Always On - Publications - Faculty & Research

04 Jun 2014
What Do You Think?

Does Internet Technology Threaten Brand Loyalty?

Summing Up Is the Potential Negative Impact of New Information Technologies on Customer Loyalties Overstated? Customers will remain loyal to brands that meet their needs, regardless of the effects of new information technologies View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Advertising; Consumer Products; Technology

09 Aug 2013
Research & Ideas

Read All About It: Digital CEO Buys Traditional Media!

Amazon). But is there an economic rationale to the investment? Or to put it more bluntly, is there a viable future for these newspapers after the Internet has disrupted the traditional print business? Since Bezos's strategy for any business has View Details

Keywords: by Jim Aisner; Journalism & News; Publishing

24 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

The Hidden Vulnerabilities of Open Source Software

Commonly used free and open source software (FOSS) is one of the most significant technological trends of the decade. After all, 80-90 percent of a typical application contains FOSS components. And that trend is only increasing with its... View Details

Keywords: by Frank Nagle and Jenny Hoffman; Computer

18 Mar 2019
Research & Ideas

Stuck in Commuter Hell? You Can Still Be Productive

work to transition from our home role to our work role is not always intuitive. One would think that switching roles is as easy as putting on a different hat. It turns out that... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

13 Mar 2019
Research & Ideas

Ignore This Advice at Your Own Peril

Employees regularly turn to managers and other higher-level co-workers to seek advice about job-related issues and next steps for their careers. Yet people don’t always take the advice they receive; they may accept some suggestions and... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

05 Aug 2015
What Do You Think?

What Happened to the ‘Innovation, Disruption, Technology’ Dividend?

in the field of analytics are focused on improved utilization of productive equipment and materials It is hard to get much GDP growth or wage growth this way, but corporate profits are certainly going up. Perhaps that is a better way to... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Computer; Technology

30 Nov 2016
What Do You Think?

How Do Leaders Manage the Tension Between Pride and Arrogance?

influence on whether or not an organization crosses the line from pride to arrogance. (3) It is possible to lead close to the line between pride and arrogance without crossing it; several suggestions were offered for how to do this. Ken... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

03 Mar 2003
Research & Ideas

The Ingredients of a Deal Disaster

truly meeting on the underlying social contract. It's almost always best to get the managers who must make the deal work involved in the negotiating process, where they can begin to forge a positive social... View Details

Keywords: by Ron S. Fortgang, David A. Lax & James K. Sebenius

24 Nov 2015
Research & Ideas

Developing Your Next CEO for the Family Business

A good book on CEO succession is The CEO Within by my Harvard Business School colleague Joe Bower. Bower studied how companies perform after hiring a new CEO, noting whether the successor had been recruited from inside or outside the... View Details

Keywords: Re: Andi Wang; Retail; Auto

10 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 10, 2018

filing of the 13D. Informed traders find it profitable to concentrate their trades with a leaking broker because the loss due to the information leakage is more than compensated by the gains derived from trading on the information... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

16 May 2016
HBS Case

Food Safety Economics: The Cost of a Sick Customer

prided itself on avoiding artificial ingredients, opting instead to use a relatively short supply chain of local growers for many of its ingredients. That strategy just might have been part of its problem, says John A. Quelch, the Charles... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage

11 Mar 2001
Research & Ideas

Evolving for Success [Part Two]

territories where people control their own turf, their own profit-and-loss responsibility, and their own division. New ideas, whether that includes the Internet or anything else, don't descend upon a company in the boxes that have already been established View Details

Keywords: by Staff

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

Balancing the Future Against Today’s Needs

navigate conflicts both external and internal. Today, more than ever, markets exert continual pressure on organizations to cut costs and return capital to the bottom line, but building value demands that much of that same capital be... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Michelman

07 Nov 2006
First Look

First Look: November 7, 2006

Executive MBA programs who had worked in a range of organizational settings. Overall, our analyses demonstrate that influences on the decision to speak up include both stable and situation-specific factors, such that conceptualizing... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

18 Apr 2005
Research & Ideas

Prosper with Multi-Channel Retailing

For decades, major retailers offered customers only two methods of purchasing: directly at the store or from catalogs sent through the mail. With the advent of the Internet, retail companies that offered only one or two channels suddenly... View Details

Keywords: by Julie Jette; Consumer Products; Retail

28 Feb 2011
Research & Ideas

The Importance of ‘Don’t’ in Inducing Ethical Employee Behavior

what not to do? Harvard Business School professor Joshua D. Margolis draws a parallel to stage directions in a high-school play. "If you're always told when to enter, you might skip over the one time... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

07 Nov 2011
Research & Ideas

The Forgotten Book that Helped Shape the Modern Economy

A British merchant's long-forgotten seventeenth-century book may not only fuel a radical rethinking about how modern economies developed in Europe and America, but also add historical perspective on today's hot-button issue of the proper... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

08 Jun 2009
Research & Ideas

The Return of the Salesman

Throughout history salespeople have come in all sizes and stripes—peddlers, drummers, canvassers, agents, sales reps, and of course the iconic door-to-door salesman. But it's only been relatively recently that historians have focused scholarly attention View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

04 Nov 2015
What Do You Think?

Why Does Gender Diversity Improve Financial Performance?

(Danielle); “Winning in this age requires more cross-disciplinary thinking... Women, in my experience, are better thought integrators.” (Allison S. A. Graves); “Many studies suggest that women tend to score higher on tests of social... View Details