Publications

08 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team

little performance variability—because the tasks are standard, because the firm or industry has reduced variability, or because the business model limits the bandwidth of performance variance. Think about the difference between sales... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

Brian L. Trelstad

Brian Trelstad is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School in the General Management Unit and the Faculty Chair of the Advanced Leadership Initiative. He teaches elective courses on Social Entrepreneurship and Systems... View Details

Keywords: service industry; service industry; service industry; service industry; service industry; service industry

July 1991 (Revised October 1995)
Case

KPMG Peat Marwick: The Shadow Partner

By: Robert G. Eccles Jr.

KPMG Peat Marwick executives needed to decide whether to fund full development of "The Shadow Partner," the name coined to describe a worldwide information network that would link all KPMG professionals to each other and to a wealth of data bases and information... View Details

Keywords: Information Management; Data and Data Sets; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Information Technology

March 2022
Article

Carbon Footprinting and Pricing under Climate Concerns

By: Marco Bertini, Stefan Buehler, Daniel Halbheer and Don Lehmann

This article studies how organizations should design a product by choosing the carbon footprint and price in a market with climate concerns. The authors first show how the cost and demand effects of reducing the product carbon footprint determine the profit-maximizing... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Footprint; Carbon Offsetting; Climate Impact; Net-zero Emissions; Pricing; Climate Change; Product Design; Price; Environmental Sustainability; Marketing

February 2014
Background Note

Raising Startup Capital

By: Jeffrey Bussgang

Entrepreneurs typically focus their full energies on business-building. But raising capital is a core part of building a valuable business. Developing expertise in raising capital is more than a necessary evil, it is a competitive weapon. Master it and you will be in a... View Details

July 2010 (Revised September 2012)
Case

Public Architecture

By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Christopher Marquis and Bobbi Thomason

Public Architecture is a non-profit architecture company dedicated to creating social and professional change through design for the public good. Public has focused on three strategies to create change: 1) promoting the design community's commitment to pro bono work,... View Details

Keywords: Design; Innovation and Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Nonprofit Organizations; Business Strategy; Integration

15 Nov 2011
First Look

First Look: November 15

where a firm monetizes its product through sponsors rather than setting prices to its customer base. We analyze strategic interactions between an innovative entrant and an incumbent where the incumbent may imitate the entrant's business... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

26 Sep 2017
Blog Post

A Summer Internship with the International Rescue Committee

professionals network of the International Rescue Committee, dubbed “GenR”. I joined the community on a whim, but as I learned more about the work that the IRC did, including visiting their field station in Cote D’Ivoire, I grew more... View Details

11 Nov 2022
Blog Post

Meet the HBS Armed Forces Alumni Association

In honor of Veterans Day, we checked in with the HBS Armed Forces Alumni Association, the club on campus for student veterans. The mission of the Armed Forces Alumni Association (AFAA) is to help talented veterans transition out of the military to Harvard Business... View Details

22 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

figure. Without open source software and their ubiquitous code-creation networks, firms would pay an estimated 3.5 times more to build the software and platforms that run their businesses, or roughly $8.8 trillion, say Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Computer; Information Technology; Technology

October 2010
Case

DLA Piper and Christie's International (A)

By: Robert G. Eccles and Dilyana Karadzhova

International law firm DLA Piper is selected as major legal services provider of renowned art business Christie's International. Nine months after the start of relationship, the client calls Nigel Knowles, DLA Piper joint CEO and Managing Partner, with a litany of... View Details

Keywords: Attorney and Client Relationships; Law; Practice; Reputation; Ethics; Risk and Uncertainty; Legal Services Industry

Article

Know Your Customers' 'Jobs to Be Done'

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan

Firms have never known more about their customers, but their innovation processes remain hit-or-miss. Why? According to Christensen and his coauthors, product developers focus too much on building customer profiles and looking for correlations in data. To create... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management

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December 2019 (Revised December 2022)
Case

TXU (A): Powering the Largest Leveraged Buyout in History

By: Trevor Fetter, Erik Snowberg and Rebecca M. Henderson

This case is designed to support a lively discussion about the relative merits of shareholder vs. stakeholder perspectives in the context of a company that provides a vital public service that has important environmental implications. The 2007 purchase of TXU, the... View Details

Keywords: Leveraged Buyouts; Transformation; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Environmental Sustainability; Business and Shareholder Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Energy Generation; Non-Renewable Energy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Utilities Industry; Energy Industry; Texas

June 2018
Article

Personal and Social Usage: The Origins of Active Customers and Ways to Keep Them Engaged

By: Clarence Lee, Elie Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh

We study how digital service firms can develop an active customer base, focusing on two questions. First, how does the way that customers use the service postadoption to meet their own needs (personal usage) and to interact with one another (social usage) vary across... View Details

Keywords: Customer Engagement; Adoption Routes; Word-of-Mouth; Digital Marketing; Bayesian Estimation; Customers; Communication; Consumer Behavior; Marketing; Internet and the Web; Analytics and Data Science

September 2017
Case

Tencent

By: John R. Wells and Gabriel Ellsworth

Tencent had undergone many transformations since it was founded in 1998 as a simple messaging service. In 2017, it was the largest online games provider in China with a wide range of game types, China’s largest social networking service provider with several of the... View Details

March 1998
Article

On the Sequencing of Privatization in Transition Economies

By: Gautam Ahuja and Sumit K. Majumdar

This paper presents an empirical criterion for establishing privatization priorities for state-owned enteiprises. The approach uses firm performance, defined as productive efficiency, as the basis for deciding the sequence in which firms are privatized. Sequencing is... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Performance Efficiency; Privatization; Developing Countries and Economies; Planning; Service Industry; India

July–August 2018
Article

When Technology Gets Ahead of Society

By: Tarun Khanna

New technologies can be unsettling for industry incumbents, regulators, and consumers, because norms and institutions for dealing with them don’t yet exist. Interestingly, businesspeople in emerging economies face similar challenges: The rules are unclear and... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Society; Situation or Environment; Infrastructure; Entrepreneurship; Performance Effectiveness; Cooperation