Publications

February 1984 (Revised March 1991)
Case

Sof-Optics, Inc. (B)

Involves the introduction of a technology which almost completely eliminates direct labor for a major segment of the product line. The technology is unproven though, and requires managing the learning process. The teaching objective is to review the differences in... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Change Management; Production; Performance Capacity

Educators

March 1996 (Revised January 1997)
Case

Scott Cook and Intuit

By: James L. Heskett

Scott Cook has just learned that Microsoft has withdrawn its $2 billion offer for his company Intuit. Because of his company's prospects, he is elated. But he now must decide the direction in which to take his company while continuing to focus on the formula of... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Entrepreneurship; Business or Company Management; Marketing Strategy; Product Development

2024
Working Paper

Contributing to Growth? The Role of Open Source Software for Global Startups

By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Frank Nagle and Shane Greenstein

How does participating in open source software (OSS) communities spur entrepreneurial growth? To address this question, we analyze novel data matching accounts from GitHub—the largest OSS hosting platform—to the universe of global software venture-backed firms... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Open Source Distribution; Entrepreneurship; Business Growth and Maturation; Human Capital; Valuation; Corporate Strategy

SSRN

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2009
Working Paper

Varied Experience, Team Familiarity, and Learning: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety

By: Bradley R. Staats, Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano

Prior work examining the relationship of varied experience (i.e., the concurrent completion of multiple tasks) and learning by groups finds inconsistent results. We hypothesize that team familiarity, i.e, individuals' prior shared work experience, may help explain this... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Learning; Performance Effectiveness; Groups and Teams; Social Psychology; Familiarity

12 Mar 2015
Working Paper Summaries

What Courses Should Law Students Take? Harvard’s Largest Employers Weigh In

Keywords: by John C. Coates, Jesse M. Fried & Kathryn E. Spier; Legal Services; Education

Article

Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do about It

By: Michael Beer, Magnus Finnström and Derek Schrader

U.S. corporations spend enormous amounts of money—some $456 billion globally in 2015 alone—on employee training and education, but they aren't getting a good return on their investment. People soon revert to old ways of doing things, and company performance doesn't... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Leadership Development; Organizational Design; Employees; Business Processes; United States

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17 Dec 2012
Research & Ideas

Teaming in the Twenty-First Century

progress without a blueprint. The skill set involves interpersonal awareness, skillful inquiry, and an ability to teach others what you know. Teaming is very different from the idea of building a high-performance team to fit a known task. It is dynamic; View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish

Teaching Interest

FIELD 3: Integrative Intelligence

FIELD 3 brings the entire first-year experience together by challenging students to synthesize the knowledge, skills, and tools acquired in the RC within a real microbusiness they must design and launch themselves. Building on HBS's historic strength in the case... View Details

October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

SEK: Reimagining Spanish Higher Education at Universidad Camilo José Cela (UCJC)

By: John J-H Kim, Mary C. Sauer and Emilie Billaud

In 2023, Nieves Segovia, President of the SEK Education Group in Spain, contemplates the future of her family's for-profit education company, which includes K-12 schools and the newly established UCJC university. Renowned for its innovation in education, SEK faces... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Curriculum and Courses; Higher Education; Teaching; Digital Strategy; Disruptive Innovation; Knowledge Dissemination; Leading Change; Growth and Development Strategy; Management Succession; Resource Allocation; Organizational Structure; Education Industry; Europe; Spain

Educators

26 Apr 2024
HBS Case

Deion Sanders' Prime Lessons for Leading a Team to Victory

Leaders intent on boosting team performance could learn from the old-school, military-style approach of Deion Sanders, a former star athlete and now the unorthodox coach behind the revival of two college football teams. “When I’m teaching... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman; Sports

July–August 2018
Article

How CEOs Manage Time

By: Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria

In 2006 Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria launched a study tracking how large companies’ CEOs spent their time, 24/7, for 13 weeks: where they were, with whom, what they did, and what they were focusing on. To date, Porter and Nohria have... View Details

Keywords: CEOs; Executives; Time Management; Attitudes; Managerial Roles; Leadership; Performance Effectiveness; Strategy; Decision Making; Organizational Culture

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23 May 2023
Research & Ideas

Face Value: Do Certain Physical Features Help People Get Ahead?

Next came the empirical validation of directions and rankings. The authors developed a deep learning model that predicts if a face could belong to a celebrity or not. And they then compared that CVP score... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

28 Jan 2008
Research & Ideas

Billions of Entrepreneurs in China and India

often provided in a top-down manner. The second difference is the nature and extent of openness to outside influence and foreigners. Foreign direct investment pours into China. India has embraced foreign View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

2018
Chapter

The Strategic Imperative of Psychological Safety and Organizational Error Management

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Paul Verdin

Despite discussion in the management literature about agile organizations or learning organizations, many large organizations are top-down, slow to change, and fraught with obstacles to learning. We describe “strategy-as-learning” to contrast with the traditional... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Learning; Safety; Organizational Culture; Performance Consistency

27 Jul 2020
Book

Reflection: The Pause That Brings Peace and Productivity

reflection?” In addition, Badaracco interviewed more than 100 managers, ranging from supervisors to CEOs, from 15 countries to learn how busy men and women today find time for reflection. He found that almost all of them do reflect, but... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Article

Capabilities, Cognition and Inertia: Evidence from Digital Imaging

By: M. Tripsas and G. Gavetti

There is empirical evidence that established firms often have difficulty adapting to radical technological change. Although prior work in the evolutionary tradition emphasizes the inertial forces associated with the local nature of learning processes, little... View Details

Keywords: Business Offices; Organizations; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

Teaching Interest

Driving Organizational Agility - Virtual

By: Ranjay Gulati

Today's businesses must be alert to changes in the external environment, develop competitive strategies quickly—and adapt the organization to execute. In this virtual program, you'll explore organizational structures and processes that have enabled businesses to... View Details

26 Aug 2002
Research & Ideas

High-Stakes Decision Making: The Lessons of Mount Everest

the Everest case provides a framework for understanding, diagnosing, and preventing serious failures in many types of organizations. However, it also has important implications for how leaders can shape and direct the processes through... View Details

Keywords: by Michael A. Roberto

July 2023
Case

DayTwo: Going to Market with Gut Microbiome (Abridged)

By: Ayelet Israeli

DayTwo is a young Israeli startup that applies research on the gut microbiome and machine learning algorithms to deliver personalized nutritional recommendations to its users in order to minimize blood sugar spikes after meals. After a first year of trial rollout in... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Nutrition; Market Entry and Exit; Product Marketing; Distribution Channels

Educators