Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(4,616)
- Faculty Publications (695)
- December 2022 (Revised September 2024)
- Teaching Note
Leonard Bernstein: Changing the World
By: Robert Simons and Shirley Sun
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 122-056. The case traces the rise of Leonard Bernstein from a middle-class family in Boston to the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The case describes how he studied music intensely as a young man and developed mentors to... View Details
- Working Paper
Diversification as an Adaptive Learning Process: An Empirical Study of General-Purpose and Market-Specific Technological Know-How in New Market Entry
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
An enduring trait of modern corporations is their propensity to diversify into multiple lines of business. Penrosian theories conceptualize diversification as a strategy to exploit a firm’s fungible, yet “untradeable,” resources and point to redeployment of... View Details
- 2022
- Article
Becoming a Learning Organization While Enhancing Performance: The Case of LEGO
By: Thomas Borup Kristensen, Henrik Saabye and Amy Edmondson
Purpose - The purpose of this study is to empirically test how problem-solving lean practices, along with
leaders as learning facilitators in an action learning approach, can be transferred from a production context to a
knowledge work context for the purpose... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Entry Points: Gaining Momentum in Early-Stage Cross-Boundary Collaborations
By: Eva Flavia Martínez Orbegozo, Jorrit de Jong, Hannah Riley Bowles, Amy Edmondson, Anahide Nahhal and Lisa Cox
To address complex social challenges, it is widely recognized that leaders from public, for-profit, and civic organizations should join forces. Yet, well-intended collaborators often struggle to achieve alignment and fail to gain traction in their joint efforts. This... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo
By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details
- November 2022
- Background Note
The Future of E-Commerce: Lessons from the Livestream Wars in China
By: Ayelet Israeli, Jeremy Yang and Billy Chan
This note explores the emerging multi-billion dollar commerce trend of livestream commerce. Livestream commerce is the sale of goods or services directly to consumers via live shows on digital platforms (such as social media or e-commerce platforms). It is a form of... View Details
Keywords: Retail; Retailing; E-commerce; E-Commerce Strategy; Ecommerce; Channels Of Distribution; Marketing Communication; Livestream Commerce; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Strategy; Advertising; Brands and Branding; Media; Consumer Behavior; Social Media; Retail Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Advertising Industry; China; United States; United Kingdom
- November 2022
- Article
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundary Maintenance between Social Groups
By: Anjali M. Bhatt, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava
When the social boundaries between groups are breached, the tendency for people to erect and maintain symbolic boundaries intensifies. Drawing on extant perspectives on boundary maintenance, we distinguish between two strategies that people pursue in maintaining... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Green Bargains: Leveraging Public Investment to Advance Climate Regulation
By: Jonas Meckling and Jesse Strecker
Climate policy has entered a new era as public investment is increasingly moving to center stage, including recovery spending and long-term climate investment plans. While essential for decarbonization, public investment is not enough – the carrots of investment need... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Sharing Models to Interpret Data
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
To understand new data, we share models or interpretations with others. This paper studies such exchanges of models in a community. The key assumption is that people adopt the interpretation in their community that best explains the data, given their prior beliefs. An... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Evolution of ESG Reports and the Role of Voluntary Standards
By: Ethan Rouen, Kunal Sachdeva and Aaron Yoon
We examine the evolution of ESG reports of S&P 500 firms from 2010 to 2021. The
percentage of firms releasing these voluntary disclosures increased from 35% to 86%
during this period, although the length of these documents experienced more modest
growth. Using a... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Ceibal: Sustaining and Scaling Educational Innovation in Uruguay
By: John J-H Kim, Michael Chu and Mariana Cal
Ceibal was founded in 2007 in Uruguay, as an initiative to reduce the digital gap in the country. After playing an important role providing a smooth transition to remote learning during COVID, Ceibal in 2022 must now determine the best way to fulfill its mission to "be... View Details
- 13 Oct 2022
- Other Presentation
4 Business Ideas That Changed the World: Disruptive Innovation
By: Amy Bernstein, Rita McGrath, Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Derek van Bever
A roundtable conversation takes stock of Clayton Christensen’s influential theory. This first in a series of roundtable conversations assessing the origins and impact of four breakthrough ideas.
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
In the 1980s, Clayton Christensen cofounded a startup that... View Details
Keywords: Disruptive Innovation
- October 2022 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
SMART: AI and Machine Learning for Wildlife Conservation
By: Brian Trelstad and Bonnie Yining Cao
Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART), a set of software and analytical tools designed for the purpose of wildlife conservation, had demonstrated significant improvements in patrol coverage, with some observed reductions in poaching and contributing to wildlife... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Margaret Thatcher: Changing the World
By: Robert L. Simons and Shirley Sun
This case traces the rise of Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a shopkeeper, from a small industrial town in England to the longest-serving leader in the Western world. The case describes how she became interested in politics at an early age, attended Oxford, and... View Details
- 2022
- Article
The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in Third-Person Attributions of Meaning
By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson
The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent... View Details
- October 2022
- Article
Underestimating Counterparts' Learning Goals Impairs Conflictual Conversations
By: Hanne K. Collins, Charles A. Dorison, Francesca Gino and Julia A. Minson
Given the many contexts in which people have difficulty engaging with views that disagree with their own— from political discussions to workplace conflicts—it is critical to understand how conflictual conversations can be improved. Whereas previous work has focused on... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Developing a Sustainable High Commitment, High Performance System of Organizing, Managing, and Leading: An Actionable Systems Theory of Change and Development
By: Michael Beer
This paper presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes... View Details
- September 16, 2022
- Article
Bored at Work? Learn to Manage It by Putting It to Work
By: Katherine Connolly Baden, Boris Groysberg and Heather Poco
Do you often feel bored at work or in life? Do you want to feel less bored? If so, what can you do to make that happen? Boredom has a bad rap, but is it really so bad? View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Rocket Learning: Evidence in Action
By: Brian Trelstad, Tomas Rosales and Malini Sen
Founders of Rocket Learning, an India-based nonprofit which focused on early childhood education (ECE), received an invitation from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), a development research organization, to test its intervention for ECE with a... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Overreaction and Diagnostic Expectations in Macroeconomics
By: Pedro Bordalo, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
We present the case for the centrality of overreaction in expectations for addressing important challenges in finance and macroeconomics. First, non-rational expectations by market participants can be measured and modeled in ways that address some of the key challenges... View Details