Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,271)
- Faculty Publications (569)
- 2008
- Chapter
When Learning and Performance Are at Odds: Confronting the Tension
By: Sara Jean Singer and A. C. Edmondson
This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance and then describe several challenges for researchers and managers who wish to study or promote learning in... View Details
- August 2008 (Revised June 2013)
- Background Note
Note on the Nonprofit Coherence Framework
By: Allen S. Grossman and Stacey Childress
This note presents the Nonprofit Coherence Framework. It helps nonprofit leaders identify the key elements that support an organizational strategy focused on attaining high performance, bring those elements into a coherent relationship with the strategy and each other,... View Details
- Article
Can They Take It with Them? The Portability of Star Knowledge Workers' Performance: Myth or Reality
By: Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee and Ashish Nanda
This paper examines the portability of star security analysts' performance. Star analysts who switched employers experienced an immediate decline in performance that persisted for at least five years. This decline was most pronounced among star analysts who moved to... View Details
- June 2008 (Revised May 2017)
- Case
Cook Composites and Polymers Co.
By: Deishin Lee, Michael W. Toffel and Rachel Gordon
This case describes how a company improves resource efficiency and process quality in its manufacturing process by developing a waste by-product into a new product. The case describes how CCP cleans production equipment between batches using styrene, which becomes a... View Details
- June 2008 (Revised October 2008)
- Case
AREVA T&D
By: Ananth Raman, Vincent Marie Dessain, Ane Damgaard Jensen and Gudrun Urfalino Kristinsdottir
The case explores the rapid and highly effective turnaround at AREVA's transmission and distribution (T and D) business by focusing on the division's operations. The division was struggling in 2004 when newly-appointed CEO Philippe Guillemot and his team improved... View Details
- Article
A Head Start on Succession
By: Joseph L. Bower
Our studies of CEO succession over the past several years have shown some improvements in the trends in CEO turnover, often resulting from outside pressures for improved oversight and better corporate governance. The next step in improving CEO succession—and ultimately... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
How Can Decision Making Be Improved?
By: Katherine L. Milkman, Dolly Chugh and Max H. Bazerman
The optimal moment to address the question of how to improve human decision making has arrived. Thanks to fifty years of research by judgment and decision making scholars, psychologists have developed a detailed picture of the ways in which human judgment is bounded.... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Future of Social Enterprise
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Herman B. Leonard and Susan McDonald
The Future of Social Enterprise considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. We trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to... View Details
- 2008
- Report
Survey Questionnaire on Environmental Management Practices: Summary of Results by Industry and Practices
By: Magali Delmas and Michael W. Toffel
This document provides a summary of the results of a survey on Environmental Management Practices (EMP) conducted by the University of California at Santa Barbara during October and November 2003. The survey was sent to 3255 facilities in 8 industrial sectors: pulp,... View Details
- April 2008
- Teaching Note
Exercise: Challenging Operational Assumptions
By: Frances X. Frei and Christine van Keuren
Teaching Note for [608128]. View Details
- April 2008
- Case
Ophthalmic Consultants of Boston and Dr. Bradford J. Shingleton (2004)
By: H. Kent Bowen and Marcelo Pancotto
Dr. Bradford Shingleton has developed some of the highest quality eye surgery techniques in the industry. He involves his nurses and technicians in creating a surgical service that is constantly improving. The case has many details about how Dr. Shingleton works with... View Details
- April 2008
- Exercise
Exercise: Customer-Operator Letter Writing
By: Frances X. Frei
The exercise involves having students write letters to an organization of their choice describing their operating experience at a detailed level. The companies' responses are paired with the students' letters and the entire collection is made available to the class.... View Details
- April 2008
- Module Note
Improvement with Customer-Operators
By: Frances X. Frei and Dennis Campbell
Taught as the third module in a Harvard Business School course on Managing Service Operations: Understanding the Customer Operating Role (606-092). Explores how firms can systematically leverage their customer-operators in the organizational improvement process is... View Details
- March 2008
- Exercise
Exercise: Challenging Operational Assumptions
By: Frances X. Frei
This exercise provides students with an opportunity to thoroughly test an operating assumption. Students state an assumption as a testable hypothesis, collect and analyze relevant data, and communicate the results. At HBS, it is incorporated in a second-year elective... View Details
- March – April 2008
- Article
Interorganizational Trust, Governance Choice, and Exchange Performance
By: Ranjay Gulati and Jackson Nickerson
This paper looks at when and how preexisting interorganizational trust influences the choice of governance and in turn the performance of exchange relationships. We theorize that preexisting interorganizational trust complements the choice of governance mode (make,... View Details
- February 2008
- Article
Does Focus Improve Operational Performance? Lessons from the Management of Clinical Trials
By: Robert S. Huckman and Darren Zinner
- January 2008 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Comcast New England: A Journey of Organizational Transformation
By: Michael Beer and Anita Arun
This case describes how Kevin Casey, Comcast's New England Region general manager, transformed a low commitment and performance organization. When he took charge of this Comcast region he inherited an organization that was bureaucratic, had low customer satisfaction,... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Becoming a New Manager
By: Linda A. Hill
You've just been promoted to a managerial position for the first time—congratulations! But beware: the managerial role differs markedly from the individual contributor role. Go into the job with mistaken assumptions about what to expect, and you just may be blindsided... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy
By: John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz
Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In "Greater Good", the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function—and does so democratically.... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Mastering the Management System
By: Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton
Companies have always found it hard to balance pressing operational concerns with long-term strategic priorities. The tension is critical: World-class processes won't lead to success without the right strategic direction, and the best strategy in the world will get... View Details