Publications

2016
Teaching Note

Advanced Leadership Pathways: Shelly London and Ethics Education

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Tessa Natanay Hamilton and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone

Teaching Note for Case 313-028. Following a successful career as a Senior Vice President, Vice President, and Chief Communications Officer at two large corporate companies, Shelly London became a Harvard Advanced Leadership Fellow. During her fellowship she set out to... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Education; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Decision Making; Leadership; Innovation and Management; Change Management; Social Enterprise; Education Industry; Service Industry; North and Central America

2012
Case

Zhejiang Semir Garment Co., Ltd.

By: F. Warren McFarlan, Jie Jiao and Yuren Fang

With the rapid growth of China's economy and China's increasing integration into the global economy in the past two decades, China's leisure clothing and garment enterprises achieved a rapid rise and became an important competitive force confronting the foreign brands... View Details

Keywords: Business Model Innovation; Competitive Strategy; Management Controls; China; China

2015
Chapter

Deep Smarts as the Underpinnings of Dynamic Capabilities

By: Dorothy A. Leonard and Michelle Barton

Both ordinary and dynamic capabilities depend upon the deep smarts, i.e., business-critical, experience-based knowledge, held in the heads of an organization’s top talent. This chapter examines the links between individual and organizational capabilities and presents... View Details

Keywords: Management Skills; Experience and Expertise; Innovation and Invention

Find at Harvard

April 2013 (Revised April 2014)
Case

Transitions Asia: Managing Across Cultures

By: Roy Y.J. Chua and Dawn H. Lau

The director of an interim executive search firm, Chee Lung Tham, faced a clash of culture and management styles when his mainland Chinese client threatened to fire the American interim manager that Tham had assigned. The client, Wong Lung, ran a family-owned garment... View Details

Keywords: China; Cross-cultural Management; Management Style; Conflict Management; Family Business; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Service Industry; China

February 2008 (Revised November 2011)
Case

The International Monetary Fund in Crisis

By: Rawi Abdelal, David Moss and Eugene Kintgen

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn became the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund in late 2007, he faced a number of significant changes. The organization had lost much of its legitimacy over the previous decade, and countries seemed increasingly reluctant to... View Details

Keywords: History; Globalized Economies and Regions; Problems and Challenges; Developing Countries and Economies; Borrowing and Debt; Government and Politics; Financial Institutions; Business Strategy; Macroeconomics; Financial Services Industry

May 2006 (Revised July 2007)
Case

Creating Meaning for the Customer: The Case of GMACI

Excellence in exploiting customer information and leveraging its affiliation to the GM group are among the strategic options that GMAC Insurance CEO Gary Kusumi is considering. GMAC Insurance, the wholly-owned auto insurance subsidiary of General Motors, formed through... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Strategy; Auto Industry; Insurance Industry

2001
Working Paper

Contextuality Within Activity Systems

By: Michael E. Porter and Nicolaj Siggelkow

Research on the interactions among activities in firms and the extent to which these interactions help create and sustain competitive advantage has rapidly expanded in recent years. In this research, the two most common approaches have been the complementarity... View Details

Keywords: Value Chain; Strategy; Competitive Strategy

Read Now

02 Jan 2024
What Do You Think?

Do Boomerang CEOs Get a Bad Rap?

Carolina to support their claim. The Bingham study analyzed data for 6,429 CEOs of S&P 1,500 index firms from 1992 to 2017. Among these were 438 boomerang CEOs with more than a year out of office between stints as CEO; 193 of these were founders. At the risk of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

21 Oct 2008
First Look

First Look: October 21, 2008

and return unused capital to his investors. With the passing of each venture, he has learned about forming founding teams, splitting equity with his co-founders, hiring executives to work for him, and when to take outside funding. Now,... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

07 Apr 2022
Research & Ideas

Giving Back: Consumers Care More About How Companies Donate Than How Much

doing so in the future. Keenan and colleagues found support for these additional beliefs; however, perceptions of a brand’s generosity remained the primary driver of their study results. Valuable advice for generous firms The results may... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

24 Oct 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Startup or Established Company? Which Is Best for You?

executive teams can be world class or “legacy” leaders who can’t move with the times. There are many tradeoffs when factoring leadership into the decision process of startup versus mature. Startup founded by serial entrepreneurs. This can... View Details

Keywords: by Julia B. Austin

16 Nov 2021
HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

reportedly linked to job-related misery. In a landmark ruling in 2019—the first of its kind—a French court found that a number of executives at France Télécom had fostered an environment of institutional harassment in the ruthless means... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

07 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Fail—and How Their Founders Can Bounce Back

Failure Can Be An Asset, But Personal Failure Is Ruinous Still, stubborn entrepreneurs continue to found companies, in spite of the failure rates, which raises the question of why. It's not as if any of them harbored childhood dreams of... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

03 Mar 2023
Research & Ideas

When Showing Know-How Backfires for Women Managers

demonstrate their capabilities before an audience. But this can be dangerous: Feldberg found that when women put off private office tasks such as strategic planning or data analysis, their departments’ profits and customer service ratings... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin; Retail; Consumer Products

9 May 2011 - 11 May 2011
Conference Presentation

How Firms Respond to Mandatory Information Disclosure

By: Anil Doshi, Michael Toffel and Glen W. S. Dowell

When new institutional pressures arise, which organizations are particularly likely to resist or acquiesce? When subjected to new information disclosure mandates, an increasingly popular form of market-based government regulation, which types of organizations are... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Disclosure; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Environmental Regulation; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Change and Adaptation