Agents - Publications - Faculty & Research

01 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

First Minutes are Critical in New-Employee Orientation

that provides telephone and chat support for its global customers. Traditionally, Wipro's orientation for call center employees consisted of an informational session about the company, followed by several weeks of training in which new call View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Web Services; Service; Telecommunications

19 Apr 2010
Research & Ideas

The History of Beauty

worldwide, there is now also a concern that the forms in which such claims were delivered, whether in jars or creams, should be relevant to local consumers in each market. Moreover, as global firms experiment with taking new beauty ideals around the world, they are... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Beauty & Cosmetics

2008
Chapter

Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model

By: Rakesh Khurana and Herbert Gintis

Since the mid-1970s neoclassical economic theory has dominated business school thinking and teaching in dealing with the nature of human motivation. However valuable in understanding competitive product and financial markets, neoclassical economic theory employs an... View Details

Keywords: Business Education; Ethics; Managerial Roles; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Culture; Business and Shareholder Relations; Mathematical Methods; Behavior

Citation

29 Mar 2022
Book

5 Qualities That Help Companies Thrive for Decades—Even Centuries

This function of keeping and nurturing values can be more difficult in public companies, where turnover of top leaders is relatively frequent. “Philosophically-wise, families are the key agent for passing on these value sets from one... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Output and asset price fluctuations

What are the sources of business cycles? How are these shocks propagated in the economy? Why are their effects so persistent? How can we explain asset price fluctuations? How are shocks transmitted internationally?To study these questions, I have developed a series... View Details

25 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

HBS Cases: Beauty Entrepreneur Madam Walker

by nearly 1,000 female sales agents across the country. How did Walker journey from the cotton fields to the status of an enterprising businesswoman, perhaps even the first self-made African American millionaire in the United States? Her... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Beauty & Cosmetics

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

who knows, and has credibility within, the norms of the relevant customer's culture) Selling (e.g., an insurance agent or a retail associate with experience in another sales context) The relevance of each type of experience varies with... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

22 Feb 2018
Book

The New History of American Capitalism

movements. Approaches vary greatly, but many scholars attend closely to the subjects who receive, impose, resist, or recast race as a category. Their work erodes the image of exchange between equally situated agents and locates it in a... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing

13 Feb 2006
Research & Ideas

When Gender Changes the Negotiation

trigger that may favor women over men is playing the role of agent (advocating for others) as opposed to playing the role of principal (advocating for themselves). Our research suggests that, as evident in the story of Maureen Park, women... View Details

Keywords: by Dina W. Pradel, Hannah Riley Bowles & Kathleen L. McGinn

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Budgeting Kills Your Company

bested its Scandinavian rivals on return on equity, total shareholder return, cost-to-income ratio, and customer satisfaction. The Budget As An Agent Of Strategic Alignment Other experts are not as eager for a complete overhaul. Harvard's... View Details

Keywords: by Loren Gary

26 Sep 2011
HBS Case

HBS Cases: Lady Gaga

A&M Vice Chairman Steve Berman, Live Nation's global touring CEO Arthur Fogel, William Morris Endeavor agent Marc Geiger, and producer Vincent Herbert. Go Big or Go Home? In the autumn of 2009, Lady Gaga was set to go on the road with... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Entertainment & Recreation; Music

15 Jul 2019
Book

Many Executives Are Afraid of Finance. Here's How They Can Gain Confidence

by asymmetric information—in other words, managers have a lot of information, and investors don’t know if they can trust them. We’re all engaged in a large information game where agents don’t always do what their principals want them to.... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

09 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organizations

all. Everyone would act as a free agent in a winner-take-all contest. Opportunism and selfish political behavior would be rampant. A great deal of frantic effort would be expended—but little of it would be the kind of coordinated effort... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Lawrence & Nitin Nohria

08 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: A Sense of Urgency

The enterprise continued to make money even as it turned slowly to lose market share in a post-monopoly world. The positive net income helped greatly in supporting complacency. In frustration, his change agents waited and waited for a... View Details

Keywords: by John P. Kotter

28 May 2019
Research & Ideas

Investor Lawsuits Against Auditors Are Falling, and That's Bad News for Capital Markets

class (group of investors) to bring a suit has been weakened. This matters because the way US investors hold corporations and agents of corporations accountable is through class-action lawsuits. Investors that sue most often as lead... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services; Accounting

20 Aug 2008
Op-Ed

The Time is Right for Creative Capitalism

examples of where global capitalism is going. (RED) integrates the power of big business, new customer priorities, and the interconnected agents of social change, in the form of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.... View Details

Keywords: by Nancy Koehn

28 Jan 2020
Book

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

person can do it all. What do your discussions with leaders teach us about putting together a coalition? Kanter: I urge leaders to live by the Change Agent Rule of Three. In every situation, leaders must deal with three groups of... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

13 Jun 2011
HBS Case

Mobile Banking for the Unbanked

fundamental theorem of marketing: understand what your customers really want," Rangan says. To create a distribution channel, M-PESA franchised thousands of mom-and-pop convenience stores to act as M-PESA agents at their existing... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking; Communications; Telecommunications

29 Jul 2013
Research & Ideas

A Manager’s Moral Obligation to Preserve Capitalism

entitled, but also obligated to do that. Not so fast, say Henderson and Ramanna. They argue managers have another interest, not just to serve as agents for their shareholders, but also to serve as agents for... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

some of the most urgent problems facing modern societies, we find American business schools propagating the doctrine of shareholder primacy and the paradigm of the manager as the mere agent of the company's "owners". Taken in... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

Publications