Publications

August 2017 (Revised September 2018)
Case

Accounting Turbulence at Boeing

By: Jonas Heese, Suraj Srinivasan, David Lane and James Barnett

Unlike its rival Airbus, Boeing had used a practice called program accounting to record its commercial aircraft expenses since the 1980s. Program accounting allowed Boeing to expense estimated average costs instead of the actual production costs of an aircraft. This... View Details

Keywords: Asset Recognition; Program Accounting; Airline Industry; Accounting; Production; Cost; Air Transportation Industry

December 2012 (Revised November 2014)
Case

Lit Motors

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Alex Godden

In mid-2012 Lit Motors had created both engineering and design prototypes and conducted initial customer tests on less than $750,000 of investment. Lit Motors' founder, Daniel Kim, had started the company to design and manufacture an efficient electric 2-wheeled... View Details

Keywords: Lean Startup; Prototyping; Electric Vehicle; Urban Vehicle; Customer Tests; Gyroscope; Entrepreneurs; Development Stage Enterprises; Creativity; Disruptive Technologies; Consumer Surveys; Market Segmentation; Manufacturing Costs; Entrepreneurship; Auto Industry; United States; California

June 2018 (Revised April 2021)
Case

Valuing Snap After the IPO Quiet Period (A)

By: Marco Di Maggio, Benjamin C. Esty and Gregory Saldutte

Snap, the disappearing message app, went public at $17 per share on March 2, 2017, making its two 20-something founders the youngest self-made billionaires in the country. Over the next three weeks, 14 analysts made investment recommendations on Snap: two with buy... View Details

November 2012
Article

Does Management Really Work?

By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen

HBR's 90th anniversary is a sensible time to revisit a basic question: Are organizations more likely to succeed if they adopt good management practices? The answer may seem obvious to most HBR readers, but these three economists cast their net much wider than that. In... View Details

Keywords: Best Practices; Consulting Firms; Corporations; Cost Control; Employee Training; Executive Ability (Management); Executives—training Of; Hospitals—administration; Industrial Management—research; Productivity Incentives; School Management Teams; Work Environment; Management; Research

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April 1998 (Revised September 1998)
Case

Classic Pen Company, The: Developing an ABC Model

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Classic Pen has diversified from its core blue and black pen business by introducing new specialized colors. But costs have risen and margins on blue and black pens are decreasing. The controller turns to activity-based costing (ABC) for an explanation. View Details

Keywords: Activity Based Costing and Management; Manufacturing Industry

August 2017 (Revised September 2022)
Case

Fuyao Glass America: Sourcing Decision

By: Willy Shih

In today's global economy, what are the factors that go into production location choice? This case is set in the world's second largest automotive glass producer as it expands from China into the United States. To meet a very aggressive cost target, management is faced... View Details

Keywords: Supply Chains; Globalization Of Supply Chain; Manufacturing Footprint; Manufacturing; Manufacturing Strategy; Global Strategy; Supply Chain; Globalization; Supply Chain Management; Production; Logistics; Strategy; Auto Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States; China

22 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

Open Source Software: The $9 Trillion Resource Companies Take for Granted

making the two datasets complementary. Although they looked at all programming languages, they narrowed in on the top five based on data from GitHub: C (including C# and C++), Java, JavaScript, Python, and Typescript. They also included the Go programming language. To... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Computer; Information Technology; Technology

28 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

How to Avoid a Price Increase

When product companies see the cost of materials rise, the result for consumers is often a price increase (gasoline) or, less often, a smaller amount of product at the same price (potato chips). Which option is more likely to turn off... View Details

Keywords: by Manda Salls

09 Jan 2024
Research & Ideas

Could Clean Hydrogen Become Affordable at Scale by 2030?

Hydrogen is poised to move from the sidelines of global clean energy as the industry learns to produce it more efficiently and at lower cost, according to newly published research led by Gunther Glenk, a climate fellow with Harvard Business School's Institute for the... View Details

Keywords: by Desmond Dodd; Energy; Green Technology

March 1978 (Revised October 1978)
Case

Rosemont Hill Health Center

An administrator of a neighborhood health center is considering changing his cost accounting system from a single cost per visit to a cost per visit for each department in the center. Used to illustrate several issues related to cost accounting in health care:... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

November 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

MiDAS: Automating Unemployment Benefits

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

In 2015, the state of Michigan considered whether to nominate its Michigan Integrated Data Automated System (MiDAS) for a prestigious state technology award. Launched in 2013 amid severe budget pressures, the $47 million automated fraud detection system was designed to... View Details

March 2004 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Midwest Office Products

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Presents an easy introduction to time-driven activity-based costing (ABC) that allows students to build a simple ABC model of order profitability. Midwest's time-driven ABC approach is based on two categories of parameter estimates. The first is the cost per hour of... View Details

Keywords: Cost; Price; Activity Based Costing and Management; Time Management; Financial Reporting; Profit; Performance Improvement; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Performance Evaluation

16 Aug 2022
News

HBS to Provide Full-Tuition Scholarships for Students with Greatest Financial Need

October 1994
Case

Kamakura Ironworks Company, Ltd.

Describes cost management techniques in a supplier chain in the Japanese automotive industry. Exposes students to interorganizational cost management systems and explores when cost systems are required and when they can be switched off. Also illustrates supportive... View Details

Keywords: Cost Accounting; Cost Management; Supply Chain; Auto Industry; Japan

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June 1991 (Revised September 1996)
Case

Human Resource Management at American Airlines

American Airlines' strategy calls for continued growth, improvements in customer service, and cost reduction. This case examines the Human Resource Management system at American Airlines and its role in the airline's past and continued success. May be used with... View Details

Keywords: Air Transportation; Management Systems; Human Resources; Business Strategy; Air Transportation Industry; United States

Srikant M. Datar became the eleventh dean of Harvard Business School on 1 January 2021. During his tenure as a faculty member, he served as Senior Associate Dean for University Affairs (including Faculty Chair of the Harvard Innovation Lab), for Research, for... View Details

Keywords: accounting industry; airline; automobiles; banking; biotechnology; communications; consumer products; e-commerce industry; health care; high technology; investment banking industry; management consulting; manufacturing; pharmaceuticals; venture capital industry

02 Mar 2007
What Do You Think?

What Is the Government’s Role in US Health Care?

Summing Up This month's exchange of ideas regarding U.S. healthcare reform ranged far and wide. Some of us were interested primarily in the issue of cost escalation and how to contain it. Others addressed issues of quality. For still... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Health

05 Jul 2022
What Do You Think?

Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management?

those days, there was fascination with air freight and the trade-off of inventory and transportation costs—as in spending more for air transport in order to spend less on owning inventory, thereby optimizing what we called the “total cost... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Manufacturing; Shipping; Transportation

July 1991
Case

Pioneer Petroleum Corp.

By: Richard S. Ruback

Pioneer is an integrated oil company. Its operations include exploration and development, production, transportation, and marketing. The case focuses on Pioneer's cost of capital calculations and its choice between a single company-wide cost of capital or divisional... View Details

Keywords: Cost of Capital; Energy Industry; Mining Industry