Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(16,362)
- Faculty Publications (2,711)
- January 2025
- Technical Note
Get Cool: Air Conditioning Industry Background
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jacob A. Small
The “air conditioning paradox” is tied to climate change: the more the planet warms, the greater the need for cooling (due to the dangers of extreme heat as well as comfort within buildings), but the use of electricity-powered AC contributes to further warming. There... View Details
- January 2025
- Teaching Note
Vytal: Packaging-as-a-Service
By: George Serafeim, Michael W. Toffel and Stacy Straaberg
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 124-007. The Germany-based startup Vytal operated the largest digital-native reusable packaging-as-a-service network globally, having raised nearly €15 million, established a large network of restaurant partners, and prevented the use of... View Details
Keywords: Environmental Sustainability; Innovation and Invention; Business Growth and Maturation; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Startups; Resource Allocation; Risk Management; Adoption; Strategy; Performance Productivity; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Supply Chain; Distribution; Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Business Model; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Profit; Financing and Loans; Expansion; Green Technology Industry; Service Industry; Retail Industry; Germany; Europe
- January 2025
- Case
GE Appliances 2025: Energizing Change
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jacob A. Small
At the turn of 2025, Kevin Nolan, CEO of GE Appliances following its acquisition by Chinese appliance giant Haier in 2016, is reviewing progress toward his net zero carbon vision for homes, which would otherwise exacerbate the global warming climate crisis. An... View Details
- January 2025
- Teaching Note
Not Everyone’s Cup of Coffee: Organizing the Café Industry
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Anoushka Kiyawat and Kathleen McGinn
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 925-004. View Details
- January 2025
- Case
Apax Partners: Deciding Whether to Bid for Trader Corp.
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Apax Partners’ investment committee was scheduled to meet on March 21, 2011, to decide whether to invest in Trader Corporation, a Canadian classified advertising business for used automobiles with both print (magazines) and digital (website) distribution. What made... View Details
Keywords: Value Creation; Network Effects; Private Equity; Growth Management; Digital Marketing; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; E-commerce; Valuation; Competition; Digital Platforms; Digital Strategy; Digital Transformation; Transition; Investment; Risk and Uncertainty; Advertising Industry; Auto Industry; Information Industry; Canada; United Kingdom; New York (state, US); New York (city, NY)
- January 2025
- Case
Jaipur Literature Festival 2024
By: Tarun Khanna and Kanika Jain
The Jaipur Literature Festival had evolved from a modest gathering in 2006 into one of the world’s most significant literary events. It was known for its principle of egalitarian access, allowing people from various social backgrounds to come together and engage with... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Automatic Enrollment with a 12% Default Contribution Rate
By: John Beshears, Ruofei Guo, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and James J. Choi
We study a retirement savings plan with a default contribution rate of 12% of income, which is much higher than previously studied defaults. Twenty-five percent of employees had not opted out of this default 12 months after hire; a literature review finds that the... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from Migration Patterns of 212 Million Voters
By: Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Vincent Pons and Emilie Sartre
Using data on the residential location and migration for every voter in U.S. states recording partisan registration between 2008–2020, we find that residential segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
CEO-Firm Matches and Productivity in 42 Countries
By: Amanda Dahlstrand, Dávid László, Helena Schweiger, Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun
Firms are key to economic development, and CEOs are key to firm productivity. Are firms in countries at varying stages of development led by the right CEOs, and if not, why? We develop a parsimonious measure of CEO time use that allows us to differentiate CEOs into... View Details
- January 2025
- Article
Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights from Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
By: John Guzek and Ashley Whillans
This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. Through interviews with 30 SMB owners across various industries, we identify the key barriers to ESOP adoption as lack of... View Details
- 2025
- Article
Statistical Inference for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Discovered by Generic Machine Learning in Randomized Experiments
By: Kosuke Imai and Michael Lingzhi Li
Researchers are increasingly turning to machine learning (ML) algorithms to investigate causal heterogeneity in randomized experiments. Despite their promise, ML algorithms may fail to accurately ascertain heterogeneous treatment effects under practical settings with... View Details
- 2025
- Book
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
We all struggle with difficult conversations, but we're often not very good at easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and... View Details
Keywords: Interpersonal Communication
- December 2024 (Revised July 2025)
- Case
Arcor Group: Navigating Agribusiness Challenges in Argentina
By: Alberto Cavallo, Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago and Mariana Cal
In 2016, Arcor Group, Argentina's leading food company, faced a pivotal decision regarding its newly formed Agribusiness division. CEO Luis Alejandro Pagani and Modesto Magadán, General Manager of the Agribusiness division, evaluated whether to increase investments in... View Details
- December 2024
- Case
Core Innovation Capital: Investing in Fintech for Good
In 2017, Arjan Schütte, founder of Core Innovation Capital, faced a decision on whether to invest in Hugo Insurance, an auto insurance startup. Core, an early-stage social impact VC firm, focused on “fintech for good,” by investing in financial services for low- to... View Details
- December 2024
- Article
Managerial Pluralism: Thirty Years of Teaching Business Ethics
The author reflects on 30 years of teaching business ethics at Harvard Business School. The paper presents tactical lessons for teaching courses in professional ethics and introduces “managerial pluralism.” This concept is akin to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Policy-Aware Experimentation: Strategic Sampling for Optimized Targeting Policies
By: Yi-Wen Chen, Eva Ascarza and Oded Netzer
Firms often rely on randomized experiments to estimate customer-level treatment effects for targeting policies. Standard "test-then-learn" approaches typically sample customers uniformly to optimize estimation accuracy but ignore economic objectives, leading to... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Psychological Safety as an Enduring Resource amid Constraints
By: Hassina Bahadurzada, Amy C. Edmondson and Michaela J. Kerrissey
While psychological safety is recognized as valuable in healthcare, its relationship to resource constraints is not well understood. We investigate whether psychological safety mitigates the negative impact of resource constraints on employees. Leveraging longitudinal... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Demond Martin and WellWithAll
By: Hise Gibson, Archie L. Jones and Ai-Ling Jamila Malone
This case study chronicles the transformative entrepreneurial path of Demond Martin, co-founder and CEO of WellWithAll, a health and wellness startup. Motivated by a pivotal life experience and deep concern for racial health inequities, Martin transitions from a... View Details
Keywords: Customers; Diversity; Ethnicity; Race; Health; Recruitment; Leadership Style; Management Style; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Relationships; Trust; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Investment; Business Startups; Transition; Entrepreneurship; Equality and Inequality; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; Health Industry; United States; Chicago; Boston; Atlanta; North Carolina; District of Columbia
- 2024
- Book
The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism: How Pervasive Cronyism and Restricted Suffrage Are Destroying Democratic Capitalism as a National Ideal ... And What to Do About It
What are we to do about declining public trust and confidence in democratic capitalism, which many citizens consider a cornerstone of our national ideology and identity? In this book, I address how we can rekindle the fading light of democratic capitalism as an... View Details
- November 2024
- Case
Fyffes International SA
By: David E. Bell, Damien McLoughlin and Tonia Labruyère
Helge Sparsoe, CEO of Fyffes since 2020, had taken the tropical produce importer and distributor back to a path of stable level of profitability since he joined in 2020. He was now thinking about next steps for the business, which mainly traded in bananas. He was... View Details
Keywords: Plant-Based Agribusiness; Change Management; Environmental Sustainability; Brands and Branding; Demand and Consumers; Supply Chain; Competition; Price; Value Creation; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Switzerland; United Kingdom; Republic of Ireland; Colombia; Guatemala; Costa Rica; Ecuador