Publications

06 Jan 2011
What Do You Think?

How Should Management Deal With “Anonymous”?

real questions about the implications of criminal or terrorist use of cyber weapons to destroy business assets. Should management be concerned about them? What, if anything, can or should be done about it at the organizational level? And... View Details

Keywords: by James L. Heskett

July – August 2010
Article

Are You Ignoring Trends That Could Shake Up Your Business?

By: Elie Ofek and Luc Wathieu

Virtually all managers in consumer businesses recognize major social, economic, and technological trends. But many do not consider the profound ways in which trends--especially those that seem unrelated to their core markets--influence consumers' aspirations,... View Details

Keywords: Trends; Innovation and Invention; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Behavior; Product Development

2013
Book

Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

By: Thomas H. Davenport and Jinho Kim

Managers today need to be able to analyze and make sense of data. They need to be conversant with analytical technology and methods and to make decisions on quantitative analysis. This book offers a variety of practical tools and examples to improve a manager's... View Details

Keywords: Statistics; Business Analytics; Big Data; Analytics and Data Science; Management Practices and Processes; Mathematical Methods; Information Management

19 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Fed Up Workers and Supply Woes: What's Next for Dollar Stores?

Retailers should be ecstatic. Last year was dismal amid the pandemic, with plunging revenue and record bankruptcies. But this year things have turned around. For instance, retail sales in April through June were up 28.2 percent from the... View Details

Keywords: by Christine Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Retail

30 May 2005
Research & Ideas

Germany’s Pioneering Corporate Managers

actually have a lot to learn from one another, rather than setting one country's management practices up as a standard to which others should conform—or else they do not measure View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

02 Apr 2007
Lessons from the Classroom

Making the Move to General Manager

jobs, who are 'the general manager in the middle' who have the incredibly difficult job of managing up, down, and across the organization. "The cases are designed to get smart people to see different... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

May 2014
Article

Right Up the Middle: How Israeli Firms Go Global

By: Jonathan Friedrich, Amit Noam and Elie Ofek

The article considers international business enterprises based in Israel and how they successfully expanded from their origins as small businesses. A common technique of those companies in which they focused on market entry in other countries whose markets were too... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Israel

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05 Dec 2012
What Do You Think?

Should Managers Bother Listening to Predictions?

Summing Up Can Managers Afford to Ignore Predictions in Planning? There is a healthy skepticism when it comes to the reliability of predictions as a basis for planning. Donald Kortalon, commenting on this... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

July 2003 (Revised June 2004)
Case

Managing Business Risk of Information Technology

By: Richard L. Nolan and Robert D. Austin

Sets up a situation in which participants must create presentations that assess the IT risk of a large company. View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Information Technology

Educators

07 Mar 2023
HBS Case

ChatGPT: Did Big Tech Set Up the World for an AI Bias Disaster?

who could have been instrumental in helping the company reach its long-term AI goals. You Might Also Like: Why Technology Alone Can't Solve AI's Bias Problem When Bias Creeps into AI, Managers Can Stop It by Asking the Right Questions Why... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis; Technology

17 Apr 2019
Research & Ideas

How Managers Stifle Creativity

constraint. Among destroyers of creativity, or “creativity killers,” as I call them, excessive constraint is probably number one. When people are supposed to be coming up with new ideas or solving complex problems in new ways, they need... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

30 Jan 2019
What Do You Think?

Who Will Measure up to These Two Remarkable Leaders?

column challenged readers to come up with nominations of current leaders that we might be recognizing for their similarly remarkable accomplishments 10 or 20 years from now. This prompted Sandeep to ask, “Where are those legends, the... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Air Transportation; Financial Services

June 2007
Article

The Speed-Reading Organization: Revving up Finance with Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing

By: Robert S. Kaplan and Steven R. Anderson

Keywords: Organizations; Finance; Activity Based Costing and Management

Article

Stop the Meeting Madness: How to Free Up Time for Meaningful Work

By: Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun

Many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both. We can all joke about how painful they... View Details

Keywords: Time Management; Performance Efficiency; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement

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2010
Simulation

Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence

By: Linda A. Hill and William Q. Judge

In this single-player simulation, students play one of two roles at a sunglass manufacturing firm and face the challenges associated with implementing an organization-wide environmental sustainability initiative. The initiative seeks to change raw material inputs in... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Power and Influence; Problems and Challenges; Environmental Sustainability; Production; Wastes and Waste Processing; Adoption

07 Oct 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

How Companies Can Make Up with (Very) Unhappy Customers

for competitors. Tesco’s Stumble into the US MarketUK retailer Tesco was very successful penetrating foreign markets—until it set its sights on the United States. What Mark Zuckerberg Can Learn About Crisis Leadership from StarbucksWhile Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail; Air Transportation

December 2004 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Managing a Public Image: Rob Thomas

By: Robin J. Ely and Ingrid Vargas

Rob Thomas describes some of the challenges he has faced as a white, middle-aged man who is managing director of a mid-size consulting firm where he is committed to increasing staff gender and racial diversity. Unwilling to risk the disapproval of any constituency,... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Age; Race; Identity; Failure; Gender; Consulting Industry

Educators