Publications

Purchase

18 Nov 2008
First Look

First Look: November 18, 2008

alternatives. Purchase this case: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/ b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=709436 Infosys' Relationship Scorecard: Measuring Transformational Partnerships Harvard Business School Case 109-006 This case analyzes Infosys'... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

19 Jul 2011
Working Paper Summaries

Signaling to Partially Informed Investors in the Newsvendor Model

Keywords: by Vishal Gaur, Richard Lai, Ananth Raman & William Schmidt

October 1992 (Revised December 1992)
Case

American Connector Company (A)

By: Gary P. Pisano

American Connector Co. is forced to reexamine operations at its Sunnyvale plant when a Japanese competitor announces plans to build an "ultimate" plant in the United States. Case examines issues related to benchmarking a competitor's manufacturing capabilities and... View Details

Keywords: Production; Infrastructure; Competitive Strategy; Global Strategy; Policy; Strategic Planning; Performance Productivity; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Performance Effectiveness; Sunnyvale; Japan

Educators

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03 Nov 2015
First Look

November 3, 2015

the performance effects of those choices. We find that, on average, deviations lead to slower read times. Doctors tend to deviate more with experience and when they have more variety within their queue.... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

05 Mar 2009
What Do You Think?

How Frank or Deceptive Should Leaders Be?

all organizations in all cultures, in times of success as opposed to decline, when talking about the past as opposed to the future, or in dealing with employees of all generations. As many respondents to this month's column pointed out, the View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

19 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Birth of the American Salesman

the salesman's role in promoting goods was different from that of advertising. To use a military analogy common in the early twentieth century, advertising was a weapon for waging an air war, while salesmen were deployed as foot soldiers in a ground campaign. Sales... View Details

Keywords: by Laura Linard

2020
Article

Worry at Work: How Organizational Culture Promotes Anxiety

By: Jeremy A. Yip, Emma E. Levine, Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer

Organizational culture profoundly influences how employees think and behave. Established research suggests that the content, intensity, consensus, and fit of cultural norms act as a social control system for attitudes and behavior. We adopt the norms model of... View Details

Keywords: Anxiety; Norms; Stress; Culture; Tightness-looseness; Curvilinear; Organizational Culture; Emotions; Performance

16 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Strategy and the Internet

competitive advantage—by operating at a lower cost, by commanding a premium price, or by doing both. Cost and price advantages can be achieved in two ways. One is operational effectiveness—doing the same things your competitors do but doing them better. Operational... View Details

Keywords: by Michael E. Porter

04 Nov 2015
What Do You Think?

Why Does Gender Diversity Improve Financial Performance?

Does Gender Diversity in Management Enhance Performance? Why? A variety of explanations for the positive correlation between gender diversity and better business performance found in a recent McKinsey study were advanced in responses to... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

Article

The Allure of Unknown Outcomes: Exploring the Role of Uncertainty in the Preference for Potential

By: Daniella Kupor, Zakary L. Tormala and Michael I. Norton

Influence practitioners often highlight a target's achievements (e.g., "she is the city's top-rated chef"), but recent research reveals that highlighting a target's potential (e.g., "she could become the city's top-rated chef") can be more effective. We examine whether... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Forecasting and Prediction; Performance Evaluation

01 Feb 2011
First Look

First Look: Feb. 1

by the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), 1995-2003 Authors:Sergio G. Lazzarini and Aldo Musacchio Abstract There is a growing literature comparing the performance of private vs. state-owned companies. Yet, there is little work... View Details

January 2017
Article

Impact Evaluation Methods in Public Economics: A Brief Introduction to Randomized Evaluations and Comparison with Other Methods

By: Dina Pomeranz

Recent years have seen a large expansion in the use of rigorous impact evaluation techniques. Increasingly, public administrations are collaborating with academic economists and other quantitative social scientists to apply such rigorous methods to the study of public... View Details

Keywords: Practice; Public Sector; Research; Policy; Performance Evaluation

06 Feb 2020
Research & Ideas

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

previously in our analysis of his Amazon shareholder letters. 4. Jeff Bezos’ patents are customer-centric For a more granular look at Bezos’ inventions, we performed a word frequency analysis using the abstracts of his patents. The top... View Details

Keywords: by Tricia Gregg and Boris Groysberg; Retail

2012
Working Paper

Rainmakers: Why Bad Weather Means Good Productivity

By: Jooa Julia Lee, Francesca Gino and Bradley R. Staats

People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just... View Details

Keywords: Productivity; Opportunity Cost; Distractions; Weather; Performance Productivity; Social Psychology; Mathematical Methods

16 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

The Most Successful Startups Have Hands-On Founders

that more intensive people management is a worthwhile investment of a founder’s time.” Effective human resource management is more than just keeping the paperwork flowing. “You also need to focus on the strategic part of managing people... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

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