Publications

January – February 2011
Article

Creating Shared Value

By: Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer

The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business has been criticized as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely thought to be prospering at the expense of their communities. Trust in business has fallen to new... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Economic Growth; Economic Systems; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Trust; Human Needs; Welfare; Competitive Advantage; Value Creation

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Web

Curriculum - Case Method Project

theories; majority rule vs. tyranny of the majority; dangers of small republics; “expanding the sphere”; the Constitutional Convention; origins of American federalism, Articles I-III of the U.S. Constitution In Detail: Debt and Paper... View Details

June 2018
Background Note

Introduction to Life Settlements

By: Alexander Braun, Lauren H. Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Jiahua Xu

Life insurance is an asset owned by the majority of American adults (61%). Note that this 61% penetration rate is essentially at parity with home ownership (64%) and higher than that of 401(k) retirement account ownership (53%). Life settlements, or life insurance... View Details

Keywords: Insurance; Assets; Value; Markets; Investment Return

March 2015
Case

Tim Keller at Katzenbach Partners LLC (A) (Abridged)

By: Boris Groysberg and James Weber

Tracks the first six months of a recent MBA grad, Tim Keller, at Katzenbach Partners, a boutique consulting firm focused on organizational change and strategy. Covers how Keller initially struggles with his assignment and ends with a question of whether or not he... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Relations; Organization Behavior; Superior ＆ Subordinate; Managing Projects; Informal Organization; Consulting; Professional Services; Leadership; Work-Life Balance; Decision Choices and Conditions; Organizations; Rank and Position; Product Development; Service Industry; Consulting Industry

December 2013
Case

Grupo Beta San Miguel

By: David E. Bell and Natalie Kindred

In November 2013, Dr. Jose Pinto, head of Grupo Beta San Miguel (BSM), Mexico's largest private sugar producer, is weighing the future prospects of the Mexican sugar industry as he considers whether BSM should bid on one of the state-owned sugar mills slated for... View Details

Keywords: Mexico; Jose Pinto; Beta San Miguel; Polycrom; Sugar; World Sugar Trade; NAFTA; Strategy; Trade; Futures and Commodity Futures; Agribusiness; Price; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Mexico; United States; North America

October 2005 (Revised September 2006)
Case

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Marie Bell

One of Boston's main cultural attractions, the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), has experienced a steady decline of its core audience over the last decade. The museum's executive director attempted to bridge the shortfall by staging new, innovative, special exhibitions,... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Growth Management; Innovation Leadership; Capital; Financing and Loans; Service Operations; Consumer Behavior

August 1995 (Revised September 1995)
Case

Hutton Branch Manager (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine and Jane Palley Katz

The manager of an E.F. Hutton branch office must decide how best to approach a colleague whose aggressive and ethically problematic cash management practices have cost the branch a major institutional client. These practices had been encouraged by top management at... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Business or Company Management; Decisions; Management Skills; Cash Flow; Financial Management; Investment; Management Teams; Financial Services Industry

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28 May 2013
News

Are eBay Auctions A Thing Of The Past?

01 Jul 2011
News

Corporates need to hard sell strategy to their people

27 Sep 2021
News

Revival: The Independent Bookstore Industry Is Growing with a Loyal Customer Base Wanting to Shop Local

2023
Working Paper

Causes and Consequences of State Violence against Civilians: The Rohingya of Myanmar

By: C. Austin Davis, Paula Lopez-Pena, A. Mushfiq Mobarak and Jaya Wen

The Rohingya crisis is a severe, ongoing conflict involving large-scale violence and forced displacement, yet its causes are contested and its consequences lack systematic documentation. We marshal a variety of existing and original data to shed light on its drivers,... View Details

Keywords: War; Conflict and Resolution; Motivation and Incentives; Developing Countries and Economies; Myanmar

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2000
Article

Georgia Regional Transportation Authority: A Case Study of an Innovative Regional Planning Institution

By: Brian Trelstad

The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), a new regional planning institution, is a governor-appointed body of 15 regional leaders with broad authority over land use and transportation planning throughout the state. Created in the summer of 1999, GRTA... View Details

Keywords: Transportation; Planning; Business and Community Relations; Georgia (state, US); Atlanta

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December 2015
Case

Negotiating the Path of Abraham, 2015 Progress and Challenges

By: James K. Sebenius

The Abraham Path board reviews the last five years and seeks to frame and act on its major strategic, negotiating, and operational challenges going forward. The Abraham Path Initiative seeks to revitalize a route of Middle East cultural tourism following Abraham's path... View Details

October 2013
Case

Oaktree and the Restructuring of CIT Group (A)

By: Victoria Ivashina and David Scharfstein

CIT's prepackaged bankruptcy marked the first time a major financial institution was able to successfully restructure and emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, challenging conventional views that a financial firm could not survive bankruptcy proceedings as a going... View Details

Keywords: Debt Securities; Restructuring; Financial Services Industry

Research Summary

Overview

Jurgen's research focuses on the challenges and opportunites to the energy sector created by technological change and externalities, in particular those associated with greenhouse gas emissons. Specific areas of interest include the development of potential pathways to... View Details

February 2015 (Revised August 2016)
Case

Nokia's Bridge Program: Redesigning Layoffs (A)

By: Sandra J. Sucher and Susan J. Winterberg

"Not another Bochum." Nokia Board Chairman Jorma Ollila was clear in the goals he set for the 2011 restructuring that Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop, had decided was necessary to address the dramatically changed competitive environment the company faced in smartphones... View Details

Keywords: Layoffs; Plant Closure; Outplacement; Shared Value; Business or Company Management; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Restructuring; Employee Relationship Management; Telecommunications Industry

September 2015
Case

GovDelivery

By: Mitchell Weiss

Is government the biggest, worst customer in the world? And is that a reason for venture investors to back companies that sell to government or to stay away? It had been seven years since Scott Burns joined his friend Zach Stabenow to get a company called GovDocs off... View Details

Keywords: GovDelivery; Public Entrepreneurship; B2G; Business-to-Government; Scott Burns; Entrepreneurship; Government Administration; Venture Capital; Information Technology Industry; Public Administration Industry; Web Services Industry; Minnesota; United States

17 Nov 2020
Blog Post

Partners and Families Are an Integral Part of the MBA Experience

This article was originally published in the November 2020 edition of the Harbus. Life at HBS looks different for every student as the campus is filled with people hailing from an array of countries, industries, and backgrounds. The lives students led before coming to... View Details

2025
Working Paper

Enhancing Treatment Effect Prediction on Privacy-Protected Data: An Honest Post-Processing Approach

By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza

As firms increasingly rely on customer data for personalization, concerns over privacy and regulatory compliance have grown. Local Differential Privacy (LDP) offers strong individual-level protection by injecting noise into data before collection. While... View Details

Keywords: Targeted Intervention; Conditional Average Treatment Effect Estimation; Differential Privacy; Honest Estimation; Post-processing; Analytics and Data Science; Consumer Behavior; Marketing