Publications

August 2023
Case

Salma Qarnain: Spaceships to Broadway

By: Leslie Perlow, Mel Martin and Hannah Weisman

Salma Qarnain, daughter of Pakistani Muslim immigrants, is an engineer trained at Stanford and MIT. She began her career building spacecrafts but 30 years later finds herself pursuing her calling, acting on Broadway. The case explores Qarnain’s career path, family... View Details

Keywords: Personal Development and Career; Job Search; Job Design and Levels; Happiness; Identity; Well-being; Work-Life Balance; Family and Family Relationships; Theater Entertainment; Film Entertainment; Talent and Talent Management; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; Aerospace Industry; United States; New York (city, NY); Boston; California

May 1996 (Revised March 2005)
Case

Bombardier TEG (A)

By: Stephen P. Bradley and Takia Mahmood

Bombardier, a Canadian manufacturer of passenger railcars and market leader in the United States, faces aggressive competition from a new entrant, U.S.-owned Morrison Knudsen, that has come into the industry with closely related capabilities in engineering and... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Goals and Objectives; Strategy; Competition; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Rail Transportation; Manufacturing Industry; Rail Industry; Canada; United States

May 1997 (Revised July 1997)
Case

Vermeer Technologies (D): Making Transitions

By: Ashish Nanda

Microsoft has acquired Vermeer, and Vermeer executives are both excited and concerned as they prepare to move to Redmond. Even though the acquisition has been financially rewarding, the Vermeer engineers worry how well they will adapt to their new home. Meanwhile,... View Details

Keywords: Horizontal Integration; Value Creation; Applications and Software; Acquisition; Product Development; Information Technology Industry

02 Oct 2020
Video

Anu Aga

Anu Aga, former head of Thermax, an engineering and energy company in India, explains the circumstances around which she was chosen as her husband’s successor at Thermax after he passed away in 1996. She discusses the many challenges she faced and how she was able to... View Details

August 2019 (Revised March 2023)
Case

Rand Fishkin at Moz (A)

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

In 2016, senior management at Moz, a venture capital–backed startup providing software tools for digital marketing professionals, must decide how to address a looming cash flow crisis precipitated by failed efforts to broaden its product line. Seattle-based Moz had... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Scaling; Entrepreneurship; Failure; Business Startups; Diversification; Growth Management; Technology Industry

20 Aug 2024
Blog Post

Chasing a Dream: My Summer Internship at Chelsea Football Club

Johann Farhat (MBA 2025) holds a Civil Engineering degree from the American University of Beirut. After graduating, he spent three years in management consulting at Strategy& in Dubai before moving to Madrid to work at Amazon for... View Details

2018
Book

Driving Digital Strategy: A Guide to Reimagining Your Business

By: Sunil Gupta

Disruption and transformation get a lot of hype and for good reason. Digital technologies have disrupted entire industries and incumbents have often struggled in this new world. Typical approaches used by legacy players such as using technology to improve efficiency,... View Details

Keywords: Marketing; Information Technology; Transformation; Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Organizational Structure; Digital Strategy

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08 Dec 2021
Blog Post

The Drive to Succeed: Silvio Memme (MBA 2020) of OMERS Ventures and His Career Switch into Venture Capital

As a child, Silvio Memme (MBA 2020) had a big dream – to one day design engines for Ferrari. While naysayers told him to be realistic, Memme took that advice to mean he would need to pour himself into this goal for it to become a reality.... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital

September 2021 (Revised December 2023)
Case

On the Bubble: Startup Bootstrapping

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Tom Quinn and Annelena Lobb

Bubble was a software company in the low-code/no-code market, making tools that allowed users without traditional programming backgrounds or technical skills to build software. The case covers cofounder Joshua Haas’s engineering background, as he experienced a high... View Details

04 Sep 2020
Blog Post

Advice from a Career Switcher: The Value of Informational Conversations with Alumni

– Coursera, edX, Udacity – and so I was able to learn to code from these new, high quality resources.” As it turned out, edX hired Adam and he spent the next five years in various engineering roles. Adam credits that “on-the-job... View Details

15 Aug 2016
News

The Scandal Effect

Sunil Gupta

Co-Chair, Driving Digital Strategy

Sunil Gupta is the Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration and co-chair of the executive program on Driving... View Details

Keywords: advertising; communications; consumer products; credit card; education industry; financial services; high technology; marketing industry; telecommunications

March 2018 (Revised March 2019)
Case

Gender and Free Speech at Google (A)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Martha J. Crawford and Sarah Mehta

In August 2017, Google fired James Damore, a 28-year-old software engineer who had been employed by the company since 2013. The move came after Damore penned an internal company memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which posited that innate biological... View Details

Keywords: Free Speech; Representation; Diversity; Gender; Race; Human Resources; Employees; Employee Relationship Management; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Labor; Employment; Lawsuits and Litigation; Organizational Culture; Technology Industry; United States; California

12 Oct 2022
Video

Laura N Montoya: The Global Cultural Lens of AI

20 Mar 2014
News

Fixing a Weak Safety Culture at General Motors

Research Summary

Derivative Securities

Professor Chacko's research on financial engineering has addressed the valuation and application of derivative securities. Professor Chacko's research has looked at the pricing of a variety of derivative securities, including fixed-income securities. He has developed... View Details

25 Nov 2013
News

Does successful viral marketing lead to a successful product?

2020
Working Paper

Performance Hacking: The Contagious Business Practice that Corrodes Corporate Culture, Undermines Core Values, and Damages Great Companies

By: Robert D. Austin and Richard L. Nolan

August 7, 1955 is an important date in commercial aviation history. You could say it began the jet airliner age, though other dates might also qualify. Jet engines had proven successful in military aircraft. But no one knew then whether members of the general public... View Details

Keywords: Performance; Organizational Culture; Values and Beliefs

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November 2007
Article

A Staged Solution to the Catch-22

By: Andrei Hagiu and Thomas Eisenmann

Companies looking to launch a two-sided platform—between, for example, credit card users and merchants, or search engine users and advertisers—must overcome the reluctance of one side to sign on until it's confident the other side will be well populated. It's a common... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Social Psychology; Two-Sided Platforms

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