Filter Results:
(193)
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(251)
- News (29)
- Research (193)
- Events (1)
- Multimedia (1)
- Faculty Publications (92)
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(251)
- News (29)
- Research (193)
- Events (1)
- Multimedia (1)
- Faculty Publications (92)
Sort by
- Research Summary
Microwedges: Challenging power one small opening at a time [Dissertation, job market paper]
Based on a 31-month qualitative inductive study of multidisciplinary change teams, I introduce the concept of the “microwedge”—a small action or series of actions by team members that allows the team to examine their own assumptions so that they can begin to engage... View Details
- March 1995 (Revised April 1995)
- Background Note
Scope of the Corporation, The
By: David J. Collis
Describes analyses that determine the appropriate limit to the scope of the firm. Examines both the production cost justification for firm diversification--economies of scope and shared resources, and the governance cost justification for including transactions inside... View Details
Collis, David J. "Scope of the Corporation, The." Harvard Business School Background Note 795-139, March 1995. (Revised April 1995.)
- 2017
- Article
Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing
By: Michael Y. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson
Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in radical... View Details
Keywords: Self-Managed Organizations; Self-Managed Teams; Self-organizing Systems; Self-managing Organizations; Flat Organization; Decentralization; Organization Design; Non-hierarchical Organizations; Less-hierarchical Organizing; Organizational Structure; Organizational Design; Research
Lee, Michael Y., and Amy C. Edmondson. "Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the Limits of Less-Hierarchical Organizing." Research in Organizational Behavior 37 (2017): 35–58.
- 03 Mar 2011
- Working Paper Summaries
How Firm Strategies Influence the Architecture of Transaction Networks
- April 1999
- Teaching Note
Finding New Markets for New and Disruptive Technologies: Managing Innovation, Overview Teaching Note for Module 2
By: Clayton M. Christensen
Provides instructors with an overview teaching note for the second module of the Managing Innovation course in which students explore the challenges and methods for defining and creating new markets for new technologies. In addition to summarizing each of the cases... View Details
- 28 Jul 2010
- Working Paper Summaries
Disagreement about the Team’s Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance
Keywords: by Heidi K. Gardner
- 16 Feb 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization
- 2017
- Working Paper
Empowering Bureaucracy: Achieving Non-Hierarchical Control and Employee Autonomy Through Dynamic Formal Roles
By: Michael Lee
Hierarchy and formal structure are conventionally viewed as two tightly coupled dimensions of organization design. As organizations move from more hierarchical to less hierarchical authority structures, they also tend to reduce formal structure. However, organic... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Radical Transformation at Bayer: Dynamic Shared Ownership
By: Boris Groysberg and Gamze Yucaoglu
In 2023, Bill Anderson became CEO of Bayer AG, a 160-year-old life sciences giant looking to strengthen its pharma pipeline, manage debt, and cut through bureaucracy. His bold response: Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), a radical model replacing traditional hierarchies... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization
By: Maria Guadalupe and Julie Wulf
This paper establishes a causal effect of competition from trade liberalization on various characteristics of organizational design. We exploit a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies (1986-1999) of large U.S. firms and find that increasing competition leads firms... View Details
Keywords: Trade; Managerial Roles; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy
Guadalupe, Maria, and Julie Wulf. "The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-067, November 2008.
- January 2004 (Revised April 2004)
- Case
Crisis and Response: Sexual Abuse Allegations in the Boston Archdiocese (B)
By: Ashish Nanda
In 2002, the Boston archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church was confronted by public revelations of how allegations of clergy sexual abuse were handled by the archdiocese during the 1990s. This case describes how the Boston archdiocese addressed the issue over the... View Details
Keywords: Conflict of Interests; Crime and Corruption; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Religion; Crisis Management; Boston
Nanda, Ashish. "Crisis and Response: Sexual Abuse Allegations in the Boston Archdiocese (B)." Harvard Business School Case 904-049, January 2004. (Revised April 2004.)
- 2024
- Working Paper
“If You’re Not There… You’re Not There”: How Art Market Platforms Induce Status Anxiety to Coerce Participation
By: James Riley and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan
This paper, an 18-month ethnographic investigation of international art fairs (IAFs), shows how market platforms can have a coercive effect, inducing sellers (i.e., art galleries) to participate despite ambivalence over their value and anxiety over the process by which... View Details
- December 2003 (Revised February 2008)
- Background Note
Law and Legal Reasoning: An Introduction
By: Henry B. Reiling
Gives prominence to Mr. Justice Holmes' Prediction Theory of the law as a practical--and by analogy to forecasting in finance and other functional areas of business--comfortable, and familiar way for businesspeople to think about the law. Law is defined as a forecast... View Details
Reiling, Henry B. "Law and Legal Reasoning: An Introduction." Harvard Business School Background Note 204-080, December 2003. (Revised February 2008.)
- 07 Sep 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Decision-Making by Precedent and the Founding of American Honda (1948–1974)
- March 2009 (Revised February 2011)
- Background Note
Note: Fair Value Accounting for Investments in Debt Securities
The note describes how fair value accounting applies to debt securities that are classified by financial institutions as (1) "trading" securities, (2) "available for sale" securities, or (3) "hold to maturity" securities. It explains the hierarchy for inputs used in... View Details
Fruhan, William E. "Note: Fair Value Accounting for Investments in Debt Securities." Harvard Business School Background Note 209-134, March 2009. (Revised February 2011.)
- March 2022
- Article
Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst and Yuhai Xuan
We explore gender differences in performance in a comprehensive sample of venture capital investments in the United States. Investments by female venture capital investors have significantly lower success rates than investments by their male colleagues when controlling... View Details
Gompers, Paul A., Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst, and Yuhai Xuan. "Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance." Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 57, no. 2 (March 2022): 485–513.
- 2010
- Working Paper
Disagreement about the Team's Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance
By: Heidi K. Gardner
Hierarchies are pervasive in groups, generally providing clear guidelines for the dominance and deference behaviors that members are expected to show based on their relative ranks. But what happens when team members disagree about where each member ranks on the... View Details
Keywords: Performance Effectiveness; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Conflict and Resolution; Perception; Status and Position; Cooperation
Gardner, Heidi K. "Disagreement about the Team's Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-113, June 2010.
- August 2017
- Article
A Formal Theory of Strategy
What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper formally studies these questions, starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices.” The paper shows that this... View Details
Van den Steen, Eric J. "A Formal Theory of Strategy." Management Science 63, no. 8 (August 2017): 2616–2636.
- December 2014
- Article
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
By: Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very... View Details
Bloom, Nicholas, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization." Management Science 60, no. 12 (December 2014): 2859–2885.
- Fall 2012
- Article
The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised
By: Julie Wulf
For decades, management consultants and the popular business press have urged large firms to flatten their hierarchies. Flattening (or delayering, as it is also known) typically refers to the elimination of layers in a firm's organizational hierarchy and the broadening... View Details
Wulf, Julie. "The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised." California Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 5–23.