Publications

15 Apr 2020
News

Staying Healthy Indoors, the past and Future of Power, and Shoe Libraries: Books in Brief

08 Jun 2009
Research & Ideas

The Return of the Salesman

Throughout history salespeople have come in all sizes and stripes—peddlers, drummers, canvassers, agents, sales reps, and of course the iconic door-to-door salesman. But it's only been relatively recently that historians have focused... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

September 2022 (Revised January 2023)
Case

DBS: Purpose-Driven Transformation

By: Ranjay Gulati, Adina Wong, Dawn H. Lau and Joseph Mesfin

Singapore-based bank DBS went through three waves of purpose-driven transformation, overhauling the bank’s systems, upgrading employee skills, and re-centering its customer focus, with the bank’s purpose growing bolder with each key milestone achieved. Find out how the... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Alignment; Business Strategy; Balanced Scorecard; Technology Adoption; Mission and Purpose; Change Management; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Asia; Singapore

2013
Book

Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters

By: Walter A. Friedman

The period leading up to the Great Depression witnessed the rise of the economic forecasters, pioneers who sought to use the tools of science to predict the future, with the aim of profiting from their forecasts. This book chronicles the lives and careers of the men... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting And Prediction; Economic History; Economics; History; Risk and Uncertainty; United States

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Web

The Five Forces - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

value is divided among industry actors. First described by Michael Porter in his classic 1979 Harvard Business Review article, Porter’s insights started a revolution in the strategy field and continue to View Details

08 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Silos That Work: How the Pandemic Changed the Way We Collaborate

“Leaders have to understand this. The major lesson for employers is there’s been a shift in our communication networks as a result of the pandemic, and that this shift has to View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

11 Feb 2019
Research & Ideas

The Business of Saving the Planet

"The fact that the benefits of addressing the problem of climate change almost certainly outweigh the costs ... does not make concerted global action to address the problem easy." —Climate Change in 2018: Implications for Business If there is one positive... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Energy; Green Technology

2021
Working Paper

The Business of K-12 Education in China

By: Geoffrey Jones and Yuhai Wu

This working paper examines the evolution of K-12 education in China, especially between 1985 and the present day, drawing extensive interviews with participants in the educational sector. China has been hugely successful in reaching almost 100 percent literacy,... View Details

Keywords: K-12 Education; China; Real Estate; Early Childhood Education; Performance Evaluation; Teaching; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Personal Development and Career; Social Issues; Nonprofit Organizations; Private Sector; Education Industry; Real Estate Industry; China

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Our recent work investigates dealers' trading behavior and pricing strategy in the corporate bond market to shed new light on the role of the network of existing relationships among dealers in shaping the transmission of risk and influencing market liquidity. We show... View Details

Research Summary

National Innovation Systems in the Life Sciences

This is an international comparative study of how institutional contexts shape the process by which science is leveraged into commercial technology. The study explores how variance in corporate governance systems, knowledge- and skill-formation systems, and... View Details

January 2007 (Revised May 2008)
Case

Henry Luce and the American Century

By: Nitin Nohria, Anthony Mayo and Logan Wilcox

Henry Luce, founder of the publishing company which produced Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, created the largest media company in the world by the mid-20th century. Luce's flagship magazine, Time, was able to gross over $20 million in sales during its... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Leadership Style; Emerging Markets; Publishing Industry; United States

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2012
Chapter

The Availability and Utilization of 401(k) Loans

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

We document the loan provisions in 401(k) savings plans and how participants use 401(k) loans. Although only about 22% of savings plan participants who are allowed to borrow from their 401(k) have such a loan at any given point in time, almost half had used a 401(k)... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Personal Finance; Retirement; Financing and Loans; Microeconomics

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27 Jul 2012
News

How to Be Effective in the Global Economy and the Boardroom: CFOs Offer Lessons Learned on the Journey

December 2006 (Revised October 2016)
Case

eClinicalWorks: The Paths to Growth

By: Robert F. Higgins and Mark Rennella

In January 2006, eClinicalWorks (eCW) had an acquisition opportunity that could fundamentally change the way they had done business since the inception of the company in 1999. eClinicalWorks was a privately run business in the healthcare information technology field... View Details

Keywords: Young Companies; Strategic Revelation; Strategy And Execution; Strategy Development; Strategy And Leadership; Financing Strategy; Financing Risk; Financing; Expansion; Business Growth and Maturation; Organizational Culture; Financing and Loans; Customer Focus and Relationships; Acquisition; Growth and Development Strategy; Information Technology Industry; Health Industry; Massachusetts

10 Jul 2023
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2023

attributes like aesthetics from products that shape consumer-brand interactions. Finally, let me share a book that has touched my soul—The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. This is a science-fiction masterpiece exploring humanity's quest... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

April 2021 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Project Restart: Deciding the Future of English Football

By: Nour Kteily and Deepak Malhotra

In March 2020, the English Premier League football (soccer) season was suspended partway through due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Two months later the season remained in limbo, with a looming deadline to decide whether to attempt to complete the season or curtail it—and... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Sports; Health Pandemics; Decision Making; Fairness; Values and Beliefs; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Motivation and Incentives; Outcome or Result; Perception; Negotiation; Sports Industry; United Kingdom

May 2025
Article

Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs

By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details

Keywords: Expectations; Memory; COVID-19 Pandemic; Risk and Uncertainty; Cognition and Thinking

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2007
Working Paper

Paths to Equality: Walking the Talk in Multi-party Negotiations

By: Kathleen L. McGinn, Katherine L. Milkman and Markus Nöth

Past research has shown that communication in negotiations heightens social awareness, facilitates coordination, increases the utility for the other's positive outcomes, and thereby leads to more equal payoffs. But the role of specific communication strategies in... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Fairness; Agreements and Arrangements; Negotiation Types; Behavior; Competition