Publications

November 2005
Case

Playgrounds and Performance: Results Management at KaBOOM! (A)

By: Herman B. Leonard, Marc J. Epstein and Laura Winig

KaBOOM!, a successful playground-building social enterprise funded through corporate partnerships, wants to develop a performance measurement system that will enable the organization to expand its impact substantially. The board of directors and management are trying... View Details

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Enterprise; Performance Evaluation; Management Systems; Design; Construction Industry

August 2018 (Revised April 2021)
Case

The Fuji-Xerox Merger

By: Guhan Subramanian and Annie Zhao

In January 2018, Xerox, a well-known American digital document firm, convened its board of directors to decide whether to approve a merger with Japanese imaging company Fujifilm. Activist Xerox shareholders were suing to halt the transaction, and documents unearthed... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Negotiation Deal; Negotiation Process; Corporate Governance; Law

February 2019 (Revised September 2019)
Case

Theranos: The Unicorn That Wasn't

By: Joseph B. Fuller and John Masko

In 2003, 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes founded a startup dedicated to making blood testing easier and more affordable. By 2015, her company, Theranos, was worth $9 billion. It boasted a star-studded board and contracts with national pharmacy and supermarket chains... View Details

Keywords: Theranos; Blood; Lab Testing; Fraud; Holmes; Balwani; Shultz; Carreyrou; Securities And Exchange Commission; Food And Drug Administration; FDA; SEC; Health Testing and Trials; Corporate Accountability; Organizational Culture; Misleading and Fraudulent Advertising; Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

Research Summary

Business Leaders and the Social Sector

By: James E. Austin

This research involed a multifaceted, multi-year study of corporate and business leader involvement in the social sector. This examined: the extent and nature of, and motivation for, Harvard Business School graduates' involvement with nonprofit and social-sector ... View Details

April 2005 (Revised May 2005)
Case

Executive Compensation at General Electric (A)

By: V.G. Narayanan and Michele Jurgens

Faced with falling share prices and the critical eye of the media focused on Jack Welch's retirement plan, newly appointed CEO Jeff Immelt had the challenge of reassessing GE as a leader of corporate integrity and good governance. Presents the changes Immelt initiated... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Governing and Advisory Boards; Media; Governance; Corporate Accountability

February 2001
Case

PlanetFeedback: The Voice of One ... The Power of Many (A)

By: James L. Heskett

The management of PlanetFeedback in proposes a merger with Intelliseek. Their goal is to create a comprehensive C2B and B2B business focused on the generation and analysis for business clients of consumer feedback data via the Internet, Planet Feedback's board of... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Decisions; Information Management; Analytics and Data Science; Business Strategy; Internet and the Web; Information Technology Industry

09 Sep 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Perspectives from the Boardroom--2009

Keywords: by Jay W. Lorsch, Joseph L. Bower, Clayton S. Rose & Suraj Srinivasan

21 Sep 2009
Research & Ideas

Excessive Executive Pay: What’s the Solution?

was no less emphatic. "This is an unprecedented preemption of state corporate law that will turn boards of more than 15,000 publicly traded companies into political bodies and threaten their ability to... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson

March 2011 (Revised December 2019)
Case

Wealth Management Crisis at UBS (A)

By: Paul M. Healy

The case describes the challenges that UBS faced as a result of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation for tax fraud, that claimed that UBS had helped some 52,000 U.S. residents hide billions of dollars in untaxed assets in secret Swiss accounts between... View Details

October 2001 (Revised November 2005)
Case

eBay, Inc.: Stock Option Plans (A)

The footnote disclosure for eBay, Inc. in 2000 indicates that if the company had accounted for employee stock options under the fair value method, its reported profit of $48 million would have been a loss of $91 million. The protagonist is a prospective member of the... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Stock Options; Financial Reporting

April 2025 (Revised June 2025)
Case

Governing Sustainability in a Shifting Context (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz

In early 2025, boards of directors had to rethink corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts amid rapidly-shifting social, legal, regulatory, and economic forces. While just a few years earlier, calls to address racial justice and climate change reached into... View Details

November 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Votorantim: Uniting Family and Business Across Generations

By: Christina R. Wing, Carla Larangeira and Pedro Levindo

Over a 105-year span, the Ermírio de Moraes family built Votorantim, one of Latin America’s largest industrial conglomerates, and among Brazil’s topmost businesses, also credited for helping “build” the country over decades. By early 2023, Votorantim included... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Family Ownership; Business and Shareholder Relations; Family and Family Relationships; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Chemical Industry; Mining Industry; Financial Services Industry; Latin America

Research Summary

The Talent at the Table: Business Expertise and Share Ownership in Fortune 500 Boardrooms

This paper examines the relationship between corporate value and "vestige" directors, defined as directors who own sizeable shareholdings but lack salient business experience relative to their peers on Fortune 500 boards. These people come to serve on... View Details

September 2006 (Revised February 2007)
Case

Timing of Option Grants at UnitedHealth Group (A)

Faced with press allegations that executives' stock options might have been backdated, the Board of UnitedHealth Group needs to determine whether its accounting for the options was proper, and if not, what the restatement amount should be and what... View Details

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards; Ethics; Stock Options; Accounting; Crisis Management; Corporate Governance; Insurance Industry; Health Industry; United States