logistics (B)

By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred

This two-part case focuses on how to identify and manage strategic uncertainties in an innovative, entrepreneurial start-up company. In the (A) case, students learn about Quiet Logistics, an e-commerce fulfillment company working with high-end apparel retailers such as... View Details