Publications

January 2018 (Revised May 2018)
Case

AT&T Managing Technological Change and the Future of Telephone Operators in the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and William R. Kerr

By the 1930s, AT&T dominated the American phone industry, serving 10 million telephones and employing over 100,000 switchboard operators. But beginning in the mid-1910s, the company began changing from manually operated switchboards to mechanical switching systems that... View Details

Keywords: AT＆T; Bell Telephone; Phone Lines; Phone Operators; Mechanical Switching; Layoffs; Technological Change; Transition; History; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Disruption; Change Management; Communications Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States

Research Summary

Retail Store Operations

Professor Ton's research focuses on the last link in many supply chains, the retail store. She examines how store operations should be designed and managed to ensure that both in-store logistics activities and customer service activities are performed... View Details

June 2001 (Revised June 2001)
Background Note

Process Improvement Template

Managers are often confronted with the challenge of improving critical business processes so that their efforts are not merely ad hoc. This note provides a template by which improvement efforts are converted from unstructured efforts to bona fide, hypothesis-testing... View Details

Keywords: Performance Improvement; Business Processes

May 2018 (Revised January 2019)
Teaching Note

Nashton Partners and Its Search Fund Process

By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld

Teaching Note for HBS No. 212-006. In 2008, Jay Davis (HBS’ 08) and Jason Pananos (HBS’ 08) formed Nashton Partners and raised $500,000 from investors to fund their search. After 30 months of searching, and exhausting the money they raised to fund their search, Davis... View Details

Keywords: Search Fund; Acquisition; Capital Structure; Financing and Loans; Investment Funds; Partners and Partnerships

June 1999 (Revised November 1999)
Background Note

Processes of Strategy Definition and Implementation, The

By: Clayton M. Christensen and Jeremy Dann

Strategy definition is not a short, discrete process. Rather, outside influences (market, political, technological, etc.) and the company's own resource allocation process continually reshape an organization's strategy. View Details

Keywords: Disruption; Management Practices and Processes; Resource Allocation; Strategic Planning; Situation or Environment; Strategy

1992
Chapter

Understanding and Influencing Group Process

By: John J. Gabarro and Anne Harlan

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Power and Influence

TeachingInterests

Understanding and Influencing Operations as an Investor

This course is designed to impart to students who plan to become investors an understanding of firms' operations, and to students, including entrepreneurs, planning to operate companies an understanding of how to interface with investors. The course also... View Details

March 1985 (Revised July 1986)
Background Note

Foreign Operations Accounting and Analysis

By: David F. Hawkins

Keywords: International Accounting

1991
Book

Operations Strategy: Text and Cases

By: David A. Garvin

Keywords: Operations; Strategy; Cases

July 1983
Background Note

Self-Assessment and Career Development Process

May 2011
Case

Baria Planning Solutions, Inc.: Fixing the Sales Process

By: Steven C. Wheelwright and William Schmidt

Baria Planning Solutions (BPS) is a consulting firm that specializes in using spend analysis to help companies identify savings through reduced procurement costs and improved supplier performance. Management is concerned about the disappointing performance of the sales... View Details

Keywords: Quantitative Analysis; Technology; Operations Management; Product Lines; Manufacturing; Capacity Planning; Production Planning; Production; Management Practices and Processes; Service Operations; Supply Chain Management; Salesforce Management; Planning; Consulting Industry; North and Central America

1975
Text Book

Operations Management: Text and Cases

By: Paul Marshall, William Abernathy, Jeffrey G. Miller, Richard P. Olsen, Richard S. Rosenbloom and D. Daryl Wyckoff

Keywords: Management; Information; Cases

2017
Working Paper

Inequality in Knowledge Repository Use in Scaling Service Operations

By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR)... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Repository; Scaling Service Operations; Fluid Teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Performance

SSRN

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Research Summary

Empirical Operations Management

Empirical Operations Management, especially issues at the interface of finance and operations management.

Please see personal webpage.

View Details

June 2001
Teaching Note

Retail Operations TN

By: Ananth Raman

Describes the teaching objectives and content of the Retail Operations Module in the Coordinating and Managing Supply Chains elective course at HBS. First describes the motivation for developing a module on retail operations in a supply chain course and then addresses... View Details

Keywords: Curriculum and Courses; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Motivation and Incentives; Retail Industry