Publications

Web

Redefining Productivity in the Value Chain - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

HBS ISC Creating Shared Value CSV Creating Shared Value CSV Explained Emerging Topics CSV in Practice Published CSV Cases CSV Explained CSV Explained The Three Levels of CSV View Details

25 Apr 2014
News

The measure of business success is in how you add value

Adrian Beer (OPM 31, 2002), CEO of GrupoBeer, says success in business means adding value for your clients. (Published April 2014) View Details

November 2020 (Revised July 2022)
Case

Dell Technologies: Bringing the Cloud to the Ground

By: Navid Mojir and V. Kasturi Rangan

The case tells the story of Dell Technologies and its efforts to revitalize its value proposition and escape a commodity trap by acquiring EMC for $67 billion—the largest tech acquisition in history. It also shows the deeply intertwined connections between a company’s... View Details

Keywords: Value Proposition; Go-to-market; Strategic Positioning; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Technological Innovation; Business Divisions; Information Technology Industry; Computer Industry

September 2020
Case

&pizza: Leading an ‘Employee-First’ Company During a Period of Societal Challenges

By: Francesca Gino and Jeffrey Huizinga

&Pizza is a pizza chain that in the spring of 2020 finds its business completely up-ended by the COVID-19 crisis and shut-down. Many companies in the restaurant and hospitality sector responded to the crisis by shutting down their operations and laying off employees.... View Details

Keywords: Agility; Crisis; Culture; Values; COVID-19 Pandemic; Crisis Management; Leadership; Organizational Culture; Values and Beliefs; Employee Relationship Management

April 27, 2009
Article

Fraud in Online Advertising

By: Benjamin Edelman

At first glance, online advertising seems to be as measurable a medium as any ever invented. Advertisers can count how many times an ad was sent, then measure sales—yielding an analysis that seems to report the value of an online ad campaign. But the reality is... View Details

Keywords: Advertising Campaigns; Online Advertising; Crime and Corruption; Measurement and Metrics; Value

Find at Harvard

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25 Apr 2014
Video

Adrian Beer - Making A Difference

June 2016 (Revised December 2017)
Case

Google to Alphabet: Ten Things We Know to Be True

By: Robert Simons and Annelena Lobb

Google’s founders wrote “10 Things We Know to Be True,” a document detailing founding principles and values, early in the company’s life. As the company expanded, added business units, and changed its name to Alphabet, were these principles and values still valid and... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Strategy; Organizational Design; Technology Industry

May 2016 (Revised September 2017)
Case

Canadian Pacific's Bid for Norfolk Southern

By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield

In December 2015, Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR) has just made its third bid to acquire Norfolk Southern Corporation (NSC), one of the largest railroads in the United States. Having rejected the prior offers, NSC’s CEO James Squires and the NSC board must now value... View Details

Keywords: Capital Structure; Cash Flow; Cost of Capital; Financial Strategy; Investment Activism; Bids and Bidding; Negotiation Offer; Corporate Strategy; Rail Transportation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Transformation; United States; Canada

28 Feb 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Master the Team Meeting

monkeybusinessimages No matter how much we hate going to meetings, there’s a generally accepted best practice that teams should meet with their managers on a regular cadence. More often than not, unfortunately, I hear leaders and their staffs dreading these... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Ball: EVA Driving the World's Leading Can Manufacturer (A)

By: Jonas Heese and Susan Pinckney

The case describes Ball’s multi decade history of using Economic Value Added to drive decision making and workforce compensation. In 2016, the company acquired Rexam PLC and became the world’s leading metal beverage container company. Consumer demand for varied... View Details

Keywords: Education; Government

2015
Working Paper

What Do Private Equity Firms Say They Do?

By: Paul A. Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan and Vladimir Mukharlyamov

We survey 79 private equity investors with combined assets under management (AUM) of over $750 billion about their practices in firm valuation, capital structure, governance, and value creation. Investors rely primarily on internal rate of return (IRR) and multiples to... View Details

Keywords: Governance; Value Creation; Private Equity; Capital Structure; Valuation; Management Practices and Processes

SSRN

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2013
Chapter

The Design of Online Advertising Markets

By: Benjamin Edelman

Because the market for online advertising is both new and fast-changing, participants experiment with all manner of variations. Should an advertiser's payment reflect the number of times an ad was shown, the number of times it was clicked, the number of sales that... View Details

Keywords: Misleading and Fraudulent Advertising; Online Advertising; Price; Market Design; Measurement and Metrics; Sales; Motivation and Incentives; Internet and the Web

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March 1983 (Revised January 1989)
Case

American Home Products Corp.

American Home Products is a company with virtually no debt. Students are asked to analyze the company's debt policy and make a recommendation to the CEO. It is likely that adding debt to the capital structure would create some value for shareholders; the CEO is firmly... View Details

Keywords: Value Creation; Business Strategy; Borrowing and Debt; Consumer Products Industry

October 1987 (Revised January 1989)
Background Note

Purchasing a Business: The Search Process

Describes the steps necessary to purchase a small to medium size company. Provides an eight-part analytical framework. Issues covered in the framework include the following: the self-assessment, deal criteria, deal sources, resources necessary to purchase a business,... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Framework; Resource Allocation; Negotiation Deal; Business Processes; Valuation

June 1993 (Revised November 2007)
Case

Duckworth Industries, Inc.--Incentive Compensation Programs

By: William E. Fruhan Jr.

A private company is considering an introduction of a long-run incentive compensation system in which payoffs to managers are determined by the economic value added for shareholders by their individual business units. The proposed new system is compared to a number of... View Details

Keywords: Executive Compensation; Management Teams; Business and Shareholder Relations; Motivation and Incentives; Value Creation