Publications

February 2014 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams

By: Tatiana Sandino

Indian cell phone retailer Go Mobile had implemented high-powered incentives to motivate its store employees to behave as owners and provide exceptional service. As the company scaled up, it faced multiple challenges in building a layer of district managers that were... View Details

Keywords: Employee Relationship Management; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Growth Management; Organizational Design; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Management Practices and Processes; Telecommunications Industry; India

Educators

July 1979 (Revised July 1995)
Background Note

The Uses of Ideology for Managers

By: George C. Lodge

Keywords: Management Practices and Processes

February 1996
Case

Active Coatings, Inc. (A): Challenges in Managing Product Development

Two entrepreneurs face a tough decision when confronted with disappointing test results from the medical application they have chosen to commercialize their innovative process technology. They must decide whether to redesign the technology's current lead-application or... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Decision Choices and Conditions; Product Development

Educators

Article

The Growing Strategic Importance of End-of-Life Product Management

By: Michael W. Toffel

Requiring manufacturers to manage the their products when they become waste is an innovative form of regulation, one that has been adopted by countries in Asia, Europe, and North America on a variety of products that range from vehicles to appliances to batteries.... View Details

Keywords: Product; Environmental Sustainability; Cost Management; Wastes and Waste Processing; Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Manufacturing Industry; Asia; Europe; North and Central America

06 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

The Right Way to Manage Customer Churn for Maximum Profit

bucket and in a little over three years all your current customers might be gone,” says Gupta, the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. For that reason, many companies have a program to actively View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail; Service; Financial Services

2013
Working Paper

An Empirical Study of the Spillover Effects of Workload on Patient Length of Stay

By: Jillian Berry Jaeker and Anita Tucker

We use two years of inpatient data from 243 California hospitals to quantify the relationship between hospital-level workload and patient length of stay (LOS), and its "spillover" effects across patient types. Patients are categorized as medical or surgical, and the... View Details

Keywords: Workload; Processing Times; Healthcare; Working Conditions; Performance Productivity; Time Management; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry; California

May 2017
Case

Four Products: Predicting Diffusion (2017)

By: John Gourville

One job of product managers, marketers, strategic planners, and other corporate executives is to predict what the demand will be for a new product. This task is easier for certain classes of new products than for others. For new consumer package goods, for instance,... View Details

Keywords: Diffusion Processes; Product Adoption; Forecasting and Prediction; Product; Product Launch; Marketing

Educators

2004
Chapter

Institutional Pressure and Environmental Management Practices

By: Magali Delmas and Michael W. Toffel

Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability

2019
Book

Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership

By: Linda A. Hill

In your career, or anyone's, there is one transition that stands out as the most crucial—going from individual contributor to competent manager.

New managers have to learn how to lead others rather than do the work themselves, to win trust and respect, to... View Details

Keywords: Management; Leadership; Leadership Development; Management Skills; Learning

06 Jan 2011
What Do You Think?

How Should Management Deal With “Anonymous”?

hackers, organized theft by criminals, and efforts by international terrorists to target and shut down, or threaten to shut down, everything from bank accounts to nuclear processing facilities. There has been an immediate call for risk... View Details

Keywords: by James L. Heskett

February 2021
Article

Topic Classification of Electric Vehicle Consumer Experiences with Transformer-Based Deep Learning

By: Sooji Ha, Daniel J Marchetto, Sameer Dharur and Omar Isaac Asensio

The transportation sector is a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a driver of adverse health effects globally. Increasingly, government policies have promoted the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) as a solution to mitigate GHG emissions.... View Details

Keywords: Natural Language Processing; Analytics and Data Science; Environmental Sustainability; Infrastructure; Transportation; Policy

29 Sep 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater

know where you're going when you start a journey. A manager who needs to be handed a clear set of objectives or a process specification is only half a manager (and not the most... View Details

Keywords: by Rob Austin & Lee Devin

2017
Working Paper

Discretionary Task Ordering: Queue Management in Radiological Services

By: Maria Ibanez, Jonathan R. Clark, Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

Work scheduling research typically prescribes task sequences implemented by managers. Yet employees often have discretion to deviate from their prescribed sequence. Using data from 2.4 million radiological diagnoses, we find that doctors prioritize similar tasks... View Details

SSRN

March 2006
Module Note

Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World: Module 3: Expanding Diversity

By: Alan D. MacCormack

Describes the third module of the 30-session Harvard Business School elective course Managing Innovation in an Uncertain World. The course helps students understand the challenges that uncertainty implies for innovation and how to overcome them. The course emphasizes... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Business Processes; Projects; Risk and Uncertainty; Product Development; Managerial Roles; Opportunities; Perspective; Expansion; Goals and Objectives

June 2001
Exercise

Strategic Human Resource Management Applications Exercise

By: Michael Beer

Overview of a method for diagnosing and developing an organization's capability to achieve its goals and implement its strategy, with exercises for application. A rewritten version of an earlier exercise. View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Goals and Objectives; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Design; Strategy

06 Oct 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

18 Tips Managers Can Use to Lead Through COVID's Rising Waters

the hiring and onboarding process, as opposed to outsourcing most of these processes to HR. Once the staffer is hired, the hiring manager should communicate the news to the rest of the organization so their... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

May 1994
Background Note

Managing Market Complexity: A Three-Ring Circus

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

Proposes models of organization that address the various product-market environments posed by the product life cycle. Frames these changes along the two dimensions of uncertainty and diversity. Offers three sets of organizational characteristics to reflect the three... View Details

Keywords: Business Processes; Growth and Development Strategy; Complexity; Organizational Structure; Organizational Culture; Product Marketing; Markets; Product