Levers Of Control - Publications - Faculty & Research

09 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Starbucks’ Lessons for Premium Brands

morale. None of this need have happened if Starbucks had stayed private and grown at a more controlled pace. To continue to be a premium-priced brand while trading as a public company is very challenging.... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Retail

02 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

Food Stamp Entrepreneurs: How Public Assistance Enables Business Bootstrapping

Participation. He compared data for households that fell just above the SCHIP income eligibility threshold with those that fell just below it, before and after the program took effect. This mimicked the effect of experimental treatment... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

02 Dec 2019
What Do You Think?

How Does a Company like Boeing Respond to Intense Competitive Pressure?

schedules, and even safety, something has to be done. When combined with a loss of “voice” at lower levels in the organization, it can be lethal. In the view of some observers, that’s what happened recently... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Air Transportation

15 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

The Founding CEO’s Dilemma: Stay or Go?

Noam Wasserman is an assistant professor and MBA Class of 1961 Fellow in the entrepreneurial management unit at Harvard Business School. His paper "Founder-CEO Succession and the Paradox of... View Details

22 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

When Protestors Knock at Your Door

making them a more influential lever in many cases than states." Also intriguing is the "passion and tenacity with which NGO members and activists pursue their interests. They dedicate (and, in certain cases, risk) their lives... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia Churchwell

31 Oct 2014
Op-Ed

Ebola’s Call To Arms About Disaster Preparedness

First of all, many more Americans will die of heart attacks than will ever die of Ebola. This is not like smallpox, whose spread can only be View Details

Keywords: by Gautam Mukunda; Health

19 Jul 2007
Research & Ideas

Podcast: Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal

three dozen voting members of the Bancroft family, who control 64 percent of the voting shares. The family is expected to vote July 23. Meanwhile, the Journal reported on July... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Aisner; Journalism & News; Publishing

February 2012
Article

Management Practices across Firms and Countries

By: Nicholas Bloom, Christos Genakos, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

For the last decade we have been using double-blind survey techniques and randomized sampling to construct management data on over 10,000 organizations across 20 countries. On average, we find that in manufacturing American, Japanese, and German firms are the best... View Details

Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Competency and Skills; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Organizations; Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Sectors; Performance; Business and Shareholder Relations; Private Equity; Multinational Firms and Management; United States; Germany; Japan; China; India

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01 Jul 2019
What Do You Think?

Are Super Stretch Goals Only for the Very Young?

further growth, and essentially the loss of control of the company by the board, which was even required to remake its composition. At Volkswagen, eerily similar things... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

04 Oct 2004
Research & Ideas

Start to Measure Your E-commerce Success

a summary measure of revenue generation and cost control. They should be controllable in that employees in the organization can actually influence improvement in the factor measured. Some View Details

Keywords: by Marc J. Epstein

13 Mar 2014
Research & Ideas

Can We Get To Where We Need To Go?

upgrade the nation's air traffic control system. Kanter acknowledged that the projects needed to address the country's infrastructure issues are not small, but noted that the US has a long history of taking... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Transportation; Air Transportation; Auto

13 May 2019
Research & Ideas

The Unexpected Way Whistleblowers Reduce Government Fraud

Whistleblower complaints against federal contractors can help government agencies drive better deals with those companies—even when the allegations turn out to be unsubstantiated, according to new research. Under the burden of a... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Service; Construction

05 Jun 2007
First Look

First Look: June 5, 2007

to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

21 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

7 Successful Battle Strategies to Beat COVID-19

business applications, aimed at empowering teams to better respond to changing customer and competitive threats, are already au fait with this idea of using military strategy to guide project decision-making. Many Agile-immersion... View Details

Keywords: by Euvin Naidoo

07 Apr 2011
What Do You Think?

When Should the Public Sector Take Over in a Meltdown?

a situation in which events appear to be out of the control of a responsible private organization. Differences of opinion arise over whether an... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Energy; Utilities

21 Mar 2016
HBS Case

Can Customer Reviews Be 'Managed?'

reviews, online reviews, TripAdvisor being the biggest. The second one is location of the hotel and the third is price. So companies control price. They don’t control location.... View Details

Keywords: by Brian Kenny; Advertising; Travel

15 Feb 2017
Op-Ed

What Africa Can Teach the United States About Funding Infrastructure Projects

entrepreneurs (like Waze or Uber) from open data sources—rather than being controlled by a central utility. Pricing can vary by demand or by user’s ability to pay. This provides an astonishing ability to improve how the existing... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction

22 Apr 2002
Lessons from the Classroom

Entrepreneurship: It Can Be Taught

people who start companies have to do. Many of our students are confronted for the first time with some very realistic problems. We then move on to managing relationships. Since an entrepreneur really doesn't own everything but tries to... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

08 Mar 2012
Research & Ideas

Unplugged: What Happened to the Smart Grid?

who would keep control of those assets in the future, according to the case. So the same transmission lines, power transformers, and circuit breakers that were installed in the 1960s and '70s are still in... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Energy; Utilities

06 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Expensing Options Doesn’t Solve the Problem

WorldCom or Adelphia. The failures at those companies were more likely caused by a combination of fraud committed by individuals, inadequate control and governance systems that tolerated clear conflicts... View Details

Keywords: by William Sahlman

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