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activism
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- April 2008 (Revised September 2008)
- Case
Shareholder Activists at Friendly Ice Cream (A)
By: Fabrizio Ferri, V.G. Narayanan and James Weber
Two activist investors, one a founder and one a hedge-fund manager, seek to improve board oversight at a chain restaurant company. Prestley Blake founded Friendly Ice Cream in 1935 with his brother, and the two created a chain of full-service restaurants. In 1979 they... View Details
- April 2008 (Revised August 2008)
- Supplement
Shareholder Activists at Friendly Ice Cream (B)
By: V.G. Narayanan, Fabrizio Ferri and James Weber
This case study briefly describes the outcome of the Shareholder Activists at Friendly Ice Cream (A) case. View Details
- March 2008 (Revised March 2009)
- Case
Transforming AMFAM
By: Rakesh Khurana, Rajiv Lal and Cathy Ross
On a winter day in December 2007 at the American Family Mutual Insurance Company (AMFAM) headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, Dave Anderson and Jack Salzwedel remained in the conference room after the senior management meeting had concluded. Anderson, CEO of AMFAM since... View Details
- March 2008
- Course Overview Note
Dynamic Markets
By: Joshua D. Coval and Erik Stafford
The Dynamic Markets course at Harvard Business School is organized around the hands-on application of financial decision making in a wide variety of capital market settings. The course relies heavily on in-class simulations of a range of market settings where students... View Details
- March 2008 (Revised February 2009)
- Case
Transparent Value LLC
By: Sharon P. Katz, Krishna G. Palepu and Aldo Sesia, Jr.
Leading index company Dow Jones recently signed a license and joint marketing agreement with Transparent Value LLC, the creator of a new fundamentals-based valuation methodology. The agreement allowed Dow Jones to offer a family of indexes based on the Transparent... View Details
Keywords: Asset Management; Stocks; Price; Performance Expectations; Mathematical Methods; Valuation
- February 2008 (Revised January 2009)
- Background Note
Offshoring Day in BGIE and Strategy
By: Jan W. Rivkin and Troy Smith
Describes a set of activities in which students will participate before and during a day of classes on offshoring. The day's classes will examine the implications of offshoring for policy makers, business leaders, and workers. View Details
- January 2008 (Revised July 2009)
- Case
Forecasting the Great Depression
What is proper role of professional economic forecasting in financial decision making? The case presents excerpts from three leading economic forecasters on the eve of, and just after, the stock market crash of October 1929. The first set of excerpts is from Roger... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised February 2008)
- Case
South Dakota Wheat Growers
By: David E. Bell and Mary L. Shelman
As a farmer-owned cooperative, South Dakota Wheat Growers (SDWG) serves the needs of its 3,600 active farmer-members by supplying farm inputs and organizing the marketing and transportation of grain produced in the co-op's service territory. For almost 80 years, the... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised July 2008)
- Case
Opportunity Partners
By: Robin Greenwood and James Quinn
Philip Goldstein, the principal in a growing hedge fund and prominent activist investor, has taken a position in a Mexico-based closed-end fund. Following a hard-fought proxy contest in which he advocated for management to eliminate the fund's substantial discount,... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy
By: John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz
Marketing has a greater purpose, and marketers, a higher calling, than simply selling more widgets, according to John Quelch and Katherine Jocz. In "Greater Good", the authors contend that marketing performs an essential societal function—and does so democratically.... View Details
- June 2008
- Article
How Are Preferences Revealed?
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Putting Leadership Back into Strategy
In recent decades an infusion of economics has lent the study of strategy much needed theory and empirical evidence. Strategy consultants, armed with frameworks and techniques, have stepped forward to help managers analyze their industries and position their companies... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
Venture Capital Investment Cycles: The Impact of Public Markets
It is well documented that the venture capital industry is highly volatile and that much of this volatility is associated with shifting valuations and activity in public equity markets. This paper examines how changes in public market signals affected venture capital... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Workplace Peers and Entrepreneurship
By: Ramana Nanda and Jesper B. Sorensen
We examine whether the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity is related to the prior career experiences of an individual's co-workers, using a unique matched employer-employee panel dataset. We argue that coworkers can increase the likelihood that an individual... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Competition in Modular Clusters
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The last twenty years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms. In these clusters the activities of R&D, product design, production, distribution, and system integration may be split up among hundreds or even thousands... View Details
- 2007
- Other Unpublished Work
Competitiveness at the Crossroads: Choosing the Future Direction of the Russian Economy
By: Michael E. Porter, Christian H.M. Ketels, Mercedes Delgado and Richard Bryden
In early 2006, the Center for Strategic Research (CSR) in Moscow commissioned Professor Michael Porter and his team to conduct a review of the existing evidence on Russian competitiveness. The objective of this report is to synthesize, interpret, and draw
implications... View Details
- November – December 2007
- Article
Fundamentally Flawed Indexing
By: Andre F. Perold
A new theory of finance is being advanced as providing definitive proof that holding stocks in proportion to their market capitalizations is an inferior investment strategy. The claim is that capitalization weighting necessarily invests more in overvalued stocks and... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
Irving Fisher, Economic Forecasting, and the Myth of the Business Cycle
A premier economist of the twentieth century and a founder of neoclassical thought, Irving Fisher was also an active participant in the field of economic forecasting. Fisher made theoretical contributions to the understanding of economic fluctuations, popularized the... View Details
- 2007
- Book
When Professionals Have to Lead: A New Model for High Performance
By: Thomas J. DeLong, John J. Gabarro and Robert Lees
For too long, professional services firms (PSFs) have relied on the "producer-manager" model, which works well in uncomplicated business environments. However, today's managing directors must balance conflicting roles, more demanding clients, tougher competitors, and... View Details
- October 2007
- Case
Blue River Capital
By: Krishna G. Palepu, Tarun Khanna and Richard Bullock
Examines the strategy and experience of Indian private equity firm Blue River Capital. Blue River was established in 2005 to invest primarily in middle market, particularly family-run, businesses in India. Blue River caters to this niche as an active investor,... View Details