Publications

May 2024
Case

LinkedIn Corporation, 2024

By: David B. Yoffie, George Gonzalez and Emily Grandjean

By 2024, the LinkedIn profile was well established as the professional identity of record on the Internet. Following a multi-year effort to expand the platform’s user base, as well as a period of rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, LinkedIn’s membership had... View Details

Keywords: Platform; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Goals and Objectives; Social Media; Network Effects; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Evaluation; Technology Industry; Employment Industry; Sunnyvale

May 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Hakluyt: From Corporate Intelligence to Trusted Advisors

By: Joseph B. Fuller and Lena Duchene

Established in 1995 by a group of ex-British intelligence officers, Hakluyt & Company (Hakluyt) was a corporate advisory firm that generated insights by leveraging a unique blend of internal expertise and a global network of well-connected individuals. Since 2019, the... View Details

May 2024
Case

HarvEast

By: Jeremy Friedman and Natalie Kindred

In late 2023, Dmitry Skornyakov, CEO of Ukrainian agribusiness HarvEast, was navigating the turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in 2014 and escalated into full-scale war in February 2022. Before the full-scale invasion, HarvEast managed 127,000... View Details

Keywords: Goods and Commodities; Natural Resources; Food; Problems and Challenges; Adaptation; Innovation and Management; Crisis Management; Logistics; Supply Chain; Risk and Uncertainty; Loss; Trust; Human Needs; War; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Chile; South America; Latin America; Ukraine

April 2024
Case

Michelin in Motion: Putting Purpose to Work

By: Hubert Joly, Nitin Nohria and Emilie Billaud

When he became CEO, facing limited growth prospects, a low valuation, and therefore a stagnating share price, Menegaux and his team launched a set of initiatives to reposition Michelin. These included (1) articulating a clear purpose (“We care about giving people a... View Details

April 2024
Case

Dr. Tom Mihaljevic and Cleveland Clinic

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag

In December 2022, Dr. Tomislav (“Tom”) Mihaljevic, CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic, was reflecting on the last few years at the hospital, marked both by unprecedented challenges and remarkable achievements. Cleveland Clinic had recently been ranked the world’s... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Human-Computer Interactions in Demand Forecasting and Labor Scheduling Decisions

By: Caleb Kwon, Ananth Raman and Jorge Tamayo

We investigate whether corporate officers should grant managers discretion to override AI-driven demand forecasts and labor scheduling tools. Analyzing five years of administrative data from a large grocery retailer using such an AI tool, encompassing over 500 stores,... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Forecasting and Prediction; Working Conditions; Performance Productivity

April 2024
Article

A Machine Learning Algorithm Predicting Risk of Dilating VUR among Infants with Hydronephrosis Using UTD Classification

By: Hsin-Hsiao Scott Wang, Michael Lingzhi Li, Dylan Cahill, John Panagides, Tanya Logvinenko, Jeanne Chow and Caleb Nelson

Backgrounds: Urinary Tract Dilation (UTD) classification has been designed to be a more objective grading system to evaluate antenatal and post-natal UTD. Due to unclear association between UTD classifications to specific anomalies such as vesico-ureteral reflux (VUR),... View Details

Keywords: Health Disorders; Health Testing and Trials; AI and Machine Learning; Health Industry

March–April 2024
Article

Case Study: Navigating Labor Unrest

By: Jorge Tamayo

Paulo Ferreira, the president of Luna Brazil, has an ambitious plan to turn around the dismal performance of the plant he oversees in Campinas. The wrinkle is, he needs the buy-in of the powerful local union, which is still smarting from a 10-year-old labor conflict... View Details

Keywords: Strategy And Execution; Layoffs; Manufacturing; Labor and Management Relations; Labor Unions; Negotiation Tactics; Conflict and Resolution; Performance Improvement; Corporate Strategy; Manufacturing Industry; Brazil

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April 2024
Article

Fee Variation in Private Equity

By: Juliane Begenau and Emil N. Siriwardane

We study how investment fees vary within private-capital funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management and performance-based fees. Managers of venture capital funds... View Details

Keywords: Pension Funds; Fee Dispersion; Search And Negotiation Frictions; Private Equity; Investment Funds

March 2024
Module Note

Accounting Standards for the 21st Century

By: Jonas Heese

Over the past two decades, accounting standards have evolved to meet the demands of a rapidly changing business environment. This module note focuses on understanding the impact of these standards on measuring firm performance and financial position in the context of a... View Details

Keywords: Financial Statements; Standards; Performance Evaluation; Change Management

March 2024
Article

Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard

By: Kala Viswanathan, Matthew S. Johnson and Michael W. Toffel

Problem definition: Given the enormous disruptions and costs of occupational injuries, companies and buyers are increasingly looking to voluntary occupational health and safety standards to improve worker safety. Yet because these standards only require... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Health; Occupational Safety; Program Evaluation; Safety Performance; Injuries; OHSAS 18001; ISO 45001; Working Conditions; Safety; Standards

February 2024
Case

Chime Solutions

By: Shai Bernstein, William R. Kerr, Christopher Stanton, Raymond Kluender and Mel Martin

Just two years after launching its 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact firm... View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Service Operations; Recruitment; Performance; Change Management; Retention; Financial Institutions; Employee Relationship Management; Talent and Talent Management; Growth Management; Mission and Purpose; Communications Industry; Service Industry; United States

2024
Working Paper

Corporate Culture Homogeneity and Top Executive Incentive Design: Evidence from CEO Compensation Contracts

By: Dennis Campbell, Ruidi Shang and Zhifang Zhang

We examine how corporate cultures characterized by high degrees of homogeneity in the underlying values and beliefs of organizational members are related to the design of CEO incentive compensation contracts. We argue that culture homogeneity within firms lowers... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Culture; Compensation Design; Accounting; Management Control; Incentive Systems; Organizational Culture; Job Design and Levels; Governance; Executive Compensation; Motivation and Incentives

2024
Working Paper

Warnings and Endorsements: Improving Human-AI Collaboration Under Covariate Shift

By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo and Kris Ferreira

Problem definition: While artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms may perform well on data that are representative of the training set (inliers), they may err when extrapolating on non-representative data (outliers). These outliers often originate from covariate shift,... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Decision Choices and Conditions

January 2024
Supplement

Winning Business at Russell Reynolds

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

Keywords: Restructuring; Talent and Talent Management; Compensation and Benefits; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Motivation and Incentives; Consulting Industry

January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)

By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg

In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details

January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Pioneer Natural Resources: Enhancing the Capital Return Strategy with Variable Dividends

By: Benjamin C. Esty, Elisabeth Kempf and E. Scott Mayfield

In February 2021, Scott Sheffield, the CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources (an independent oil and gas company based in Texas), was considering the possibility of enhancing the firm’s capital return strategy by introducing a variable dividend tied to cash flows in... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Finance; Cash Flow; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Value Creation; Decision Choices and Conditions; Investment Return; Profit; Policy; Business and Shareholder Relations; Energy Industry; United States; North America; Texas

January 2024 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Uncle Nearest: Creating a Legacy

By: Hise Gibson, Archie L. Jones, Nicole Gilmore and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone

Fawn Weaver, as a Black woman and industry outsider in a capital-intensive, highly regulated, competitive and male-dominated spirits industry, successfully overcame numerous obstacles to launch a premium American whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest in 2017, which became the... View Details

January 2024
Supplement

Accounting Red Flags or Red Herrings at Catalent? (B)

By: Joseph Pacelli, ZeSean Ali and Tom Quinn

GlassHouse Research identified accounting red flags at Catalent. Fiat Lux Partners countered most of GlassHouse’s claims. Who was right? This update explores the aftermath of the short seller duel. View Details