Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(6,698)
- Faculty Publications (942)
- March 2013 (Revised July 2014)
- Supplement
Bay Partners (B)
By: Josh Lerner and Lauren Barley
In December 2012, Salil Deshpande has rejoined Bay Partners (Bay), which had been restructured following the 2010 departures of three of its general partners. Life was good for Deshpande: his firm had distributed roughly $1 billion to its limited partners (LPs) over... View Details
- February 2013 (Revised March 2013)
- Case
Agero: Enhancing Capabilities for Customers
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
This case illustrates the importance of choosing a primary customer as the basis for organization design. Cross Country Group managers adjusted resource allocation, organization design and performance measures over time to transform Cross Country Group from an... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Management; Entrepreneurial Gap; Entrepreneurship; Auto Industry; Insurance; Performance Management; Performance Measurement; Performance Measures; Performance Pressure; Decisions; Family Business; Resource Allocation; Organizational Design; Customer Focus and Relationships; Performance Evaluation; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Industry
- February 2013
- Case
18 Months in a Startup: Zaggora.com
By: Tom Nicholas
The founders of Zaggora reflected back on a tumultuous year-and-a-half in which they had generated, from just $40,000 in personal savings, a multi-million dollar sportswear enterprise selling Hotpants to women. These were hotpants not of the 1960s hipster variety, but... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Do Display Ads Influence Search?: Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising
By: Sunil Gupta
As firms increasingly rely on online media to acquire consumers, marketing managers feel comfortable justifying higher online marketing spend by referring to online metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). However, these standard online... View Details
- 2013
- Article
The Strategic Fitness Process: A Collaborative Action Research Method for Developing Organizational Prototypes and Dynamic Capabilities
By: Michael Beer
Organizations underperform and sometimes fail because their leaders are unable to learn the unvarnished truth from relevant stakeholders about how the design and behavior of the organization is misaligned with its goals and strategy. The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised June 2017)
- Case
The Perfect Storm: What Happens When the Market Moves Four Standard Deviations?
Adam Carter was the portfolio manager for Tate Modern Finance III, L.P. (“Tate” or the “Fund”), the third in a series of U.S. commercial real estate debt funds sponsored by the London-based Tate Partners. The Fund was capitalized with $700 million of equity... View Details
- January 2013
- Case
Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture (MM)
By: Frances X. Frei and Robin J. Ely
On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately-held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft-line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its Board of Directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Behavioral Corporate Finance: A Current Survey
By: Malcolm Baker and Jeffrey Wurgler
We survey the theory and evidence of behavioral corporate finance, which generally takes one of two approaches. The market timing and catering approach views managerial financing and investment decisions as rational managerial responses to securities mispricing. The... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Managing Firms in an Emerging Economy: Evidence from the Time Use of Indian CEOs
By: Raffaella Sadun
The success or failure of a company is often ascribed to the behavior of its CEO. Yet little is known about what top managers actually do, whether this matters for firm performance, and why it differs across firms. We provide some answers by developing a new survey... View Details
- October 2012
- Article
Giving Time Gives You Time
By: Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton
Four experiments reveal a counterintuitive solution to the common problem of feeling that one does not have enough time: giving some of it away. Although people's objective amount of time cannot be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), this research... View Details
Keywords: Time Perception; Well-being; Volunteering; Prosocial Behavior; Helping; Time Management; Welfare
- December 2012
- Background Note
Are Daily Deals Good for Merchants?
By: Sunil Gupta, Timothy Keiningham, Ray Weaver and Luke Williams
In the relatively short time since Groupon was founded, the response to "daily deals"—services that promote businesses by marketing deeply discounted, pre-paid vouchers to an online subscriber base—has by all accounts been spectacular. Our evaluation of daily deals is... View Details
- December 2012
- Case
Delwarca Software Remote Support Unit
By: Roy D. Shapiro and Paul E. Morrison
Delwarca Software provides business software to large corporate clients around the world. The firm serves customers who prefer to assemble corporate solutions using a combination of software programs from various suppliers rather than implementing a single enterprise... View Details
- November 2012 (Revised July 2014)
- Case
Doing Deals and Leading Teams at XAF Partners
By: Boris Groysberg and Kerry Herman
Private equity firm XAF Partners, created out of the 2003 merger of Shanghai-based Xuan Partners and AF Group, a spin out of the Shanghai-based, emerging market-focused private equity arm of a large European bank, had grown steadily over the last decade, establishing... View Details
Keywords: Professional Service Firms; Leading Teams; Producing Managers; Delegation; Giving And Receiving Feedback; Managing Performance; Leadership; Work-Life Balance; Managerial Roles; Talent and Talent Management; Service Operations; Time Management; Performance; Financial Services Industry; Asia
- November 2012
- Case
New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc. (Abridged)
By: H. Kent Bowen, Robert S. Huckman, Carin-Isabel Knoop and Matthew Preble
Considers whether New Balance, one of the world's five largest manufacturers of athletic footwear, should respond to Adidas' planned acquisition of Reebok—a transaction that would join the second- and third-largest companies in the industry. Highlights the unique... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
Does Management Really Work?
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
HBR's 90th anniversary is a sensible time to revisit a basic question: Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? The answer may seem obvious to most HBR readers, but these three economists cast their net much wider than that. In... View Details
- November 2012
- Article
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
Keywords: Decentralization; Social Capital; Theory Of The Firm; Firm Objectives, Organization, And Behavior; Business Economics; Management Of Technological Innovation And R＆D; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Diffusion Processes; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Trust; Technology Adoption; Multinational Firms and Management
- October 8, 2012
- Column
Henkel's Culture Shift
By: Robert Simons
This case descriibes a CEO-led organizational transformation driven by stretch goals, performance measurement, and accountability. When Kasper Rorsted became CEO of Henkel, a Germany-based producer of personal care, laundry, and adhesives products, in 2008, he was... View Details
- September 2012 (Revised September 2014)
- Case
Doing Business in Malaysia
By: C. Fritz Foley, Michael Shih-Ta Chen and Keith Chi-Ho Wong
This case focuses on the current business environment in Malaysia as of 2012 by introducing the main economic, political and cultural aspects of the country for those interested in doing business there. The advantages and challenges of investing and doing business in... View Details
- September 2012
- Supplement
Intraoperative Radiotherapy for Breast Cancer (B)
By: Willy Shih
The intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) business at Carl Zeiss Meditec had struggled with growth since the time of the (A) case. Though the unit had grown revenues in excess of 50% and had exceeded its EBIT target, it faced several key strategic choices. Should it... View Details
Keywords: Radiotherapy; Breast Cancer; Brachytherapy; Therapeutic Radiation; Oncology; Oncology Treatment Systems; Elekta AB; Varian Medical Systems; Xoft; Electronic Brachytherapy; Intraoperative Radiotherapy; Disruptive Innovation; Health Care and Treatment; Entrepreneurship; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Health Industry; Germany
- 2012
- Book
The Architecture of Innovation: The Economics of Creative Organizations
By: Josh Lerner
Innovation is a much-used buzzword these days, but when it comes to creating and implementing a new idea, many companies miss the mark—plans backfire, consumer preferences shift, or tried-and-true practices fail to work in a new context. So is innovation just a... View Details