Small Companies - Publications - Faculty & Research

08 Dec 2022
HBS Case

The War in Ukraine and Nestlé’s Moral Dilemma: Stay or Leave Russia?

today’s leaders face when confronted with a moral dilemma. Even though the business in Russia represented a small portion of Nestlé’s worldwide sales, staying in the country could have had an outsized impact on the company’s reputation.... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products

September 1974 (Revised January 1988)
Case

Midwest Ice Cream Co.

Midwest Ice Cream (a disguised name) serves as an example to examine a planning and control system. Useful management information, which otherwise would not be apparent, is derived by preparing a basic profit variance analysis. This illustrates how the company is doing... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Management Systems; Food and Beverage Industry

Citation

Educators

Purchase

02 Sep 2014
Research & Ideas

Food Stamp Entrepreneurs: How Public Assistance Enables Business Bootstrapping

public benefits programs for which they were newly eligible, Olds says. Yet they took the risk of starting new companies even though their budget constraints had not changed, and even though they never signed up for SCHIP or SNAP. It was... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

18 Oct 2016
Op-Ed

Why Business Should Invest in Community Health

“where people live, learn, work, and play.” Many firms acknowledge the importance of employee health to their bottom lines, and have also started taking steps to improve their consumer health and environmental health footprints. Target, however, counts among a View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch, Howard Koh, and Pamela Yatsko; Health

05 Feb 2001
Research & Ideas

The Ten Deadly Mistakes of Wanna-Dots

Increasingly, it seems, there are just two types of companies left in the world: dot-coms and "wanna-dots." The dot-coms, of course, are the pure Internet companies operating on-line businesses.... View Details

Keywords: by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

28 May 2024
In Practice

Job Search Advice for a Tough Market: Think Broadly and Stay Flexible

industry- or function-specific in focus, while other firms concentrate on small or family businesses, the public sector, and even private equity. By limiting your focus to the major strategic firms, you will significantly decrease the... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

01 Dec 2023
News

Wide Horizon

home in Dallas to his parents’ place in Ruston, Louisiana, the small town of about 22,000 where he grew up. While there, the kids, then two and three years old, started running a fever, which would eventually register around 104 degrees.... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; Photos by Sarah Wilson

27 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Gen AI Marketing: How Some 'Gibberish' Code Can Give Products an Edge

suggest and prioritize. Lakkaraju conducted the analysis with HBS postdoctoral researcher Aounon Kumar. The ability to manipulate product comparison could give some companies an unfair advantage, but it could also level playing fields,... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Technology

18 Feb 2013
Research & Ideas

Breaking Through a Growth Stall

Starting a successful business is often considered the hardest thing entrepreneurs do—but growing an existing venture may be even more difficult. Many companies get stuck on a plateau that inhibits their ability to grow: a scale stopper.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

27 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Building Businesses in Turbulent Times

explains how large and small companies can position themselves to survive—and thrive—in turbulent times. Applegate is head of the School's Entrepreneurial Management Unit and faculty chair of the Executive... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

28 Mar 2016
Research & Ideas

What's a Boss Worth?

worked with a technology-based services company that tracked all of its workers’ transaction times. Importantly, supervisors were rotated on an ongoing basis, so workers would have different bosses every few months. Looking at the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Service

06 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Expensing Options Doesn’t Solve the Problem

do no more than palliate public outrage. What we need is a much more comprehensive look at the recent scandals so that we can begin to figure out what the real issues are. As a start, let's consider one of corporate America's biggest villains: Enron. Certainly the... View Details

Keywords: by William Sahlman

23 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: ‘Talk, Inc.’

spirit and in practice, organizational conversation is quite different from corporate communication. The latter function grew naturally out of the command-and-control model. Top-down and one-way in its orientation, corporate communication aptly suited the needs of... View Details

Keywords: Re: Boris Groysberg

04 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

Don’t Lose Money With Customers

companies knowingly persist in money-losing customer relationships. Why such inconsistent behavior? HBS associate professor Narakesari ("Das") Narayandas has been investigating the various stances that companies, deliberately... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

26 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

A Clear Eye for Innovation

preparing for the innovations that will define the future. This mental balancing act can be one of the toughest of all managerial challenges—it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities—and it's no... View Details

Keywords: by Charles A. O'Reilly III & Michael L. Tushman

04 Sep 2007
Research & Ideas

Jumpstarting Innovation: Using Disruption to Your Advantage

Mature companies understand that to compete today they need to innovate. But finding sources of innovation while still paying attention to the current business can be a struggle. The good news, says Harvard Business School professor Lynda... View Details

Keywords: by Lynda M. Applegate

17 Feb 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

How Entrepreneurs Can Find the Right Problem to Solve

discovery to validate a problem but don’t yet have a product, my follow-up question is: “How do you know people or companies will use your product?” Answers are equally discouraging. More often than not, I hear examples of interest tests,... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

11 Sep 2000
Research & Ideas

Riding the Internet Fast Track

genuine concern, as is the efficiency of using established distribution systems designed for inter-store delivery to also package and ship thousands of small orders to individual consumers. More important, the substantial losses these... View Details

Keywords: by Peter Jacobs

23 Jul 2021
Blog Post

Trends in Consumer Products

A job search in Consumer Products requires thorough research to understand how Covid has affected a company’s business. Most consumer products companies had very uneven business results—some brands saw enormous growth and others saw... View Details

25 Aug 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Agglomeration and Innovation

Keywords: by Gerald A. Carlino & William R. Kerr

Publications