Publications

Educators

Article

How to Really Motivate Salespeople

By: Doug J. Chung

Much of what we believe about the best ways to compensate and motivate the sales force is based on theory and lab experiments. But in the past decade, researchers have been moving out of the lab and into the field, analyzing companies' sales and pay data, and... View Details

Keywords: Compensation; Motivating People; Motivation and Incentives; Compensation and Benefits; Sales

March 2007 (Revised October 2008)
Case

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics

By: Anita Elberse, Catherine Anthony and Joshua Callahan

It is February 2007, exactly three years before Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics. Judy Rogers, City Manager for the City of Vancouver and a member of the Board of Directors for Vancouver's Organizing Committee (VANOC), is keen to ensure the Games will have a... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Markets and Industries; Social Marketing; Business and Government Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Conflict and Resolution; Sports; Public Administration Industry; Sports Industry; Vancouver

Educators

May 2011
Article

Extreme Productivity

By: Robert C. Pozen

A veteran top executive at two giant mutual fund companies, the author has also been an attorney, a government official, a law school professor, and a business school professor-sometimes simultaneously. Over the years, he has devised a number of principles and... View Details

Keywords: Managerial Roles; Time Management; Performance Capacity; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity; Personal Development and Career

May 2011
Article

The Power of Small Wins

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer

What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and... View Details

24 Jan 2012
First Look

First Look: Jan. 24

estimates of corruption and study its relationship with organizational ownership. Book: http://www.cmi.no/research/project/?1473=the-international-handbook-on-the-economics-of Knowledge-based Innovation: Emergence and Embedding of New View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2014
Working Paper

Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors

By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson

General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Structure; Decision Making; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry

26 Apr 2024
HBS Case

Deion Sanders' Prime Lessons for Leading a Team to Victory

COO,” Gibson says. “Is the best CIO a tech person? No, the best CIO is the person who is an integrator of systems.” 8. Less can be more. When he builds practice schedules,... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman; Sports

April 2021 (Revised January 2022)
Supplement

SA Taxi: A Vehicle for Empowerment? (B)

By: Nien-he Hsieh, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and F. Christopher Eaglin

SA Taxi was a vertically integrated business that operated in South Africa’s distinctive taxi industry. Despite being plagued by violence, informal structures, unsafe road practices and lack of government support, the taxi industry had grown to become South Africa’s... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Accountability; Ownership; Ownership Stake; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Equality and Inequality; Race; Situation or Environment; Transportation Industry; South Africa; Africa

22 Sep 2009
First Look

First Look: September 22

Working PapersMixed Source Authors:Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Gastón Llanes Abstract We study competitive interaction between profit-maximizing firms that sell software and complementary goods or services. In addition to tactical price competition, we allow firms... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

November 2009
Article

Is it Fair to Blame Fair Value Accounting for the Financial Crisis?

By: Robert C. Pozen

When the credit markets seized up in 2008, many heaped blame on "mark to market" accounting rules, which require banks to write down their troubled assets to the prices they'd fetch if sold on the open market - at the time, next to nothing. Recording those assets below... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Fair Value Accounting; Financial Crisis; Assets; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Crisis Management; Standards; Banking Industry

02 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

10 Trends to Watch in 2024

The lightning-fast ascent of generative AI isn’t the only sea change on the horizon for businesses in the new year. The global economy is in flux as war, climate change, trade issues, and infrastructure problems demand attention. Many companies continue to struggle to... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

Research Summary

Professor Wei-Skillern's research is focused in the field of Social Enterprise. Her research examines the creation of social value in both commercial and nonprofit organizations. In the former stream of research on corporate social responsibility, she has studied... View Details

10 Jul 2023
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2023

generally refers to spiritual dryness, or profound loneliness and doubt. The best social science indicates that across the globe, our communities are becoming lonelier and less fulfilled. John of the Cross teaches how to find deep meaning... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2007
Book

An Experiment in Fair Value Accounting? The State of the Art in Research and Thought Leadership on Accounting for Life Assurance in the UK and Continental Europe

By: Joanne G Horton, Richard H. Macve and George Serafeim

"Fair value" is currently the central topic of debate in the development of accounting standards. While it has now been defined to mean an exit price in US GAAP, the IASB is still considering its own definition, and some commentators are arguing for versions of entry... View Details

Keywords: Transition; Financial Instruments; Framework; Market Entry and Exit; Insurance; Revenue Recognition; Fair Value Accounting; Standards; United Kingdom

Article

Making Exit Interviews Count

By: Everett Spain and Boris Groysberg

In the knowledge economy, skilled employees are the assets that drive organizational success. Thus companies must learn from them—why they stay, why they leave, and how the organization needs to change. A thoughtful exit interview—whether it be a face-to-face... View Details

Keywords: Information; Management Practices and Processes; Retention; Resignation and Termination

Register to Read

February 2020
Article

Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard

By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller

The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Decision Making; Risk and Uncertainty; Behavior; Perception