Publications

22 Feb 2024
News

Combat-Tested Cancer Coaching

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Spotify More Skydeck episodes Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. When Kathy Giusti (MBA 1985) was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1996, she was overwhelmed. It was the pre-Internet era, with limited available information, but... View Details

12 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

When Experts Play It Too Safe: Innovation Lessons from a NASA Experiment

the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and LISH research scientist Michael Menietti; as well as George Washington University’s Zoe Szajnfarber and Jason Crusan. “Given that these types of decisions can... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Aerospace

18 Oct 2022
Research & Ideas

When Bias Creeps into AI, Managers Can Stop It by Asking the Right Questions

biases, and these will continue. For instance, a few years ago, Amazon used an algorithm to help them decide who to employ. And the algorithm disproportionally picked men over women because historically, they had hired more men than women. Because humans made View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2025
Working Paper

Navigating Choppy Waters: How U.S. Trade Policy Uncertainty Affects Small Businesses

By: David Atkin, Zoë Cullen and Ebehi Iyoha

This paper explores the impact of recent changes in the US trade policy environment on small businesses. Drawing on a survey of more than 4,000 small businesses conducted between March 22 and 31, 2025, we examine firms’ knowledge, expectations, and decisions during... View Details

Keywords: Trade; Risk and Uncertainty; Government Legislation; Globalization; International Relations; Small Business

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2023
Working Paper

Do Active Funds Do Better in What They Trade?

By: Marco Sammon and John J. Shim

We develop two new, simple measures to quantify active fund decisions at the individual position level. The intuition is to separate passive rebalancing induced by flows and position changes from active rebalancing decisions. We find that additive active rebalancing --... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Financial Management

SSRN

June 2020
Teaching Note

Catalant's Operating System for the Future of Work

By: Christopher Stanton, William R. Kerr, James Palano and Kendall Smith

This case touches on the topics of project-based work, agile methodology, and skill and talent management through Catalant's evolution as a company. Catalant’s journey to becoming a software platform and talent marketplace provides context for students to explore new... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Transformation; Business Startups

September 2012 (Revised September 2014)
Case

Doing Business in Brazil

By: Aldo Musacchio, Gustavo A. Herrero, Ricardo Reisen de Pinho, Cintra Scott and Jill Avery

This case examines the challenges and opportunities of doing business in Brazil. It highlights Brazil's ongoing economic transformation in the decades leading up to 2014 in the context of its historical, political, and cultural background. The case summarizes some of... View Details

Keywords: Emerging Market Finance; Emergent Countries; Business History; Economic History; Emerging Markets; Business Ventures; Strategy; Brazil

April 2009 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Backchannelmedia: Making Television 'Clickable'

By: Sunil Gupta, Kavita Shukla and Zachary Scott Clayton

Backchannelmedia (BCM), a three-year-old start-up, intended to completely disrupt the world of advertising by transforming the way Americans watched television. BCM had developed a technology to make television "clickable," enabling viewers to interact with the content... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Investment; Disruptive Innovation; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Competition

Article

Managing Proprietary and Shared Platforms

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

In a platform-mediated network, users rely on a common platform, provided by one or more intermediaries, that encompasses infrastructure and rules required by users to transact with each other. A fundamental design decision for firms that aspire to develop... View Details

Keywords: Governance Controls; Digital Platforms; Infrastructure; Competition; Cooperation; Information Infrastructure

Find at Harvard

March 2002 (Revised May 2003)
Case

NeoPets, Inc.

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Elizabeth Kind

NeoPets, a rapidly growing Internet start-up, faces decisions about its international expansion strategy--whether to enter a joint venture with a conglomerate in Singapore to exploit Asian markets as well as which other regions to target. NeoPets allows its... View Details

Keywords: Expansion; Global Strategy; Network Effects; Joint Ventures; Business Conglomerates; Age; Internet and the Web; Product Positioning; Digital Marketing; Internet and the Web; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Information Technology Industry; Asia; Singapore

July 2001 (Revised February 2003)
Case

Recall 2000: Bridgestone Corp. (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine

In September 2000, the president of Bridgestone-Firestone, the U.S. subsidiary of Japan's Bridgestone Corp., was invited to appear before a U.S. congressional subcommittee investigating the August 2000 recall of more than 6.5 million tires made by the subsidiary. The... View Details

Keywords: History; Crisis Management; Business Processes; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; Rubber Industry; Japan; United States

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance – for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up... View Details

01 Dec 2023
News

The Exchange: Help Wanted

Image by John Ritter The path to a job in the C-suite isn’t what it used to be. For many years, companies could lean on financial expertise and industry connections when recruiting candidates, but HBS professors Raffaella Sadun and Joseph Fuller say that so much has... View Details

Keywords: Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services

26 Sep 2024
HBS Seminar

Garrett Van Ryzin, Columbia & Amazon

April 2006
Module Note

Cross-Border Financial Opportunities

By: Mihir A. Desai and Kathleen Luchs

Describes the fifth module in the International Finance course at Harvard Business School. This module explores how segmented capital markets create financing opportunities for firms and the mechanisms that evolve to take advantage of those opportunities. The issues... View Details

Keywords: Opportunities; Capital Markets; Decisions; International Finance; Motivation and Incentives; Taxation

2008
Working Paper

Where Does It Go? Spending by the Financially Constrained

By: Shawn A. Cole, John Thompson and Peter Tufano

In this paper, we analyze the spending decisions of over 1.5 million Americans who vary in their degree of revealed credit constraints. Specifically, we analyze how these Americans spend their income tax refunds, using transaction-level data from a stored-value card... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Credit; Personal Finance; Spending; Taxation; Consumer Behavior; United States

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Teaching Interest

Overview

Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) is a course about the broad economic and political context in which business operates. Throughout their careers business leaders are asked to formulate and lead their firm's responses to the external... View Details

Keywords: International Economy; Macroeconomics; Political Economy

June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Sequoia Capital

By: Jo Tango, Christina Wallace, Srimayi Mylavarapu and Johnson Elugbadebo

Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm founded in 1972, quickly grew to become one of the most storied venture capital firms in the world. Fueled by a strong culture, Sequoia's investment track record included the names of some of the largest global successes.... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Restructuring; Corporate Strategy; Financial Services Industry

2020
Case

Brightline: Targeting a Successful Future with High Speed Rail

By: Andrew J. Hoffman

High-speed rail (HSR) is a high-performance transportation technology that is time competitive with airplanes and automobiles, and is an environmentally preferable alternative due to its low carbon dioxide emissions. Brightline is a Florida HSR system in Phase II of... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Marketing Strategy; Segmentation; Transportation Industry