Publications

April 2020 (Revised June 2020)
Case

Oriental Land Co., Ltd.—Tokyo Disney Resort

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Akiko Kanno

This case describes the history of Oriental Land Co. Ltd.’s (OLC's) Tokyo Disney Resort (TDR), its operations, the extent of vertical integration, and the challenges it faced in 2018 as OLC's chairman and CEO, Toshio Kagami, contemplated how best to deal with... View Details

Keywords: Strategy For Multi-business Firm; Business Models; Growth; Theme Parks; Disney; Disney Parks; Licensing; Royalties; Two-part Tariffs; Oriental Land Co.; Tokyo Disneyland; Tokyo DisneySea; Tokyo Disney Resort; Tokyo Disney; Growth Strategy; Hotels; Hotel Industry; Partnership; Development; Attractions; Rides; Urayasu; Kagami; Congestion; Pricing; Amusement Parks; Amusement Park Industry; Brand; Branding; History; OLC; Corporate Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Business History; Price; Retention; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Brands and Branding; Agreements and Arrangements; Contracts; Operations; Vertical Integration; Problems and Challenges; Partners and Partnerships; Business Strategy; Expansion; Rail Transportation; Transportation Networks; Accommodations Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Tourism Industry; Asia; Japan; Tokyo; United States

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

pervasive uncertainty created by COVID-19 in other ways, for example nurturing the relationship with other firms in their networks or establishing new connections that could lead to new learnings. Other firms, and especially businesses... View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

18 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

How New Managers Become Great Managers

As they acquire more power and establish relationships with a broad range of people, they find themselves holding a more central position in their network of relationships—and thereby they gain even more... View Details

Keywords: by Linda Hill

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

and practices out of the network of those that have been found to be associated with professions. We use these traits and practices both to set forth our own notion of the essence of professionalism and to enable us to compare management... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

October 2018
Case

Accomplice: Scaling Early Stage Finance

By: Ramana Nanda, Raffaella Sadun and Olivia Hull

Accomplice, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Boston, is raising its second fund in November 2017. Since 2009, the firm has followed a seed-led investment model, investing in tech companies at the earliest stages, often when products and business models are... View Details

Keywords: Early Stage Finance; Seed Finance; Scouts; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Private Equity; Investment Portfolio; Organizational Structure; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Partners and Partnerships; Networks; Adaptation; Corporate Strategy; Technology; Financial Services Industry; Massachusetts; Boston; Cambridge; United States

29 Jan 2021
Op-Ed

How Influencers, Celebrities, and FOMO Can Win Over Vaccine Skeptics

central premise of the diffusion of innovations framework is that customer or patient segments that adopt early will influence later adopters. Innovators will influence early adopters, who then influence the early and late majority, who... View Details

Keywords: by Rohit Deshpandé, Ofer Mintz, and Imran S. Currim

30 Mar 2018
What Do You Think?

What Should Mark Zuckerberg Do?

contributed to the rapid growth of the network. The addition of each user increased the value of the network to everyone: users, the developers of apps made available to users, and advertisers utilizing user information. Although users... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Web Services; Information Technology

March 2017
Case

Intellectual Ambition at Harvard Business School: Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Amram Migdal

This case, set in the 1920s and 1930s, discusses the contributions of Harvard Business School (HBS) Professors Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger to management research and to the Human Relations Movement in management scholarship. The case focuses on their research... View Details

March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Winning Business at Russell Reynolds (A)

By: Ethan Bernstein and Cara Mazzucco

In an effort to make compensation drive collaboration, Russell Reynolds Associates’ (RRA) CEO Clarke Murphy sought to re-engineer the bonus system for his executive search consultants in 2016. As his HR analytics guru, Kelly Smith, points out, that risks upsetting–and... View Details

20 Oct 2003
Research & Ideas

Gaps in the Historical Record: Development of the Electronics Industry

created by the swift expansion of local and wide area corporate computer networks (LANS and WANs) and the privatized Internet brought a second Japanese challenge in the early 1990s. Critical here was the development of the workstation... View Details

Keywords: by Alfred D. Chandler Jr.; Consumer Products

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

journals. “Academic research can be helpful, but it tends to be overly complex, hard to digest, and not backed by real quantitative insights from customer populations or engagements,” says Neale-May, executive director of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, a... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

22 Jul 2019
Book

How to Be a Digital Platform Leader

research, you identified 209 platform failures between 1995 and 2015 and about 45 successful firms for the same period. What are drivers of success? Yoffie: The most important driver of success is network effects. View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

February 2022
Case

US Foods: Driving Post-Pandemic Success?

By: David E. Bell, Olivia Hull and Amy Klopfenstein

In November 2021, US Foods CEO Pietro Satriano must decide his company’s trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic. US Foods suffered due to business closures and social distancing during the height of the pandemic. While the situation improved following the return of... View Details

September 2020
Case

Uber at a Crossroads (2017)

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Karen Elterman

This case describes the history of Uber, its business model—including the ways it differed from that of the traditional taxi industry—and its competition with Lyft. The case is set in 2017, a year in which Uber was plagued by even more scandals than usual, though its... View Details