Performance Improvement - Publications - Faculty & Research

04 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

The Real Cost of Bribery

employees in 840 companies about workplace morale. High-morale companies (those at which more than 75 percent of the workforce reported "overall satisfaction with their company") had significantly stronger year-over-year stock View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

13 Apr 2009
Research & Ideas

Kind of Blue: Pushing Boundaries with Miles Davis

what everybody else is doing in the moment. Very often, this openness is gone after the first take. On a second take, many musicians will try to improve their own performance, and just by focusing on their own View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Music

14 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Understaffed and Overworked: What Now?

50 percent bottom-line improvement during the next year. To do this, Andrus knew she would need a focused and dedicated team. What she had was an overburdened one. In fact, a company survey showed that 60 percent of Andrus's 48 reports... View Details

Keywords: by Paul Michelman

18 Dec 2019
Book

6 Skills That Wise Companies Harness for World-Changing Innovation

As a boy, Soichiro Honda, the eventual founder of Honda Motor Co., was infatuated with airplanes. At age 10 he biked 20 kilometers to see American pilots performing aerobatics near his home in Japan, climbing a tree to watch the show. It... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

16 Aug 2011
First Look

First Look: August 16

Abstract This paper documents that ventures that are funded by two successful angel groups experience superior outcomes to rejected ventures: they have improved survival, exits, employment, patenting, web traffic, and financing. We use... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

04 Oct 2018
Research & Ideas

Diversity Boosts Profits in Venture Capital Firms

controlled experiment.” Looking at the financial performance of those firms, they determined that having at least one woman in a VC fund improved performance by approximately... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Banking; Financial Services

13 Nov 2019
Research & Ideas

Don't Turn Your Marketing Function Over to AI Just Yet

how new products or services would perform at various prices or with different characteristics. The machine learning algorithms that might power such a device are, at least for now, incapable of producing such promising results. But what... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

04 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

How Schmoozing with the Boss Helps Men Get Promoted

female, women make up only 38 percent of middle management jobs, 22 percent of C-suite seats, and a grim 5 percent of CEO positions, according to 2019 data from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “The improvement over the last... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2010
Working Paper

Introductory Reading for Being a Leader and the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model

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

This paper is the sixth of six pre-course reading assignments for an experimental leadership course developed by the authors over five years (2004-2008) at the U. of Rochester Simon School of Business working with students, alumni, executives, and faculty from various... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Development; Curriculum and Courses; Strategy; Performance Capacity; Attitudes; Behavior; United States; Netherlands; Texas

Citation

SSRN

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

Co managed to serve clients profitably, transferring most of the additional costs and getting a bump for improved service-level agreements and number of orders managed similar to the one they usually get during peak times like Black... View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

04 Jun 2018
What Do You Think?

Are There Conditions Under Which Directors Should Consider Hiring a CEO Fired Elsewhere for Inappropriate Behavior?

unlikely to respond to methods aimed at improving behavioral problems.” CLT commented: “The refusal of an applicant to honor a policy is (more than) reason enough to dismiss the applicant from further consideration. Why hire an applicant... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

04 Apr 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research, April 4

political participation and interest while improving representation of all groups. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=52460 December 2016 Strategic Management Journal Through the Mud or in the Boardroom:... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

02 Jul 2013
First Look

First Look: July 2

and goad managers. This response assesses Caesars Entertainment's CodeGreen scorecard, advocates a more comprehensive environmental assessment to target subsequent improvement efforts, and describes how the company can leverage and scale... View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

27 Aug 2012
Research & Ideas

Employee-Suggestion Programs That Work

literature—including Frankel's work—is that since not all problems identified by frontline staff are of equal importance, it is worth time and money to perform extensive prioritization. Suggestions that will produce the greatest View Details

Keywords: by Paul Guttry

September 1991 (Revised November 1993)
Case

Snake River Steel

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Keywords: Performance Capacity; Performance Improvement; Steel Industry

Citation

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03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads. Employing a wealth of interviews and quantitative data, their book takes the first comprehensive approach in decades to examine the evolving MBA marketplace and its threats as well as possibilities for... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

May 2020
Teaching Note

Baskits Inc.

By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 217-001. Robin Kovitz (MBA 2007) acquired Baskits, a Canadian gift basket company, in October of 2014. The business was highly seasonal with two-thirds of its sales occurring in November and December. Baskits dealt with its seasonality... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Performance Improvement; Canada

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12 Nov 2018
Research & Ideas

'Always On' Isn't Always Best for Team Decision-Making

because they can copy the better solution. With intermittent interaction, the high performers also benefit. Seeing diverse approaches in their lower-performing peers’ solutions can spark ideas to improve... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland

April 1995
Supplement

Japan 1995: Return to High Performance?

By: George C. Lodge and Marie Bell

Provides an update to Japan Confronts an Interdependent World. View Details

Keywords: Performance Improvement; Japan

Citation

Find at Harvard

November 1989 (Revised January 1990)
Case

Paul Revere Insurance Co. (C): Competing For the Baldrige Award--The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Exercise

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award requires firms to submit applications that conform to a rigorous quality-assessment system. This case consists of several parts of a service company's 1988 Baldrige application together with material from the Malcolm Baldrige... View Details

Keywords: Quality; Performance Improvement; Performance Evaluation

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