Publications

2022
Book

The Heart of Business (ハート・オブ・ビジネス)――「人とパーパス」を本気で大切にする新時代のリーダーシップ

By: Hubert Joly and Caroline Lambert

A remarkable turnaround by a leader with a remarkable philosophy: Find your noble purpose. Put people at the center. Unleash human magic.
"It was fall in Minnesota. It was getting cold and we were supposed to die." This is how Hubert Joly describes the early,... View Details

Keywords: Capitalism; Leadership; Mission and Purpose; Business and Stakeholder Relations

September 2012 (Revised December 2012)
Case

Addleshaw Goddard LLP (Abridged)

By: Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and James Weber

Addleshaw-Goddard (AG), the 15th largest law firm in the UK, is seeking ways to serve larger clients on more important legal matters. Part of this strategy involves its "Client Development Centre (CDC)," an innovative idea and set of services launched by Dr. Jim Hever... View Details

Keywords: Price; Innovation and Invention; Service Operations; Partners and Partnerships; Competitive Advantage; Diversification; Legal Services Industry; United Kingdom

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

Richard L. Nolan are professors at Harvard Business School while Shannon O'Donnell is a consultant with Cutter Consortium's Innovation Practice and a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School. The three teamed up via email for the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

24 Jan 2018
Research & Ideas

How to Get People Addicted to a Good Habit

Addiction: A Field Experiment in Handwashing, authored by Hussam; Atonu Rabbani, an associate professor at the University of Dhaka; Giovanni Reggiani, then a doctoral student at MIT and now a consultant at The Boston View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

October 2009 (Revised April 2010)
Case

Societe Generale (A): The Jerome Kerviel Affair

By: Francois Brochet

This case illustrates the tension/balance that firms with complex and risky business models must consider in designing their internal controls. It describes the environment in which a derivatives trader engaged in massive directional positions on major European stocks... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Problems and Challenges; Complexity; Cost Management; Balance and Stability; Business Model; Design; Stocks; Crisis Management; Financial Markets; Consulting Industry; Europe

11 Jul 2016
HBS Case

Neurodiversity: The Benefits of Recruiting Employees with Cognitive Disabilities

Specialisterne, a Danish software firm with 75 percent of its workforce diagnosed with ASD. Ferose, like the founder of Specialisterne, has a son diagnosed with ASD. Specialisterne is what Austin calls the “gold standard” of neurodiversity. The software testing and... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Technology

27 Jun 2011
Research & Ideas

Recovering from the Need to Achieve

done, but I'd like to demonstrate the prescriptive possibilities by way of Jeff Gardner, a character I created for an earlier book on leadership. Jeff was the highly successful partner of a small consulting firm, and I ended the story in... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Budgeting Kills Your Company

keep a tight rein on costs—but the dynamics of the budgeting process often undermine this effort. "In tough times like these, any significant real cost growth feels imprudent and is hard to justify for most businesses," writes Mike Baxter, a partner in the... View Details

Keywords: by Loren Gary

30 Oct 2019
Research & Ideas

How to Recover Gracefully After Shutting Down Your Startup

step should be to consult a lawyer and an accountant to understand their legal obligations and how to sequence payments to parties owed money. After that, they should formulate a plan for communicating the news to customers and... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

05 May 2008
Research & Ideas

Connecting with Consumers Using Deep Metaphors

Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, and Lindsay Zaltman, managing director of Olson Zaltman Associates, a research and consulting firm, believe that deep insights from consumers are essential for brands that... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Consumer Products

31 Aug 2020
What Do You Think?

Why Don’t More Organizations Understand the Power of Diversity and Inclusion?

correlation vs. cause and effect. As commenter Diogenes put it, “Prove with a cogent methodology that racial and gender diversity lead to greater profitability. Prove causation, not correlation (which studies to date primarily by View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

October 2010 (Revised May 2017)
Case

Building a Developmental Culture: The Birth of Deloitte University

By: Boris Groysberg, Maureen Gibbons and Joshua Bronstein

It is October 2009 and Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte LLP, has just returned from the groundbreaking of Deloitte University. When completed, Deloitte University would be a world class learning and development center owned by, and for the exclusive use by the employees... View Details

Keywords: Leading Change; Problems and Challenges; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Teams; Competency and Skills; Training; Employees; Values and Beliefs; Consulting Industry; Consulting Industry; United States

01 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

The Big Influence of Small Countries in the United Nations Secretariat

miscalculated. By contrast, in this setting you have a constant struggle in real time between every nation in the world vying for influence within the Secretariat." To figure out who has been winning that competition, Werker and Novosad View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Failure Analysis

the folly of not adhering strictly to the company's core beliefs.2 Similarly, we have observed failed consulting relationships in our field research in which the consultants simply blamed the failure on the... View Details

Keywords: by Amy Edmondson & Mark D. Cannon

16 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

Has COVID-19 Broken the Global Value Chain?

the global value chain, and what more might we expect? Laura Alfaro and Ester Faia: In 2012, a survey by the World Economic Forum and [the consulting firm] Accenture, devoted to assess the risk of a disruption in the global supply chain,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

21 Feb 2005
Op-Ed

Is Business Management a Profession?

requirement of passing a standard exam before being admitted to practice, nor are senior managers, investment bankers, or consultants required to participate in continuing education. There is no explicit obligation, for example, for... View Details

Keywords: by Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria & Daniel Penrice

18 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

How New Managers Become Great Managers

teaching, and consulting over the past ten years, I have come to understand more deeply than ever that the best managers are those who have an appetite for learning and are willing to work on themselves. Management is very hard; even the... View Details

Keywords: by Linda Hill

March 2000 (Revised August 2000)
Case

Ethan Berman at RiskMetrics Group (A)

Ethan Berman, CEO of J.P. Morgan's risk management spinoff, has grown RiskMetrics Group (RMG) from a small team of 30 to a 70-person firm contemplating an IPO. Along the way, the consensus-based decision-making process that he espoused started to prove unwieldy; his... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Style; Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Making; Consulting Industry; Consulting Industry