Publications

SSRN

May 2011
Article

The Wise Leader

By: Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi

In an era of increasing discontinuity, wise leadership has nearly vanished. Many leaders find it difficult to reinvent their corporations rapidly enough to cope with new technologies, demographic shifts, and consumption trends. They can't develop truly global... View Details

Keywords: Communication Intention and Meaning; Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Values and Beliefs; Knowledge Sharing; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leadership; Leadership Development; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Personal Characteristics; Power and Influence

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July 2020
Article

Tell It Like It Is: When Politically Incorrect Language Promotes Authenticity

By: J. Schroeder, M. Rosenblum and F. Gino

When a person’s language appears political—such as being politically correct or incorrect—it can influence fundamental impressions of him or her. Political correctness is “using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others’ feelings, especially those others who... View Details

Keywords: Language; Interpersonal Communication; Perception

October 2007 (Revised June 2008)
Case

Leader(ship) Development

By: Scott A. Snook

Designed for use in the first year of an MBA program, can be included within a core course on leadership or used more broadly to orient students to their upcoming experience while in school. Offers a series of robust conceptual models to help students frame their... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Development; Framework; Business Education; Education Industry

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15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

Harvard Business School, where he teaches the (MBA) Foundations business history course, Creating Modern Capitalism. He also serves as co-editor of the Business History Review. Al Chandler is appropriately regarded as the founder of the View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

Research Summary

Consumer Response to Online Ratings and Recommendations

Jolie is currently conducting several laboratory and field experiments to assess the tendency of individuals to employ predictable heuristics in complex information aggregation tasks, thus leading to search and choice behavior that is suboptimal relative to the fully... View Details

March–April 2013
Article

Unlocking Innovation Through Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke

There is a downside to businesses that focus heavily on standardization, optimization, and driving out variability: Such organizations leave themselves vulnerable to underinvesting in experimentation and variation, which are the lifeblood of innovation. Good... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Innovation Management; Learning And Development; Research; Innovation and Management; Business Processes

2013
Working Paper

Management: Theory and Practice, and Cases

By: Richard L. Nolan

This working paper reports on a major Harvard Business School project designed to enhance MBA and practicing executives in case learning. The work is built on the foundation of HBS field cases employing the monomyth "hero's journey" classic story structure along... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; CIO; CEO; Hero's Journey; Monomyth; Management; Practice; Cases; Theory; Innovation and Invention

SSRN

2017
Working Paper

The Effectiveness of White-Collar Crime Enforcement: Evidence from the War on Terror

By: Trung Nguyen

This paper studies the deterrent effect of criminal enforcement on white-collar criminal activities. Using the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a shock to the FBI’s allocation of investigative resources and priorities, and variations in the Muslim population in the United... View Details

Keywords: Regulation; Fraud; White-collar Crime; Enforcement; Crime and Corruption; Law Enforcement; System Shocks

SSRN

December 2014
Article

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi

The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details

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September 12, 2017
Article

What's the Right Kind of Bonus to Motivate Your Sales Force?

By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas

Companies typically compensate their sales force by using some combination of salary, commission, and bonuses, but executives are often unsure which incentives provide the best motivation. Should bonuses be tied to quotas or should they be given unconditionally? Is it... View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Salesforce Management

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12 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

What Great American Leaders Teach Us

Are there certain characteristics that all leaders possess? Could Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton be equally successful today running another company? Harvard Business School's Leadership Initiative is attempting to answer these and other questions about the View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

June 2021 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Nissan's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By: Ananth Raman, William Schmidt and Ann Winslow

In January 2020, Ashwani Gupta took over as COO at Nissan Motor Corporation, and several weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic began. Nissan’s Business Continuity Plan (BCP) had been key to the resilience of Nissan’s supply chain. It had enabled Nissan to recover from... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Supply Chain Management; Health Pandemics; Auto Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Japan; India

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August 2020
Article

Workplace Knowledge Flows

By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton

We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Interpersonal Communication; Employees; Performance Productivity; Sales; Motivation and Incentives

Article

Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-control

By: D. A. Tian, J. Schroeder, G. Haubl, J. Risen, M. I. Norton and F. Gino

Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Perception; Personal Characteristics; Health

31 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

The Most Powerful Workplace Motivator

workplace motivator is our natural tendency to measure our own performance against the performance of others. "Traditionally, [the field of] economics has held a very rational view of people, and there's a... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

Research Summary

Competitive Arousal

By: Deepak Malhotra

A fourth stream of research examines a phenomenon that my co-authors and I have termed Competitive Arousal. We find that some features of competitive contexts (e.g., time pressure, perceptions of rivalry, and the presence of an audience) can heighten... View Details

2025
Working Paper

How Does Wage Inequality Affect the Labor Movement

By: Barbara Biasi, Zoë B. Cullen, Julia H. Gilman and Nina Roussille

This paper provides causal evidence on how wage inequality among workers affects the labor movement using three complementary research designs: a vignette experiment with union organizers, a natural policy experiment that increased wage inequality among Wisconsin... View Details

Keywords: Wages; Equality and Inequality; Labor and Management Relations; Labor Unions; Negotiation