Publications

March–April 2017
Article

Hiring an Entrepreneurial Leader: What to Look For

By: Timothy Butler

Aspiring to be innovative and agile, companies of all shapes and sizes want to recruit entrepreneurial managers. But most firms lack a scientific way to separate the true entrepreneurs from other candidates. To address that problem, Butler compared the psychological... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Leadership Style; Attitudes

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October 1996 (Revised January 1997)
Case

AT&T Resource Link: Revisioning the Managerial Workforce

Resource Link is an in-house temporary firm, supplying managers and technical workers to the 26 business units of AT&T on a contract basis. The challenge facing Resource Link is how to grow, since an increasing number of managers are eager to use variable workers to... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Organizational Design; Personal Development and Career; Employment Industry; Telecommunications Industry

July 2010
Case

Fidelity Retires in Canada

By: Robert C. Pozen and Edward Warren Scott

The head of Fidelity Canada was faced with a decision about what to do with its retirement business there. Although Fidelity as a fund manager has made some headway in Canada, the competition has been very tough for the administration of retirement plans—a separate... View Details

Keywords: Business Exit or Shutdown; Investment Funds; Globalized Firms and Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Retirement; Competition; Financial Services Industry; Canada; United States

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28 Aug 2014
News

How the Internet Saved Handmade Goods

August 2002
Case

Trilogy University

By: Thomas J. DeLong and Michael Paley

In early 2001, Trilogy Software faced a slowdown in its business, a large number of unsuccessful customer deployments, and an overall weakening in the enterprise software market. In response, the company revamped its business model and restructured the organization.... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizational Design; Alignment; Restructuring; Organizational Structure; Change Management; Business Strategy; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Information Technology Industry

24 Oct 2023
HBS Case

From P.T. Barnum to Mary Kay: Lessons From 5 Leaders Who Changed the World

are operating in competitive markets where someone is trying to leapfrog us or steal our customers,” Simons says. “The more there’s risk of disruption in your industry, the more there’s a danger that someone who is an outlier in terms of... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

10 Feb 2003
Research & Ideas

Commodity Busters: Be a Price Maker, Not a Price Taker

Insurance built a wonderful business by selecting relatively low-risk customers from among generally high-risk motorcyclists. Step 4: Keep it simple. Don't shoot yourself in the foot by mismanaging your own product View Details

Keywords: by Benson P. Shapiro

12 Jul 2012
News

Finding a Cure for "CEO-itis"

September 2005 (Revised November 2006)
Case

AmorePacific: From Local to Global Beauty

By: Pankaj Ghemawat, Carin-Isabel Knoop and David Kiron

Suh Kyung-Bae, the President and CEO of AmorePacific, a South Korean cosmetics company, was an ardent globalizer. In its home market, AmorePacific had held off major multinational players such as L'Oreal and Estee Lauder and had engaged them in markets around the... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Local Range; Global Range; Global Strategy; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; South Korea

17 Aug 2020
Research & Ideas

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

related discipline of survival psychology shine a light on the present moment and contains wisdom for how leaders can manage the unrolling crisis. “As CEOs in this crisis, we have no option but to become the wartime CEO, however... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

26 Apr 2017
Working Paper Summaries

Assessing the Quality of Quality Assessment: The Role of Scheduling

Keywords: by Maria Ibanez and Michael W. Toffel; Service; Food & Beverage

16 Feb 2018
News

Spotted at LearnLaunch 2018: Speakers Address Career Pathways, Alternative Credentials, and Skills Vs. Degrees

February 2007 (Revised June 2009)
Case

Edelnor (A)

By: Jordan I. Siegel

Fernando del Sol, president of F. S. Inversiones in Chile, had just bought himself a headache as a New Year's present. On December 31, 2001, he purchased a Chilean electricity generation and transmission company called Edelnor that was in danger of becoming insolvent... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Investment; Courts and Trials; Business Strategy; Energy Industry; Chile

June 2019
Case

Athena Bancorp

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Abbott

Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Human Resources; Strategy; Service Delivery; Banking Industry

26 Jan 2024
Blog Post

HBS Alumna Fighting Cancer with a Novel Cell Therapy

Ananya Zutshi (MS/MBA 2021) wanted a career in pharmacology biotech, but wasn’t sure if she wanted to be on the management side or scientific side. She studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate at... View Details

Career Coach

Roshan Tathed

Roshan wants to help students think critically about their career paths and what really matters most to them. Having worked extensively across Healthcare, Telecom, Media, Technology, Fintech and Edutech across big tech, startups, and top View Details

Driving Digital Strategy

Disruption and transformation get a lot of hype, and for good reason. Digital technologies have disrupted entire industries and incumbents have often struggled in this new world. Typical approaches used by legacy players such as using technology to improve... View Details

2008
Book

On Competition

By: M. E. Porter

Competition is one of society's most powerful forces for making things better in many ﬁelds of human endeavor. The study of competition and the creation of value, in their full richness, have preoccupied me for several decades. Competition is pervasive, whether it... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Practice; Competitive Strategy; Theory; Value Creation

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March 2019
Case

Mahindra Finance

By: V.G. Narayanan and Tanvi Deshpande

Mahindra Finance is a non-banking lender operating mainly in the rural and semi-urban areas of India. Set up in 1991, the company had grown to become a market leader with assets of $8.5 billion and a presence in 3,30,000 villages across India. Since most of Mahindra's... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Business Model; Volatility; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decisions; Credit; Financing and Loans; Service Delivery; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Services Industry; India