Service Excellence - Publications - Faculty & Research

17 Jan 2020
In Practice

6 Traits That Set Top Business Leaders Apart

forthcoming book Step Back: How to Bring the Art of Reflection into Your Busy Life. 2. They embrace new thinking "They resist distilling their work into just one thing! Excellent leaders see nuances, contradictions, possibilities for... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

13 Mar 2007
First Look

First Look: March 13, 2007

projects conducted by clinical managers at the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. My findings suggest that social position is an important enabling condition for divergent organizational change, and is a determinant as well of... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

25 Aug 2014
HBS Case

Starbucks Reinvented

took steps to reengage its partners and store managers. In February 2008, Starbucks closed more than 7,000 of its stores across the country for "Espresso Excellence Training," taking the time to work with approximately 135,000... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

22 Dec 2015
First Look

December 22, 2015

Service Excellence to the GCC Tanfeeth, a business process outsourcing (BPO) firm in the United Arab Emirates, was founded in July 2011 as a fully owned subsidiary of Emirates NBD, the largest bank in the... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

03 Aug 2009
Research & Ideas

Corporate Social Responsibility in a Downturn

business sense? A: PNC [a financial services organization based in Pittsburgh] is an excellent example of how a business has focused on a cause that the company, its employees, and its customers deeply care... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

09 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

It’s Time to Reset Decision-Making in Your Organization

says. Porter provides the example of a company focused on high-end features and service that is tempted during a recession to cut back in response to a customer’s price concerns. This is the wrong move, he says. By cutting back on what... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott

07 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

4+2 = Sustained Business Success

business performance. What does matter, it turns out, is having a strong grasp of the business basics. Without exception, companies that outperformed their industry peers excelled at what we call the four primary management... View Details

Keywords: by Nitin Nohria, William Joyce & Bruce Roberson

31 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 31, 2018

infrastructure presents an excellent opportunity to avoid the pitfalls of complex, restrictive, digital health systems that have evolved elsewhere. We propose here a federated, patient-centric, application programming interface... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

14 Jan 2019
Op-Ed

These 4 CEOs Created a New Standard of Leadership

Group to add healthier products to its lineup. When soft drink sales declined in 2010, shareholders criticized PepsiCo’s execution. Nooyi responded by beefing up PepsiCo’s marketing and strengthening her leadership team—but held firm to her strategy. By 2012, Pepsi was... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George; Health; Banking; Food & Beverage; Consumer Products

09 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Organizations

like that was explicitly designed to engage the drives, the skills, the smarts, and the emotions of such people in a collaborative effort to design, produce, and sell products and services of value to the wider world? After we have... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Lawrence & Nitin Nohria

13 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

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

how new products or services would perform at various prices or with different characteristics. The machine learning algorithms that might power such a device are, at least for now, incapable of producing such promising results. But what... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

15 Mar 2016
First Look

March 15, 2016

store. In 2015 the company was developing a strategy for its Smart Platform, a model in which Ocado would lease its software, hardware, and integration services to brick-and-mortar grocery retailers seeking to build online businesses.... View Details

18 Jul 2011
Research & Ideas

Looking in the Mirror: Questions Every Leader Must Ask

and reaching your potential. "My objective is to help leaders reach their potential by helping them realize that they don't need to have all the answers or do this alone. I hope they will see that framing a question and listening can be enormously powerful in... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

01 Sep 2021
What Do You Think?

Can We Train for Trust?

that 80 percent of executives around the world rated employee experience (including trust) important or very important. Employee experience drives engagement. And yet in the Deloitte study, only 22 percent of executives felt that their companies were View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

and ultimately an excellent journey to learning effective leadership skills in The Adventures of an IT Leader (Harvard Business Press). According to the novel's creators, a fictional approach allowed them to blend real-life incidents they... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

14 Jun 2010
Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Measuring Social Impact

of Nonprofit Organizations in June, a joint executive education program presented by the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, Harvard's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and the Harvard Kennedy School. He will co-chair the HBS Executive Education program... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

13 Feb 2006
Research & Ideas

When Gender Changes the Negotiation

The last few months have been trying for Maureen Park, the managing director of a small portfolio management firm. The firm's parent company, a large financial services concern, was performing below forecasts, and morale among Park's... View Details

Keywords: by Dina W. Pradel, Hannah Riley Bowles & Kathleen L. McGinn

06 Sep 2004
Research & Ideas

The Innovator’s Battle Plan

technology so it could be useful to Western Union's most profitable real-time long-distance data customers. When an existing firm tries to insert a product or service with disruptive potential into its processes, what comes out the other... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony & Erik A. Roth

24 Feb 2022
Op-Ed

Want to Prevent the Next Hospital Bed Crisis? Enlist the SEC

billing rule that hospitals had ignored, it imposed a tangle of new requirements and directed the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to help prevent excess out-of-network charges. And consider the HHS’s multimillion dollar... View Details

Keywords: by Regina Herzlinger and Richard Boxer; Health

18 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

How New Managers Become Great Managers

much too modest. She is an excellent role model for how to manage our careers if we hope to move into ever more important managerial positions. From her story, we see that leadership can be an exciting but arduous journey of... View Details

Keywords: by Linda Hill

Publications