Service - Publications - Faculty & Research

April 2014
Article

The Limits of Scale: Companies That Get Big Fast Are Often Left Behind. Here's Why.

By: Hanna Halaburda and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

The value of many products and services rises or falls with the number of customers using them; the fewer fax machines in use, the less important it is to have one. These network effects influence consumer decisions and affect companies' ability to compete. Strategists... View Details

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April 2012
Article

Coming Through When It Matters Most

By: Heidi K. Gardner

All teams would like to think they do their best work when the stakes are highest-when the company's future or their own rests on the outcome of their projects. But too often something else happens. In extensive studies of teams at professional service firms, I have... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Projects; Performance Expectations; Failure; Risk and Uncertainty; Safety; Experience and Expertise; Knowledge Sharing

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February 2011 (Revised December 2012)
Case

Coca-Cola on Facebook

By: John Deighton and Leora Kornfeld

In late 2008, executives at Coca-Cola had to decide what to do with a fan-created page on Facebook that had amassed over one million followers in three months. From a legal point of view the fan-created page was in violation of Facebook's terms of service as a... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Governance Controls; Policy; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; Social and Collaborative Networks; Food and Beverage Industry

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As we start to think about returning to work, shopping, and recreation, there is much talk about transformed... View Details

Coming Through When It Matters Most

All teams would like to think they do their best work when the stakes are highest—when the company’s future or their own rests on the outcome of their projects. But too often something else happens. In extensive studies of teams at professional service firms,... View Details

21 Jul 2020
Cold Call Podcast

Starbucks Commits to Raising Awareness of Racial Bias

Keywords: & Katherine B. Coffman; Service; Service

30 Jan 2018
First Look

January 30, 2018

Sandino Abstract—Many service organizations rely on information sharing systems to boost employee creativity to meet customer needs. We conducted a field experiment in a retail chain, based on a registered report accepted by Journal of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

21 Jul 2022
Research & Ideas

Did Pandemic Stimulus Funds Spur the Rise of 'Meme Stocks'?

The US government set out to support consumers and jolt the economy when it issued federal stimulus checks during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But actually, that money helped propel questionable investments in “meme stocks,” one of the most visible... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

22 Oct 2019
Research & Ideas

Use Artificial Intelligence to Set Sales Targets That Motivate

we need to improve our profit,” he says. For example, a US industrial service company was losing 20 percent of its customers every year. Through research, its leaders realized that when customers stayed with the company for six months,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

19 Nov 2013
First Look

First Look: November 19

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2350805 Surfacing the Submerged State with Operational Transparency in Government Services By: Buell, Ryan W., and Michael I. Norton Abstract—As Americans' trust in government nears historic lows, frustration with... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2009 (Revised June 2011)
Case

Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture

By: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely and Laura Winig

On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its board of directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Choices and Conditions; Governing and Advisory Boards; Service Delivery; Organizational Culture; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry

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January 2004 (Revised January 2005)
Case

Delta Air Lines (A): The Low-Cost Carrier Threat

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Laurent Therivel

The top management of Delta Air Lines must decide how to respond to the threat posed by low-cost carriers such as Southwest and JetBlue. Among the options considered is the launch of a low-cost subsidiary by Delta itself. Prior efforts to launch a low-cost subsidiary,... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Cost; Decision Choices and Conditions; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Air Transportation Industry

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01 Sep 2021
What Do You Think?

Can We Train for Trust?

with your employees and create processes and standards internally to ensure your products or services are up to standard.” Their model for doing this consists of four elements: Competence: Is the organization good enough at what it does... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Budgeting Kills Your Company

Similarly, each branch manager gets to decide what resources the unit needs. To make its central services more responsive to market demands, Handelsbanken conducts an annual round of negotiations in which cost estimates and the View Details

Keywords: by Loren Gary

05 Jun 2009
What Do You Think?

What Does Slower Economic Growth Really Mean?

with these projections. But they suggest that it's time that we ask whether we have been using the right measures for growth. First, when we speak of growth, it usually refers to growth in gross domestic product, the value of all goods and View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Financial Services; Financial Services; Financial Services

30 Mar 2010
First Look

First Look: March 30

PublicationsThe Coexistence of Overestimation and Underweighting of Rare Events and the Contingent Recency Effect Authors:Greg Barron and Eldad Yechiam Publication:.Judgment and Decision Making 4, no. 6 (October 2009) Abstract Previous research demonstrates... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

March 2021 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Resident

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones

Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Business Growth and Maturation; Operations; Entrepreneurship; Competitive Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Decisions; Marketing Strategy; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers

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2020
Working Paper

No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India and then explore potential drivers of the... View Details

Keywords: Assortative Matching; Productivity; Global Buyers; Readymade Garments; Management; Employees; Performance Productivity

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Winter 2013
Article

The New Patent Intermediaries: Platforms, Defensive Aggregators and Super-Aggregators

By: Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie

The patent market consists mainly of privately negotiated, bilateral transactions, either sales or cross-licenses, between large companies. There is no eBay, Amazon, New York Stock Exchange, or Kelley's Blue Book equivalent for patents, and when buyers and sellers do... View Details

Keywords: Intellectual Property; Platforms; Intermediaries; Aggregator; Patents; Digital Platforms; Marketplace Matching; Distribution Channels

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