by Bill Kirby - Publications - Faculty & Research

15 Feb 2017
Op-Ed

What Africa Can Teach the United States About Funding Infrastructure Projects

President Trump’s infrastructure plan and a counterproposal by Senate Democrats are rising toward the top of the national agenda. All agree that there is a pressing need to fix the collapsing bridges, potholed roads, crashing trains, and... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction

22 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

Advertising: It’s Not ‘Mad Men’ Anymore

billings of the largest 500 firms or so. By contrast, Silk and King analyzed data from the US Census Bureau that includes revenue from some 10,000 agencies of all sizes, over half of which are small and... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Advertising

29 Oct 2000
Research & Ideas

The Entrepreneurial Venture: A Conversation

changing corporate world beset by reorganization, downsizing, and recession. Of that group, the Bulletin asked four members of the class to share some of their views on sizing up and seizing opportunity. Their discussion gives insights... View Details

Keywords: by Susan Young

16 Aug 2024
In Practice

Election 2024: What's at Stake for Business and the Workplace?

Kamala Harris was part of an administration that passed the largest climate combat bill in history, and Governor Tim Walz led Minnesota to declare a goal of zero carbon emissions by 2040. The other side... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

24 Jul 2006
Research & Ideas

How Kayak Users Built a New Industry

from these standards. By the same token, the dominant design of rodeo kayaks (as of about 2000) involves a short, center-buoyant, planing hull made of molded plastic. Bill Abernathy of HBS and Jim Utterback... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Entertainment & Recreation

07 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

Big Infrastructure May Not Always Produce Big Benefits

vis-a-vis local financial development in districts all along the route, is the first paper to connect microlevel financial development with infrastructure development. The paper, Infrastructure and Finance: Evidence from India's GQ Highway Network, is coauthored View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Construction

11 Apr 2000
Research & Ideas

Financial Services 24/7

brave new world. The transformation ignited by the Internet is creating a new paradigm in the financial services industry, characterized by surprising business structures. "The competitive landscape is... View Details

Keywords: by Susan Young

28 Oct 2015
Research & Ideas

A Dedication to Creation: India's Ad Man Ranjan Kapur

One day in 1966 while Ranjan Kapur was walking in midtown Manhattan, a black limo pulled up alongside. A man he instantly recognized as advertising icon David Ogilvy, founder of the agency where Kapur had recently been hired, stepped out and greeted him View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Advertising

05 Oct 2009
Research & Ideas

The Vanguard Corporation

communities like leeches. The time is ripe for a new corporate model, driven by a new type of business leader, where creating business value also means creating value for society. Surprisingly, Kanter finds models for these so-called... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

11 May 2011
Research & Ideas

Building a Better Board

has been a tremendous shift to the better over the past 15 years” By the time he retired in 2002, the board-serving landscape had changed considerably. These days, serving on a few boards can comprise almost a full-time job. While... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

23 Aug 2004
Research & Ideas

New Challenges for Long-Term Investors

individual's portfolio to his or her age (young investors should take more risk with stocks) and attitudes toward risk (conservative investors should hold more cash). Research done by Harvard Business School finance professor Luis M.... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

Balancing the Future Against Today’s Needs

Bill George, now a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. "Innovators need to be able to try things out, fail, correct them, and then bring them back into the organization." You really need to develop two... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Michelman

07 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The Debate over Taxing Foreign Profits

the right to tax those profits as well. Second, when the United States imposes its taxes on Cummins's German activity, the government provides some relief for the foreign taxes paid by Cummins to avoid double taxation of overseas profits.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

20 Dec 2004
Research & Ideas

How an Order Views Your Company

into the business to the day the product departs the shipping dock. The researchers encouraged businesses to think of that order as the actual customer, and watched as they routed that person here and there among departments, perhaps ignored View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

26 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

A Better Way to Negotiate: Backward

management. Instead, Perlman mapped backward from his VC target, reasoning that WebTV's appeal and value to the VCs would be greatly enhanced by partnership with a prominent consumer electronics firm. Perlman started View Details

Keywords: by James K. Sebenius

August 2018 (Revised April 2019)
Case

Chateau Winery (A): Unsupervised Learning

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

This case follows Bill Booth, marketing manager of a regional wine distributor, as he applies unsupervised learning on data about his customers’ purchases to better understand their preferences. Specifically, he uses the K-means clustering technique to identify groups... View Details

Keywords: Clustering; Data Science; Analytics and Data Science; Customers; Marketing; Analysis

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December 2009 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Phreesia: The Patient Intake Company

By: Regina E. Herzlinger

How should the co-founders of an organization that provides patient sign-in and billing services scale their company after five years of successfully targeting small private physician practices? Phreesia had deployed a direct mail and sales force strategy that resulted... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Social Entrepreneurship; Revenue; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

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Research Summary

Political Economy and Effects of Gun Policy

In two projects with Mike Luca and Deepak Malhotra, I examine the causes and consequences of gun policy.

The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy

There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in... View Details

Keywords: Gun Policy; Firearms; Political Economy; United States

June 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Communities In Schools (Atlanta): Innovating a College Program

By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Lynda M. Applegate and Alexis Lefort

Frank Brown, CIS of Atlanta's new Black CEO, was keen to extend CIS's well-honed case management in schools program to youth in college. Founded 50 years ago by Bill Milliken, CIS, a network of 110 affiliates, had built a strong program of assisting and supporting... View Details

Keywords: Decisions; Education; Expansion; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Atlanta

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March 2021 (Revised May 2021)
Case

ALDDN: Advancing Local Dairy Development in Nigeria

By: Meg Rithmire and Debora L. Spar

In 2020, Ndidi Nwuneli, founder and CEO of Sahel Consulting in Nigeria, faced a thorny set of problems. Her firm partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a large project to develop the local dairy industry as a way to facilitate equitable growth and... View Details