Publications

Awa Ambra Seck is an Assistant Professor in the View Details

Research Summary

Divergent change in organizations

By: Julie Battilana

The first stream of research in Professor Battilana’s work aims to identify the conditions that enable individual actors to initiate divergent change within organizations as well as the conditions enabling successful implementation of such change. It combines... View Details

February 4, 2013
Guest Column

How Facebook Can Totally Undermine Apple and Google in the Platform Games

By: Andrei Hagiu

Today, Facebook seems like the juggernaut crushing everything in its path, most recently Twitter's Vine app and Yandex's social app. And in its last quarter, Facebook's mobile usage surpassed its web usage—for the first time ever. This is important because Facebook has... View Details

Keywords: Technology Industry

Read Now

August 2014
Teaching Plan

The Huffington Post

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

In February 2010, management of the Huffington Post, a fast-growing but not-yet-profitable Internet newspaper that aggregates blog posts from unpaid contributors and excerpts of stories originally published by other news sites, faces a number of decisions about its... View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Newspapers; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Journalism and News Industry

11 May 2018
News

Online Ad Targeting Does Work—As Long As It's Not Creepy

October 2011 (Revised January 2012)
Case

LinkedIn Corporation

By: Francois Brochet and James Weber

The case is set at the end of the first public trading day of LinkedIn, an online professional network company. It provides information on the company's business model, financial statements, competitive landscape, and IPO terms, to help the reader critically assess the... View Details

Keywords: Initial Public Offering; Growth and Development; Earnings Management; Risk Management; Valuation; SWOT Analysis; Emerging Markets; Business Model; Information Technology; Competitive Strategy; Web Services Industry

January 2022
Case

Bee-ing Better at Bombas

By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Youngme Moon and John Masko

David Heath and Randy Goldberg founded Bombas in 2013 to serve two missions: to deliver the “best socks in the history of feet,” and to donate socks (the most requested item in homeless shelters) to Americans experiencing homelessness. Eight years later, Bombas had... View Details

Keywords: Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Digital Marketing; Distribution; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Quality; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Human Needs; Poverty; Growth and Development Strategy; Apparel and Accessories Industry; New York (city, NY)

March 2008 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Facebook

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Thomas R. Eisenmann, Aaron Smith, David Chen and Brian Feinstein

As Facebook topped one billion monthly users in October 2012, the online social network continued to face questions about how best to monetize its surging traffic. The company could invest further in new advertising products, which represented the majority of the... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Profit; Open Source Distribution; Social and Collaborative Networks; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Information Technology Industry

June 2023
Article

The Effect of Firms' Information Exposure on Safeguarding Employee Health: Evidence from COVID-19

By: Lisa Yao Liu and Shirley Lu

We show that information exposure through international business networks enables firms to take proactive measures that benefit employees and potentially the local community. Specifically, in the early days of COVID-19, firms that have business networks with China and... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Networks; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Health Pandemics; Decision Choices and Conditions; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter's purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing... View Details

05 Jan 2024
Blog Post

Meet The HBS African American Student Union

Founded in 1968 by 5 Black students at Harvard Business School, the African American Student Union (AASU) is a community for all Black students at HBS inclusive of all backgrounds, familial situations, and social preferences. Our goal is... View Details

03 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

HBS Faculty on Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa

members—Deepak Malhotra, an authority on negotiation strategy; Noel Maurer, an expert on the politics and economics of the energy business; and Magnus Thor Torfason, an authority on how behavior is influenced by the social structures of... View Details

Keywords: Re: Deepak Malhotra; Energy; Utilities

July – August 2011
Article

Evolve (Again)

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter

Frenzy over social networks and interactive media can produce equally overhyped predictions that everything will change, not to mention money-losing investments in silly ventures. Separating enduring strategic lessons from the hype can help avoid a new crash. Hint: the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Venture Capital; Investment; Technological Innovation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Partners and Partnerships

Find at Harvard

March 2008 (Revised June 2011)
Case

MySpace

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, David T. Chen and Carin-Isabel Knoop

The case, set in late 2007, examines what MySpace—the largest online social network—should do to respond to its agile competitor, Facebook. Since its inception MySpace had experienced phenomenal growth, acquiring 20 million members in its first 20 months of operation,... View Details

Keywords: Open Source Distribution; Partners and Partnerships; Social and Collaborative Networks; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; Information Technology Industry

September 2016
Case

Ekal Vidyalaya: Education for Rural India

By: David Drake, Namrata Bhattacharya, Pooja Godbole and Amrita Saigal

By examining Ekal Vidyalaya (Ekal), a nonprofit network of schools in India, this case focuses on the classic challenge faced by organizations that grow through replication (e.g., McDonald's, Starbucks, Walmart, Whole Foods): How can they continue to drive growth when... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Early Childhood Education; India

April 2013
Article

Overcoming Resistance to Organizational Change: Strong Ties and Affective Cooptation

By: Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro

We propose a relational theory of how change agents in organizations use the strength of ties in their network to overcome resistance to change. We argue that strong ties to potentially influential organization members who are ambivalent about a change (fence-sitters)... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Power and Influence; Health Industry; United Kingdom