Publications

Professor Bradley is the William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. In addition to teaching Management and Strategy in the Owner President Management Program and leading an... View Details

Keywords: e-commerce industry; financial services; health care; high technology; internet; pharmaceuticals; telecommunications

Article

Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance

By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats

In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details

Keywords: Management; Groups and Teams; Performance; Problems and Challenges; Projects; Experience and Expertise; Change; Diversity; Information Technology Industry; India

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29 Jan 2019
Research & Ideas

'Green Bonds' May Be Our Best Bet for Environmental Damage Control

truly qualify as green—as opposed to just greenwashing—wasn’t straightforward. “There isn’t a crisp definition about what is a green bond and what isn’t,” says Serafeim, a professor in the Accounting and Management Unit. “The test we used... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Energy; Utilities; Construction; Green Technology; Public Administration

25 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why IT Does Matter

had the courage to invest in its performance, and they used it to gain a significant competitive edge. It is naive to assume that other sharply discontinuous technologies will not offer similar... View Details

Keywords: by F. Warren McFarlan & Richard L. Nolan

September 2016
Article

The Effect of Target Difficulty on Target Completion: The Case of Reducing Carbon Emissions

By: Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li and George Serafeim

Targets are an integral component of management control systems and play a significant role in achieving desirable performance outcomes. We focus on a key environmental performance objective—reduction of carbon emissions—as a setting in which to examine how target... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Target-setting; Management Accounting; Management Accounting And Control Systems; Control Systems; Sustainable Development; Environment; Goals and Objectives; Climate Change; Management Systems; Accounting; Environmental Sustainability

2015
Working Paper

Expertise vs. Bias in Evaluation: Evidence from the NIH

By: Danielle Li

Evaluators with expertise in a particular field may have an informational advantage in separating good projects from bad. At the same time, they may also have personal preferences that impact their objectivity. This paper develops a framework for separately identifying... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Performance Evaluation; Experience and Expertise

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October 2019
Article

Partial Deregulation and Competition: Effects on Risky Mortgage Origination

By: Marco Di Maggio, Amir Kermani and Sanket Korgaonkar

We exploit the OCC's preemption of national banks from state laws against predatory lending as a quasi-experiment to study the effect of deregulation and its interaction with competition on the supply of complex mortgages. Following the preemption ruling, national... View Details

Keywords: Great Recession; Subprime; Complex Mortgages; Credit Supply; Household Debt; Preemption Rule; Competition; Mortgages; Government Legislation; Credit; Financial Crisis

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January 2014 (Revised May 2014)
Background Note

Rail Transportation in the United States

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Matthew Guilford

In the 20th century, automobiles and airlines pushed rail into the background as an often-troubled and neglected mode. After a review of the long history of rail in the U.S., this paper examines the situation in the 21st century, including the rail market structure,... View Details

Keywords: Railroad History; History; Rail Transportation; Rail Industry

2022
White Paper

The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement

By: Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, Nik Dawson and Gad Levanon

The American Opportunity Index: A Corporate Scorecard of Worker Advancement is a new effort to give companies and other stakeholders a set of robust tools that measure how well major employers are doing in fostering economic mobility for workers and how they could do... View Details

Keywords: Upward Mobility; Career Advancement; Personal Development and Career; Compensation and Benefits; Employees; Wages; Human Capital; Recruitment

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29 Oct 2020
Blog Post

Delving Deeper into Development with the MBA/MPA-ID Program – a Q+A with Zainab Raji (MBA/MPA-ID 2022)

history on my grandpa’s walking tours of Lagos Island, celebrating Eid holidays with family, and working on craft projects with my twin sister. My family bonded over storytelling. Older family members recounted tales of their past... View Details

January 2017 (Revised June 2017)
Case

Chicago and the Array of Things: A Fitness Tracker for the City

By: Rajiv Lal and Scott Johnson

The city of Chicago has recently launched a project called the Array of Things. The program involves a series of sensor nodes placed around the city that capture a massive amount of data including pedestrian and vehicle flow, air quality, and cloud cover. The Array of... View Details

Keywords: Smart Connected Products; Smart Cities; Internet Of Things; Sensors; Govenment; Government Administration; Technological Innovation; Digital Platforms; Applications and Software; Information Infrastructure; Internet and the Web; Public Administration Industry; Technology Industry; Chicago; United States

September 1998 (Revised September 1998)
Case

Saturn Corporation in 1998

Describes the challenges facing the Saturn Corp., General Motor's (GM) small-car company, as it enters a phase of transferring its knowledge, technology, and experience throughout GM. Describes the urgency of Saturnization at GM and the continuing pressure to retain... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Competitive Advantage; Auto Industry; United States

July 2014
Case

Paramount Equipment, Inc.

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Wei Wang

Paramount Equipment, Inc., based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is a large manufacturer of cranes and compact construction equipment, aerial work platforms, and food service equipment. Founded in 1987, Paramount now had manufacturing operations in 24 countries. However, it... View Details

February 1998 (Revised May 2007)
Case

Airborne Express

By: Jan W. Rivkin

In the wake of a highly successful quarter, senior managers of Airborne Express, the third largest player in the express mail industry, review the firm's competitive position. Airborne has survived, and recently prospered, in an industry with significant economies of... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Business Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Global Strategy; Rank and Position; Service Industry

11 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Creating an R&D Strategy

Keywords: by Gary P. Pisano

January 2010 (Revised March 2013)
Case

foursquare

By: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Thomas R. Eisenmann, Jeffrey J. Bussgang and David Chen

Co-founders of foursquare are deciding how to respond to competitive threats and scale up the organization. Foursquare was a location-based online service that allowed users to "check in" to a location using an application on a smartphone. Foursquare kept track of a... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Internet and the Web; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Competitive Advantage; Web Services Industry; United States

22 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

How to Make AI 'Forget' All the Private Data It Shouldn't Have

training for various reasons.” Rachel Layne: What is machine “unlearning” and why is it important? Seth Neel: Before defining machine unlearning, maybe it's good to set a baseline of what machine learning is. Broadly, I view machine learning as View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Technology; Information Technology

December 2011
Article

Data Impediments to Empirical Work on Health Insurance Markets

By: Leemore S. Dafny, David Dranove, Frank Limbrock and Fiona Scott Morton

We compare four datasets that researchers might use to study competition in the health insurance industry. We show that the two datasets most commonly used to estimate market concentration differ considerably from each other (both in levels and in changes over time),... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Analytics and Data Science; Market Participation; Insurance Industry

February 2002 (Revised March 2002)
Case

Customer Profitability and Customer Relationship Management at RBC Financial Group

By: V.G. Narayanan and Lisa Brem

The Royal Bank of Canada uses customer relationship management and customer profitability tools to gain a competitive advantage in Canada's increasingly crowded financial services market. The case presents two pricing and customer management issues: one from the point... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Price; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing; Customer Value and Value Chain; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; Canada