Publications

Find at Harvard

30 Aug 2010
Research & Ideas

Turning Employees Into Problem Solvers

research team recently set out to better understand what managers can do to encourage employees to speak up about problems, and to investigate how managers can encourage employees to offer solutions. The... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Health

January 2023
Case

Year Up: Measuring and Scaling Impact

By: Natalia Rigol, Benjamin N. Roth, Brian Trelstad and Sarah Mehta

Year Up, a non-profit that provides training and practical work experience to low-income young people, has for years prioritized impact measurement. By 2022, it had built a robust body of evidence demonstrating that its program yields higher earnings for participants.... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Education; Jobs and Positions; Measurement and Metrics; Performance; Research; Social Enterprise; Growth Management; Education Industry; United States; Massachusetts; Boston

30 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

‘Intrinsic Joy’ Sparks Ideas Better than Cash

It seems obvious: If you want to boost innovation from a crowd writing and improving software code, just dangle a cash incentive. When GitHub began offering matching funds to open source software users who snagged outside sponsors in 2019, it seemed to View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Technology

June 2019
Case

Athena Bancorp

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Abbott

Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch... View Details

Keywords: Banks and Banking; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Culture; Human Resources; Strategy; Service Delivery; Banking Industry

March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (A)

By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco

In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting–and... View Details

Web

Hire Talent

depends on intentionally managing technology, routines, and communication. The HBS Career & Professional Development (CPD) office shares practical tips to help you and your team thrive. Whether you work from... View Details

September 2022
Article

The Limits of Inconspicuous Incentives

By: Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Katherine Milkman, Luca Foschini and Bradford Tuckfield

Managers and policymakers regularly rely on incentives to encourage valued behaviors. While incentives are often successful, there are also notable and surprising examples of their ineffectiveness. Why? We propose a contributing factor may be that they are not... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Behavior

Find at Harvard

Read Now

March 2020 (Revised June 2022)
Case

GreenLight Fund

By: Brian Trelstad, Julia Kelley and Mel Martin

As Tara Noland, the Executive Director (ED) of GreenLight Cincinnati, reflected on her first few years on the job. Noland had delivered on what she had been hired to do in the city: work with leading philanthropists and nonprofit executives to use data and evidence to... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy; Venture Philanthropy; Replication; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Venture Capital; Social Issues; Decision Making; Analytics and Data Science; Cincinnati

April 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

Impact Investing for Cancer

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Matthew G. Preble

It is early 2018, and Emily Park, managing director of impact for the Abreu Family Office, is meeting the next day with Tomás and Maria Abreu to discuss the various ways in which the Abreus can allocate a planned $100 million to make a meaningful difference in cancer... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investing; Investment; Health Disorders; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Decision Choices and Conditions

August 2016 (Revised October 2016)
Case

Nirvana Vihar Rehabilitation Homes

By: Shawn Cole, Andreas Rotenberg and Thomas van den Aarssen

Kumar Builders (KUL) was finally nearing completion on the four luxury condominium towers that comprised the first phase of its bold vision for the redevelopment of more than 70 acres of prime real estate in downtown Pune, India. The Nirvana Hills development also... View Details

Keywords: Real Estate; Slum Redevelopment; Double Bottom Line; Economic Development; Partnerships; Partners and Partnerships; Development Economics; Urban Development; Business and Community Relations; Real Estate Industry; India

2009
Working Paper

Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance

By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes, by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details

Keywords: Familiarity; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Groups and Teams; Projects; Experience and Expertise; Diversity; India

Read Now

October 2002
Case

New Leaders for New Schools

Describes the founding, early growth, and expansion plans of New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit public education venture that recruits, trains, places, and supports principals in U.S. urban school districts. This case presents the strategic, financial, and... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Education; Education Industry