Always On - Publications - Faculty & Research

03 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Transforming Manufacturing Waste into Profit

It's been said that "one man's trash is another man's treasure." HBS Assistant Professor Deishin Lee, however, has taken that old adage a step further in her recent working paper Turning Waste into By-Product by showing how it's possible for companies to turn... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing

22 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

When Agreeing to Disagree Is a Good Beginning

School’s Program on Negotiation. “What was it that they figured out that allowed for disagreement to be productive? What can we all do so that disagreement turns out to be productive rather than damaging?” Key, the researchers found, was... View Details

Keywords: by Clea Simon, Harvard Gazette

12 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

How Scale Changes a Manager's Responsibilities

employees, founding leaders confront an important reality: It’s time to let go. It’s simply impossible to be plugged into everything. At this stage, you are probably managing managers, and more than ever have to empower your leaders to, well, lead! They will not View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

16 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

Are You a Strategist?

powerful impact on practice. But the benefits have not come without costs." Montgomery maintains that strategy has been narrowed to a competitive game plan, separate from a firm's larger sense of purpose. This has led to the eclipse of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

21 Feb 2018
Research & Ideas

When a Competitor Abandons the Market, Should You Advance or Retreat?

the most similar to ours’—that means the same disease and same mechanism of action—‘and we’re ready to react when they have a result.’” (Acting on your competitor’s actions isn’t always so cut-and-dried,... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Pharmaceutical; Health

29 Sep 2022
Op-Ed

Inclusive Leadership Advice: Get Comfortable With the Uncomfortable

end. The other players may bring up topics that a performer knows nothing about. That’s okay: The goal is to always react purely in the moment. Consider the strategies required in two popular games, chess and ping-pong. When you play... View Details

Keywords: by Francesca Gino

18 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Industrial Decarbonization: Confronting the Hard Challenges of Cement

Cities like Cairo; Chongqing, China; Delhi; and Kinshasa, Congo are experiencing population explosions accompanied by unprecedented demand for homes, offices, factories, and infrastructure. In the United States, the Biden Administration’s policy-driven infrastructure... View Details

Keywords: by by Janelle Conaway; Green Technology; Energy; Industrial Products; Manufacturing

30 Jul 2018
Research & Ideas

Why Ethical People Become Unethical Negotiators

fraudulent fund, even though many suspected something was strange, since the low-risk fund had defied reality by dramatically outperforming the stock market several years in a row. “We were all aware of this hedge fund that had had great returns for 20 years,” recalled... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

28 Jan 2020
Book

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time is to be published today. Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. In addition to her many years of teaching and research at HBS,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

28 Nov 2023
Book

Economic Growth Draws Companies to Asia. Can They Handle Its Authoritarian Regimes?

Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. We asked Rithmire, the F. Warren MacFarlan Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, to provide insights on how business leaders might think about doing business in these... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

30 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Six Steps for Making Your Threat Credible

In the classic game of Chicken, two drivers on a crash course speed toward each other. The rules are simple: Whoever swerves first and avoids collision loses, and whoever is brave enough to stay the course wins. Of course, when both... View Details

Keywords: by Deepak Malhotra

05 Dec 2018
Research & Ideas

Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures

If you’re a business leader who oozes achievement, sprints up the corporate ladder, and earns big bucks, your co-workers probably resent you to some extent. New research says high-achievers can win over their colleagues with a simple approach: by sharing the failures... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

07 Jul 2011
What Do You Think?

So We Adapt. What’s the Downside?

Steel put it, "if something's worth doing, it's worth doing wrong Get on with it and see if it works." We are often admonished to "try a lot of things and keep what works." But Harford points out that this is easier... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

19 Jul 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Government 'Nudges' Motivate Good Citizen Behavior

reviewed every paper that was focused on that success metric and that was published in a top academic journal in the last 15 years. Analyzing the results, they didn’t always find that nudges were the most... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

01 Feb 2022
Book

Innovation Isn’t Just for Startups: How Big Companies Can Succeed

silicon chip, Analog would sell an answer." “Becoming a corporate explorer is not a route to a safe or easy career,” they write. However, Tushman and Binns explain in the following Q&A, explorers are the ones who lead established... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

25 Jan 2016
Research & Ideas

When Negotiating a Price, Never Bid with a Round Number

always been done. Fact is, in addition to proving the benefit of using precise numbers, social psychology scholars have shown that people are hardwired to communicate with round numbers, especially when they’re unaware of research telling... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

15 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

IT Job Wages Are No Longer 'Exceptional'

including two economic recessions. Smaller cities and rural areas were excluded because of missing data for at least one year during this time period. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Greenstein and Cao parsed both the... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Information Technology

08 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

Keep Your Weary Workers Engaged and Motivated

[This is the sixth installment in a monthly series on management issues in the time of COVID-19.] We recently asked 600 CEOs: What is keeping you awake at night during this global pandemic? A major and multifaceted concern that emerged is... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

07 Jul 2019
HBS Case

Walmart's Workforce of the Future

$409.9 billion to $476.2 billion. (Walmart closed 2,214 discount stores or converted them into other formats from 1993 to 2018, with 2,576 supercenters opening during that time.) In addition to increasing Walmart’s supercenter footprint, CEO Doug McMillon’s omnichannel... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail

19 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Birth of the American Salesman

same degree as the United States by the early twentieth century. There were many reasons for this: The emergence of salesmanship in the U.S. depended on a stable currency, the rule of law, the protection of private property, and the... View Details

Keywords: by Laura Linard

Publications