Publications

November 22, 2021
Article

Manage Your Talent Pipeline Like a Supply Chain

By: Joseph B. Fuller and Matthew Sigelman

In supply-chain management, you get what you plan for. Companies understand that principle when it comes to the goods that they consume and produce, but not when it comes to the people they hire and train. For decades, companies have adopted a short-term, ad hoc... View Details

Keywords: Talent Management; Talent and Talent Management; Labor; Strategic Planning

January 2009 (Revised March 2009)
Case

A Chinese Start-up's Midlife Crisis: 99Sushe.com

By: William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan and Tracy Manty

Now into their third year at the helm of an Internet start-up in China, Ken Pao and Bill Li were managing a totally different company (with a new name) from the one they first founded in 2006. Having changed their business model from a social networking site to an... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Model; Games, Gaming, and Gambling; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Investment Funds; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; China

Web

Faculty & Research

connected elevators. But instead of laying off legacy hardware staff and hiring new talent, the CEO wants to offer the employees a "Grand Bargain": The company will pay for voluntary reskilling and retraining, but the workers will need to... View Details

February 1991
Case

Burlington Northern: The ARES Decision (B)

By: Julie H. Hertenstein and Robert S. Kaplan

The ARES team formally proposes that Burlington Northern implement the ARES system. The project meets resistance. In light of financial restructuring and high level of debt, executives wonder whether the company can afford ARES. Weak links during the ARES development... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Restructuring; Cost vs Benefits; Decision Choices and Conditions; Borrowing and Debt; Capital Budgeting; Projects; Technology Adoption; Service Industry

August 1993 (Revised August 2002)
Exercise

Work Methods Design Exercise

Teams of students receive identical product design specifications, a sample unit of the product, and a series of assignment questions that entail time and motion studies, which they must both understand and perform before class discussion. In class, teams explain how... View Details

Keywords: Resource Allocation; Product Development

March 2025
Article

Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field

By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang

Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details

Keywords: Selection and Staffing; Recruitment; Diversity; Goals and Objectives; Communication Intention and Meaning; Behavior

4 Jul 2014 - 7 Jul 2014
Talk

I'm Just Passionate!: Attributing Emotional Displays to Passion versus Emotionality

By: Elizabeth Baily Wolf and Alison Wood Brooks

People often express emotions at work that violate workplace display rules. In particular, expressing self-focused sadness is often viewed as inappropriate. Across three experimental studies, we find that the attributions that people make for their inappropriate... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Emotion; Display Rules; Emotions

2010
Chapter

Crime Distribution and Victim Behavior during a Crime Wave

By: Rafael Di Tella, Sebastian Galiani and Ernesto Schargrodsky

The study of how crime affects different income groups faces the difficulty that crime-avoiding activities vary across these groups. Thus, a lower victimization rate in one group may not reflect a lower burden of crime, but rather a higher investment in crime... View Details

Keywords: Safety; Wealth and Poverty; Selection and Staffing; Crime and Corruption; Income; Leading Change; Information Management; Argentina

06 Jun 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas: June 6, 2017

question using a unique dataset of the gender of venture capital partners’ children. First, we find strong evidence that parenting more daughters leads to an increased propensity to hire female partners by venture capital firms. Second,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

September 2024
Article

Sales Coaching and Value Creation

By: Frank V. Cespedes

Despite the prevalence of “coachability” in firms’ stated hiring criteria, managers over-estimate the amount of time they actually devote to coaching their people. For example, research indicates that only 15% of sales managers even spend as much as 25% of their time... View Details

Keywords: Competency and Skills; Employee Relationship Management; Management Practices and Processes

May 3, 2023
Article

What Top-Performing Sales Managers Do Differently

By: Mike Schultz and Frank V. Cespedes

Sales managers hire reps, influence their training, provide (we hope) feedback and so reinforce good selling behaviors, and are key in the execution of growth and change initiatives. In a study of more than 1,000 sales managers and sellers across industries, we found... View Details

Keywords: Management Practices and Processes; Sales; Performance Effectiveness

September 2002
Case

Seattle Public Schools, 1995-2002 (A): The Freedom Agenda

Describes efforts in Seattle Public Schools, under the leadership of Superintendent Joseph Olchefske, to replace the district's centralized budgeting process with school-level budgets. Olchefske's decentralization effort, referred to locally as the Freedom Agenda,... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Practices and Processes; Operations; Education; Education Industry; Seattle

13 Oct 2015
News

The Online Ad Scams Every Marketer Should Watch Out For

The Psyche on Automatic: Amy Cuddy Probes Snap Judgments, Warm Feelings, and How to Become an “Alpha Dog”

Social psychologist Cuddy, an assistant professor of business administration, investigates how people perceive and categorize others. Warmth and competence, she finds, are the two critical variables. They account for about 80 percent of our... View Details

February 2022
Article

Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and William L. Skimmyhorn

Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan.... View Details

Keywords: Retirement Savings; Automatic Enrollment; Choice Architecture; Nudge; Financial Distress; Retirement; Saving; Borrowing and Debt; Behavior

The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while... View Details

August 2009 (Revised November 2010)
Case

Managing Creativity at Shanghai Tang

By: Roy Y.J. Chua and Robert G. Eccles

Shanghai Tang is a luxury brand that focuses on Chinese-inspired fashion, accessories, and home decoration products. In fall 2008, amidst a growing global economic crisis, Raphael Ie Masne, executive chairman of Shanghai Tang, had to decide what to do with the recently... View Details

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Financial Crisis; Employee Relationship Management; Selection and Staffing; Creativity; Apparel and Accessories Industry

June 2007 (Revised February 2008)
Case

Ericsson: Leading in Times of Change

By: Das Narayandas, Vincent Marie Dessain, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Anders Sjoman

After its dramatic corporate turnaround, the Swedish telecom infrastructure company Ericsson hires a new CEO to bring the former Swedish flagship company back on track. Puts students in the shoes of Carl-Henric Svanberg, an industry outsider and CEO of locks group Assy... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Profit; Leading Change; Goals and Objectives; Managerial Roles; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Problems and Challenges; Sweden