Publications

September 2012 (Revised July 2014)
Case

Blackstone's Investment in Intelenet

By: Josh Lerner, Sandeep Bapat and Rachna Tahilyani

Three years had passed since Blackstone's investment in Intelenet Global Services, their third largest investment in India. Great progress had been made, but now a new challenge loomed. Globank, a large global bank, was Intelenet's largest customer. Intelenet's... View Details

Keywords: India; Blackstone; Private Equity; Financial Services Industry; India

20 Aug 2020
Book

From the Plow to the Pill: How Technology Shapes Our Lives

For centuries, the creation of innovative technology—from steam engines and automobiles to computers and smartphones—has dramatically changed the nature of our work. Less deeply understood has been the impact of technology on the inner currents of our personal lives,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Dennis Campbell

Dennis W. Campbell is currently the Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching activities focus broadly on how management control systems can be designed to balance short-term strategy execution... View Details

Keywords: financial services; service industry; hotels ＆ motels; consumer products; restaurant; manufacturing; professional services

01 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

How To Make Restructuring Work for Your Company

attracting new business from corporate and retail customers. The merger was therefore also viewed as a vehicle for increasing top-line revenue growth. Internal cost cutting alone would not have enabled either bank to achieve this second... View Details

Keywords: by Stuart C. Gilson

January–February 2023
Article

The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Davide Sola and Martin Kupp

Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants. What separates them from the pack? They all go through a developmental stage called extrapolation, say three business school professors.
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Keywords: Entrepreneurship And Strategy; Scalability; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship

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Article

Distributionally Robust Optimization and Its Tractable Approximations

By: Joel Goh and Melvyn Sim

In this paper we focus on a linear optimization problem with uncertainties, having expectations in the objective and in the set of constraints. We present a modular framework to obtain an approximate solution to the problem that is distributionally robust and more... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Mathematical Methods; Operations

Every major company is grappling with the meaning and application of sustainability in relation to its geographic location, industry and business model. Similarly, more and more institutional investors are incorporating sustainability into their... View Details

2014
Book

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

By: Sven Beckert

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins... View Details

Keywords: Economic Systems; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Globalized Markets and Industries; Society; Manufacturing Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry

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April 2014 (Revised March 2018)
Case

Texas Children's Hospital: Congenital Heart Disease Care

By: Michael E. Porter, Justin M. Bachmann and Zachary C. Landman

In 2014, Dr. Charles D. Fraser Jr., Surgeon-in-Chief of Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, was contemplating the future direction of the congenital heart disease program. The nation's largest pediatric hospital, Texas Children's was ranked by U.S. News & World... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Congenital Heart Disease; Integrated Practice Units; Health Care and Treatment; Outcome or Result; Measurement and Metrics; Performance Improvement; Health Industry; United States; Texas

February 2002 (Revised December 2003)
Exercise

Incentives Game, The

By: Jason R. Barro, Brian J. Hall and Jonathan Lim

This exercise provides an opportunity to gain insight about designing, negotiating, and responding to incentives. The setting is investment management. A class is divided into a certain number of investment firms. Each company has one CEO and begins with four portfolio... View Details

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

Keywords: Information Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Organizational Culture; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Performance Productivity; Problems and Challenges; Management Practices and Processes; Business Divisions; Information Management; Information Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States

Even the most vocal critic of the American health care system cannot watch coverage of the current Covid-19 crisis without appreciating the heroism of each caregiver and patient fighting its most-severe consequences. Hospitals are being built in parks and convention... View Details

February 1991 (Revised February 1992)
Case

Appex Corp.

By: Nitin Nohria

1990 Business Week named Appex Corp. the fastest growing high-technology company in the United States. Appex provided management information systems and intercarrier network services to cellular telephone companies. During its rapid growth, the company went through... View Details

Now a Wall Street Journal Best-seller! Over a decade ago, the best-selling business fable Who Moved My Cheese? offered its answer to the question: accept that change is inevitable and beyond your control, don't waste your time wondering why things are the... View Details

24 Jul 2000
Research & Ideas

Value Maximization and Stakeholder Theory

as do those who narrowly focus on short-term financial gain. In the excerpt below, Jensen describes a new scorecard to help business leaders and managers keep pace. A firm cannot maximize value, Jensen writes, if it ignores the interests... View Details

Keywords: by Michael C. Jensen

Article

A Theories-in-Use Approach to Building Marketing Theory

By: G. Zaltman, Valarie A. Zeithaml, Bernard Jaworski, Ajay K. Kohli, Kapil R. Tuli and Wolfgang Ulaga

This article’s objective is to inspire and provide guidance on the development of marketing knowledge based on the theories-in-use (TIU) approach. The authors begin with a description of the TIU approach and compare it with other inductive and deductive research... View Details

Keywords: Building Theory; Grounded Theory; Theories-in-use; Theory Construction; Theory Development; Marketing; Knowledge; Theory

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September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
Case

GreenFire Energy, 2020: Geothermal Innovation

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In June 2020, GreenFire Energy Inc. (GreenFire) presented its report to the California Energy Commission indicating that its proof of concept project to demonstrate its new geothermal electricity generation technology, ECO2G™, had been a success. While conventional... View Details

Keywords: Geothermal Electricity; Renewable Energy; Energy Generation; Technological Innovation; Commercialization; Strategy; Decision Choices and Conditions

28 Sep 2011
Research & Ideas

The Profit Power of Corporate Culture

arises because little research has been targeted at trying to quantify its importance on performance. In his new book, The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance, HBS Professor Emeritus James L. Heskett... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2020
Working Paper

Why Do Firms Automate Production, and How Do They Adjust? Evidence from the Bell Telephone System over the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and James J. Feigenbaum

Over the course of the 20th century, AT&T's operating companies replaced telephone operators with mechanical switching and dial telephones. Yet it took AT&T 30 years from the invention of the technology to begin using it, and another 60 years to finish installing it... View Details

Keywords: Employment; Labor; Technology Adoption; Technology Networks; History; Telecommunications Industry; United States