Publications

Find at Harvard

April 1995 (Revised July 1996)
Supplement

Governance at Metallgesellschaft (B)

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Samanta Graff

Supplements the (A) case. View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Corporate Accountability; Business Conglomerates; Governing and Advisory Boards; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Corporate Governance; Chemical Industry; Chemical Industry; Germany; United States

April 1995 (Revised July 1996)
Case

Governance at Metallgesellschaft (A)

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Samanta Graff

MG Corp., a U.S. subsidiary of Germany's international conglomerate, Metallgesellschaft, engaged in a disastrous hedging strategy that nearly dragged the entire enterprise into bankruptcy. This case explores issues of responsibility and accountability among the... View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Corporate Accountability; Business Conglomerates; Governing and Advisory Boards; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Corporate Governance; Chemical Industry; Chemical Industry; Germany; United States

April 1988
Case

Restructuring European Petrochemicals: Update 1988

By: Joseph L. Bower

Keywords: Restructuring; Corporate Strategy; Chemical Industry; Chemical Industry; Europe

Find at Harvard

November 1987 (Revised March 1990)
Case

Ethyl Corp. in 1979

Describes the competitive situation facing the market leader in antiknock additives, the Ethyl Corp. Demand is declining rapidly and Ethyl has to decide whether to close capacity, and if so, how. Raises issues of corporate as well as SBU strategy because antiknock... View Details

Keywords: Business Units; Corporate Strategy; Performance Capacity; Chemical Industry; Chemical Industry

25 Apr 2023
Blog Post

Harvard Climate Leaders Program

climate-related issues grew, particularly from an agricultural perspective. Daniel Tong: I am Brazilian, grew up in São Paulo, and majored in Chemical Engineering, even though I never worked in the space. I started my career at J.P.... View Details

October 1997 (Revised September 2003)
Case

Eli Lilly and Company: Drug Development Strategy (A)

By: Stefan H. Thomke, Ashok Nimgade and Paul Pospisil

Describes how Eli Lilly and Co. tries to accelerate its new drug development process with the aid of "combinatorial chemistry"--a rapidly emerging and revolutionary approach to preclinical drug discovery. The product manager of a potential blockbuster migraine drug... View Details

Keywords: Chemicals; Finance; Innovation and Invention; Time Management; Markets; Product Development; Organizations; Business Processes; Problems and Challenges; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Competition; Pharmaceutical Industry

06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

customers to learn an entirely new design language. (Flavorists, for example, think in terms of formulations and chemical compounds, whereas customers think of tastes such as smoky, sweet, fresh, and so on.) Third, they must contain... View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke & Eric Von Hippel

Web

ARD - Georges F. Doriot : Educating Leaders, Building Companies, Baker Library, Harvard Business School

head of the chemical engineering department at MIT, and Jerome C. Hunsaker, head of the aeronautical engineering department at MIT, served as technical consultants. With Doriot's support, Dorothy Rowe, who started as Doriot's... View Details

01 Oct 2000
News

Books

chemicals and pharmaceuticals; and computers, Silicon Valley, and the Internet. From the past eighty years of "relentless change," McCraw offers colorful illustrations of how business transformed the country's economic and cultural... View Details

14 May 2008
Research & Ideas

Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

a three-year study of 238 professionals from seven companies in the high-tech, consumer products, and chemicals industries. Without revealing the focus of their study, they asked the subjects (all of whom were working on projects... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail; Apparel & Accessories; Fashion; Entertainment & Recreation

01 Mar 2003
News

Inside the Revolution

Enriquez projects another image, filled with the letters ATCG in various combinations. The letters stand for adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine — the chemicals that make up DNA. Just as the floppy disk stores the zeroes and ones,... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons; Eileen McCluskey; Jonathan West; Life Sciences Project; LSP; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

14 Nov 2006
First Look

First Look: November 14, 2006

Eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dow Chemical made a major investment in the Halle-Leipzig region, one of the largest chemical industry sites in Europe. The executive in charge of Dow's... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

February 2009 (Revised March 2013)
Case

Messer Griesheim (A)

By: Josh Lerner, Ann-Kristin Achleitner, Eva Lutz and Kerry Herman

In 2001, Allianz Capital Partners and Goldman Sachs acquired a majority stake in Messer Griesheim, a European industrial gas concern held by Hoechst. The dealmakers faced several challenges, including delicate corporate governance issues due to partial family ownership... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Restructuring; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Corporate Governance; Family Ownership; Chemical Industry; Chemical Industry; Europe