Publications

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December 2010
Case

Oral Rehydration Therapy

By: Nava Ashraf and Claire Qureshi

This case highlights the puzzlingly high rate of diarrhea-related child mortality in developing countries despite the existence of a simple, effective treatment: oral rehydration therapy (ORT). ORT treated extreme dehydration caused by diarrhea, which was a leading... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Innovation Strategy; Problems and Challenges; Developing Countries and Economies; Technological Innovation; Distribution Channels; Emerging Markets; Consumer Behavior; Performance Consistency; Performance Evaluation; Health Industry; Africa; Asia

Educators

19 Jun 2007
First Look

First Look: June 19, 2007

Egyptian Retailers Harvard Business School Case 106-065 CEMEX has pursued an aggressive decommoditization strategy focused on its relationship with small Egyptian retailers. In particular, the strategic role and effectiveness of the... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

31 Jul 2012
First Look

First Look: July 31

consider the benefits and risks of different performance evaluation strategies and their implications for a firm's performance, culture, and employee morale. Are there certain types of firms or industries for which such systems are more... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

May 2011
Article

The Power of Small Wins

By: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer

What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and... View Details

Article

The IT Transformation Health Care Needs

By: Nikhil R. Sahni, Robert S. Huckman, Anuraag Chigurupati and David M. Cutler

In recent years, health care organizations have made sizable investments in information technology. They’ve used their IT systems to replace paper records with electronic ones and to improve billing processes, thereby boosting revenue. But so far, IT has been of little... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Information Technology; Performance Improvement; Business Model

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05 Jul 2012
What Do You Think?

Why Is Trust So Hard to Achieve in Management?

effectiveness and of achievement at all costs" (Liam); (3) "excessive turnover and continuous change" (Marlis Krichewsky); (4) leaders who "use ambiguity and weasel words in their promises" (Jim Conlow); (5)... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

26 Nov 2007
Research & Ideas

Best Practices of Global Innovators

work that the decisions a firm makes about how to partition tasks and allocate them to partners are among the most critical, yet poorly understood, aspects of these projects. These choices dictate how effectively a project is run, and can... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

15 Jun 2010
First Look

First Look: June 15

tranches. Overall, a one standard deviation reduction in average time on the market decreases the interest rate for institutional loans by over 30 basis points per annum. While this effect is significantly larger for loan tranches bought... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

September–October 2013
Article

The Role of Organizational Scope and Governance in Strengthening Private Monitoring

By: Lamar Pierce and Michael W. Toffel

Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and... View Details

Read Now

01 Mar 2023
What Do You Think?

How Much Does 'Deep Purpose' Matter to the Bottom Line?

by thinking about how it might have changed an important decision, had we had it in place when we made the decision. My experiences in researching and putting a value on an effective culture tell me that if notions concerning deep purpose... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

July–August 2018
Article

How CEOs Manage Time

By: Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria

In 2006 Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria launched a study tracking how large companies’ CEOs spent their time, 24/7, for 13 weeks: where they were, with whom, what they did, and what they were focusing on. To date, Porter and Nohria have... View Details

Keywords: CEOs; Executives; Time Management; Attitudes; Managerial Roles; Leadership; Performance Effectiveness; Strategy; Decision Making; Organizational Culture

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09 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

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

experimentation. Uncertainty in this sense refers not to scientific questions about the coronavirus, but to what effect the virus will have on the future. What new realities will it generate? What will recovery look like? How long will it... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Sarah Abbott

06 May 2014
First Look

First Look: May 6

August 2013 Management Science The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance By: Eccles, Robert G., Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim Abstract—We investigate the View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

September 2002 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Istituto Clinico Humanitas (A)

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer, Gary P. Pisano and Ning Tang

Istituto Clinico Humanitas is a newly built private hospital, south of Milan, Italy, that has attained unusual profitability while treating public system patients. The hospital was built and is managed by Techosp, a subsidiary of Techint, a global engineering and... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Systems; Infrastructure; Managerial Roles; Integration; Performance; Health Industry; Milan

Educators

08 Mar 2004
Research & Ideas

Creating Value in Your Business Ecosystem

Wal-Mart's and Microsoft's dominance in modern business has been attributed to any number of factors, ranging from the vision and drive of their founders to the companies' aggressive competitive practices. But the performance of these two... View Details

Keywords: by Marco Iansiti & Roy Levien

05 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

How Hormones Foretell Whether People Will Cheat

we see so frequently in the real world." The Lab Experiments The research team conducted a series of experiments to study the effect of two important hormones: testosterone (associated with decreased fear and increased sensitivity to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

June 2017 (Revised May 2019)
Supplement

Kjell and Company: Motivating Salespeople with Incentive Compensation (B)

By: Doug J. Chung

Kjell & Company was a Swedish retail electronics chain founded in 1988 by brothers Marcus, Mikael and Fredrik Dahnelius. The company operated 84 stores, all company-owned, located mainly in the metropolitan areas of Sweden’s most popular cities: Stockholm, Gothemburg... View Details

Keywords: Salesforce Management; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Change Management; Behavior; Electronics Industry; Sweden

March 2019
Article

Open Source Software and Firm Productivity

By: Frank Nagle

As open source software (OSS) is increasingly used as a key input by firms, understanding its impact on productivity becomes critical. This study measures the firm-level productivity impact of nonpecuniary (free) OSS and finds a positive and significant value-added... View Details

Keywords: Applications and Software; Open Source Distribution; Performance Productivity; Information Technology; Strategy