Failure - Publications - Faculty & Research

TeachingInterests

MBA Elective Curriculum-- Competing Through Business Models

The words “business model” are inescapable in our daily fare of business news. These two ubiquitous words seemed to effortlessly rise up to prominence during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. When businesspeople, journalists, academics, and other... View Details

10 Sep 2001
Research & Ideas

Do You Have Change Fatigue?

efforts fail for two main reasons, says Garvin: Poor design. These include the failure to address the underlying processes used to get the work done (for example, the performance management system, or the way resources are allocated),... View Details

Keywords: by Nick Morgan

January 2021
Supplement

What Went Wrong with Boeing’s 737 Max? (B)

By: William W. George and Amram Migdal

Following the March 10, 2019, crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, en route to Nairobi, Kenya and the October 29, 2018, downing of Lion Air flight 610 as it took off from Jakarta, Indonesia, Boeing’s 737 Max jet, the model flown in both instances, was grounded by... View Details

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22 Feb 2022
News

New Urban Order

standardization has been a failure mode for innovation and productivity until recently,” he observes. Yang has spent much of his career in the cleantech industry and is founder and CEO of Liatris, an eco-friendly insulation startup. He... View Details

Keywords: Kathleen Fu, Deborah Blagg, Julia Hanna, and Maureen Harmon; illustrations by; energy; environment; sustainability; entrepreneurship; Transit and Ground Passenger Transportation; Transportation; Water, Sewage and Supply Systems; Utilities; Construction of Buildings; Construction; Waste Management and Remediation Services; Corporate Services

Web

Charts & Statistics - Leadership

Airmail service starts Influence: High 30 1930 s 19 The New Deal Commercial and investment banking separated Reconstruction Finance Corp. created to combat bank and business failures Introduction of Federal Deposit Insurance SEC... View Details

09 Aug 2021
Research & Ideas

OneTen: Creating a New Pathway for Black Talent

students and preparing them for dead-end, less desirable jobs. Pursuing them amounts to personal or familial failure for some people. That said, there are some interesting efforts to elevate vocational education at the local and state... View Details

Keywords: by Rawi E. Abdelal, Katherine Connolly Baden, and Boris Groysberg

10 Feb 2003
Research & Ideas

Commodity Busters: Be a Price Maker, Not a Price Taker

two primary competitors, Checkpoint and Sensormatic, went at each other mercilessly, unbridled competition can be destructive. Sensible business managers focus primarily on their own success, not on creating failure for their competitors.... View Details

Keywords: by Benson P. Shapiro

01 Jan 2002
News

Egon P.S. Zehnder (MBA '56)

who regularly seek his advice. But some things are different, he laughs. "I work only five days a week now. No more Saturdays." When he was just 34, Zehnder took a very big risk. In the age of the organization man, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. When View Details

08 Feb 2010
HBS Case

Looking Behind Google’s Stand in China

on a separate matter involving the China Written Works Copyright Society, which accused Google of failure to inform or pay authors of books it was digitizing. Google issued an apology. My suspicion is there was thought to be a quid pro... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

04 Feb 2010
What Do You Think?

What’s the Best Way to Make Careful Decisions?

for failure in similarly uncontrollable circumstances. We hire "stars," only to watch them burn out in a new and different managerial environment. We look for "best practice" (à la Jim Collins in Good to Great and... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

10 Jul 2007
What Do You Think?

How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?

that actions of leaders most often explain no more than 10 percent of performance. Such things as a company's operating environment, the economy in general, or its long-run success or failure account for more of its current performance.... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

13 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis

to nurture talent is legendary. Just about anybody who is anybody in jazz can trace some lineage back to "Miles University." Finally, the process that led to Kind of Blue is an example of pushing boundaries and taking experimentation right up to the edge of... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Music

06 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

Strategic Intelligence: Adapt or Die

corporate strategy, Wells has learned that the seeds of failure are often planted years before they sprout, and only by overcoming complacency and constantly adapting to the changing competitive environment can companies prosper in the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

04 Apr 2012
Research & Ideas

When Founders Recruit Friends and Family as Investors

chance to thrive. Drawing on more than a decade of researching smashing successes and painful failures alike, Wasserman walks readers through the dilemmas that plague and challenge most new entrepreneurs, starting with pre-founding career... View Details

Keywords: by Noam Wasserman

29 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

The History and Influence of Andy Grove

most fun place to work. He guided the company through one of the great transitions in tech history, changing a maker of memory chips into a microprocessor powerhouse, but also had failures such as Intel's response to the floating point... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Computer

22 Jul 2019
Book

How to Be a Digital Platform Leader

research, you identified 209 platform failures between 1995 and 2015 and about 45 successful firms for the same period. What are drivers of success? Yoffie: The most important driver of success is network effects. Network effects create... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

20 Mar 2000
Research & Ideas

Incubators: The New Venture Capitalists?

venture capital world is basically comprised of numbers. You have somewhere between 50% and 90% failure rate in the venture capital world. That's how it works. You make bets. It's probability. "From the incubator side, we're really... View Details

Keywords: by Kenneth Liss

27 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

Want a Happy Customer? Coordinate Sales and Marketing

marketing to gather, catalogue, analyze, and share such information as current sales rates, customer response to new initiatives, competitive activity, and marketing communication literature including brochures, proposals, and presentations. Companies have found... View Details

Keywords: by Benson Shapiro

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

MIT Sloan Management Review article, The Impossibility of Auditor Independence, which argued that “it is psychologically impossible for auditors to maintain their objectivity” and that “cases of audit failure are inevitable, even with the... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

Publications