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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(249)
- News (29)
- Research (193)
- Events (1)
- Multimedia (1)
- Faculty Publications (92)
- December 2003 (Revised February 2008)
- Background Note
Law and Legal Reasoning: An Introduction
By: Henry B. Reiling
Gives prominence to Mr. Justice Holmes' Prediction Theory of the law as a practical--and by analogy to forecasting in finance and other functional areas of business--comfortable, and familiar way for businesspeople to think about the law. Law is defined as a forecast... View Details
Reiling, Henry B. "Law and Legal Reasoning: An Introduction." Harvard Business School Background Note 204-080, December 2003. (Revised February 2008.)
- 07 Sep 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Decision-Making by Precedent and the Founding of American Honda (1948–1974)
- March 2009 (Revised February 2011)
- Background Note
Note: Fair Value Accounting for Investments in Debt Securities
The note describes how fair value accounting applies to debt securities that are classified by financial institutions as (1) "trading" securities, (2) "available for sale" securities, or (3) "hold to maturity" securities. It explains the hierarchy for inputs used in... View Details
Fruhan, William E. "Note: Fair Value Accounting for Investments in Debt Securities." Harvard Business School Background Note 209-134, March 2009. (Revised February 2011.)
Power, For All: How it Really Works and Why it's Everyone's Business
Battilana and Casciaro offer a timely, democratized vision of power. While hierarchies tend to stay in place because power is often sticky, by agitating, innovating, and orchestrating change, they show how those with less power can challenge established... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Disagreement about the Team's Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance
By: Heidi K. Gardner
Hierarchies are pervasive in groups, generally providing clear guidelines for the dominance and deference behaviors that members are expected to show based on their relative ranks. But what happens when team members disagree about where each member ranks on the... View Details
Keywords: Performance Effectiveness; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Conflict and Resolution; Perception; Status and Position; Cooperation
Gardner, Heidi K. "Disagreement about the Team's Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-113, June 2010.
- March 2022
- Article
Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance
By: Paul A. Gompers, Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst and Yuhai Xuan
We explore gender differences in performance in a comprehensive sample of venture capital investments in the United States. Investments by female venture capital investors have significantly lower success rates than investments by their male colleagues when controlling... View Details
Gompers, Paul A., Vladimir Muhkarlyamov, Emily Weisburst, and Yuhai Xuan. "Gender Gaps in Venture Capital Performance." Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 57, no. 2 (March 2022): 485–513.
- December 2014
- Article
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
By: Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very... View Details
Bloom, Nicholas, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization." Management Science 60, no. 12 (December 2014): 2859–2885.
- Fall 2012
- Article
The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised
By: Julie Wulf
For decades, management consultants and the popular business press have urged large firms to flatten their hierarchies. Flattening (or delayering, as it is also known) typically refers to the elimination of layers in a firm's organizational hierarchy and the broadening... View Details
Wulf, Julie. "The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised." California Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 5–23.
- 21 Dec 2020
- News
Why middle managers are feeling the most stressed out during COVID
Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing
Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
A Formal Theory of Strategy
What makes a decision strategic? When is strategy most important? This paper formally studies these questions, starting from a (functional) definition of strategy as “the smallest set of choices to optimally guide (or force) other choices.” The paper shows that this... View Details
Van den Steen, Eric J. "A Formal Theory of Strategy." Management Science 63, no. 8 (August 2017): 2616–2636.
- November 2004 (Revised June 2005)
- Background Note
Designing Products and Processes: Aligning Hierarchical Problem Levels with Problem-Solving Team Forms
All complex systems have four distinct hierarchical design levels: system objectives, architecture, interfaces, and components. Each level has a distinct design question associated with it. Distinguishing among these levels and understanding the questions associated... View Details
Spear, Steven J. "Designing Products and Processes: Aligning Hierarchical Problem Levels with Problem-Solving Team Forms." Harvard Business School Background Note 605-039, November 2004. (Revised June 2005.)
- November 2003 (Revised February 2004)
- Case
Richmond Events
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Kristin Lieb
The managers of British business forum planner, Richmond Events, are struggling to expand their conference offerings into new territories. At the same time, they are trying to decide how product managers, who are critical to event success, should be hired, trained,... View Details
Keywords: Conferences; Innovation and Management; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Conflict Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Marketing; Service Industry; United Kingdom; Asia
Edmondson, Amy C., and Kristin Lieb. "Richmond Events." Harvard Business School Case 604-055, November 2003. (Revised February 2004.)
- September–October 2012
- Article
One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions
By: Ali E. Abbas and David E. Bell
We introduce a variety of new independence conditions for multiattribute utility functions that permit preference dependencies among the attributes of a decision problem. The hierarchy of new conditions varies in the degree to which it specifies the functional form,... View Details
Abbas, Ali E., and David E. Bell. "One-Switch Conditions for Multiattribute Utility Functions." Operations Research 60, no. 5 (September–October 2012): 1199–1212.
- 2021
- Working Paper
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
Do white collar workers with lower social status in the occupational hierarchy die younger? The influential Whitehall studies of British civil servants identified a strong inverse relationship between employment rank and mortality, but we do not know if this effect... View Details
Nicholas, Tom. "Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?" Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-080, January 2021.
- January–February 2015
- Article
Social Comparisons and Deception Across Workplace Hierarchies: Field and Experimental Evidence
By: Benjamin Edelman and Ian Larkin
We examine how unfavorable social comparisons differentially spur employees of varying hierarchical levels to engage in deception. Drawing on literatures in social psychology and workplace self-esteem, we theorize that negative comparisons with peers could cause either... View Details
Edelman, Benjamin, and Ian Larkin. "Social Comparisons and Deception Across Workplace Hierarchies: Field and Experimental Evidence." Organization Science 26, no. 1 (January–February 2015): 78–98.
- March 2017
- Article
Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status
By: T. B. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M. E. Schweitzer
Across eight experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm... View Details
Bitterly, T. B., A.W. Brooks, and M. E. Schweitzer. "Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 112, no. 3 (March 2017): 431–455.
- August 2023
- Article
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United... View Details
Nicholas, Tom. "Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?" Economic History Review 76, no. 3 (August 2023): 1191–1230.
- March 2011 (Revised February 2012)
- Case
Innovation and Growth at Actelion Ltd.
By: Gary P. Pisano, Daniela Beyersdorfer and Ruth Dittrich
In late 2010, Jean-Paul Clozel, CEO of the Swiss biotech pharmaceuticals firm Actelion, looks back on a successful decade. The small venture that he had started with a few of his scientist colleagues in the late 1990s to discover novel medicine in a research-driven... View Details
Keywords: Business Model; Talent and Talent Management; Innovation and Management; Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Development; Organizational Culture; Research and Development; Biotechnology Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Switzerland
Pisano, Gary P., Daniela Beyersdorfer, and Ruth Dittrich. "Innovation and Growth at Actelion Ltd." Harvard Business School Case 611-065, March 2011. (Revised February 2012.)
- 2010
- Other Unpublished Work
Saving Face by Making Meaning: The Negative Effects of Brand Communities' Self-serving Response to Brand Extensions
By: Jill Avery
An ethnographic study of a brand community following the launch of the Porsche Cayenne SUV finds that brand extensions can negatively affect the value of their parent brands. By studying the collective response to brand extensions of existing consumers and by... View Details