Business Failures - Publications - Faculty & Research

24 Feb 2021
Lessons from the Classroom

What History's Biggest Wars Teach Us About Leading in Peace

for corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. After all, leadership challenges, strategic choices, and high-stakes negotiations are constants not only in conflicts among nations, but in the business world, too, he points out. So View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

01 Sep 2023
News

Startup Success Beyond Silicon Valley

insights could business leaders gain from this phenomenon? “Entrepreneurship is no longer something we see exclusively in tech hubs like Silicon Valley,” says Gompers, the Eugene Holman Professor of Business... View Details

Keywords: Jennifer Mele

09 Feb 2004
Research & Ideas

Got a New Strategy? Now Make it Happen

Despite widespread rhetoric about the need for organizational agility, an astonishing number of businesses stay stuck in neutral when they need to implement a new strategy. Consider the situation that Lynne Camp faced in July 2000. Camp,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer & Russell A. Eisenstat

04 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Is Government Just Stupid? How Bad Decisions Are Made

decision making. These barriers are: Do no harm. Their gain is our loss. Competition is always good. Support our group. Live for the moment. No pain for us, no gain for them. The antidote? An approach used in the business schools, whereby... View Details

Keywords: by Max H. Bazerman, Jonathan Baron & Katherine Shonk

19 Oct 2022
Op-Ed

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

you likely did not have when you were colleagues at a business where someone else was accountable for the overall successes and failures and, likely, making more strategic decisions than you were privy to.... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

December 1997 (Revised October 2008)
Case

Wolfgang Keller at Konigsbrau-TAK (A)

By: John J. Gabarro

Wolfgang Keller, manager of the Ukrainian subsidiary of a German beer company, faces a managerial dilemma. His subordinate, Dmitri Brodsky, is a talented and experienced commercial director who is not meeting his goals expediently and often requires considerable... View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Performance Evaluation; Management Style; Managerial Roles; Behavior; Conflict Management; Situation or Environment; Failure; Employee Relationship Management; Food and Beverage Industry; Ukraine; Germany

Citation

Educators

Purchase

August 2009 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Intel NBI: Radio-Frequency Identification

By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston

The Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) group was a start-up that was part of Intel's New Business Initiatives. It sought initially to develop and sell a high performance Rf fast read rate module targeted at fixed position readers that might be found in loading docks... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Organizational Structure; Failure; Diversification; Integration; Semiconductor Industry

Citation

Find at Harvard

08 Sep 2022
Book

Gen Xers and Millennials, It’s Time To Lead. Are You Ready?

for Boomers to step aside, and for the new generation to step up,” says George, now an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. “They are the leaders we need.” Many Baby Boomers in the US are rejecting the idea of a quiet Florida... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

10 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

Breakthrough Negotiation: Don’t Leave It On the Table

In a new book, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts, Harvard Business School professor Michael Watkins dissects the art of give-and-take. This excerpt... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Watkins

28 Oct 2014
First Look

First Look: October 28

Designed around the course at Harvard Business School, Collis' new text takes the firm that operates across borders as a unit of analysis and the senior manager in a multinational as the typical decision maker. Illustrated with examples... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Cheap, Fast, and In Control: How Tech Aids Innovation

What are some of the new "star" technologies and how can the average business integrate them in order to conduct low-cost, rapid testing? We need to appreciate that new knowledge comes as much from View Details

Keywords: by Wendy Guild

08 Mar 2019
Research & Ideas

Seven Negotiation Lessons from Amazon's HQ Disaster in Queens

As Amazon’s stunning pullout from New York fades into the news archives, its potent lessons for business negotiators risk being lost. Highly promising deals in diffuse multiparty settings with many potential spoilers, like Amazon’s... View Details

Keywords: by James K. Sebenius; Real Estate; Construction

29 Jan 2018
Book

How 'Teaming' Saved 33 Lives in the Chilean Mining Disaster

is in process. Teaming, she says, is essential to organizational learning. In her new book Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership, Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: by Amy C. Edmondson; Mining

02 Apr 2020
What Do You Think?

What Are Lessons for Leaders from This Black Swan Crisis?

years The greatest COVID-19 failure was clearly the failure to adapt in time to an emerging threat.” Bill Wallace said, “I’m calling the COVID-19 pandemic a White Swan: inevitable through global mobility and... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

Web

Human Behavior & Decision-Making - Faculty & Research

Human Behavior & Decision-Making Human Behavior & Decision-Making 2014 Book The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See By: Max Bazerman This book will examine the common failure to notice critical information due to bounded... View Details

31 Oct 2018
What Do You Think?

What is the Function of Fear in Leadership?

high standards, commanded great respect, and the fear he created was entirely purposeful and positive.” John Hudson stated, “(It is) hard to find a business without fear of something in its bag of incentives, be it fear of failure, fear... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

31 Oct 2017
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 31, 2017

issues in business history concerned how business enterprises innovated and created wealth as well as patterns of success and failure in that process. There now exists, after a... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

10 May 2021
Research & Ideas

Who Has Potential? For Many White Men, It’s Often Other White Men

the partners worried the high turnover was damaging the firm’s competitive edge, according to research by Robin Ely, the Diane Doerge Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

14 Feb 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research: February 14

institutionalized in America over subsequent decades in a way that has been difficult to replicate in other countries. The role of history helps to explain why. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52209 December 8, 2016 Harvard View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

12 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

How Scale Changes a Manager's Responsibilities

I've experienced first-hand the excitement and pain that come as companies with a few founders scale to hundreds or thousands of employees. At somewhere around 75 to 100 employees, running a business becomes more complicated, demanding... View Details