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Advisory Board - Entrepreneurship

opportunities. He graduated from Kenyon College, has one daughter, and lives in Wellesley, MA. Marla Malcolm Beck (MBA 1998), Bluemercury Marla Malcolm Beck is the co-founder and CEO of Bluemercury Inc., a high-growth luxury beauty View Details

15 Jul 2013
Research & Ideas

Five Imperatives for Improving Health Care

the last 30 years. We want providers to look at their processes for activities, such as running an operating room, discharging patients, or conducting physician rounds, and figure out cost-effective ways to improve upon them,"... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

06 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Latest Isn’t Always Greatest: Why Product Updates Capture Consumers

because consumers are using an imperfect shortcut to make a decision, which makes them more susceptible to inferring that altered products are better, even in situations when this is not true. “It operates in this zone where there is some... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail; Retail

2015
Case

Fine Harvest Restaurant Group (cases A and B)

By: Clara (Xiaoling) Chen, Kenneth A. Merchant, Tatiana Sandino and Wim A. Van der Stede

The Fine Harvest Restaurant Group cases A and B examine a company's design of a new system to evaluate the performance (and determine the bonuses) for its restaurant managers. Fine Harvest had traditionally evaluated restaurant managers based on store margins and had... View Details

Keywords: Incentive Systems; Relative Performance Evaluation; Restaurant Industry; Accounting; Economics; Human Resources; Measurement and Metrics; Labor; Performance; Salesforce Management; Retail Industry; North and Central America

March 2006 (Revised October 2007)
Case

The Parisian Revival

By: Rajiv Lal and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In mid-2005, George Jones had two jobs: head of Saks Inc.'s 41-store Parisian department store chain as well as president and CEO of the Saks Department Store Group (SDSG), an umbrella for seven chains with a total of 182 stores across the United States. In 2003 Jones... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement; Sales; Retail Industry; United States

Find at Harvard

November 2018 (Revised June 2019)
Case

Michael Rubin and Fanatics (A)

By: Robert F. Higgins and John Masko

In 2016, Michael Rubin’s Fanatics was the U.S.’ largest sports e-commerce company and operator of the official online store for all the major American sports leagues. That year, Fanatics began to dabble in manufacturing licensed sports merchandise, securing limited... View Details

Keywords: Fanatics; Licensed Merchandise; E-commerce; Entrepreneurship; Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Sports; Retail Industry; Retail Industry; Retail Industry; United States

01 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

How To Make Restructuring Work for Your Company

address any one of these challenges can cause the restructuring to fail. Having A Business Purpose Restructuring is more likely to be successful when managers first understand the fundamental business/strategic problem or opportunity that their company faces. At Humana... View Details

Keywords: by Stuart C. Gilson

01 Mar 2024
News

Case Study: Testing the Waters

Illustration by Christina Spano Endurance training was nothing new to Lauren Picasso (MBA 2014), who’d raced through her younger years as a cross-country runner and swimmer. In 2017, when she was director of marketing at Jet.com and looking for a physical challenge,... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Food and Beverage Stores; Retail Trade

05 Jul 2022
What Do You Think?

Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?

distribution channel. Fluctuating demand at the retail level would generate exaggerated fluctuations—a “whipsaw” effect—in expected demand and inventory planning at the back end, or manufacturing level, in an effort to meet possible... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Manufacturing; Shipping; Transportation

March 2013
Case

An Entrepreneur's New Product Development Journey

By: Elie Ofek

This case tracks the new product development process undertaken by Gauri Nanda, the founder and CEO of Nanda Home, as she ventures to innovate beyond her initial product launches. Having achieved commercial success with her first product Clocky, a roll away alarm clock... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Product Development; Manufacturing Industry; Consumer Products Industry

March 2022 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Perch

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Stacy Straaberg and Julia Kelley

In May 2021, Perch CEO Chris Bell needed to decide whether his e-commerce aggregator company, which bought and scaled Amazon Marketplace brands, should acquire up to three acquisition targets. The prospective acquisitions, Web Deals Direct, HomeCo, and Future Brands,... View Details

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Globalization - Faculty & Research

U.S. firms by analyzing detailed data on patent applications and on the operations of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational firms. The results indicate that increases in the share of a firm's innovation performed by inventors of a... View Details

01 Apr 2008
First Look

First Look: April 1, 2008

Case 208-069 Delphi Corporation, operating under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, has filed a plan of reorganization with the court, under which a consortium of hedge funds led by Appaloosa Management will invest up to $2.6 billion in... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

19 Sep 2023
Blog Post

2023 Summer Internships in Business & Environment

operates power projects and is the world’s largest producer of wind and solar energy. Aman's role prior to HBS was the Head of Partnerships at Plentify. Dennis Cha (MBA 2024, Section F), Summer Internship: Product Partnership Intern,... View Details

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Accounting & Management Awards & Honors - Faculty & Research

Susanna Gallani : Received the 2021 Robert F. Greenhill Award. Jonas Heese : Winner of the 2021 FESE De La Vega Best Paper Award for “Does Industry Employment of Active Regulators Weaken Oversight?” Krishna G. Palepu : Winner of the 2021 Case Centre Award in the... View Details

04 Apr 2023
Book

Two Centuries of Business Leaders Who Took a Stand on Social Issues

While shareholders still reign supreme at many companies, a widespread shift toward more responsible business practices is driving more leaders to take a stand on social and environmental issues today, says Harvard Business School Professor Geoffrey Jones. Jones... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Consumer Products; Fashion; Retail; Green Technology

23 Aug 2006
Op-Ed

The Real Wal-Mart Effect

This opinion piece, first published in the New York Times in August 2005, has been updated by Pankaj Ghemawat for HBS Working Knowledge.Mighty Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, must feel less like a hotbed of retailing and... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat & Ken A. Mark; Retail

January 2020 (Revised October 2021)
Case

Zara: An Integrated Store and Online Model (A)

By: Antonio Moreno

In 2010, amidst the growth of ecommerce and the emergence of new, purely online, fashion players, Zara launched its first online store, Zara.com. Since then, Zara’s online business had grown at a fast pace. By 2018, 12% of Inditex Group’s total sales came from the... View Details

Keywords: Stores; Integration; Operations; Business Model; Strategy; E-commerce; Retail Industry; Retail Industry; Europe

February 2013 (Revised February 2014)
Case

Phu My Hung

By: John Macomber and Dawn H. Lau

Privately held city development promoters decide whether to partner on next phase or go it alone in a 20-year, 4000-acre project. Set outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this decades-long project led by two Taiwanese families reshaped and built the economic... View Details

Keywords: Urban Development; Infrastructure; Real Estate Industry; Viet Nam