Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(920)
- Faculty Publications (163)
- March 2018
- Article
Making the Numbers? 'Short Termism' and the Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster
By: Hazhir Rahmandad, Rebecca Henderson and Nelson P. Repenning
Much recent work in strategy and popular discussion suggests that an excessive focus on "managing the numbers"—delivering quarterly earnings at the expense of longer-term investments—makes it difficult for firms to make the investments necessary to build competitive... View Details
- November 2017
- Editorial
Facebook, BlackRock, and the Case for Purpose-Driven Companies
By: George Serafeim
Purpose-driven companies have been shown to outperform their peers over the long term. But purpose-driven companies are also hard to come by. Why is that? Because purpose is costly. At the very least, it requires a credible commitment to that purpose. And credible... View Details
- Article
How a Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team for Long-Term Success
By: Frank V. Cespedes and David Mattson
It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses—and it’s hard to fault them. The biggest problem with a... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance
By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload, individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, to complete work more... View Details
- Editorial
How Laws and Culture Hold Back Socially Minded Companies
By: George Serafeim, Daniela Saltzman and Bronagh Ward
- May 2017 (Revised August 2021)
- Case
Mavi: Fashioning a Path to Brand Growth
By: Jill Avery and Gamze Yucaoglu
This case examines the strategic choices and business model with regards to branding at Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer. The case is presented from the perspective of the company CEO and its global brand director who is also part owner. In 2015, Mavi had sales... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Architecture; Brand Portfolio Strategy; Brand Positioning; International Expansion; Retailing; Fashion; Pricing; Fast Fashion; Emerging Economies; Brand Extension; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Emerging Markets; Growth and Development Strategy; Expansion; Global Range; Decision Choices and Conditions; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Turkey; Europe; Asia
- 2016
- Article
The Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet as a Financial-Stability Tool
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Gregory Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We argue that the Federal Reserve should use its balance sheet to help reduce a key threat to financial stability: the tendency for private-sector financial intermediaries to engage in excessive amounts of maturity transformation—i.e., to finance risky assets using... View Details
- January 12, 2017
- Blog Post
Short-Termism and Shareholder Payouts: Getting Corporate Capital Flows Right
By: Jesse Fried and Charles CY Wang
- November 2016 (Revised December 2016)
- Module Note
Strategy Execution Module 12: Aligning Performance Goals and Incentives
By: Robert Simons
This module reading explains how managers use performance goals and incentives to ensure that employee actions align with the overall business strategy of the organization. The module begins by discussing how managers use goals to communicate business strategy, the... View Details
- October 2016
- Article
Technical Debt and System Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Defect-related Activity
By: Alan MacCormack and Daniel J. Sturtevant
Technical debt is created when design decisions that are expedient in the short-term increase the costs of maintaining and adapting this system in future. An important component of technical debt relates to decisions about system architecture. As systems grow and... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Bank Risk-Taking and the Real Economy: Evidence from the Housing Boom and Its Aftermath
By: Antonio Falato, Giovanni Favara and David Scharfstein
The short-termism of lenders amplifies boom-bust credit cycles, leading in turn to real costs for the aggregate economy. During the U.S. housing credit boom, publicly-traded banks increased mortgage lending activity and relaxed standards much more than privately-held... View Details
- August 2016 (Revised May 2018)
- Module Note
Strategy Execution Module 1: Managing Organizational Tensions
By: Robert Simons
This module reading lays the foundation for executing strategy using performance measurement and control systems. Properly applied, these systems can overcome the organizational blocks that impede the potential of all people who work in modern organizations. This... View Details
Keywords: Management Control Systems; Implementing Strategy; Strategy Execution; Performance Measurement; Profit Planning; Organization Design; Profitable Growth; Management Attention; Organizational Conflict; Human Behavior; Strategy; Ethics; Goals and Objectives; Organizational Design; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Performance; Measurement and Metrics
- 2017
- Working Paper
Economic Uncertainty and Earnings Management
By: Luke C.D. Stein and Charles C.Y. Wang
In the presence of managerial short-termism and asymmetric information about skill and effort provision, firms may opportunistically shift earnings from uncertain to more certain times. We document empirically that when financial markets are less certain about a firm's... View Details
- February 2016 (Revised July 2017)
- Case
Leadership and Independence at the Federal Reserve
By: David Moss and Marc Campasano
“From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the current economic crisis caused by the housing bubble, every economic downturn suffered by this country over the past century can be traced to Federal Reserve policy.” Ron Paul, a Republican from... View Details
- November 2015 (Revised March 2018)
- Case
Air Products' Pursuit of Airgas (A)
By: Charles C.Y. Wang, Paul M. Healy, Penelope Rossano and Kyle Thomas
This case centers around the Air Products' hostile takeover attempt of Airgas in 2010. Air Products argued that its offer of a 38% premium is generous given Airgas' poor performance, which Air Products attributed to underperforming and entrenched managers at Airgas. On... View Details
- September 2015
- Article
Speaking of the Short-Term: Disclosure Horizon and Managerial Myopia
By: Francois Brochet, Maria Loumioti and George Serafeim
We study conference calls as a voluntary disclosure channel and create a proxy for the time horizon that senior executives emphasize in their communications. We find that our measure of disclosure time horizon is associated with capital market pressures and executives'... View Details
- August 2015
- Article
A Comparative-Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson and Jeremy C. Stein
We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short-term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with... View Details
- July 2015 (Revised October 2016)
- Case
China Lodging Group (A)
By: Tatiana Sandino, Shelley Xin Li and Nancy Hua Dai
This case study explores the challenges of aligning middle management interests with company goals as a company navigates rapid growth in a dynamic industry. China Lodging Group, a Chinese hotel chain that opened about 2,000 hotels during its first decade in business,... View Details
- Article
Integrated Reporting and Investor Clientele
By: George Serafeim
In this paper, I examine the relation between Integrated Reporting (IR) and the composition of a firm's investor base. I hypothesize and find that firms that practice IR have a more long-term oriented investor base with more dedicated and fewer transient investors.... View Details
- May–June 2015
- Other Article
HRM at a Crossroads: Comments on 'Evolution of Strategic HRM Through Two Founding Books: A 30th Anniversary Perspective on Development of the Field'
By: Michael Beer
I agree with Bruce Kaufman's evaluation of the HRM field and the danger to its relevance if change does not take place in the field's almost exclusive use of normal science, lack of focus on organizational change and development and indifference to the development of... View Details