Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(745)
- Faculty Publications (141)
- 2014
- Working Paper
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details
- September–October 2013
- Article
Changes in Work, Changes in Self? Managing Our Work and Non-Work Identities in an Integrated World
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan and Erin M. Reid
Diverse workplaces are challenging the boundaries between workers' personal and professional lives, as workers today navigate employer pressures regarding who they are and who they can be outside of work. Lakshmi Ramarajan and Erin M. Reid consider how the attunement... View Details
- 2013
- Chapter
Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries: Task Decomposition, Knowledge Distribution and the Locus of Innovation
By: Karim R. Lakhani, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf and Michael L. Tushman
This chapter contrasts traditional, organization-centered models of innovation with more recent work on open innovation. These fundamentally different and inconsistent innovation logics are associated with contrasting organizational boundaries and organizational... View Details
- 2013
- Article
The Strategic Fitness Process: A Collaborative Action Research Method for Developing Organizational Prototypes and Dynamic Capabilities
By: Michael Beer
Organizations underperform and sometimes fail because their leaders are unable to learn the unvarnished truth from relevant stakeholders about how the design and behavior of the organization is misaligned with its goals and strategy. The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)... View Details
- 2012
- Article
Organization Design for Business Ecosystems
The modern corporation has long been the central focus of the field of organization design. Such firms can be likened to nation-states: they have boundaries that circumscribe citizen-employees, and they engage in production and trade. But individual corporations are... View Details
- December 2012
- Article
Reflected Knowledge and Trust in Global Collaboration
By: Mark Mortensen and Tsedal Neeley
Scholars argue that direct knowledge about distant colleagues is crucial for fostering trust in global collaboration. However, their arguments focus mainly on how trust accrues from knowledge about distant collaborators' personal characteristics, relationships, and... View Details
- Article
Exploring the Duality Between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the 'Mirroring' Hypothesis
By: Alan MacCormack, Carliss Y. Baldwin and John Rusnak
A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that the organization produces. Specifically, products tend to "mirror" the architectures of the organizations in which they are... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
Organization Design for Distributed Innovation
Systems of distributed innovation—so-called business ecosystems—have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. These entities generally encompass numerous corporations, individuals, and communities that might be individually autonomous but related through their... View Details
- 2012
- Book
Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy
By: Amy C. Edmondson
Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. I show that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those... View Details
- 2011
- Article
Strategic Change and the Jazz Mindset: Exploring Practices That Enhance Dynamic Capabilities for Organizational Improvisation
By: Ethan S. Bernstein and Frank J. Barrett
How can leaders adopt a mindset that maximizes learning, remains responsive to short-term emergent opportunities, and simultaneously strengthens longer-term dynamic capabilities of the organization? This chapter explores the organizational decisions and practices... View Details
Keywords: Dynamic Capabilities; Strategic Change; Jazz; Jazz Mindset; Improvisation; Innovation; Change Management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leading Change; Leadership Style; Leadership; Management; Management Style; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Organizations; Creativity; Strategy; Auto Industry; Banking Industry; Bicycle Industry; Computer Industry; Consulting Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Education Industry; Electronics Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Financial Services Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Health Industry; Information Technology Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Music Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; Retail Industry; Semiconductor Industry; Service Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Japan; Taiwan; Europe; Asia
- October 2011 (Revised May 2015)
- Case
The American Repertory Theater
By: Rohit Deshpande, Allen S. Grossman and Ryan Johnson
When Diane Paulus, artistic director and CEO of the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) first started in 2008, she attracted media coverage around an aesthetic that aimed to give the audience more ownership over the theater experience, excited theatergoers by... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
Taking Gender into Account: Theory and Design for Women's Leadership Development Programs
By: Robin J. Ely, Herminia Ibarra and Deborah Kolb
We conceptualize leadership development as identity work and show how subtle forms of gender bias in the culture and in organizations interfere with the identity work of women leaders. Based on this insight, we revisit traditional approaches to standard leadership... View Details
- Article
Organizational Ambidexterity in Action: How Managers Explore and Exploit
By: Charles A. O'Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman
Dynamic capabilities have been proposed as a useful way to understand how organizations are able to adapt to changes in technology and markets. Organizational ambidexterity, the ability of senior managers to seize opportunities through the orchestration and integration... View Details
- March 2011
- Case
Insight Communications
By: Rajiv Lal and Natalie Kindred
After undertaking a multi-year, metrics-driven operational and cultural overhaul, in April 2010 Insight Communications was planning the next phase of its development. Insight was a New York-based provider of cable, landline phone, and high-speed Internet service to... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
Developing an Effective Organization: Intervention Method, Empirical Evidence, and Theory
By: Michael Beer
The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)-a platform... View Details
- Article
A Learning Perspective on Intraorganizational Knowledge Spill-Ins
By: James Oldroyd and Ranjay Gulati
This exploratory study examines the role of intraorganizational knowledge spill-ins in the process of inferential learning. Drawing on the notions of knowledge reliability (the creation of shared meanings) and validity (understandings of cause and effect), we explore... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
Change for Change's Sake
By: Freek Vermeulen, Phanish Puranam and Ranjay Gulati
No one disputes that firms have to make organizational changes when the business environment demands them. But the idea that a firm might want change for its own sake often provokes skepticism. Why inflict all that pain if you don't have to? That is a dangerous... View Details
- June 2010
- Article
The Circulation of Ideas across Academic Communities: When Locals Re-import Exported Ideas
By: Julie Battilana, Michel Anteby and Metin Sengul
The circulation of ideas across academic communities is central to academic pursuits and has attracted much past scholarly attention. As North American-based scholars with European ties, we decided to examine the impact of Organization Studies in North American... View Details
- July – August 2009
- Article
Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance
By: Sebastian Raisch, Julian Birkinshaw, Gilbert Probst and Michael Tushman
Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues that are fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Don't Just Survive - Thrive: Leading Innovation in Good Times and Bad
By: Lynda M. Applegate and J. Bruce Harreld
Battered by contracting markets and frozen credit, many businesses today are fighting for survival. Indeed, the current global financial crisis provides a mandate for restructuring. But survival is not the end goal. In fact, cost cutting and restructuring are simply... View Details