Publications

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August 2001 (Revised August 2005)
Case

Guinness PLC: Managing Negotiations

By: Michael A. Wheeler

Describes an initiative by Guinness, LLP to revise the process by which it centrally authorizes, supports, and reviews negotiations that are undertaken worldwide on its behalf. Senior managers wished to give regional officers enough discretion to respond to local... View Details

Keywords: Partners and Partnerships; Negotiation; Acquisition

07 Oct 2011
News

After Jobs, Who Will Be Next American Visionary?

05 Sep 2023
Book

Failing Well: How Your ‘Intelligent Failure’ Unlocks Your Full Potential

In the 1990s, after drugmaker Eli Lilly spent more than a decade and millions of dollars developing the new drug Alimta to treat lung cancer, the medication came up short in effectively treating cancer in expanded trials. While the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

October 1979 (Revised January 1983)
Background Note

IBM Corp., Background Note

Describes some aspects of how the senior managers of IBM conducted its affairs. Much of this note is a factual description of the design of the organization and of the formal process by which members of the organization worked together. Also contains excerpts from... View Details

Keywords: Management Style; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Management Teams; Computer Industry; United States

11 May 2022
News

Why One Little Goof Drove Wordle Fans Nuts

February 2007 (Revised June 2009)
Case

Edelnor (A)

By: Jordan I. Siegel

Fernando del Sol, president of F. S. Inversiones in Chile, had just bought himself a headache as a New Year's present. On December 31, 2001, he purchased a Chilean electricity generation and transmission company called Edelnor that was in danger of becoming insolvent... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Investment; Courts and Trials; Business Strategy; Energy Industry; Chile

14 Mar 2023
Video

Admissions Information Session for College Students

Web

Faculty & Advisors | MBA

Association Education Fellowship and is a Venture Capital Advisor at Harvard Business School. Julia Hallisey MBA’87, Harvard University; BA, English, Smith College Julia is Chief Operating Officer View Details

July 2004 (Revised October 2004)
Case

Harbus Foundation (2003), The

In 1997, the Harbus Foundation was established by Harvard Business School students to use the school newspaper's accumulated operating surpluses for creating social value in the community. The case investigates the challenges that the student management team faced in... View Details

Keywords: Social Enterprise; Corporate Governance; Education Industry; Boston

March 2014
Supplement

School of One: Reimagining How Students Learn (B)

By: John J-H Kim and Christine S. An

This supplements the "A" case. Joel Rose and Chris Rush decide to spin-off from School of One to found New Classrooms Innovation Partners. Rose and Rush navigate the strategic complexities of the spin-off process to make their mission-driven product a reality. The case... View Details

Keywords: Education Technology; Ed Tech; Classroom Innovation; Entrepreneurs; Entrepreneurship; Patents; Spin-offs; Non-profit Management; Scaling Ed Tech Products; Strategy

February 2018 (Revised May 2018)
Case

Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Nancy Hua Dai

CEO Zhang Ruimin must plan how to accelerate the growth of self-managed microenterprises. Platforms were Haier’s business platforms operating in five major sectors: white goods transformation, investment and incubation, financial holdings, real estate, and cultural... View Details

Keywords: China; Microenterprise; Appliances; Platform; Change; Innovation; Opportunities; Entrepreneurship; Digital Platforms; Transformation; Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; China

October 2007
Article

Grist: A Strategic Approach to Climate

By: Michael E. Porter and Forest Reinhardt

Climate change will affect everything businesses do, as government efforts to mitigate carbon emissions cause their prices to rise steeply. This special edition of Forethought takes a hard-nosed look at the risks and opportunities of climate change. Michael E. Porter... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Leadership; Logistics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Performance Improvement; Climate Change; Competitive Advantage; Corporate Strategy

Article

Build It, Buy It, or Both? Rethinking the Sourcing of Advertising Services

By: Alvin J. Silk and Marta M. Stiglin

This paper provides an update on the current state of in-house agencies. Whereas traditional consideration of internalizing advertising services was framed as a binary choice of build or buy, today's advertisers frequently pursue hybrid policies of build and buy to... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Advertising; Advertising Industry

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05 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

Lessons in Decision-Making: Confident People Aren't Always Correct (Except When They Are)

are well-calibrated about what they know and don’t know, acknowledge their blind spots, and engage others in the decision process might have better results. When confidence is... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
Case

OhmConnect: Energizing the Future

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details

Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe

June 2004
Case

AT&T's Transmission Systems Business Unit (A)

By: Rogelio Oliva, Elizabeth Keating and James Quinn

The newly appointed director of the project dedicated to reducing product development time for AT&T's Transmission Systems Business Unit (TSBU) is trying to decide how best to sustain the momentum of its Achieving Process Excellence (APEX) teams. During the past three... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Groups and Teams; Performance Improvement; Business Processes; Product Development; Telecommunications Industry