Publications

04 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

Don’t Lose Money With Customers

Investors diligently manage financial portfolios to maximize returns on their assets; yet corporate managers who invariably proclaim their business customers to be "valuable assets" rarely manage their relationships with them... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

August 1994
Article

Human Relations in the Workplace

By: J. J. Rotemberg

Keywords: Relationships

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Book Review

Book Review of Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market by William Finlay and James E. Coverdill, Cornell University Press, 2002

By: Rakesh Khurana

Keywords: Relationships

July 1970
Article

Communes

By: R. M. Kanter

Keywords: Relationships

3 PM – 7:30 PM PST, 15 Nov 2017

HBS Alumnae Circles Open House & Training 2017: Palo Alto

HBS Alumnae Circles are taking new members - are you interested? Register for this upcoming open house to learn more. View Details

27 Aug 2007
Op-Ed

Mattel: Getting a Toy Recall Right

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch is debuting a blog on marketing issues at Harvard Business Online. HBS Working Knowledge is reprinting his first entry, which looks at the Mattel toy recall.Mattel has been criticized heavily for having to recall not once... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch; Consumer Products

October 1997
Case

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (B)

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Elaine V. Backman

Outlines the process of strategy reinvention adopted by Planned Parenthood. It lays out the new strategic proposals, and the reactions of the various constituencies to those proposals. View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Framework; Core Relationships; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Health Industry

January 1997 (Revised August 2007)
Case

Computron, Inc. (2006)

By: John A. Quelch

In July 1996, Mr. Thomas Zimmermann, European Manager of Computron, must select a price for a new computer for his largest customer. A rewritten version of an earlier case. View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Price; Product; Europe

13 May 2002
Op-Ed

A Cure for Enron-Style Audit Failures

If companies and regulators are ever to learn from the collapse of Enron—and prevent similar corporate debacles in the future—they must look more closely at the relationship between auditors, managers and the company audit committee. The... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Lorsch; Accounting

2025
Working Paper

With a Little Help from My Family: Informal Startup Financing

By: Brian K. Baik, Johan Ludvig S. Karlsen and Katja Kisseleva

Using Norwegian administrative data, we identify family equity investments in startups and examine their effects on investor returns and firm behavior. Informal investors earn lower returns than external individuals, and the firms they back are less likely to secure... View Details

Keywords: Early Stage Finance; Informal Investment; Household Finance; Risk Taking; Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurship; Personal Finance; Family and Family Relationships; Business Startups; Investment; Norway

SSRN

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April 2021 (Revised June 2021)
Supplement

Balancing Act: Deborah Lovich (C)

By: David G. Fubini and Patrick Sanguineti

This case provides further updates on Deborah Lovich's decision, as well as reflections from her family and mentors on her path. View Details

Keywords: Work/life Balance; Work/family Balance; Work-Life Balance; Family and Family Relationships; Personal Development and Career

Article

Soul and Machine (Learning)

By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan

Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Marketing Applications; Knowledge; Technological Innovation; Core Relationships; Marketing; Applications and Software

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March 2021
Article

The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the... View Details

Keywords: Customer Compatibility; Satisfaction; Profitability; Service Operations; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Satisfaction; Performance

October 2000 (Revised December 2002)
Background Note

Note on Customer Management

By: Das Narayandas

Describes a process for managing customers for profit. View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Value

June 1998
Case

MSE, Inc. Privatization: August 1997

By: Paul A. Gompers and Alexander Tsai

Keywords: Privatization; Alliances

November 2024
Case

Helium: Crowdsourcing a National Telecom Network

By: Jorge Tamayo and Mahesh Ramakrishnan

In 2024, Helium is running a pilot to test pricing models for their innovative crowdsourcing approach to building out a national telecom network. View Details

Keywords: Networks; Price; Telecommunications Industry; United States

November 2019
Case

Chief: Role for Carolyn Childers

By: Katherine B. Coffman, Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Kathleen L. McGinn, Katherine Chen and Julia Kelley

In 2018, Carolyn Childers is preparing to launch Chief, a New York-based peer network for women executives, and must decide whether to bring on a co-founder. After becoming the senior vice president of operations at her previous company, Childers was inspired to build... View Details

Keywords: Networking; Founders; Entrepreneurship; Networks; Negotiation