Publications

28 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

Keep or Cut Workers? How Companies Reacted to the COVID-19 Crisis

Employment,” which Rouen co-authored with Stanford professor Rebecca Lester and University of Texas professor Braden Williams. As the American economy slowly recovers from the pandemic, corporate leaders, policymakers, and researchers are... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

19 Oct 2022
Op-Ed

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

Recently, I was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast where Dr. Andrew Huberman interviewed Dr. David Buss, a founding member in the field of evolutionary psychology and professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, whose... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

14 Aug 2006
HBS Case

On Managing with Bobby Knight and “Coach K”

practices as can be imagined—Snook asks students to confront their basic assumptions about human nature, motivation, and preferred styles of leading. Bobby Knight, also known as "The General," is the head coach at Texas Tech... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Sports

May 2013
Case

Wendy Peterson

By: Linda A. Hill and Alisa Zalosh

Wendy Peterson was recently promoted to Vice President of Sales at the Plano, Texas, office of AccountBack, an accounting software and services company. To penetrate a perceived market niche, Peterson hires Fred (Xing) Wu, whose familiarity with and access to Chinese... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Conflict Management; Salesforce Management; Rank and Position; Performance Evaluation; Management Teams; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Accounting Industry; Texas

2010
Working Paper

Course Materials For: 'Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership - An Ontological Model'

By: Werner H. Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron and Kari L. Granger

This course is designed to leave students being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self-expression - rather than attempting to learn the characteristics, styles, and skills of noteworthy leaders, and then trying to remember and apply them... View Details

Keywords: Curriculum and Courses; Leadership Development; Research; Science; Attitudes

SSRN

06 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Latest Isn’t Always Greatest: Why Product Updates Capture Consumers

necessarily better,” says Ximena Garcia-Rada, a former Harvard Business School doctoral student who is now an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. “We see a significant proportion of participants shift to the objectively... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products; Retail

August 2012
Case

ARISE: A Destination-for-a-Day Spa

By: Michael Beer and Lynda St. Clair

A new Dallas-based health and beauty spa aims to use a highly distinctive human resource system as the foundation of its competitive strategy. By encouraging employees to act as "personal wellness coaches" (PWCs) with high commitment and broad responsibilities, the... View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Organizational Design; Organizational Culture; Service Delivery; Competitive Strategy; Innovation Strategy; Health Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Service Industry; Texas

December 2020 (Revised April 2021)
Case

IBM Watson at MD Anderson Cancer Center

By: Shane Greenstein, Mel Martin and Sarkis Agaian

After discovering that their cancer diagnostic tool, designed to leverage the cloud computing power of IBM Watson, needed greater integration into the clinical processes at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the development team had difficult choices to make. The Oncology... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Innovation Strategy; Knowledge Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Operations; Failure; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Health Care and Treatment; Product Development; Health Industry; Information Technology Industry; Technology Industry; United States; Houston; Texas

January 2023 (Revised December 2023)
Case

OhmConnect: Energizing the Future

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller

Founded in 2013, OhmConnect was a free consumer web app that alerted customers about peak hours of electricity demand, and paid them to lower their energy use at home during these periods. The company sold the aggregated reductions generated by thousands of households... View Details

Keywords: App Development; Renewable Energy; Electricity Usage; Regulations; VC; Technology; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC); Scalability; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Business Model; Venture Capital; Energy Industry; United States; California; Texas; Europe

October 2022
Case

Cost Plus Drugs

By: Alexander MacKay and James Barnett

In September 2022, Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company CEO Alex Oshmyansky considered the future of the company. Cost Plus Drugs was a retailer for more than 340 generic oral medications, selling their drugs at significantly lower prices than typical pharmacies.... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Decision Making; Entrepreneurship; Ethics; Health; Markets; Social Enterprise; Society; Strategy; Health Care and Treatment; Business Divisions; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Health Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States; Texas

20 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

How Partisan Politics Play Out in American Boardrooms

and stock exchanges in recent years have championed elevating more women to executive teams, the increase in gender diversity has not altered the political bent of many organizations.” “If you tell somebody you're moving to Texas or... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

05 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

How Hormones Foretell Whether People Will Cheat

Harvard Business School; Ellie Shuo Jin and Leslie K. Rice, doctoral students at The University of Texas at Austin; and Robert A. Josephs, professor and head of the Clinical Neuroendocrinology Laboratory at UT Austin. Employers may be... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

03 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Transforming Manufacturing Waste into Profit

It's been said that "one man's trash is another man's treasure." HBS Assistant Professor Deishin Lee, however, has taken that old adage a step further in her recent working paper Turning Waste into By-Product by showing how it's possible for companies to turn... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Manufacturing

31 Jan 2018
Research & Ideas

American Idle: Workers Spend Too Much Time Waiting for Something to Do

former HBS doctoral student who is now an assistant professor at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Despite such pitfalls of idle time, however, the phenomenon has been understudied. “There is much more focus... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

27 Feb 2006
Research & Ideas

When Rights of First Refusal Are a Bad Deal

incumbent advantage. But did it really? As Harvard Business School professor Alvin E. Roth and Texas A&M professor Brit Grosskopf demonstrate in recent research, the devil is in the details. And the devil gave Paramount, not NBC, the... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Construction; Real Estate; Entertainment & Recreation

October 2012
Case

Hill Country Snack Foods Co.

By: W. Carl Kester and Craig Stephenson

Hill Country Snack Foods, located in Austin, Texas, manufactures, markets, and distributes snack foods and frozen treats. The CEO is passionate about maximizing shareholder value and believes in keeping tight control over costs and operating the business as efficiently... View Details

Keywords: United States; Financial Strategy; Debt Management; Retail Trade; Risk Management; Food; Capital Structure; Corporate Finance; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Texas