Publications

September 2004 (Revised August 2007)
Case

Enterprise IT at Cisco (2004)

By: Andrew P. McAfee, F. Warren McFarlan and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Illustrates the challenges associated with centralizing IT decisions at Cisco after a decade of decentralized planning and project funding. When Brad Boston became Cisco's new CIO in 2001, he found that managers were starting to get frustrated with the results of their... View Details

Keywords: Management; Resource Allocation; Information Technology; Problems and Challenges; Business Ventures; Change Management; Entrepreneurship; Projects; Planning; Corporate Finance; Information Technology Industry

11 Jul 2007
Working Paper Summaries

Managing Proprietary and Shared Platforms: A Life-Cycle View

Keywords: by Thomas R. Eisenmann; Technology

24 Feb 2011
Research & Ideas

What’s Government’s Role in Regulating Home Purchase Financing?

proposals, which would include the wind down of two government sponsored enterprises—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Between them they generated more than half of all US mortgage credit before failing in September 2008. According to a new... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Financial Services

August 2, 2016
Article

Uncalculating Cooperation Is Used to Signal Trustworthiness

By: Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Martin A. Nowak and David G. Rand

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an... View Details

Keywords: Social Evaluation; Experimental Economics; Moral Psychology; Cooperation; Reputation; Decision Making

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October, 2022
Article

The Economic Dynamics of Competing Power Generation Sources

By: Gunther Glenk and Stefan Reichelstein

Competing power generation sources have experienced considerable shifts in both their revenue potential and their costs in recent years. Here we introduce the concept of Levelized Profit Margins (LPM) to capture the changing unit economics of both intermittent and... View Details

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October 2022
Case

EducationSuperHighway 2.0

By: William A. Sahlman, Allison M. Ciechanover and Emily Grandjean

In 2012, Evan Marwell launched EducationSuperHighway (ESH) to address a major problem: though most public K-12 schools in the US had access to the Internet, only roughly 30% had true broadband access that would enable every student to have high speed connectivity. ... View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Issues; Leading Change; Early Childhood Education; Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Telecommunications Industry; Education Industry; Technology Industry; United States; San Francisco

02 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

10 Trends to Watch in 2024

The lightning-fast ascent of generative AI isn’t the only sea change on the horizon for businesses in the new year. The global economy is in flux as war, climate change, trade issues, and infrastructure problems demand attention. Many companies continue to struggle to... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2022
Other Teaching and Training Material

Organizational Behavior Reading: Managing Differences

By: Robin Ely and Colleen Ammerman

This reading provides principles and practices managers can draw upon to leverage differences in social identities - such as gender and race - to create more effective work relationships, teams, and organizations. The Essential Reading's first section draws upon... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Groups and Teams; Prejudice and Bias; Identity; Management Practices and Processes

January 2019 (Revised December 2019)
Case

CrossBoundary Energy

By: John Macomber

Almost 500 million people are without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. Governments and public utilities are challenged to bring generation and distribution to most of them. Considerable promise exists in “off-grid” or “mini-grid” technologies, notably using renewable... View Details

Keywords: Energy Investing; Economic Development; Renewable Energy; Business Growth and Maturation; Developing Countries and Economies; Project Finance; Emerging Markets; Industry Structures; Infrastructure; Segmentation; Private Equity; Decision Choices and Conditions; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Africa; Tanzania; Ghana

13 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

Breaking Through the Self-Doubt That Keeps Talented Women from Leading

Collis and Leena Kulkarni, former research associates at HBS. “We found that candidates were talented, and yet they self-selected out,” Coffman says. Ultimately, that means many businesses advertising for executive positions may wind up... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

December 2024
Case

Enerjisa Üretim: The Digital Era of Electricity Generation

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Sadika El Hariri

Launched in 2017, Enerjisa Üretim was one of Türkiye’s largest private sector electricity companies. In its early days, the company faced some financial and operational troubles. When İhsan Erbil Bayçöl, the current CEO of Enerjisa Üretim, joined the business in 2018,... View Details

Keywords: Private Sector; Performance Improvement; Renewable Energy; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Units; Partners and Partnerships; Leadership; Energy Industry; Utilities Industry; Turkey

20 Jun 2023
Research & Ideas

Looking to Leave a Mark? Memorable Leaders Don't Just Spout Statistics, They Tell Stories

course of a single day, for a statistic, the temporal decay was a much more dramatic 73 percent. The difficulty in recall, in turn, stems not from loss of memory, per se. Instead, it has to do with conflicts with other similar memories that View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

2017
Working Paper

Business and Sustainability: New Business History Perspectives

By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist

This working paper provides a long-term business history perspective on environmental sustainability. For a long time, the central issues addressed in the discipline of business history concerned how business enterprises innovated and created wealth, as well as... View Details

Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Business History; Perspective

SSRN

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16 Jul 2018
Research & Ideas

Kids of Working Moms Grow into Happy Adults

wind up just as happy in adulthood as the children of moms who stayed home. Harvard Business School Professor Kathleen McGinn hopes the findings bring a big sigh of relief for guilt-ridden mothers who either have to hold down a job to... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

March 2024 (Revised July 2024)
Case

WeightWatchers: Promoting Weight Health

By: Ranjay Gulati, Cynthia A. Montgomery, Ashley Whillans, Allison Ciechanover and Emily Grandjean

In December 2023, the 60-year-old weight management industry stalwart WeightWatchers announced the launch of WeightWatchers Clinic, which incorporated GLP-1s , a new class of prescription weight-loss medications, into the company’s portfolio of products and mobile app... View Details

Keywords: Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Resource Allocation; Diversification; Leadership; Growth and Development Strategy; Technology Industry; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; New York (city, NY)