Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(6,910)
- Faculty Publications (1,162)
- November 2018
- Case
Swissgrid: Enterprise Risk Management in a Digital Age
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes
Kurt Meyer, chief risk officer of Swissgrid, the Swiss national electricity transmission system operator, reflects on the risk management system he installed after the deregulation and liberalization of the European energy market. With 41 connections to other European... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
Recipe for Success: Growth and Evolution at Cafe Cupcake
By: Anthony Mayo and Heather Beckham
Café Cupcake (CC) is a fast-casual restaurant chain that offers artisan cupcakes and light fare throughout the southeastern United States and Texas. This case chronicles the growth and evolution of Café Cupcake. It also considers the specific human resource challenges... View Details
- October 2018 (Revised March 2019)
- Background Note
Note on Managing Workforce Reductions
By: Ethan Bernstein and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Each individual who enters an organization will, at some point, leave. And yet most future leaders spend significantly more effort learning about recruiting than departures, despite the sensitivity and challenges associated with the latter. This note is intended to... View Details
- October 2018
- Case
African Bank Investments Limited (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- October 2018
- Supplement
African Bank Investments Limited (B)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
Less than a year after joining the board of African Bank Investments Limited (ABIL), the newest director finds himself in difficult discussions with other directors about removing the struggling company’s CEO. The case is set in South Africa in mid-2014 as shares in... View Details
- September–October 2018
- Article
Online MAP Enforcement: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment
By: Ayelet Israeli
This paper investigates a manufacturer’s ability to influence compliance rates among its authorized online retailers by exploiting changes in the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy and in dealer agreements. MAP is a pricing policy widely used by manufacturers to... View Details
- September 21, 2018
- Article
Innovation Should Be a Top Priority for Boards. So Why Isn't It?
By: J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Boris Groysberg
Corporate directors and executives alike recognize that today’s pace of change continues to accelerate and that firms need to innovate to stay ahead. But are boards doing enough to support innovation, as they should? We conducted a survey of over 5,000 board members... View Details
- September 2018
- Case
Hunley, Inc.: Casting for Growth
By: John A. Quelch and James T. Kindley
Hunley, Inc. manufactures rods for the niche sport of fly fishing. It specializes in freshwater rods that are perceived as "middle-market" products, targeted at "avid" fly fishers. In the face of declining revenue and a decreasing price per unit sold, the company's... View Details
- September 2018
- Case
Kevin Ryan Inc.
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Greg Marsh
The case focuses on the hiring process for a CEO. Kevin Ryan had a solid trajectory as a serial entrepreneur of well-known ventures like Gilt Group, DoubleClick, Business Insider, among others. Ryan tended to involve himself in all aspects of his ventures: ideation,... View Details
- Article
Navigating Talent Hot Spots
By: William R. Kerr
Innovation clusters like San Francisco and Boston have long had an outsize impact on the global economy, and their influence keeps growing. In 2017, for instance, America’s ten largest tech hubs accounted for 58% of U.S. patents. Globally, cities such as Tokyo, Paris,... View Details
- August 2018
- Case
Four Products: Predicting Diffusion (2018)
By: John Gourville
One job of product managers, marketers, strategic planners, and other corporate executives is to predict what the demand will be for a new product. This task is easier for certain classes of new products than for others. For new consumer package goods, for instance,... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Oaktree: Pierre Foods Investment
By: Victoria Ivashina and Mike Harmon
This case is a setting to discuss “loan to own” investment strategy that is often pursued by distressed investors. The aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis left many companies with poor liquidity and limited ability to obtain credit. One of these companies was Pierre... View Details
- August 2018
- Case
Christine Lagarde (B): Being a Public Servant
By: Julie Battilana and Carin-Isabel Knoop
This case covers the career of Christine Lagarde from 2005 to 2011 after she joins the French Government. After serving several grueling years as Finance Minister during the financial crisis that started in 2007/2008, she is being considered as the next Managing... View Details
- August 2018
- Teaching Note
IguanaFix
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Thomas Eisenmann
Teaching Note for HBS No. 817-056. IguanaFix, based in Argentina, is a platform business that connects consumers with home improvement contractors. The founders are evaluating growth options and an investment offer. The case focuses on scaling issues for a venture... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised August 2019)
- Technical Note
A Note on Compensation
By: Ethan Bernstein and Michael Norris
This note provides an overview of the important terms, concepts, and frameworks that a manager should know about compensation—whether it be their own or that of an employee. Because compensation in practice is fraught with pitfalls, this note presents an overview of... View Details
- August 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
C3.ai—Driven to Succeed
By: Robert Simons and George Gonzalez
CEO Tom Siebel navigates his artificial intelligence (ai) startup through a series of pivots, market expansions, and even an elephant attack to become a leading platform ad service provider. The case describes his unusual management approach emphasizing employee... View Details
Keywords: Strategy Execution; Performance Measurement; Critical Performance Variables; Strategic Boundaries; Internet Of Things; Artificial Intelligence; Software Development; Big Data; Machine Learning; Business Startups; Management Style; Business Strategy; Performance; Measurement and Metrics; Organizational Culture; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation; Applications and Software; Digital Marketing; Analytics and Data Science; Technology Industry; United States; California
- August 2018
- Case
BlackBuck (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai
The case presents the challenges of scaling an asset-heavy company (that relies on its operations). It highlights how decisions on the early team impact a company’s ability to scale, linkage between growth and cash flows, as well the organizational impact of high... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Detecting Anomalies: The Relevance and Power of Standard Asset Pricing Tests
By: Malcolm Baker, Patrick Luo and Ryan Taliaferro
The two standard approaches for identifying capital market anomalies are cross-sectional coefficient tests, in the spirit of Fama and MacBeth (1973), and time-series intercept tests, in the spirit of Jensen (1968). A new signal can pass the first test, which we label a... View Details
- July 2018
- Case
LIXIL Group Corporation: Building a New Company in an Old Industry
By: Boris Groysberg and Akiko Kanno
In the spring of 2018, Kinya Seto, president and CEO of LIXIL Group Corporation, a major housing and building products and services company, called a meeting at the company’s head office in central Tokyo to discuss how to implement the new three-year strategic plan.... View Details
- July 2018 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
SOFWERX: Innovation at U.S. Special Operations Command
By: Herman Leonard, Mitchell Weiss, Jin Hyun Paik and Kerry Herman
James “Hondo” Geurts, the Acquisition Executive for U.S. Special Operations Command, was in the middle of his Senate confirmation hearing in 2017 to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition. The questions had a common theme: how... View Details
Keywords: James Geurts; Innovation; Public Entrepreneurship; Open Innovation; Crowdsourcing; Contests; Prototyping; SOFWERX; Special Operations; SOCOM; Govtech; Procurement; FAR; EZ-Fly; Navy; Department Of Defense; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Entrepreneurship; Public Sector; Acquisition; Public Administration Industry; United States