management consulting - Publications - Faculty & Research

14 Jun 2021
Op-Ed

When Your Nerves Get the Best of You, Change the Narrative

consultants in a wide range of organizations, and they had taught in executive education for years. I had neither a consulting nor a teaching background. Walking to class, knowing that more than 90... View Details

Keywords: by Francesca Gino

November 2002 (Revised October 2003)
Case

Circles: Series D Financing

By: Paul W. Marshall and Kristin Lieb

Circles, a corporate concierge company on the verge of profitability, must make a decision whether to take a D-round venture capital despite ever-changing and ever-worsening terms. A four-year-old company with several major clients, it has met its business plan... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Financing and Loans; Management Teams; Growth and Development Strategy; Negotiation Process; Venture Capital; Governing and Advisory Boards; Entrepreneurship; Consulting Industry; Consulting Industry; Massachusetts

Citation

Educators

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16 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

Can Consumers Be Saved From Their Misguided Decisions?

on the problem. Then ask yourself—are those assumptions justified, and what are the things I don’t know? And what can I do to figure that out?” Rachel Layne is a freelance writer based in the Boston area. Related Reading: You're Fired: View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Consulting; Consulting

10 Apr 2014
Research & Ideas

John Kotter’s Plan to Accelerate Your Business

learned while working with clients through his consulting firm, Kotter International. As Kotter was writing the book, he spent time meeting with C-level execs and their teams, observing the dual operating system ideas in action, he says.... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

04 May 2015
Research & Ideas

Need to Solve a Problem? Take a Break From Collaborating

firms do that already. "These results seem to make a lot of sense to organizations like The Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey & Company, which deliberately use very different structures for different functional stages of a... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Video Game; Web Services

12 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets

consultant with National Economics Research Associates on high-profile antitrust cases: Microsoft and Visa, mainly. Economics consulting is very different from management... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

22 Oct 2019
Research & Ideas

Use Artificial Intelligence to Set Sales Targets That Motivate

lies in finding the sweet spot between these two undesirable outcomes, and determining how compensation can motivate salespeople best. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Chung and several executives from the consulting firm... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

29 Apr 2008
First Look

First Look: April 29, 2008

Working PapersNone this week Cases & Course MaterialsAvaya (A) Harvard Business School Case 508-048 Avaya's top management wants to improve demand generation. This requires an improvement in the relationship between Sales and... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

16 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

The Most Successful Startups Have Hands-On Founders

everything or giving (workers) only the bad parts of the task,” he says. Companies should invest in peer learning Companies often opt for formal training programs or consulting arrangements with instructors who teach entrepreneurs how to... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

05 Jan 2010
First Look

First Look: January 5

are not driven by reverse causality. These patterns are not driven solely by common law nations such as the United Kingdom and United States, but also hold in Continental Europe. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/10-045.pdf Going Through the Motions:... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

03 Jan 2023
Book

Confront Workplace Inequity in 2023: Dig Deep, Build Bridges, Take Collective Action

data-id=_/STdeHQndptXujGr22R1f][/div] An associate professor of management at Babson College and founder of the Opie Consulting Group, Opie is Black and Christian. She collaborated with Beth Livingston,... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Budgeting Kills Your Company

keep a tight rein on costs—but the dynamics of the budgeting process often undermine this effort. "In tough times like these, any significant real cost growth feels imprudent and is hard to justify for most businesses," writes Mike Baxter, a partner in the... View Details

Keywords: by Loren Gary

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

management," says Cespedes, a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School. "But far fewer confront a basic fact: Companies typically spend much more money and hire many more people,... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

July 2019 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Acelerex

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In early 2019, Randell Johnson, Founder and Chief Executive of Acelerex, was reflecting on the company’s first year of rapid growth and the challenges of scaling the business that lay ahead. Acelerex was riding the waves of change taking place in electrical power grids... View Details

Keywords: Energy; Energy Sources; Growth Management; Expansion; Global Strategy; Cash Flow; Energy Industry; Web Services Industry; Consulting Industry

Citation

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28 Nov 2005
Research & Ideas

Unilever: Transformation and Tradition

of any business that it wished. This proved to be an illusion, but it was one widely shared within the business world at the time. Diversification was the fashion of the moment, which managers were constantly under pressure to follow from... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones; Consumer Products

06 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

Does Hybrid Work Actually Work? Insights from 30,000 Emails

opposite. The results showed that hybrid workers produced more novel work than the other two groups, with managers subjectively rating their work as higher quality than the others. Choudhury notes that the new working paper may be the... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

05 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Six Ways to Build Trust in Negotiations

What began as a misunderstanding about specifications and deadlines between a manager at RLX, a software development firm, and a manager at Impress, one of its clients, had escalated into a conflict charged... View Details

Keywords: by Deepak Malhotra

01 Dec 2008
Lessons from the Classroom

How Many U.S. Jobs Are ‘Offshorable’?

members of the workforce.” As background material, students read an overview case, "The Offshoring of America," as well as "Monitor's Opportunities in India," a case that follows the decision-making process of the consulting group's CEO... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

23 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Are Great Teams Less Productive?

Learning promotes performance—is there any argument? Without learning, organizations, teams, and managers are stuck in yesterday's world. In fact, says Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, there are built-in tensions between... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

October 2009 (Revised April 2010)
Case

Societe Generale (A): The Jerome Kerviel Affair

By: Francois Brochet

This case illustrates the tension/balance that firms with complex and risky business models must consider in designing their internal controls. It describes the environment in which a derivatives trader engaged in massive directional positions on major European stocks... View Details