Publications

July 2020 (Revised October 2020)
Case

Valentina Tereshkova: Conquering Space

By: Boris Groysberg and Annelena Lobb

On June 13, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova of the USSR became the first woman to fly in space on Vostok 6. Soviet leaders publicly espoused gender equity, but also sent Tereshkova on her mission in order to be the first country to send a woman to space, a milestone they... View Details

Keywords: Gender Equity; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Personal Development and Career; Aerospace Industry; Soviet Union; United States

2006
Article

The Long-Term Value of M&A Activity to Enhance Learning Organizations

Viewing the automobile industry as being made up of independent learning-organisations may reveal some tie-ups that can generate value not easily revealed by traditional financial metrics. The key question to be answered when considering M&A activity between automakers... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Processes; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry

09 Jul 2024
Research & Ideas

Chance Encounters: What's at Stake in Return-to-Office Decisions

home. But they also used real numbers to measure productivity and saw the exact opposite in the non-subjective evaluations, so there was a disconnect between what was perceived to be going on by employees vs. what the actual numbers were... View Details

Keywords: by Jen McFarland Flint, HBS Alumni Bulletin

April 2007
Case

Leadership Forum: Building Great Careers - Video

By: D. Quinn Mills and Carole Winkler

Leadership: Can I learn it, how do I do it, and how can I use it to advance my career? How is today's world different from the one our teachers entered years ago, and how does that affect me? The two videos on this DVD address these and other questions typically asked... View Details

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Work-Life Balance; Leadership Development; Talent and Talent Management; Leadership Style; Knowledge Dissemination; Teaching; Executive Education; Decision Choices and Conditions; Management Style; Education Industry

2019
Working Paper

Voting Trusts and Antitrust: Rethinking the Role of Shareholder Rights and Private Litigation in Public Regulation, 1880s to 1930s

By: Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Laura Phillips Sawyer

Scholars have long recognized that the states’ authority to charter corporations bolstered their antitrust powers in ways that were not available to the federal government. But they have also argued that the growth of large-scale enterprises operating in national and... View Details

Keywords: Voting Trusts; Antitrust; Business and Shareholder Relations; Lawsuits and Litigation; History; United States

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2017
Working Paper

Diversity in Innovation

By: Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Q. Wang

In this paper we document the patterns of labor market participation by women and ethnic minorities in venture capital firms and as founders of venture capital-backed startups. We show that from 1990-2016 women have been less than 10% of the entrepreneurial and venture... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Gender; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital

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2009
Working Paper

Operational Failures and Problem Solving: An Empirical Study of Incident Reporting

By: Julia Rose Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer and Michael W. Toffel

Operational failures occur in all industries with consequences that range from minor inconveniences to major catastrophes. Many organizations have implemented incident reporting systems to highlight actual and potential operational failures in order to encourage... View Details

Keywords: Communication Strategy; Legal Liability; Management Practices and Processes; Service Operations; Failure; Health Industry

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December 2022
Case

Mission Produce in 2022

By: Forest Reinhardt, Jose B. Alvarez and Natalie Kindred

Founded by CEO Steve Barnard in 1983, California-based Mission Produce was a leading supplier of Hass avocados with a global sourcing, marketing, and distribution network and $892 million in 2021 sales. Barnard had been influential in the global avocado trade’s... View Details

Keywords: Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States; California; Peru; Guatemala; Colombia; Mexico; Chile

September 2013 (Revised August 2014)
Case

Claritas Genomics

By: Robert F. Higgins and Matthew Preble

Claritas Genomics was formed in January 2013 when BCH spun out its Genetics Diagnostic Lab into a fully commercial entity. Claritas offered over 100 genomic tests to detect a range of conditions, including autism and intellectual disabilities, and was developing new... View Details

June 2022
Teaching Plan

Pacesetters

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin

Teaching Plan for HBS Case No. 322-019. City Sealcoating CEO Keith Chaney had just publicly called out the Boston Chamber of Commerce for their slow progress on their supplier diversity program, Pacesetters. Established in 2018 by regional business leaders,... View Details

Keywords: Minority-owned Businesses; Procurement; Racial Wealth Gap; Diversity; Small Business; Restructuring; Contracts; Goals and Objectives; Performance Improvement; Performance Evaluation; United States; Massachusetts

April 2019 (Revised October 2021)
Case

The Rohingya Refugee: Past, Genocide, Future

By: Reshmaan N. Hussam

In August 2017, the Myanmar military commenced a brutal pogrom of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State, Myanmar. The genocidal campaign marked the most recent and decisive of a series of ethnic cleansing efforts fueled by contention around race, religion, and... View Details

Keywords: War; Ethnicity; Race; Religion; Identity; Change; Resource Allocation; Social Issues; Myanmar; Africa; Bangladesh

22 Nov 2016
First Look

November 22, 2016

résumé audit study, we examine racial minorities’ attempts to avoid anticipated discrimination in labor markets by concealing or downplaying racial cues in job applications, a practice known as "résumé whitening." Interviews with racial... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

23 Oct 2024
News

Running Man

There aren’t many people on this planet—let alone septuagenarians—who can contemplate running 50 or 100 miles at a time. But for 77-year-old Eric Spector (MBA 1972), a retired entrepreneur and CEO in the tech, consumer retail, and media sectors, running long (long,... View Details

Keywords: Christine Speer Lejeune; photos by Alison Yin

Reinventing State Capitalism

In this book we study the evolution of corporate governance arrangements that governments have adopted for their state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the last 20 years. We show that the process of privatization and liberalization of the 1990s and early 2000s created... View Details

2020
Chapter

Business, Ethics and Institutions. The Evolution of Turkish Capitalism in a Comparative Perspective

By: Asli M. Colpan and Geoffrey Jones

This chapter offers a survey of the evolution of Turkish capitalism from the 19th century Ottoman Empire until the present day. It shows that Turkish business over the last century and a half was shaped in an institutional context similar to those in many developing... View Details

Keywords: Business Groups; Capitalism; Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Government and Politics; History; Religion; Business History; Turkey; Central Asia; Middle East

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Teaching Interest

Overview

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang

Launching Technology Ventures
Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) is designed for students who are actively working on their own startups or who will work at early-stage startups. The course material is, in particular, focused on new businesses in the... View Details

April 2002
Background Note

Reflections on the United Electric case discussion Persuasion, Induction, and Grounding in the Specifics

An MBA classroom discussion revealed the perils of learning in which "theories-in-use" are not challenged and suggests strategies for more reflective learning. Two groups of students presented their positions at a conceptual level without grounding their conceptual... View Details

Keywords: Perspective; Cases

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2014
Book

Consumer Lending in France and America: Credit and Welfare

By: Gunnar Trumbull

Why did America embrace consumer credit over the course of the twentieth century, when most other countries did not? How did American policy makers by the late twentieth century come to believe that more credit would make even poor families better off? This book traces... View Details

Keywords: Attitudes; Credit; France; United States

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