Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,559)
- Faculty Publications (212)
- Article
Reflections: Toward a Normative and Actionable Theory of Planned Organizational Change and Development
By: Michael Beer
A normative and actionable theory of planned organizational change and development is proposed based on fifty years of engagement by the author as a scholar-consultant. Five principles are central features of the theory and practice proposed: 1) Organizations are... View Details
- September 7, 2020
- Article
Remote Networking as a Person of Color
By: Laura Morgan Roberts and Anthony J. Mayo
In remote work situations, where people cannot rely on impromptu elevator conversations or water cooler chats with coworkers, the answer isn’t to turn inward. In fact, the need for networking is even more important. In particular, our interactions with people whose... View Details
- September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman
In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details
- Article
Conversational Receptiveness: Expressing Engagement with Opposing Views
By: M. Yeomans, J. Minson, H. Collins, H. Chen and F. Gino
We examine “conversational receptiveness”—the use of language to communicate one’s willingness to thoughtfully engage with opposing views. We develop an interpretable machine-learning algorithm to identify the linguistic profile of receptiveness (Studies 1A-B). We then... View Details
- July 2020
- Supplement
Instabeat—Crossing the Finish Line
By: Shikhar Ghosh, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar
Lebanese entrepreneur Hind Hobeika was just 21 years old when she launched her startup, Instabeat, which had developed the first real-time bio-feedback device for swimmers to monitor and improve their performance. It had been an extremely testing 10-year journey to... View Details
- July 2020
- Article
Tell It Like It Is: When Politically Incorrect Language Promotes Authenticity
By: J. Schroeder, M. Rosenblum and F. Gino
When a person’s language appears political—such as being politically correct or incorrect—it can influence fundamental impressions of him or her. Political correctness is “using language or behavior to seem sensitive to others’ feelings, especially those others who... View Details
- April 2020
- Supplement
Cisco Systems and OpenDNS: Strategic Integration (B)
By: Andy Wu and David Wang
With more than 72,000 employees and revenues approaching the $50B mark, Cisco Systems is one of the largest information technology and networking firms globally. As the company grew and expanded into different lines of businesses, Cisco consistently looked outwards for... View Details
- April 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
Shorefast: A Strange and Familiar Way to Reimagine Capitalism
By: Brian Trelstad, Wendy Smith and Natalie Slawinski
In 2006, Zita Cobb and two of her brothers, Alan Cobb and Tony Cobb, native Newfoundlanders, launched Shorefast to help grow another leg of Fogo Island’s economy. Like so many rural communities, Fogo Island’s fate was tied directly to one primary resource—in this case... View Details
- March 2020
- Case
Hotstar
By: Krishna G. Palepu and Kairavi Dey
Hotstar was an online video streaming platform owned by Star India Private Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation. Since its launch in 2015, the platform had grown to offer over 100,000 hours of TV content, movies in nine Indian languages... View Details
- March 18, 2020
- Article
How Honest Conversations Can Accelerate Corporate Transformation
By: Michael Beer
When CEOs engage a cross section of their key people in an honest conversation about organizational strengths and barriers to the execution of strategic changes required by the changing competitive landscape, transformations are accelerated. The honest conversation... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Topic Preference Detection: A Novel Approach to Understand Perspective Taking in Conversation
By: Michael Yeomans and Alison Wood Brooks
Although most humans engage in conversations constantly throughout their lives, conversational mistakes are commonplace— interacting with others is difficult, and conversation re-quires quick, relentless perspective-taking and decision making. For example: during every... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
The Many Minds Problem: Disclosure in Dyadic vs. Group Conversation
By: Gus Cooney, Adam M. Mastroianni, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks
What causes people to disclose their preferences or withhold them? Declare their love for each other or keep it a secret? Gossip with a coworker or bite one’s tongue? We argue that to understand disclosure, we need to understand a critical and often overlooked aspect... View Details
- January 22, 2020
- Article
Making Honest Conversations the Norm
By: Michael Beer
Much admired companies like Boeing and Wells Fargo sacrifice their competitive advantage. Some make huge ethical blunders. As a result, shareholders suffer huge losses in value while employees, customers, and society lose trust and confidence in the institution. Based... View Details
- 2020
- Book
Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations About Your Company's Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy
By: Michael Beer
Is Silence Killing Your Strategy?
In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior... View Details
In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior... View Details
Keywords: Honesty; Communication; Organizational Culture; Trust; Strategy; Performance Effectiveness
- 2020
- Book
Teaching by Heart: One Professor's Journey to Inspire
By: Thomas J. DeLong
The best teachers are leaders, and the best leaders are teachers. Teaching by Heart summarizes the author's key insights gained from more than 40 years of teaching and managing. It illustrates how teachers can both lift people up and let them down. It proposes... View Details
- December 2019
- Article
It Helps to Ask: The Cumulative Benefits of Asking Follow-up Questions
By: Michael Yeomans, Alison Wood Brooks, Karen Huang, Julia A. Minson and Francesca Gino
In a recent article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP; Huang, Yeomans, Brooks, Minson, & Gino, 2017), we reported the results of 2 experiments involving “getting acquainted” conversations among strangers and an observational field... View Details
- November 2019
- Article
Conversations and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
When do conversations lead people to generate better ideas? We conducted a field experiment at a startup boot camp to evaluate the impact of informal conversations on the quality of product ideas generated by participants. Specifically, we examine how the personality... View Details
- November 2019
- Case
The Boss Has the Wrong Idea: Confidential Role Material for Julia Smith
By: Katherine Coffman, Kathleen McGinn, Judith A. Clair and Katherine Chen
“The Boss Has the Wrong Idea” is a two-person conversation exercise in which an MBA student seeks advice from a mentor in her field about how to handle an incident of workplace sexual harassment. The case consists of two confidential role materials: a role for the... View Details
- November 2019
- Case
The Boss Has the Wrong Idea: Confidential Role Material for Lee Clancy
By: Katherine Coffman, Kathleen McGinn, Judith A. Clair and Katherine Chen
“The Boss Has the Wrong Idea” is a two-person conversation exercise in which an MBA student seeks advice from a mentor in her field about how to handle an incident of workplace sexual harassment. The case consists of two confidential role materials: a role for the... View Details
- October 2019 (Revised January 2020)
- Case
Fixing Facebook: Fake News, Privacy, and Platform Governance
By: David Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook based on the idea that connecting people was a fundamentally good thing—and a way to turn a handsome profit. But from the beginning, Facebook received criticism both for how it handled user privacy and how it curated user-generated... View Details