Slack Time - Publications - Faculty & Research

19 Oct 2022
Op-Ed

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

many times your cofounding team will disagree on things—from product and hiring decisions to operating procedures and a fundraising strategy—and how you process these decisions together is fundamental to a healthy cofounding relationship.... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

16 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

How the Coronavirus Is Already Rewriting the Future of Business

remote work tech tools. Find a colleague who has used Slack and Zoom and set up a tutorial and get a sense of how to use these tools and what their functionality is like. Hopefully the virus will go away soon, but those tools will stay... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

01 Sep 2015
First Look

First Look -- September 1, 2015

reality, such as when taking another test on which they cannot cheat? We find that self-deception diminishes over time only when self-deceivers are repeatedly confronted with evidence of their true ability (Study 1); this learning,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

01 Sep 2006
What Do You Think?

Are We Ready for Self-Management?

specific task within a certain time frame." Self-management is perhaps an extreme case of what we have found, in our research, to be one of the features of high-performance work places that are most attractive to the people who work... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

30 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

The New Rules for Remote Work: Pandemic Edition

leaders need a new game plan. We asked Harvard Business School professors to provide practical advice for managing large-scale, long-term remote work at a time when many employees are not only distracted by the commotion in their homes,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

13 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis

What." Since 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Kind of Blue, it's a good time to ask: How did he do it? One of the answers is "radical simplicity," according to HBS professor Robert D. Austin and Carl... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Music

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

question," says Steve Harris, vice president of ABS Consulting, Oakland, Calif. Risk can be viewed as the product of frequency times consequence. That means a high-frequency/low-consequence event, such as the regular fluctuation of... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

04 Oct 2024
In Practice

Research-Based Advice for the Seasonally Overwhelmed and Schedule Challenged

aside time to focus that can help restore work-life balance. Joseph Fuller: Make time for ‘deep work’ at the office and home People have struggled to balance the demands of work and their personal lives... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

24 Sep 2024
Research & Ideas

Why Small Businesses Deserve More Credit

It’s Wall Street doctrine that small firms struggle to raise capital at reasonable rates and are often rejected for credit lines and loans because banks think their risk profile is too high. “If you really want to drive investment, targeting those firms that look like... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services; Banking

05 Nov 2024
Research & Ideas

AI Can Help Leaders Communicate, But Can't Make Employees Listen

If a chatbot can Slack convincingly in the boss’s voice, will employees follow orders once they realize the CEO is actually a machine? A novel two-part study finds that an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot trained to write like a... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Information Technology; Technology

12 Nov 2018
Research & Ideas

'Always On' Isn't Always Best for Team Decision-Making

collaboration encouraged by today’s communication tools like Slack and Skype good or bad for finding the best answer? “I don’t want there to be zero communication, but I do think that transparency and communication do have downsides"... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland

03 Nov 2022
Op-Ed

Feeling Separation Anxiety at Your Startup? 5 Tips to Soothe These Growing Pains

background (or theirs). These are invaluable opportunities to build a connection with your team. Unstructured time is simply ensuring you’re not tied up in meetings all day and have blocks of open time to... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

31 Oct 2014
Op-Ed

Ebola’s Call To Arms About Disaster Preparedness

Ebola. Furthermore, in the interest of efficiency, we've decreased the number of beds available for extreme cases, leaving ourselves unable to admit patients in the face of an epidemic. There's a constant trade-off between efficiency and View Details

Keywords: by Gautam Mukunda; Health

19 Jul 2010
Research & Ideas

How Mercadona Fixes Retail’s ’Last 10 Yards’ Problem

Imagine a retail chain that offers customers not only the lowest prices but also personalized customer service. Employees receive above-average wages and 20 times more training than the average American retailer. Sounds like a recipe for... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail; Food & Beverage

13 Jan 2016
Research & Ideas

The Problem with Productivity of Multi-Ethnic Teams

less productive. ©iStock/Uberimages “We were afraid teams would spend less effort finding households of different ethnicities, and they would spend all of their time trying to register their own people in order to gain power,” says Pons.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

22 Jan 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, January 22, 2019

about innovation. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55477 November–December 2018 Organization Science Slack Time and Innovation By: Agrawal, Ajay, Christian Catalini, Avi... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

10 Feb 2003
Research & Ideas

Women at Work

Cohen It was quite an adjustment. "I had to update my skills and relearn about business," Fishman Cohen said. She found a job at Bain and devoted herself utterly and full-time to her career while her husband worked three-quarters View Details

Keywords: by Wendy Guild

22 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

What's the Ideal Frequency for a Sales Quota?

in Sweden. For decades, the company had compensated sales people with a base salary and a monthly quota. But anecdotes from regional managers indicated it might be time for a change—largely thanks to the weather. “In Sweden what happens... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 Mar 2008
What Do You Think?

Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?

since the early part of the twentieth century, he believes the time may be right for significant change. He's not alone. Theodore Zeldin, a British historian who has spent a great deal of time studying the... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

14 May 2020
Research & Ideas

What Leaders Can Do to Fight the COVID Fog

deftly: “How to most effectively communicate with all employees remotely and show empathy, while running around with [my] hair on fire trying to save the current business while at the same time trying to shape the future of the company in... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

Publications