Publications

February 2014 (Revised October 2014)
Case

ISS A/S: The Buyout

By: Clayton Rose, Carsten Bienz and Lucy White

Provides the opportunity to value a leveraged buy-out; and to examine the nature and extent of a company's responsibilities to its bondholders. Here, the context is a "going private" transaction in Europe, where the financing plan called for the addition to the... View Details

Keywords: LBO; Private Equity; Contracts; Global Business; International Business; Finance; Ethics; Law; Service Industry; Europe

14 Mar 2007
Op-Ed

Government’s Misguided Probe of Private Equity

and Forstmann Little & Co., have dramatically downsized or announced their intention to cease operations after experiencing investment missteps and succession problems. Meanwhile, new organizations have amassed enormous sums of... View Details

Keywords: by Josh Lerner; Financial Services

July 2008 (Revised January 2010)
Case

Affinity Labs, Inc.

By: Joseph B. Lassiter III and Elizabeth Kind

In November 2006, Chris Michel left Military.com, which he founded in 1999, to start Affinity Labs, a global network of online communities. That month, Michel raised a Series A round of venture funding and established a partnership with Monster, which he had sold... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Demand and Consumers; Partners and Partnerships; Social and Collaborative Networks; Online Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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