Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,408)
- Faculty Publications (518)
- July 2009 (Revised January 2014)
- Case
Sustainability at Millipore
By: Michael W. Toffel and Katharine Lee
This case describes Millipore Corporation's approach to becoming a more environmentally sustainable company. As he prepared for his quarterly meeting with the CEO, the Director of Sustainability needed to develop positions on several issues. Tactically, he needed to... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Organizational Design: Balancing Search and Stability in Strategic Decision Making
By: Jan Rivkin and Nicolaj Siggelkow
Managers often must make decisions that depend on decisions in other parts of the organization. These interactions create a network of interdependent choices and make strategizing difficult. In this chapter, the authors explore the intersection between organizing and... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Taking a 'Deep Dive': What Only a Top Leader Can Do
By: Howard H. Yu and Joseph L. Bower
Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the... View Details
- February 2009 (Revised June 2019)
- Case
Cleveland Clinic: Transformation and Growth 2015
By: Michael E. Porter and Elizabeth O. Teisberg
The Cleveland Clinic's health care services are internationally renowned for quality. In 2008, The Clinic began to restructure the organization into teams defined around patient needs, rather than traditional medical specialties. "Patients First!" takes shape as the... View Details
Keywords: Health; Health Care Operations; Health Care Quality; Health Care; Strategy And Leadership; Strategy Development; Health Care and Treatment; Leading Change; Goals and Objectives; Growth and Development Strategy; Measurement and Metrics; Service Delivery; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Outcome or Result; Health Industry; Cleveland
- 2009
- Working Paper
Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting
By: Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino and Max H. Bazerman
People routinely engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty about their behavior. When and why does this occur? Across four studies, people justified their dishonest deeds through moral disengagement and exhibited motivated forgetting of information that might... View Details
- December 2008 (Revised January 2011)
- Case
Arcadia Biosciences: Seeds of Change
By: Arthur A. Daemmrich, Forest L. Reinhardt and Mary Louise Shelman
Arcadia Biosciences is an entrepreneurial California agricultural biotech company seeking to earn carbon credits by modifying commodity crops for use in China and India. Eric Rey, Arcadia's CEO, faced a strategic inflection point in early September 2008. The company... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
As the main producers of managerial elites, business schools represent strategic research sites for understanding the formation of economic practices and representations. This article draws on historical material to analyze the changing place of economics in American... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage
By: Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area--not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. Owing to execution failures, companies realize... View Details
- 2008
- Other Unpublished Work
From Public Purpose to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America
By: Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana
As the main producers of managerial elites, business schools represent strategic research sites for understanding the formation of economic practices and representations. This article draws on historical material to analyze the changing place of economics in American... View Details
- July – August 2008
- Article
Should You Invest in the Long Tail?
By: Anita Elberse
The blockbuster strategy is a time-honored approach, particularly in media and entertainment. When space is limited on store shelves and in traditional distribution channels, producers tend to focus on a few likely best sellers, hoping that one or two big hits will... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised July 2011)
- Module Note
Strategic Renewal
By: David J. Collis and Jan W. Rivkin
While it is relatively easy to identify why strategies fail, it is much harder to explain how to fix a failing strategy or build an organization that can continuously renew its strategy. This note identifies some patterns that distinguish companies whose renewal... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised July 2011)
- Background Note
Strategic Decline
By: David J. Collis and Jan W. Rivkin
This note first documents the facts around the sustainability of competitive advantage. It then observes that the demise of a previously successful strategy, in the first instance, often comes from some change in the external environment. It, therefore, characterizes... View Details
- March 2008 (Revised December 2011)
- Case
IBM Values and Corporate Citizenship
IBM's transformation into a globally integrated enterprise (GIE) began with a conviction about what should never change. Since its founding in 1911, the company operated under a set of principles articulated by founder Thomas Watson and became known for a strong... View Details
- March 2008 (Revised March 2009)
- Case
Purolator Courier Ltd.
By: Rajiv Lal and Catherine Ross
On a fall day in September 2003, Robert Swanborough made his way down a thickly carpeted hallway in Purolator's headquarters in Toronto, Canada, toward a meeting with his two deputies. Several months earlier, Swanborough, then vice-president of Marketing, had been... View Details
- March 2008
- Article
When Growth Stalls
By: Matthew S. Olson, Derek C. M. van Bever and Seth Verry
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading.
An abrupt and lasting drop in revenue growth is a crisis that can strike even the... View Details
- 2008
- Article
Ambidexterity as a Dynamic Capability: Resolving the Innovator's Dilemma
By: Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman
How do organizations survive in the face of change? Underlying this question is a rich debate about whether organizations can adapt—and if so, how. One perspective, organizational ecology, presents evidence suggesting that most organizations are largely inert and... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Putting Leadership Back into Strategy
In recent decades an infusion of economics has lent the study of strategy much needed theory and empirical evidence. Strategy consultants, armed with frameworks and techniques, have stepped forward to help managers analyze their industries and position their companies... View Details
- December 2007
- Background Note
Tools and Tactics for Transformation: Three "Whats" and Three "Hows"
By: James K. Sebenius and Stephen Friedman
Important transformation at Goldman Sachs, where one of the authors was Chairman, required analysis, political leadership, and management in order to fundamentally shift the strategy, people, and culture on a sustainable basis. After describing the actions needed to... View Details
- October 2007
- Article
Grist: A Strategic Approach to Climate
By: Michael E. Porter and Forest Reinhardt
Climate change will affect everything businesses do, as government efforts to mitigate carbon emissions cause their prices to rise steeply. This special edition of Forethought takes a hard-nosed look at the risks and opportunities of climate change. Michael E. Porter... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage
By: Alan MacCormack, Theodore Forbath, Peter Brooks and Patrick Kalaher
Many recent studies highlight the need to rethink the way we manage innovation. Traditional approaches, based on the assumption that the creation and pursuit of new ideas is best accomplished by a centralized and collocated R&D team, are rapidly becoming outdated.... View Details