Publications

Now a Wall Street Journal Best-seller! Over a decade ago, the best-selling business fable Who Moved My Cheese? offered its answer to the question: accept that change is inevitable and beyond your control, don't waste your time wondering why things are the... View Details

16 Jul 2012
Research & Ideas

Are You a Strategist?

and even its core competencies, its continued existence depends on finding and continuing to find a compelling reason for it to exist. Shepherding this never-ending process, being the steward of a living strategy, is the defining... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

07 Aug 2017
Research & Ideas

'Be Yourself (Within Reason)' and Other Job Search Survival Tips

consensual. You should want the job as much as the job wants you, so act in interviews as you would with colleagues to make sure these are people who will help spark that creativity. I added the “within reason” part because, as a PhD student, I spent a lot of View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Accounting; Education

February 2014
Article

Governance and CEO Turnover: Do Something or Do the Right Thing?

By: Ray Fisman, Rakesh Khurana, Matthew Rhodes-Kropf and Soojin Yim

We study how corporate governance affects firm value through the decision of whether to fire or retain the CEO. We present a model in which weak governance—which prevents shareholders from controlling the board—protects inferior CEOs from dismissal, while at the same... View Details

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards; Value; Retention; Resignation and Termination; Corporate Governance; Management Teams; Business and Shareholder Relations

30 Nov 2009
Research & Ideas

Tracks of My Tears: Reconstructing Digital Music

the iTunes LP format allows music companies to sell albums with bonus material such as photos. And the new Michael Jackson album will be available only in bundled format. Signs of things to come? A: I think so, yes. The labels waited a relatively long View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Music

16 Jul 2014
HBS Case

Marketing Obamacare

"This is not like Field of Dreams, where if you build it they will come," Quelch says. "There are distinct categories of consumers, each of which needs to be addressed in a different way." By using a marketing-based approach, he says, government... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

2021
Working Paper

Stock Investors' Returns Are Exaggerated

By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang

The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main... View Details

Keywords: All-shareholder Returns; Capital Flows; Dividend Reinvestment; Equity Premium; Total Shareholder Returns; Stocks; Investment Return; Market Timing

SSRN

September 2013 (Revised November 2013)
Case

Qatar: Energy for Development

By: Aldo Musacchio, Colin Donovan, Samir Mikati, Rami Sarafa and Abdulla AlMisnad

Despite being the richest country in the world on a per capita basis, for analysts Qatar belongs in the group of emerging markets considered "frontier markets." This case analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the development strategy of this small country as set... View Details

Keywords: Frontier Markets; State-owned Enterprises; State Capitalism; Sovereign Wealth Funds; Economic Development; Sovereign Finance; State Ownership; Development Economics; Energy Industry; Middle East; Qatar

Educators

03 Jan 2016
Research & Ideas

NFL Black Monday: How Much Do Coaches Really Matter?

and several other teams are expected to fire head coaches on Black Monday. Every team spends significant time and money on hiring the right coach, in the belief that who you hire is what you become. There are usually two types of teams... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg & Abhijit Naik; Sports

2016
Working Paper

Options-Pricing Formula with Disaster Risk

By: Robert J. Barro and Gordon Y. Liao

A new options-pricing formula applies to far-out-of-the money put options on the overall stock market when disaster risk is the dominant force, the size distribution of disasters follows a power law, and the economy has a representative agent with Epstein-Zin utility.... View Details

Keywords: Option Pricing; Rare Disaster; Price; Stock Options; Financial Crisis

May 2011
Article

Higher Risk, Lower Returns: What Hedge Fund Investors Really Earn

By: Ilia Dichev and Gwen Yu

The returns of hedge fund investors depend not only on the returns of the hedge funds they hold but also on the timing and magnitude of their capital flows in and out of the funds. We use dollar-weighted returns (a form of IRR) to assess the properties of actual... View Details

Keywords: Investment Funds; Investment Return; Capital Markets; Market Timing; Currency

21 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

The Pandemic Conversations That Leaders Need to Have Now

end of a call may be having a dramatic experience during this crisis is an important subtext for how they are navigating the conversation with me.” LEADING IN TIMES OF UNCERTAINTY More Stories in This Series Pandemic Self-Care for CEOs:... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg, Robin Abrahams, and Katherine Connolly Baden

2011
Case

How Fast and Flexible Do You Want Your Information, Really?

By: Thomas H. Davenport and Jim Snabe

Almost all executives want more and faster information, and almost all companies are racing to provide it. What many of them are overlooking is that the real aim should not be faster information but faster decision making, and those aren't the same things. Executives... View Details

Keywords: Management Teams; Information; Service Delivery; Decision Making; Crisis Management

08 Feb 2010
HBS Case

Looking Behind Google’s Stand in China

anything, as the leading employees of Google China are jumping ship to take jobs with Baidu and other competitors. Google will soon be down to a skeleton shift in China and, if they are permitted to stay, they will have a tough time... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

02 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

Negotiating in Three Dimensions

design, and set-up. In a nutshell, what do these elements mean individually and together? Should a negotiator weigh them equally, especially under time pressure? A: Whether your focus should be on one or a combination of tactics at the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

09 Jan 2020
Book

Rethinking Business Strategy in the Age of AI

reshaping competition? Marco Iansiti: For the first time in many years, there’s a fundamentally different way of solving the problem of meeting a customer’s needs. Airbnb is a classic example. If I want a room to spend the night, I can go... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

29 May 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Crafting Integrated Multichannel Retailing Strategies

Keywords: by Jie Zhang, Paul Farris, Tarun Kushwaha, John Irvin, Thomas J. Steenburgh & Barton Weitz; Retail

28 Apr 2020
News

Coronavirus apps: the risk of slipping into a surveillance state

September 2020 (Revised December 2021)
Case

Building India's 2.0: PayNearby

By: Lauren Cohen and Spencer C. N. Hagist

Headquartered in Mumbai, India, FinTech startup Nearby Technologies has seen its flagship brand, PayNearby, rapidly flourish across most of its target market within just four years. The unprecedented success of its payment app, which allows users to access banking... View Details

Keywords: Fintech; Developing Markets; Payments; Financial Inclusion; Finance; Entrepreneurship; Emerging Markets; Competitive Strategy; Banking Industry; India

Educators