Publications

20 Feb 2014
HBS Seminar

Rebecca Henderson, Harvard Business School

18 Oct 2016
Op-Ed

Why Business Should Invest in Community Health

including the Los Angeles County Alliance for Boys and Girls Clubs and Edible Schoolyard New York City, which focus on increasing the physical activity View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch, Howard Koh, and Pamela Yatsko; Health

January 2014
Technical Note

Learning From Extreme Consumers

By: Jill Avery and Michael Norton

Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover insights that can drive revolutionary, rather than evolutionary... View Details

Keywords: Market Research; Ethnography; Design Thinking; Innovation; New Product Development; Research; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Innovation and Invention

Emily Truelove is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches LEAD in the MBA program. She also teaches in executive education programs, including Leadership for Senior Executives,... View Details

01 Mar 2006
News

Entrepreneur's Notebook with Paul Conforti and Kim Moore (both MBA '97)

managing call centers for insurance companies but wanted to switch from telephonic to face-to-face service, so I decided to focus on restaurants. I spent the first year at HBS researching the industry and... View Details

Keywords: Margie Kelley; desserteries; Food Services and Drinking Places; Food Services and Drinking Places

27 Aug 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Guts, Gall, and Good Luck: What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur

revitalizing a listless national space program. (Published in 2016). Why Entrepreneurs Must Focus on Building Trust Legal and social institutions that support entrepreneurs often aren't well established in... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2023
Working Paper

Culture as a Signal: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Jiehang Yu

The importance of culture as an informal management control system is increasingly acknowledged in academia. While prior research mainly focuses on the value of culture on internal stakeholders (e.g., employees), we examine whether culture serves as a credible signal... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Groups and Teams; Customer Focus and Relationships

SSRN

April 18, 2023
Article

The Rebirth of Software as a Service

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Jacco van der Kooij

Traditional sales models focus on customer acquisition and the “funnel” or “pipeline” metrics that dominate talk about sales. But this approach falls short when applied to a recurring revenue business, where the customer life cycle looks more like a bowtie, not a... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Sales; Technology Industry

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Article

How Long Can a Company Thrive Doing Just One Thing?

By: Andy Wu and Scott Duke Kominers

The news that the chat app Slack was being sold to veteran customer relationship management company Salesforce for $27.7 billion raised a lot of eyebrows. Why sell after a year of explosive growth? The deal, however, epitomizes a question facing so-called best-of-breed... View Details

Keywords: Best-of-breed Companies; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy

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13 Oct 2015
Research & Ideas

Does Business Get Done the Same Way in Emerging and Developed Countries?

destruction is an old idea, going back at least to Schumpeter. We typically associate it with entrepreneurship. Someone has a brilliant new idea, everyone is excited and the entrepreneur and his View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

August 2000 (Revised November 2000)
Case

Building Brand Community on the Harley-Davidson Posse Ride

The second Harley-Davidson Posse Ride, a grueling 2,300 mile, 10-day trek from South Padre Island, Tex., to the Canadian Border is billed "for serious riders only." Harley Owner's Group (H.O.G.) Director Mike Keefe must decide whether this rolling rally deserves a... View Details

Keywords: Relationships; Customer Focus and Relationships; Brands and Branding; Motorcycle Industry; United States

2008
Book

Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage

By: James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser Jr. and Joe Wheeler

Hundreds of large organizations worldwide have used the groundbreaking Service Profit Chain to improve business performance. Now The Ownership Quotient reveals the next generation of the chain: customer and employee "owners" of your business. Employee-owners exhibit... View Details

Keywords: Customer Satisfaction; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Customer Ownership; Employee Ownership; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation

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May 2009
Case

Ceres Gardening Company: Funding Growth in Organic Products

By: John H. McArthur and Sunru Yong

Ceres is a leading player in the growing organic gardening industry, selling seeds, small plants, and related items. Their distribution depends heavily on retail sales through independent nurseries and garden centers. Because these small dealers are unable to finance... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Procedures; Marketing; Business Growth; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Marketing Strategy; Expansion; Business Growth and Maturation; Marketing Channels; Credit; Financial Statements; Sales; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry

Web

Business Solutions for the Poor (Global and Local) - Course Catalog

to 350 words) and one final course paper (600 to 750 words), No Exam Enrollment Limited to 45 students Overview Customers at higher levels of the socioeconomic pyramid are usually served by businesses who... View Details

24 Jul 2018
News

How Amy Hood Won Back Wall Street and Helped Reboot Microsoft

to the failing performance and then encouraging everyone to focus on making hard decisions quickly," says Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith, whose office... View Details

16 Jul 2024
Blog Post

Driving Positive Impact on Community and Climate with Ben Schutzman (MBA 2016)

to supporting municipalities through the life of their assets and relationship with Highland. It’s a complex job, but immensely rewarding job to balance the cost control at the backend, while still... View Details

June 2020
Case

Recovering Trust After Corporate Misconduct at Wells Fargo

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Jonah S. Goldberg

The case describes widespread misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank in the period leading up to 2017 and the company’s subsequent attempts to improve internal controls, company culture, and corporate governance. The case examines the potential causes of large scale... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Misconduct; Internal Controls; Banks and Banking; Crime and Corruption; Corporate Governance; Organizational Culture; Governance Compliance; Management Systems; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement; Governing and Advisory Boards

2009
Chapter

Nonlinear Pricing

By: Raghuram Iyengar and Sunil Gupta

A nonlinear pricing schedule refers to any pricing structure where the total charges payable by customers are not proportional to the quantity of their consumed services. We begin the chapter with a discussion of the broad applicability of nonlinear pricing schemes. We... View Details

Keywords: Price; Demand and Consumers; Duopoly and Oligopoly; Monopoly; Service Operations; Research