Corporate Purpose - Publications - Faculty & Research

06 May 2021
HBS Case

How Four Women Made Miami More Equitable for Startups

As CEO of Caribu, Tuchman set about to expand its online library of books and games and became one of the few Latina founders with a technology-based growth company. Miami native Felecia Hatcher held corporate jobs in technology until the... View Details

Keywords: by Carolyn DiPaolo

27 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

Want a Happy Customer? Coordinate Sales and Marketing

Pricing, product customization, and service customization cannot be entrusted to either group alone. The impact on economics, the whole account base, and corporate strategy require an integrated approach. At the small account end, the... View Details

Keywords: by Benson Shapiro

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

Web

2024 Reunion Presentations - Alumni

Purpose of the Firm, and the School’s ongoing work in open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop Professor Max Bazerman + More Info - Slides – Less Info - Slides It is easy to condemn... View Details

September 2021 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Dream: Impact Through Real Estate

By: Michael Chu and John Masko

The Canadian city of Toronto had one of the largest housing affordability problems of any city in the developed world. One company trying to address this problem was Dream, one of the largest real estate groups in Canada. In 2021, Dream had just launched a new system... View Details

Citation

Educators

Purchase

08 Mar 2021
Blog Post

International Women's Day Featured Stories

racial/ethnical/cultural backgrounds, yet who feel forced to choose or be bucketed by social perceptions. I co-founded Mixed Millennial with the purpose of bringing a voice, community, and sense of belonging to a silent group. Nori... View Details

28 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Coronavirus Could Create a 'Bankruptcy Pandemic'

investors, sometimes called “vultures,” have raised vast sums of money for the purpose of investing in distressed companies. As I write about in my book Creating Value Through Corporate Restructuring, they... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Financial Services; Banking

21 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

The Pandemic Conversations That Leaders Need to Have Now

organizations live-blog or live-tweet their corporate meetings or events to give employees a sense of the back-and-forth in the moment. The virtual platforms that companies are relying on these days offer a similar opportunity to invite... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg, Robin Abrahams, and Katherine Connolly Baden

03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

analytical knowledge to more of what we call "doing" (skills) and "being" (a sense of purpose and identity) must occur. Business schools need to think innovatively about how best to use the resources available to them. For example, there... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

01 Oct 2020
What Do You Think?

Are CEOs the Wrong Leaders for Stakeholder Capitalism?

Europe, financed by the Ford Foundation, concludes that since the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of the Statement “has failed to deliver fundamental shifts in corporate purpose in a moment... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

20 Jul 2022
News

Wired to be Inspired

learnings captured in his recent book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High Performance Companies. READ MORE Flint: Why don't we start by talking about what you mean by deep purpose and how it’s different from the mission statements... View Details

Keywords: Management of Companies and Enterprises; Management

01 Jun 2017
News

Research Brief: Profit with Purpose—and Middle Management

George Serafeim (photo by Susan Young) Claudine Madras Gartenberg The idea of corporate purpose—a responsibility that goes beyond dollars and cents—can seem like little more than platitudes tucked into a mission statement. But new... View Details

Keywords: Erin Peterson

02 Oct 2019
What Do You Think?

What Grade Would You Give Walmart CEO Doug McMillon?

Andrei Stanescu SUMMING UP Was Walmart’s Leadership Sufficiently Proactive in Meeting Broader Corporate Responsibilities? Several times as many respondents to this month’s column gave CEO Doug McMillon high marks as opposed to low marks... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Retail

23 Jul 2008
Sharpening Your Skills

Sharpening Your Skills: Balanced Scorecard in Action

Sharpening Your Skills dives into the HBS Working Knowledge archives to bring together articles on ways to improve your business skills. Questions To Be Answered How does the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) improve corporate governance? Does... View Details

12 Mar 2018
Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Why BlackRock CEO Larry Fink Is Not a Socialist

their returns. They believe that companies must select among binary options of serving shareholders or serving society. This is a wrong-headed idea because companies with clarity about their purpose actually perform better in the long... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George; Banking

Blog

Why Does Your Company Exist?

help the local community. While most companies have some type of socially positive goal, it usually takes a back seat to making money. But for some companies, a corporate purpose is actually much, much... View Details

2014
Article

The Governance of Social Enterprises: Mission Drift and Accountability Challenges in Hybrid Organizations

By: Alnoor Ebrahim, Julie Battilana and Johanna Mair

We examine the challenges of governance facing organizations that pursue a social mission through the use of market mechanisms. These hybrid organizations, often referred to as social enterprises, combine aspects of both charity and business at their core. In this... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Hybrid Organizations; Nonprofit; Performance Measurement; Legal Form; Agency Theory; Stakeholder Management; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Corporate Accountability

Citation

Find at Harvard

01 Dec 2018
News

From Das’s Desk

Reflective Leader. Led by HBS professors Tom DeLong and Scott Snook, participants delved into case discussions about authentic leadership, explored their personal strengths and weaknesses, and began to put perspective on their true View Details

Keywords: Das Narayandas

23 May 2019
Book

These Entrepreneurs Take a Pragmatic Approach to Solving Social Problems

responsibility which goes with that.” The purpose of business, Gay said, was to make “a decent profit decently.” In the 111 years since then, many HBS alumni have taken the school’s emphasis on social responsibility to heart by attempting... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Green Technology

01 Dec 2007
News

How Business Schools Lost Their Way

has suggested that it happened in the early 1970s, when the postwar order of relationship capitalism showed its first signs of impending collapse. Jensen pointed to the publication in the New York Times Magazine in 1970 of an article on the View Details

Keywords: Roger Thompson; Abraham Zaleznik; Business Schools & Computer & Management Training; Educational Services

Publications