Publications

02 Nov 2020
What Do You Think?

Is Antitrust Just a Quaint Notion in the Digital Age?

billion in sales and a dominant share of the office supply superstore industry—but only a 6 to 8 percent share of the overall office products market. I remember it well. I was the member of Office Depot’s board acting as the liaison to... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products; Consumer Products

01 May 2000
What Do You Think?

Can You Hard-Wire Performance?

success to the success of its engines in delivering valuable up-time to ultimate customers. But it did much more than that. By guaranteeing up-time at a given cost, GE's management created a built-in incentive to improve the View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

November 1994 (Revised November 1994)
Case

MW Petroleum Corporation (A)

By: Timothy A. Luehrman, Peter Tufano and Barbara Wall

Amoco Corp. is negotiating to sell a wholly-owned subsidiary, MW Petroleum, to Apache Corp. MW owns large reserves of oil and gas comprising many properties at different stages of engineering, development, and production. The proposed acquisition is a large one for... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Business Subsidiaries; Mining; Cash Flow; Stock Options; Financing and Loans; Price; Negotiation; Production; Valuation; Mining Industry

November 1987 (Revised January 1988)
Case

Groen: A Dover Industries Company

By: Francis Aguilar

Describes the challenges facing the president of an old-line foodservice and food processing equipment manufacturing company as it attempted to accelerate sales and profit growth through the introduction of innovative products. The introduction of a "revolutionary"... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Labor and Management Relations; Machinery and Machining; Management Style; Management Teams; Performance Efficiency; Technological Innovation; Product Development; Organizational Culture

12 Feb 2016
Op-Ed

The Real Jobs Tragedy in the US: We've Lost the Skills

production sector overall, there would seem to be no shortage of workers, with 19 current workers for each opening. But in certain skilled production occupations, like electrical View Details

Keywords: by Joe Fuller and Matt Sigelman; Manufacturing; Electronics

29 May 2001
Research & Ideas

Race Does Matter in Mentoring

interest of privacy, I have used pseudonyms for the participants.) Williams, an African-American, was born and raised in a middle-class neighborhood in Washington, DC. After earning his bachelor's degree at one of the nation's leading colleges, he began his career as a... View Details

Keywords: by David A. Thomas

10 Dec 2001
Research & Ideas

Governance in India and Around the Globe

Indian software maker Infosys specifically, and other Indian firms more generally.We document the under-studied effect that global product and labor markets can play in the convergence of corporate governance systems worldwide. This... View Details

Keywords: by Tarun Khanna & Krishna Palepu; Technology

02 Dec 2019
What Do You Think?

How Does a Company like Boeing Respond to Intense Competitive Pressure?

operating or engineering jobs (“who don’t understand the big picture,” according to those at headquarters); between officers and enlisted personnel in the military; between doctors and hospital administrators; and between faculty and... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Air Transportation

14 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Keeping Your Balance With Customers

value" of a customer. Customer growth strategies generally involve striving to expand the share of each customer's spending by expanding the company's range of products or services. This involves cross-selling to and partnering with... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton

08 Jun 2010
First Look

First Look: June 8

to accomplish the following: mine your sales data to identify "homerun" products you're missing; reinvent your forecasting and pricing strategies; build end-to-end agility into your supply chain; establish incentives that align... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Building Competitive Advantage Through Operations

It's the set of processes that transforms either materials or information into a product or service. EE: How has this definition evolved over the past decade? Upton: There have been some exciting changes in recent years. First, operations... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

05 Jun 2000
What Do You Think?

What’s Happening to Our Patience?

our spare time so we kill it." I assume he means that we engineer our lives so that we are always busy, thereby avoiding spare time. Aurin Bhattacharjee admonishes us to "moderate our ways and appreciate the passage of time for... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

November 1987 (Revised March 1988)
Case

Searching for Trade Remedies: The U.S. Machine Tool Industry--1983

By: David B. Yoffie

In 1983 the National Machine Tools Builder Association was predicting a declining market for the United States and rising imports. Machine tool manufacturers had to decide if they should ask the U.S. government for help, and if they did, which administrative channels... View Details

Keywords: Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Machinery and Machining; Government and Politics; Law; Production; Business and Government Relations; Competition; Manufacturing Industry; Japan; Germany; United States

Find at Harvard

11 Mar 2013
Research & Ideas

Marissa Mayer Should Bridge Distance Gap with Remote Workers

Finnish-American artist and an engineer father, a Midwesterner, and an accomplished engineer in her own right. This personalization alone could help get others past their simplistic thinking about her. And... View Details

Keywords: by Lakshmi Ramarajan; Publishing; Web Services

06 Apr 2016
What Do You Think?

As Tim Cook, How Would You Tackle Apple's Next Challenge?

the jobs most central to product security. According to one report, “The leader of the Core OS Security Engineering team, Dallas DeAtley, left the security division last year to work in a different part of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Computer

05 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

Venture Capital Goes Boom—or Bust?

Ninety percent of new entrepreneurial businesses that don't attract venture capital fail within three years. A software engineer at the government contractor EG&G, Don Brooks had been working on computer systems for the Idaho National... View Details

Keywords: by Paul A. Gompers & Josh Lerner

August 2014 (Revised March 2015)
Case

Molycorp: Issuing the 'Happy Meal' Securities (B)

By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield

Molycorp, the Western hemisphere's only producer of rare earth minerals, was in the middle of a $1 billion capital expansion in its effort to become a vertically integrated supplier of rare earth minerals, oxides, and metals. After reporting lower than expected... View Details