Publications

15 Jul 2019
Book

Many Executives Are Afraid of Finance. Here's How They Can Gain Confidence

what’s the best way for managers to communicate financial information to shareholders? “People who want to have advanced roles in enterprise confront financial questions more and more, and they have to be more fluent in the financial... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

12 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

How Scale Changes a Manager's Responsibilities

employees, founding leaders confront an important reality: It’s time to let go. It’s simply impossible to be plugged into everything. At this stage, you are probably managing managers, and more than ever have to empower your leaders to,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

11 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Creating an R&D Strategy

Keywords: by Gary P. Pisano

July 1997 (Revised April 1998)
Case

Chase Manhattan Corporation: The Making of America's Largest Bank

By: Stuart C. Gilson and Cedric Escalle

Chase Bank and Chemical Bank intend to merge, producing the largest commercial bank in the United States, the fourth largest in the world. Projected financial benefits under the merger reflect significant planned reduction in operating costs, including 17,000 employee... View Details

Keywords: Commercial Banking; Profit; Corporate Strategy; Value Creation; Restructuring; Negotiation; Mergers and Acquisitions; Risk and Uncertainty; Resignation and Termination; Revenue; Banking Industry; United States

May 2022
Case

Rawbank's Illico Cash: Can 'Fast Money' Overcome Cash Dependency in the DRC?

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank’s launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank’s mobile money app, Illico Cash... View Details

Monique Burns Thompson is an accomplished social entrepreneur who returns to HBS (class of 1993) and brings her twenty years of successful start-up and organizational leadership experience to her research and teaching at HBS. She has led as a co-founder, President,... View Details

2007
Working Paper

Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm

By: Eric J. Van den Steen

This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give a manager 'interpersonal authority' over employees (in a world with differing priors). The paper derives such interpersonal authority as... View Details

Keywords: Governance Controls; Employee Relationship Management; Managerial Roles; Motivation and Incentives; Boundaries; Theory

SSRN

September 2004 (Revised January 2005)
Case

IBM: Ordering Midrange Computers in Europe

IBM Europe is trying to expand business-to-business (B2B) efforts with its large distributors of midrange systems. These efforts aim to automate many transactions and business processes, removing the need for human involvement. IBM has completed an initial project with... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Marketing Channels; Distribution Channels; Information Technology Industry; Computer Industry; Germany; United States

March 2012 (Revised January 2013)
Case

Boston Children's Hospital: Measuring Patient Costs

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Mary L. Witkowski and Jessica A. Hohman

The case describes two pilot projects on applying activity-based costing to measuring the cost of treating patients. It presents process maps and financial data relating to the processes used during (1) an office visit to a plastic surgeon for three different diagnoses... View Details

Keywords: Health Care; Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing; Costing; Hospitals; Activity Based Costing and Management; Mathematical Methods; Health Industry

23 Oct 2000
Research & Ideas

The Strategy-Focused Organization

illustrate how major organizations have used the Scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the center of a company's key management processes and systems.... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton

June 2009
Case

Plaza, the Logistics Park of Zaragoza

In the year 2000, the Government of the Autonomous Community of Aragón, Spain, made public a project for the development of a large-scale logistics park in the outskirts of the city of Zaragoza. With an area of nearly 13 square kilometers, PLAZA (an acronym for... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Geographic Location; Growth and Development Strategy; Infrastructure; Logistics; Supply Chain; Transportation; Distribution Industry; Zaragoza

Research Summary

Implications of Limits of Arbitrage (with James Choi)

In this project we investigate the relationship between limits to arbitrage facing mutual fund managers and asset pricing anomalies. We measure changes in the limits to arbitrage by computing the average of slopes on current and past returns in quarterly... View Details

January 1998
Case

Meinhard v. Salmon: Court of Appeals of New York (1928)

By: Henry B. Reiling

Meinhard and Salmon were joint venturers who had a 20-year lease on the Hotel Bristol in New York City. Salmon was the managing party. Four months before the lease was to end, the owner approached Salmon and offered to lease all the property, of which the Bristol was... View Details

Keywords: Lawsuits and Litigation; Joint Ventures; Partners and Partnerships; Decisions; Asset Pricing; Leasing; New York (city, NY)

Find at Harvard

Josh Lerner graduated from Yale College with a special divisional major. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on... View Details

Keywords: biotechnology; high technology; venture capital industry

2000
Other Unpublished Work

Career Concerns and Staged Investment: Evidence from the Venture Capital Industry

By: Malcolm Baker

I develop a model in which career concerns lead to inefficient reinvestment decisions. Managers have incentives to inflate interim returns by continuing bad projects and delaying write-offs. In the venture capital industry, the syndication of follow-on investments can... View Details

Keywords: Performance Efficiency; Valuation; Venture Capital; Investment; Decisions; Motivation and Incentives; Quality