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- February 2022
- Case
US Foods: Driving Post-Pandemic Success?
By: David E. Bell, Olivia Hull and Amy Klopfenstein
In November 2021, US Foods CEO Pietro Satriano must decide his company’s trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic. US Foods suffered due to business closures and social distancing during the height of the pandemic. While the situation improved following the return of... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Agribusiness; Food; Goods and Commodities; Jobs and Positions; Job Design and Levels; Job Offer; Labor; Employment; Human Capital; Wages; Working Conditions; Operations; Distribution Channels; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Infrastructure; Logistics; Product Development; Diversification; Product Design; Service Delivery; Service Operations; Supply Chain Management; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Transportation; Truck Transportation; Transportation Networks; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Distribution Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Transportation Industry; United States
- February 2022 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Aleph Farms: A New Culture of Meat
By: Elie Ofek and Jeff Huizinga
Aleph Farms, an Israeli food-tech start-up, was hoping to play a major role in disrupting the conventional meat sector. Compared to intensive agricultural practices, Aleph’s cultured (or lab-grown) meat solution held the promise of considerably reducing greenhouse gas... View Details
Keywords: Innovation; Disruptive Innovation; Adoption; Go To Market Strategy; Industry Evolution; Food Industry; Environmental And Social Sustainability; Marketing Of Innovations; Brand Building; Capital Expenditures-equipment; Disruption; Green Technology; Environmental Sustainability; Food; Market Entry and Exit; Brands and Branding; Consumer Behavior; Competitive Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Food and Beverage Industry
- February 2022 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
Nuritas
By: Mitchell Weiss, Satish Tadikonda, Vincent Dessain and Emer Moloney
Nora Khaldi had built a technology “to unlock the power of nature” in the service of extending human lifespan and improving health, and now in April 2020 was debating telling her Board of Directors she wanted to put on ice some of her discoveries. Nuritas, the company... View Details
- January 2022
- Background Note
Common Prosperity? China Shifts Left
By: William C. Kirby and Noah B. Truwit
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been mistrustful of entrepreneurs and the private sector that operates outside the government’s authority. In its first decades under Mao Zedong, the CCP... View Details
Keywords: Market Reform; Gdp; Government Administration; Government and Politics; Private Sector; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Economy; Globalized Economies and Regions; Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Globalized Markets and Industries; Social Issues; Society; Economic Growth; China
- December 2021 (Revised January 2023)
- Case
Katerra (A)
By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann and Tom Quinn
In April 2020, Katerra executives struggled with a series of decisions that would determine the fate of one of the best-funded construction startups in history. Katerra was founded in 2015 by technology-industry executive Michael Marks and commercial real estate... View Details
- 2021
- Book
The Future of Executive Development
By: Mihnea C Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas
Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven by digital disruption and a widening gap between the skills that participants and their organizations demand and those provided by their executive programs. This work delves into the... View Details
- November 2021 (Revised March 2022)
- Case
Pacesetters
By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Mel Martin
City Sealcoating CEO Keith Chaney had just publicly called out the Boston Chamber of Commerce for their slow progress on their supplier diversity program, Pacesetters. Established in 2018 by regional business leaders, Pacesetters was supposed to facilitate... View Details
Keywords: Racial Wealth Gap; Procurement; Suppliers; Diversity; Programs; Small Business; Restructuring; Contracts; United States; Boston
- October 2021 (Revised November 2022)
- Case
The 2012 Spanish Labor Reform: Lifting All Boats, or Leveling Down?
By: Vincent Pons, Rafael Di Tella, Santiago Botella and Elena Corsi
Since 1978, Spain had struggled to control unemployment. The country’s labor law was protective of employees hired long-term and companies used temporary contracts as buffers. In 2012, amid economic recession and a 23.6% unemployment rate, a center-right government of... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Labor Market; Unemployment; Recession; Globalized Markets and Industries; Government Legislation; International Relations; Working Conditions; Employment; Labor Unions; Contracts; Social Issues; Public Opinion; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Spain; European Union
- September 28, 2021
- Editorial
A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek
By: A.V. Whillans and Charlotte Lockhart
As organizations continue to explore a variety of flexible work options, one promising avenue is the four-day workweek: The standard 40 hours per week is reduced to 32 hours, with the same pay and the same productivity expectations. Research suggests reducing hours can... View Details
- August 2021
- Case
Mylestone: Can Multiple Pivots Preserve the Life of a Death Tech Startup?
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Marilyn Morgan Westner
Dave Balter and Jim Myers co-founded Mylestone, a death tech startup that applied technology to transform how grieving people memorialize the dead. The startup addressed a cultural problem and promised to solve a pressing need in the antiquated, multi-billion dollar... View Details
- August 2021
- Article
Voter Mobilization and Trust in Electoral Institutions: Evidence from Kenya
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Tavneet Suri
Voter mobilization campaigns face trade-offs in young democracies. In a large-scale experiment implemented in 2013 with the Kenyan Electoral Commission (IEBC), text messages intended to mobilize voters boosted participation but also decreased trust in electoral... View Details
- July 2021
- Case
Amazon HQ2
By: James K. Sebenius and Ben Cook
Amazon’s failed bid for a second headquarters location (“HQ2”) in Long Island City, New York offers many lessons for negotiators looking to avoid similar high-profile defeats in strategically important deals. The company’s project – which promised to bring billions of... View Details
- Article
Work Group Rituals Enhance the Meaning of Work
By: Tami Kim, Ovul Sezer, Juliana Schroeder, Jane L. Risen, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
The many benefits of finding meaning in work suggest the importance of identifying activities that increase job meaningfulness. The current paper identifies one such activity: engaging in rituals with workgroups. Five studies (N = 1,099) provide evidence that... View Details
Keywords: Groups; Meaningfulness; Task Meaning; Ritual; Teams; Organizational Citizenship; Groups and Teams; Behavior; Familiarity
- June 15, 2021
- Article
Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman
President Joe Biden’s promise to give every American access to affordable health insurance is well-intentioned, but his plan’s policy elements—a public option, a permanent expanded tax credit—require congressional approval and would expend significant political and... View Details
- May 2021
- Article
Value-Based Healthcare in Urology: A Collaborative Review
By: Chanan Reitblat, Paul A. Bain, Michael E. Porter, David N. Bernstein, Thomas W. Feeley, Markus Graefen, Santosh Iyer, Matthew J. Resnick, C.J. Stimson, Quoc-Dien Trinh and Boris Gershman
Context:
In response to growing concerns over rising costs and major variation in quality, improving value for patients has been proposed as a fundamentally new strategy for how healthcare should be delivered, measured, and... View Details
In response to growing concerns over rising costs and major variation in quality, improving value for patients has been proposed as a fundamentally new strategy for how healthcare should be delivered, measured, and... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Judging Foreign Startups
By: Nataliya Langburd Wright, Rembrand Koning and Tarun Khanna
Can accelerators pick the most promising startup ideas no matter their provenance? Using unique data from a global accelerator where judges are randomly assigned to evaluate startups headquartered across the globe, we show that judges are less likely to recommend... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised August 2021)
- Supplement
Wendell Weeks at Corning Inc. (B): Valor Glass and the COVID-19 Pandemic
By: Ryan Raffaelli and Aldo Sesia
The (B) case offers a detailed account of Wendell Weeks’s innovation strategy at Corning, and how his approach played a critical role in the COVID-19 pandemic. It illustrates the company’s philosophy of making long-term investments in promising new technologies and... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised December 2023)
- Case
Capitalism and the Party-State: The People's Republic of China at 70
By: Meg Rithmire and Courtney Han
In 2019, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) turned seventy-years-old and became the longest active authoritarian regime in recent history. By then, China was the world’s second largest economy by GDP (after the United States), and a high-technology industrial... View Details
- Mar 2021
- Conference Presentation
Descent-to-Delete: Gradient-Based Methods for Machine Unlearning
By: Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi
We study the data deletion problem for convex models. By leveraging techniques from convex optimization and reservoir sampling, we give the first data deletion algorithms that are able to handle an arbitrarily long sequence of adversarial updates while promising both... View Details
- February 2021 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Bairong and the Promise of Big Data
By: Lauren Cohen, Xiaoyan Zhang and Spencer C.N. Hagist
Bairong CEO Felix Zhang, in launching his credit scoring start-up that incorporates 74,000 variables per individual, found strong initial success. However, the shifting regulatory environment, growing breadth of competitors, difficulties in retaining top talent, and... View Details