Publications

April 2021
Case

Codecademy: Where to Next?

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Max Mailman and Sarah Ascherman

In March 2020, Zach Sims, co-founder and CEO of online education platform Codecademy, prepared for a meeting with his Chief of Staff Kunal Ahuja to discuss the company’s goals. Codecademy billed itself as the largest online resource for computer science literacy and... View Details

Keywords: Monetization Strategy; Business Model; Change Management; Venture Capital; Leading Change; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Management Teams; Marketing Channels; Product Marketing; Network Effects; Product Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategic Planning; Internet and the Web; Digital Platforms; United States

26 May 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation

Keywords: by Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth & M. Utku Unver

06 Sep 2022
Blog Post

To Go-Go: A Foodtech Startup Serves Up Scale in Latin America

For all their variety, restaurants have two things in common: a kitchen where food is prepared and a dining area where customers consume it. But what if you could use technology to ditch the dining area and just keep the kitchen, trimming the costs—and the... View Details

September 2024
Case

InfraCredit and the Project Inception Facility

By: John Macomber, Namrata Arora and Maagatha Kalavadakken

Around the world, large infrastructure projects are frequently stymied by the high cost and high uncertainty of the project inception phase: the research and engineering and planning prior to financial close and start of construction. Could there be a new kind of... View Details

March 2024
Supplement

Teamworks: Tackling a Forecasting Fumble (B)

By: N. Louis Shipley, Stacy Straaberg and Tom Quinn

In late March 2018, Teamworks CEO Zach Maurides learned Q1 2018 sales were at risk for a large forecasting miss. Founded in 2004, Teamworks’s software application assisted support staff in messaging, scheduling, and sharing documents with collegiate and professional... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Communication Strategy; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Cycles; Technological Innovation; Sports; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Marketing; Sales; Business Strategy; Expansion; Valuation; Sports Industry; Technology Industry; United States; North Carolina

29 Feb 2024
HBS Case

Beyond Goals: David Beckham's Playbook for Mobilizing Star Talent

Superstar talent brings the kind of wattage that can power a business to the next level, as recent high-stakes decisions facing soccer legend David Beckham show. Two new Harvard Business School case studies examine the questions Beckham... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman; Sports

March 2024
Case

Teamworks: Tackling a Forecasting Fumble (A)

By: N. Louis Shipley and Stacy Straaberg

In late March 2018, Teamworks CEO Zach Maurides learned Q1 2018 sales were at risk for a large forecasting miss. Founded in 2004, Teamworks’s software application assisted support staff in messaging, scheduling, and sharing documents with collegiate and professional... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Communication Strategy; Decisions; Forecasting and Prediction; Business Cycles; Technological Innovation; Sports; Growth and Development Strategy; Resource Allocation; Marketing; Sales; Business Strategy; Expansion; Sports Industry; Technology Industry; United States; North Carolina

January 2010 (Revised August 2010)
Background Note

Advanced Leadership Note: An Institutional Perspective and Framework for Managing and Leading

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Rakesh Khurana

Large-scale societal issues increasingly appear on the agenda of business leaders, including poverty, health, education, business-government relations, and the degradation of the environment. These problems are not entirely new, but the forces of globalization and the... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Framework; Global Range; Leadership; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Social Enterprise; Social Issues; Complexity

13 Jul 2010
First Look

First Look: July 13

offered. While significant cost savings goals would be realized in part through employee layoffs, he wondered about ITG's ability to deal with these changes. Adjusting its customer portfolio meant that ITG would be pulling back products... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

07 Jan 2008
Research & Ideas

Pursuing a Deadly Opportunity

for cadavers in medical training, in medical research, and for the development of new medical devices. Given the sometimes uneasy feelings around the topic, it's easy to understand how such entrepreneurial organizations (both for-profit... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Health

21 Jun 2011
First Look

First Look: June 21

human creativity and ingenuity always find a way around any new rules, as it did in this last crisis? And finally, how can—in practical terms—we get rid of the "too big to fails," without increasing state intervention further?... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

10 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

High Commitment, High Performance Management

McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and Toyota, says Beer. Yet any company can change for the better, no matter the industry. GE, Becton Dickinson, Campbell Soup, IBM, and ASDA, a U.K. grocery chain, are examples of companies that were transformed by View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2012
Case

ChemChina

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Donghong Li, Lei Li and Hong Zhang

ChemChina is China's largest basic chemical manufacturing firm. It was included in Fortune Global 500 in 2011 and 2012, ranked No. 475 and 402. Its sales revenue in 2011 was 179 billion yuan, and profit was 600 million yuan. The year-end total assets were 254.2 billion... View Details

Keywords: Reorganization; Strategy; China; China

01 Aug 2023
What Do You Think?

As Leaders, Why Do We Continue to Reward A, While Hoping for B?

occur because of policies that conflict with incentives or the ways the incentives are administered. In 1975, Steve Kerr, who would later become head of executive development at General Electric and head of its famous educational campus in Crotonville, View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

Driving Scale with Otto

By: Rebecca Karp, David Allen and Annelena Lobb

This case asks how startup founders make scaling decisions in light of their priorities for their business and for themselves. Otto was a technology company that applied artificial intelligence technology to sales. It deployed natural language processing to find sales... View Details

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Natural Language Processing; B2B; B2B Innovation; Scaling; Scaling Tech Ventures; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Finance; Sales; Business Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology Industry; United States; Cambridge; New York (city, NY); Spain

Web

Business & Environment

interested in climate resilience. Host and Guest Host: Mike Toffel , Professor, Harvard Business School ( LinkedIn ) Guest: Alex Berkowitz , Founder & CEO, Coastal Protection Solutions ( LinkedIn ) News Customised Agricultural Advice at... View Details

September 2007
Case

Tetra Pak Argentina

By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Gustavo A. Herrero

Deals with the hands-on management of a difficult situation facing the subsidiary of a multinational corporation (Tetra Pak) in a developing country (Argentina). The situation arises from a major economic, social, and institutional breakdown that jeopardizes the... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Financial Crisis; Currency Exchange Rate; Sovereign Finance; Multinational Firms and Management; Crisis Management; Business and Government Relations; Argentina

2010
Working Paper

Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model (PDF File of PowerPoint Slides)

By: Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen and Kari Granger

This presentation is based on our research program over the last seven years in which our objective has been to rigorously distinguish leader and leadership and to create a technology for providing access to being a leader and exercising leadership effectively (in... View Details

Keywords: Curriculum and Courses; Innovation and Invention; Leadership Development; Goals and Objectives; Research and Development; Attitudes; Perception; Technology; United States