Publications

08 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

Keep Your Weary Workers Engaged and Motivated

feel like they are losing every day. I believe this will be a marathon, not a sprint, and I will need help for the next many months to keep theirs and others’ spirits high so we can keep them for when we recover.” “How to motivate a team... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

October 2019 (Revised August 2020)
Case

The Predictive Index

By: Lynda M. Applegate and James Weber

Mike Zani and Daniel Muzquiz needed to decide next steps to create a new category in the human resources consulting industry and scale their company.
Zani and Muzquiz, serial entrepreneurs, acquired Predictive Index in 2014. Previously, as clients of the... View Details

Keywords: Human Resources; Selection and Staffing; Talent and Talent Management; Recruitment; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Change Management; Disruptive Innovation; Digital Platforms; Growth and Development Strategy; Consulting Industry; Service Industry; United States

July 1997 (Revised October 2003)
Case

Chattanooga Ice Cream Division,The

By: Carl S. Sloane

Senior functional officers (marketing, manufacturing, research & development, control, and human resources) clash over alternative ideas for turning around a business in decline. The general manager is faced not only with choosing between competing ideas, but also... View Details

Keywords: Management Style; Management Teams; Groups and Teams; Managerial Roles; Conflict Management; Decisions; Performance

10 Jul 2023
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2023

Zhang: Time, design, and sci-fi I have just started reading The Coach's Guide for Women Professors by Rena Seltzer. My fabulous female colleagues recommended it to me during conversation about time management. (Who doesn't need more time,... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

03 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Cut Payroll Costs with Transparency, Fairness, and Compassion

2020 has been a challenging year for leaders, their companies, and their employees. When we asked 600 CEOs earlier this year what keeps them awake at night during this global pandemic, many cited the need to reduce expenses, including... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott

2014
Article

Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money to Benefit Others Pays Off

By: Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin and Michael I. Norton

While a great deal of research has shown that people with more money are somewhat happier than people with less money, our research demonstrates that how people spend their money also matters for their happiness. In particular, both correlational and... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Spending; Well-being; Happiness; Money; Spending; Welfare; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

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May 1998 (Revised May 1999)
Case

Biopure Corp.

By: John T. Gourville

It is early 1998 and Biopure Corp., a small biopharmaceutical firm with no sales revenues in its ten-year history, has just received government approval to release Oxyglobin, a revolutionary new "blood substitute" designed to replace the need for donated animal blood... View Details

Keywords: Segmentation; Marketing Strategy; Engineering; Budgets and Budgeting; Sales; Transformation; Markets; Debates; Product Launch; Pharmaceutical Industry

13 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet

Imagine a future in which a smart marketing machine can predict the needs and habits of individual consumers and the dynamics of competitors across industries and markets. This device would collect data to answer strategic questions,... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

2021
Book

The Peacemaker's Code

By: Deepak Malhotra

The book's many themes -- war & peace, history, strategy, negotiation, leadership, friendship, & love -- are woven together in a novel with a sci-fi hook and a thrilling premise. The protagonist is a young history professor who is whisked off to Washington, where he... View Details

Keywords: Fiction

Article

Soul and Machine (Learning)

By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan

Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Marketing Applications; Knowledge; Technological Innovation; Core Relationships; Marketing; Applications and Software

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29 Sep 2022
Op-Ed

Inclusive Leadership Advice: Get Comfortable With the Uncomfortable

end. The other players may bring up topics that a performer knows nothing about. That’s okay: The goal is to always react purely in the moment. Consider the strategies required in two popular games, chess and ping-pong. When you play chess, you View Details

Keywords: by Francesca Gino

April 2021 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Capitalism, Slavery, and Reparations

By: Sophus A. Reinert and Cary Williams

The birth of “Modern Economic Growth” constituted a watershed in human history, allowing societies to escape the Malthusian impasse and permanently raise living standards. While the new growth regime had lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty over the last... View Details

Keywords: Reparations; Living Standards; Poverty; Social Issues; Economic Growth; Equality and Inequality; Globalized Economies and Regions; Human Needs

06 Jul 2016
What Do You Think?

How Do We Pay for the Costs of Globalization?

three-sentence summary of responses to this month’s very thorny question on how the human and societal costs caused by globalization can be remedied. As if the topic were not sufficiently complex, Hugh Quick questioned my use of the term... View Details

Keywords: by James L. Heskett; Manufacturing

01 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

The ‘Luxury Prime’: How Luxury Changes People

Y.J. Chua and Xi Zou, an assistant professor at London Business School, suggest that luxury goods have an important effect on human behavior that is only now becoming clear—and that may have implications for addressing the continuation of... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert

January 2013 (Revised September 2013)
Case

Royal DSM: Fighting Hidden Hunger

By: Rebecca Henderson, Noah Fisher and Mary Shelman

In 2007 Royal DSM, a leading life science and materials company, entered a partnership with the World Food Programme (WFP) to combat hidden hunger around the world by providing micronutrient solutions. The case investigates the unexpectedly large impact the partnership... View Details

Keywords: Conflict of Interests; Human Needs; Partners and Partnerships; Global Range; Nutrition; Science-Based Business; Non-Governmental Organizations; Service Industry; Health Industry

2003
Case

Corning Microarray Technologies

By: Vijay Govindarajan, Chris Trimble and Gautam Bellur

In mid-2000, the scientific community reached a momentous milestone—the complete mapping of the human genome. Researchers in the field of genomics were anxious to dig into a tremendous array of newly possible scientific inquiries, and needed efficient experimental... View Details

Keywords: Expansion; Genetics; Manufacturing Industry; Industrial Products Industry