Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(3,673)
- Faculty Publications (939)
- October 2008
- Article
It's Time to Make Management a True Profession
By: Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana
In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True... View Details
- September 2008 (Revised August 2009)
- Case
Columbus Tubing: Steel is Real
By: Daniel C. Snow, Gary P. Pisano, Elena Corsi and Gudrun Urfalino Kristinsdottir
Columbus Tubing must choose to improve an old technology (steel) or to develop a new material (carbon fiber). The decision must take into account a complicated context: increased demand for the "old" steel products made in Italy, increasing power of carbon fiber... View Details
- Article
MIT Roundtable on Corporate Risk Management
By: Robert C. Merton
Against the backdrop of financial crisis, a distinguished group of academics and practitioners discusses the contribution of financial management and innovation to corporate growth and value, along with the pitfalls and unintended consequences of such innovation.... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Signaling Firm Performance Through Financial Statement Presentation: An Analysis Using Special Items
By: Edward J. Riedl and Suraj Srinivasan
This paper investigates whether managers' presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
CEO and CFO Career Penalties to Missing Quarterly Analysts Forecasts
By: Rick Mergenthaler, Shiva Rajgopal and Suraj Srinivasan
We find that missing the quarterly analyst consensus earnings forecast is associated with career penalties in the form of a reduced bonus, smaller equity grants, and a greater chance of forced dismissal for both CEOs and CFOs during the period 1993-2004. These results... View Details
- July–August 2008
- Article
Interview with a Quality Leader: Regina E. Herzlinger on Consumer-Driven Healthcare
Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration Chair at the Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA. She received her bachelor's degree from MIT and her doctorate from the Harvard Business School The first woman to be tenured and... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
Allocating Marketing Resources
By: Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh
Companies spend billions of dollars on marketing every year because it is essential to organic growth. Given these large investments, marketing managers have the responsibility to optimally allocate resources and to demonstrate that their investments generate... View Details
- May 2008
- Article
Real and Accrual-Based Earnings Management in the Pre- and Post-Sarbanes Oxley Periods
By: Daniel Cohen, Aiyesha Dey and Thomas Lys
We document that accrual‐based earnings management increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX) in 2002, followed by a significant decline after the passage of SOX. Conversely, the level of real earnings management activities declined... View Details
- April 2008
- Journal Article
Inventory Record Inaccuracy: An Empirical Analysis
By: Nicole DeHoratius and Ananth Raman
This study explores the systematic variation in inventory record inaccuracy (IRI) observed both within and across stores. Traditional inventory models, with a few exceptions, do not account for the existence of IRI and those that do treat record inaccuracy as random.... View Details
- March 2008
- Case
Novartis AG: Science-Based Business
By: H. Kent Bowen and Courtney Purrington
Novartis is a science-based drug company, which has important implications for its business strategy. It is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world with over $38B in sales in 2007. Pharmaceuticals account for slightly over $24B of that total. In 2007,... View Details
- March 2008
- Article
When Growth Stalls
By: Matthew S. Olson, Derek C. M. van Bever and Seth Verry
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading.
An abrupt and lasting drop in revenue growth is a crisis that can strike even the... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised November 2011)
- Case
The International Monetary Fund in Crisis
By: Rawi Abdelal, David Moss and Eugene Kintgen
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn became the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund in late 2007, he faced a number of significant changes. The organization had lost much of its legitimacy over the previous decade, and countries seemed increasingly reluctant to... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Allocating Marketing Resources
By: Sunil Gupta and Thomas J. Steenburgh
Marketing is essential for the organic growth of a company. Not surprisingly, firms spend billions of dollars on marketing. Given these large investments, marketing managers have the responsibility to optimally allocate these resources and demonstrate that these... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised October 2010)
- Case
Sara Campbell Ltd. (A)
By: Romana Autrey, V.G. Narayanan and Julia Rozovsky
Describes a situation in which Sara Campbell, the CEO of a women's apparel company, must decide how to resolve the tense relationship with her Financial Controller and ex-brother-in-law, Stephen Holt. Holt was employed by Campbell for 10 years, took on the majority of... View Details
- December 2007
- Article
Applying Modern Risk Management to Equity and Credit Analysis
By: Robert C. Merton
Traditional conventions of accounting and actuarial science distort the valuation of capital risk in corporations with pension plans because under these conventions, pension assets and liabilities are not included in balance sheet calculations. The modern risk... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised June 2011)
- Case
ISS A/S (A)
By: Clayton S. Rose
Provides the opportunity to examine the nature and extent of a company's responsibilities to its bondholders, and to develop an enhanced understanding of the challenges in managing contractual obligations, and circumstances under which business leaders might agree to... View Details
- November 2007 (Revised March 2009)
- Case
OppenheimerFunds and Take-Two Interactive (A)
By: Jay W. Lorsch, Andrew Hill and Kaitlyn Simpson
Describes the dilemma faced by Emmanuel Ferreira, a fund manager at OppenheimerFunds. As the largest shareholder and a long-time investor in software publisher Take-Two Interactive, Ferreira contemplates whether or not to get involved with other investors in trying to... View Details
- 2007
- Casebook
Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership
By: Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman and Susan Moore Johnson
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the... View Details
- 2007
- Book
When Professionals Have to Lead: A New Model for High Performance
By: Thomas J. DeLong, John J. Gabarro and Robert Lees
For too long, professional services firms (PSFs) have relied on the "producer-manager" model, which works well in uncomplicated business environments. However, today's managing directors must balance conflicting roles, more demanding clients, tougher competitors, and... View Details
- October 2007 (Revised February 2008)
- Background Note
Evaluating M&A Deals: Accretion vs. Dilution of Earnings-per-share
When discussing the pros and cons of an acquisition, practitioners often talk about the impact of the deal on the buyer's earnings-per-share (eps). An acquisition is said to be "accretive" if the buyer's eps goes up post-deal; it is "dilutive" if the buyer's eps goes... View Details