Publications

The president of Wilkerson, faced with declining profits, is struggling to understand why the company is encountering severe price competition on one product line while able to raise prices without competitive response on another product line. The controller proposes... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Competition; Profit; Product; Consumer Products Industry

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Advisory Board - Entrepreneurship

mentor to a Robert A. Toigo Fellow, a member of the Brigham and Women's Hospital Leadership Forum, and a member of the Steering Committee for New England Springboard Enterprises. Daphne is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard Business... View Details

April 1998 (Revised September 1998)
Case

Classic Pen Company, The: Developing an ABC Model

Classic Pen has diversified from its core blue and black pen business by introducing new specialized colors. But costs have risen and margins on blue and black pens are decreasing. The controller turns to activity-based costing (ABC) for an explanation. View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Manufacturing Industry

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Faculty & Researchers - Managing the Future of Work

Brookings Institution, 2022. Census II of Free and Open Source Software – Application Libraries , Report, The Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative, 2022. With James Dana, Jennifer Hoffman, Steven Randazzo, and Yanuo Zhou. The... View Details

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James Sharpe | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

Skip to Main Content HBS Entrepreneurs Collection Profiles About This Collection Contact Us Special Collections Search Paul Baier PurchasingCenter.com/Excara Frank Batten Weather Channel Steven B. Belkin Trans National Group (TNG) Hakeem... View Details

1998
Book

Advanced Management Accounting

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Anthony A. Atkinson

Keywords: Management; Cost Accounting

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Events - Business History

Slavery” Marlous van Waijenburg and Sophus Reinert (HBS), sponsoring faculty Presentations by Justene Hill Edwards (University of Virginia), Bronwen Everill (Cambridge University), Leigh Gardner (LSE), Nicholas Radburn (Lancaster), Carolyn View Details

December 2001 (Revised February 2008)
Case

Borealis

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Bjorn N. Jorgensen

When Borealis, a European producer of plastics, used a traditional, time-consuming budgeting process, the budget was quickly out of date in a competitive environment characterized by continually changing input and output prices and dynamic market conditions. This case... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Budgets and Budgeting; Forecasting and Prediction; Investment; Governance Controls; Balanced Scorecard; Management Systems; Manufacturing Industry; Europe

01 Jun 2007
What Do You Think?

How Should Pay Be Linked to Performance?

downside, more gains on the upside. The company's goals are the (opposite)." Claude Des Rosiers warned that "There are enough challenges to get people in an organization to work together (without compounding the problem by paying for individual... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

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Social Enterprise - Faculty & Research

September 26, 2024 Article A Better Way to Measure Social Impact By: Robert S. Kaplan and Constance Spitzer March 2025 Case Hurtigruten: Sea Zero By: Christian Kaps and Michael W. Toffel 2020 Book Capitalism... View Details

Working Paper

How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?

By: Paul A. Gompers, William Gornall, Steven N. Kaplan and Ilya A. Strebulaev

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing, investment selection, valuation, deal structure, post-investment value-added, exits, internal firm organization, and relationships... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Decision Choices and Conditions

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2015
Working Paper

What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?

By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov

We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Value Creation; Private Equity; Capital Structure; Valuation; Management Practices and Processes

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1974
Chapter

Management Accounting in Hospitals: A Case Study

Keywords: Accounting; Health Industry

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March 2004 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Midwest Office Products

Presents an easy introduction to time-driven activity-based costing (ABC) that allows students to build a simple ABC model of order profitability. Midwest's time-driven ABC approach is based on two categories of parameter estimates. The first is the cost per hour of... View Details

Keywords: Cost; Price; Activity Based Costing and Management; Time Management; Financial Reporting; Profit; Performance Improvement; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Performance Evaluation

Article

Reimagining the Balanced Scorecard for the ESG Era

By: Robert S. Kaplan and David McMillan

Companies are increasingly aware that their customers and society in general expect businesses to adopt and work towards social and environmental objectives as well as the traditional financial ones. This involves not only re-evaluating firms’ models but re-imagining... View Details

Keywords: ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Business Ecosystems; Balanced Scorecard; Adaptation; Business Model; Business and Stakeholder Relations

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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

Keywords: Enterprise Risk Management; Energy Transmission; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Energy; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Switzerland

2010
Working Paper

Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard

David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Balanced Scorecard; Management Systems; Performance Improvement; Strategy

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AASU50 - Alumni

Kimberly A. Kispert, MBA 1981 George L. Van Amson, MBA 1982 Kym M. Nelson, MBA 1983 George Ellis, MBA 1984 Gail S. Morales, MBA 1985 Robert R. Davenport III, MBA 1986 Stuart A. Taylor, II, MBA 1987 Arnold J. Lewis, MBA 1988 Belinda C.... View Details

March 2005 (Revised March 2006)
Background Note

Activity-Based Costing and Capacity

Discusses the use of budgeted rather than historical data in an activity-based costing (ABC) model and argues for calculating rates using practical capacity, not actual utilization. An ABC model need not be limited to analysis of historical data. When cost driver rates... View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Accounting Industry