Publications

01 Feb 2012
News

Harvard Business School Professor Discusses Importance of ISO Standards

08 May 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, May 8, 2018

program for training pediatricians was also ranked number one in the country. Madeline Bell, who had been President and Chief Operating Officer, was named Chief Executive Officer in 2015. A pediatric nurse who became a hospital... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

02 Nov 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Managing Functional Biases in Organizational Forecasts: A Case Study of Consensus Forecasting in Supply Chain Planning

Keywords: by Rogelio Oliva & Noel H. Watson

March 1988 (Revised September 1993)
Case

United Services Automobile Association (USAA)

Under the leadership of Robert F. McDermott, USAA has been transformed from a property and casualty insurance company with $200 million in assets in the late 1960s to a $11 billion financial services empire in 1988. The case illustrates the value of having a CEO drive... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Leadership; Information Technology; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; United States

2022
Working Paper

A Conceptualization of Sub-Living Wages: Liabilities, Leverage, and Risk

By: Drew Keller, Katie Panella and George Serafeim

Currently the accounting system records employee wages as an expense in the income statement. However, paying below living wages can expose an organization to reputational and operational risks. In this paper, we offer an alternative conceptualization of the issue of... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Impact Accounting; Leverage; Wages; Compensation and Benefits; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Government Relations; Social Issues; Human Capital

SSRN

March 2020
Case

ZEISS Group: Organize by Customer Culture?

By: Willy C. Shih

How should ZEISS, the German manufacturer of precision optical and optoelectronic systems manage two historic businesses that operated fairly autonomously? The Industrial Quality Solutions (IQS) business sold measurement equipment to manufacturing companies in sectors... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Structure; Organizational Culture; Manufacturing Industry; Europe; Germany

October 2009
Case

Medisys Corp.: The IntensCare Product Development Team

By: Anne Donnellon and Joshua D. Margolis

Key topics include designing teams, managing teams, managing conflict, group dynamics, project management, product development, interdepartmental relations, and organizational change. MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new... View Details

Keywords: Project Management; Interdepartmental Relations; Organizational Change; Leadership; Conflict Management; Interpersonal Communication; Groups and Teams; Product Design; Product Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Health Care and Treatment; Power and Influence; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States

Spring 2014
Article

The Market for Blood

By: Robert Slonim, Carmen Wang and Ellen Garbarino

Donating blood, "the gift of life," is among the noblest activities and it is performed worldwide nearly 100 million times annually. The economic perspective presented here shows how the gift of life, albeit noble and often motivated by altruism, is heavily influenced... View Details

Keywords: Altruism; Philanthropy; Analysis Of Health Care Markets; Market Design; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Health

March 2019
Article

Is There a Future for the Gas Network in a Low Carbon Energy System?

By: Conor Hickey, Paul Deane, Celine McInerney and Brian O' Gallachoir

This paper evaluates the potential low carbon opportunities for and challenges to the utilisation and financial performance of Ireland's gas distribution network within a series of low carbon scenarios. There has been a limited amount of academic literature published... View Details

Keywords: Decarbonization; Investment; Risk and Uncertainty; Environmental Sustainability; Demand and Consumers; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Republic of Ireland

2010
Article

Creativity

By: Beth A. Hennessey and Teresa M. Amabile

The psychological study of creativity is essential to human progress. If strides are to be made in the sciences, humanities, and arts, we must arrive at a far more detailed understanding of the creative process, its antecedents, and its inhibitors. This review,... View Details

Keywords: Creative Ability; Creativity; Social Psychology; Research; Interdisciplinary Studies

The advent of cryptocurrencies and digital assets holds the promise of improving financial systems by offering cheap, quick, and secure transfer of value. However, it also opens up new payment channels for cybercrimes. Assembling a diverse set of public on- and... View Details

Podcast: Cybersecurity: Why All Business Disciplines Need to Teach It—And How

Do your business students plan to use the internet at work? Then they need to know about cybersecurity. Threats to computer systems grow and evolve daily, putting the operations, information, and reputation of companies—as well as individuals—constantly at risk.... View Details

December 1980 (Revised June 2006)
Case

University Health Services: Walk-In Clinic

The walk-in clinic for general outpatient care at a major university experiences complaints about excessive waiting times. The system is changed to provide for initial screening of arriving patients in order to route them to appropriate health care providers. The... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Service Delivery; Health Care and Treatment; Performance Evaluation; Health Industry

11 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

Adding Time to Activity-Based Costing

previous Balanced Scorecard books focused almost exclusively on strategy and its implementation. Now we are identifying the important linkages between strategy and operations that will give companies a comprehensive, integrated View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

2022
White Paper

Census II of Free and Open Source Software - Application Libraries

By: Frank Nagle, James Dana, Jennifer Hoffman, Steven Randazzo and Yanuo Zhou

Produced in partnership with Harvard Laboratory for Innovation Science (LISH) and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), Census II is the second investigation into the widespread use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The Census II effort utilizes data... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Software; Applications and Software; Cybersecurity; Open Source Distribution

November 2015 (Revised January 2017)
Case

Uber: Changing the Way the World Moves

By: Youngme Moon

In 2015, Uber is building what may be the largest point-to-point transportation network of its kind; it is literally changing the way the world moves. But unlike traditional transportation logistics companies like FedEx, Uber has an incredibly lightweight... View Details

Keywords: Service; Innovation; Pricing; Customer Loyalty; Uber; Taxi; Sharing Economy; On-demand Economy; Marketing; Operations; Strategy; Disruption; Customer Satisfaction; Transportation; Consumer Behavior

Archie Jones is a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, where he currently teaches Venture Capital and Private Equity, Field... View Details

November 2023
Case

Open Source Machine Learning at Google

By: Shane Greenstein, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda B. Viégas, Daniel Yue and James Barnett

Set in early 2023, the case exposes students to the challenges of managing open source software at Google. The case focuses on the challenges for Alex Spinelli, Vice President of Product Management for Core Machine Learning. He must set priorities for Google’s efforts... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Technological Innovation; Open Source Distribution; Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Technology Industry; United States

July 2004 (Revised August 2004)
Case

Superior Manufacturing Company

By: David F. Hawkins, James W. Culliton and Jacob Cohen

Management must extract relevant cost data from the company's cost accounting system for product line decisions. A rewritten version of an earlier case. View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Product Development; Manufacturing Industry