Publications

24 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

The Yelp Factor: Are Consumer Reviews Good for Business?

reviews over professional critics, but also because of its historical database that tracks every review. Luca compared the ratings over time with revenue data from the state of Washington to gauge how reviews impacted restaurants' bottom... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Food & Beverage

06 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

Did You Hear What I Said? How to Listen Better

conversation; sometimes, we are even thinking about the last thing someone said and end up missing the next thing. “We suspect that many people struggle with competing motives while they speak and listen,” Brooks says. “Their minds... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

03 Oct 2005
Research & Ideas

The Box Office Power of Stars

the dynamics of star power. Can studios depend on a star's track record as a predictor of future success? Are two "A-list" stars better than one? Can stars improve a studio's overall profitability as well as kick up box office... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Entertainment & Recreation; Motion Pictures & Video

31 Oct 2007
HBS Case

Climate Change Puts Heat on GMs

What is the responsibility of business regarding social issues? And how does that jibe with maximizing profits? In "UBS and Climate Change—Warming Up to Global Action?" Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Professor Forest Reinhardt present the... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Energy; Utilities

21 Nov 2023
Research & Ideas

Employee Negativity Is Like Wildfire. Manage It Before It Spreads.

a function of the wind, and whether its overall intensity is increasing or decreasing.” Thinking about managing collective emotions is like thinking about controlling a fire. You care less about the individual trees and more about whether the fire is picking View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

22 Aug 2016
Research & Ideas

Master the One-on-One Meeting

career. From the nerdiest, most introverted engineer to the highly extroverted sales executive. They’ve been on either side of up to 20 years senior or junior to me, varying genders and from as far away as India and China to as near as... View Details

Keywords: by Julia B. Austin

2012
Working Paper

No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events

By: Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier and Felix Oberholzer-Gee

One of the benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, it has been argued, is that they build up a reservoir of public good will, shielding companies in times of trouble. In this paper, we test the view that CSR provides protection from public ire by... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Crisis Management; Media; Newspapers; Business and Community Relations; Corporate Strategy

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October 31, 2017
Article

In Tackling #MeToo, Don’t Ignore Micro-Insults That Harm Women’s Careers

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter

The Harvey Weinstein horror show has brought attention to previously unspoken abuses of male power to sexually harass and suppress women. Prominent women are joining the #MeToo moment, feeling safety in numbers as they reveal facing egregious bullying. Businesses are... View Details

Keywords: Sexual Harassment; Gender Inequality; Gender; Equality and Inequality; Change; Safety; Corporate Governance

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14 Mar 2018
Research & Ideas

Feeling Stressed? Try Sniffing Your Romantic Partner's Shirt

five hours of removal. The t-shirts were frozen to preserve the scent and thawed two hours before the stress test experiment began. (Pro tip: Freezing an item of clothing will preserve the wearer’s scent for up to two years, according to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

May 2022
Case

Maestro Pizza: Coming in Hot!

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Fares Khrais

Maestro Pizza opened its first store in 2013 after its founder, Khalid Al Omran, recognized an opportunity in Saudi Arabia to offer high quality pizza at affordable prices. The business grew rapidly and under the radar at first, but soon enough caught the attention of... View Details

Article

The Right and Wrong Way to Do ‘CEO Activism’

By: Aaron K Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel

CEO activism—where leaders take public stands on controversial social and political issues that aren’t related to their company’s bottom line—has become increasingly common. CEO activism has attracted favorable media attention, but has also resulted in backlash and... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Social Issues; Communication Strategy; Performance Effectiveness

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October 1991 (Revised December 1993)
Case

Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream, Inc.: Keeping the Mission(s) Alive

Ben & Jerry's is an anti-establishment, values-driven company that has become a successful venture. The dominant founder, Ben Cohen, is not an effective manager, but he brings creative marketing and product skills that have been important to the company's success. He... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Manufacturing Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

January 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Digital Transformation at Tata Steel

By: Krishna Palepu, Das Narayandas, Radhika Kak and Rachna Tahilyani

T.V. Narendran, CEO of Tata Steel, India’s oldest steel manufacturing firm, had taken concrete business and cultural transformation steps to future-ready the firm since taking over in 2013. He had deleveraged and instilled financial discipline, acquired new businesses,... View Details

Keywords: Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Change Management; Growth and Development Strategy; E-commerce; Steel Industry; Asia; India

June 2010
Case

Digital Link (A)

The Digital Link (A) and (B) cases present the struggles of a small public technology company to get and maintain analyst and investor attention during the "dot-com boom" of the 1990's. The case can be used in MBA or Executive Education classes. The (A) case takes... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Institutional Investing; Public Ownership

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21 Aug 2000
Research & Ideas

Inside the OR: Disrupted Routines and New Technologies

that dictate speaking patterns are sharply delineated. Thus, practicing a new kind of the team interdependence went deeply against the norm." Psychological safety—how comfortable team members felt in speaking up in the... View Details

Keywords: by Hilah Geer

July 2006 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Lenovo: Building A Global Brand

By: John A. Quelch and Carin-Isabel Knoop

Announced in December 2004, the $1.75 billion acquisition of IBM's PC division by Lenovo, China's largest PC maker, made headlines around the world. A relative upstart in the business, Lenovo acquired the division of IBM that invented the PC in 1981. While Lenovo was... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Multinational Firms and Management; Information Infrastructure; Global Strategy; Acquisition; Brands and Branding; Manufacturing Industry; Computer Industry; China

16 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

Is Your Workplace Biased Against Introverts?

passion can quietly enable organizational biases against more introspective employees, Jachimowicz and his team say, as studies show that extroverts get more attention from managers in the form of resources, raises, and promotions. The... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights

By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman

In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Technological Innovation; Communication; Performance Effectiveness; Sales; Customer Satisfaction; Competitive Strategy

2022
Chapter

Capitalism and the Environment

By: Geoffrey Jones

Capitalism drove the environmental decimation of the planet. The environment was seen as a free good, while the consequences of dirty industrial and agricultural processes were seen as external to the firm. Public policies largely allowed this to happen, as politicians... View Details

Keywords: History; Environment; Sustainability; Capitalism; Ethics; Business History; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Pollution; Climate Change