Goods and Commodities - Publications - Faculty & Research

02 Dec 2010
What Do You Think?

Making Right Choices: Art or Science?

Summing Up Thoughtful comments are hard to summarize in five paragraphs. That explains why this month's task is impossible. But one thing unites nearly everyone responding to this column, and that is one kind of objection or other to the... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

Web

Five Ways to Rethink Your Job Description - Recruiting

function or product-based keywords to describe the job's area of work. Think about the format and length Job descriptions in paragraph form can be hard to process. Make the beginning easy to scan so candidates quickly know if the job is a... View Details

27 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

How Remote Work Changes What We Think About Onboarding

to address ever-changing challenges. "Companies struggle to onboard employees even when times are good and relatively predictable." The only way to fast track onboarding View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg

24 Sep 2018
Research & Ideas

How Cost Accounting is Improving Healthcare in Rural Haiti

in rural Haiti. Using a costing system developed at Harvard Business School, researchers found that the cost of care varied dramatically from clinic to clinic. The research and the concerns it raises are detailed in a recent case study,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

Web

Bringing a Taste of Japan to the World - Global Activities 2020

and Yasu Sasago (both MBA 2020), at far right, with team members at the 2019 pop-up ramen event in Cambridge. “I realized I was a pretty good ramen cook,” says Sasago, who craved the authentic noodle dish he... View Details

Profile

Drew Keller

to rent kayaks for the day, but after seeing how much more fun people with motorboats seemed to be having, we switched plans and rented one. We spent the day water skiing, tubing, and making fun of my dad’s... View Details

Person Page

Course Development

By: Debora L. Spar

Managing International Trade and Investment

Despite the ease with which it is often conducted, doing business across borders is not the same as doing it at home. Rather, it entails a whole new set of managerial challenges: re-assessing competitive... View Details

27 Oct 2014
Research & Ideas

The Coffee Economy That Bloomed Out of Nowhere

Near the Guatemalan border in Mexico's Chiapas region, sandwiched between the Sierra Madres and the Pacific Ocean, there's a fertile pocket of land called the Soconusco. While once a hotbed of cacao production for the Aztecs View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Food & Beverage; Agriculture & Agribusiness

18 Jun 2024
Cold Call Podcast

How Natural Winemaker Frank Cornelissen Innovated While Staying True to His Brand

Keywords: Re: Tiona W. Zuzul; Food & Beverage; Agriculture & Agribusiness

August 2022 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Sweet Teez Bakery: Projecting the Dough's Rise

By: Emily R. McComb, Mel Martin and Amy Klopfenstein

In 2021, the HBS Impact Investment Fund student team met with entrepreneur Teresa Maynard, who had applied for a $25,000 impact investment loan. The students thought the former Harvard Data Scientist’s bakery business, Sweet Teez Bakery, showed promise. Maynard had... View Details

Keywords: Impact Investment; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Investment; Goods and Commodities; Financial Reporting; Small Business; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Massachusetts

Citation

Educators

Purchase

20 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

It's No Joke: AI Beats Humans at Making You Laugh

each other for decades. I was really rooting for spouses to have an edge!” Computers make good recommendations, but do people want to listen? Businesses are investing heavily in sophisticated computer algorithms that rely on past consumer... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

22 Jul 2019
Book

How to Be a Digital Platform Leader

developing customers on each side of the platform, it can still lose out. A great example was Microsoft’s failed efforts in smartphones. Microsoft built a very good operating system for smartphones, but it could not crack the market... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

01 Dec 2022
News

My First Job

watch for shoplifters, and keep smiling to maintain customer service. I was 16 and it was a real stretch, but I became quite good at juggling it all View Details

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

12 May 2021
News

The First Five Years: Sophie Bai (MBA 2020)

serendipity at its finest. It may be too soon to say, but I have a strong feeling that we will be really good friends and have each other’s back, just like the sister each of us never had. HBS is a special... View Details

24 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Changing Online Price Competition—and the Fed Needs to Pay Attention

It’s no secret that fierce competition from Amazon puts downward pressure on prices charged by Walmart and other big multichannel retailers for the same items. However, the bigger “Amazon effect” relates not to the prices themselves but... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

13 May 2022
Research & Ideas

Company Reviews on Glassdoor: Petty Complaints or Signs of Potential Misconduct?

Campbell and Shang constructed a dataset of reviews from more than 4,000 publicly traded firms between 2008 and 2016, extracting a vocabulary of 11,772 unique words used in the reviews. At the same time,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

15 Dec 2023
News

Like-Minded

Yumiko Murakami (MBA 1994), Miwa Seki (MBA 1993), and Kathy Matsui share the same month and year of birth, so the friends started an annual birthday get-together to reflect on the year ahead. Work was always a hot topic of discussion. Each woman had built a strong... View Details

01 Mar 2004
News

Derek Ferguson

future brings, he wants to make a difference. For now, it’s a matter of figuring out how to do that while serving as right-hand man to one of hip-hop’s most prominent bad boys. “You can be in the corporate world and still incorporate... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries; Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries

Research Summary

Social Innovation

My intellectual agenda addresses this question: How to innovate to solve the world’s toughest challenges? Out of the earth’s population, about 2 billion can afford good products whereas the remaining 5 billion are poor and therefore are nonconsumers.... View Details

27 Oct 2015
News

Sweet Success

When it comes to starting new ventures, some people think big picture and others dive into the details. When Robb Turner (MBA 1990) talks about the start-up of his flourishing maple syrup company, it’s obvious he’s pretty View Details

Keywords: Deborah Blagg

Publications