Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(699)
- Faculty Publications (172)
- February 2022
- Article
How Global Leaders Gain Power Through Downward Deference and Reduction of Social Distance
By: Tsedal Neeley and Sebastian Reiche
We theorize about how people with positional power enact downward deference—a practice of lowering oneself to be equal to that of lower power workers—based on a study of 115 top global leaders at a large U.S. company. These leaders were charged with advancing... View Details
- 14 Jan 2022
- Interview
Why We Need to Think of the Office as a Tool, with Very Specific Uses, Interview with Adi Ignatius
By: Tsedal Neeley and Adi Ignatius
HBR professor Tsedal Neeley has focused for years on a pair of essential business imperatives: how to go global, and how to become truly digital. More recently she has established herself as an expert in the nitty gritty aspects of the new workplace – how to hire and... View Details
- Article
Geographic Mobility, Immobility, and Geographic Flexibility—A Review and Agenda for Research on the Changing Geography of Work
I review and integrate a wide range of literature that has examined how geographic mobility of high-skilled workers creates value for organizations and individuals. Drawing on this interdisciplinary literature, I document that geographic mobility creates value by... View Details
- Summer 2021
- Article
The Cost and Evolution of Quality at Cipla Ltd, 1935–2016
By: Muhammad H. Zaman and Tarun Khanna
This article examines the evolution of Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla towards producing drugs that met the quality standards of European and U.S. regulators. It employs new research in Cipla’s corporate archives, the Creating Emerging Markets database, and... View Details
- June 2021
- Case
Acelero Learning
By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen
In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details
- June 2021 (Revised December 2021)
- Case
Suzhou Good-Ark Electronics: Creating and Implementing a Sage Culture
By: Sandra J. Sucher, Nien-he Hsieh, Susan J. Winterberg, Nancy Hua Dai and Shalene Gupta
Suzhou Good-Ark, a Chinese semiconductor implemented "Sage Culture" management based on traditional Chinese philosophy. Productivity doubled, turnover decreased, and employee satisfaction shot up. By 2015, more than 2,000 companies had toured Wu’s factories, and Wu had... View Details
- April 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
IBM: Design Thinking
By: Srikant M. Datar, Amram Migdal and Paul Hamilton
This case describes the 2012-2020 effort at IBM to implement design thinking throughout the company and hire thousands of designers to serve on every product team alongside technical engineers and developers and product managers. IBM’s design transformation is told... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Divisions; Business Units; Business Organization; Change; Change Management; Transformation; Competency and Skills; Talent and Talent Management; Design; Human Resources; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Innovation and Invention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Leading Change; Management; Business or Company Management; Goals and Objectives; Management Practices and Processes; Operations; Product; Product Design; Product Development; Organizations; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Strategy; Adaptation; Adoption; Technological Innovation; Information Infrastructure; Information Technology; Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States
- March 2021 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Seeding and Selling Asana
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal
In December 2019, Oliver Jay, Asana’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), was reconsidering his go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Asana was cloud-based work management software that enabled users to break up projects into discrete tasks that could be assigned, scheduled, and... View Details
Keywords: SaaS; Customer Journey; Business Model; Business Organization; Change Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Growth Management; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Technology Industry; United States
- March 2021
- Case
Founders Factory
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and James Barnett
In January 2020, Founders Factory (FF) Executive Chairman Brent Hoberman and CEO Henry Lane Fox were considering FF’s expansion strategy. FF operated as a venture capital (VC) fund built around an accelerator and incubator, and organized around sectors within... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Markets; Planning; Expansion; Global Range; Business Model; Talent and Talent Management; Experience and Expertise; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Global Strategy; Innovation Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Management Teams; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Partners and Partnerships; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Technology Industry; Africa; South Africa; Johannesburg; Europe; France; Paris; United Kingdom; England; London; United States; New York (city, NY)
- February 2021
- Case
Digital Manufacturing at Amgen
By: Shane Greenstein, Kyle R. Myers and Sarah Mehta
This case discusses efforts made by biotechnology (biotech) company Amgen to introduce digital technologies into its manufacturing processes. Doing so is complicated by the fact that the process for manufacturing biologics—or therapeutics made from living cells—is... View Details
Keywords: Digital Technologies; Change; Change Management; Decision Making; Cost vs Benefits; Decisions; Information; Analytics and Data Science; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Jobs and Positions; Knowledge; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Science; Strategy; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; California; Puerto Rico; Rhode Island
- December 2020
- Case
Tokio Marine Group (A)
By: David J. Collis, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno
Tokio Marine, Japan's leading insurance company, has spent nearly two decades building a global footprint in different insurance businesses around the world. As the company becomes majority non-domestic it has to make a choice of what organisation structure to adopt to... View Details
- December 2020
- Supplement
Tokio Marine Group (B)
By: David J. Collis, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno
Updates the Tokio Marine (A) case by providing information on the organisation structure adopted by the Japanese insurance firm as it moved to integrate its global operations, along with changes in HR policies that sought to balance traditional Japanese practices with... View Details
- November–December 2020
- Article
Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case
By: Robin Ely and David A. Thomas
Leaders may mean well when they tout the economic payoffs of hiring more women and people of color, but there is no research support for the notion that diversifying the workforce automatically improves a company’s performance. This article critiques the popular... View Details
- 2020
- Article
Worry at Work: How Organizational Culture Promotes Anxiety
By: Jeremy A. Yip, Emma E. Levine, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer
Organizational culture profoundly influences how employees think and behave. Established research suggests that the content, intensity, consensus, and fit of cultural norms act as a social control system for attitudes and behavior. We adopt the norms model of... View Details
Keywords: Anxiety; Norms; Stress; Culture; Tightness-looseness; Curvilinear; Organizational Culture; Emotions; Performance
- October 2020 (Revised February 2025)
- Technical Note
Reinvention
By: Ryan Raffaelli
This note is designed to introduce students to the fundamental concepts of leading innovation in established organizations. Reinvention is a process whereby organizations respond to changes in the environment that threaten their core business model, technologies,... View Details
- August 2020
- Case
Zoom Video Communications: Eric Yuan's Leadership During COVID-19
In the first half of 2020, worldwide lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic brought explosive growth to the Zoom Video Communications platform, as people replaced in-person work and social events with videoconferencing. Months into the pandemic, CEO Eric Yuan... View Details
Keywords: Transformation; Communication Technology; Customer Value and Value Chain; Values and Beliefs; Technological Innovation; Leadership; Crisis Management; Organizational Culture; Working Conditions; Strategy; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Technology Adoption; Health Pandemics; Technology Industry; United States; California
- Aug 2020
- Conference Presentation
Impacting Grand Challenges: A 'Both/And' Approach
By: Natalie Slawinski, Wendy K. Smith, Robin J. Ely, Tobias Hahn, Andrew J. Hoffman and Anita M. McGahan
In this panel symposium, we seek to build on growing efforts by management scholars to engage with grand challenges and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Reflective of the All- Academy Theme description, we note that research and scholarship... View Details
- Article
The Importance of Being Causal
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Albert Chen and Min Liu
Causal inference is the study of how actions, interventions, or treatments affect outcomes of interest. The methods that have received the lion’s share of attention in the data science literature for establishing causation are variations of randomized experiments.... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
GitLab and the Future of All-Remote Work (A)
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Emma Salomon
GitLab is arguably one of the world’s largest “all-remote” companies. Started in 2011 and with more than 1,000 employees at present, it has no physical offices and all employees, including the entire C-Suite, work remotely from all parts of the world. The case... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Voi Technology
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Olivia Hull
Voi Technology, a fast-growing start-up out of Sweden, is competing in the highly contested European e-scooter sharing market. With a presence in nearly 40 cities in Europe by February 2020, the firm is working hard to improve its unit economics to reach profitability.... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Strategy; Technology Adoption; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Marketing Strategy; Business Plan; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Energy Conservation; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Global Strategy; Globalized Economies and Regions; Innovation Leadership; Human Capital; Laws and Statutes; Growth Management; Operations; Logistics; Service Operations; Supply Chain Management; Organizational Culture; Information Infrastructure; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Technology Industry; Europe