Publications

01 Feb 1997
News

Shaping the Future of Business: Entrepreneurial Evolution at HBS

core business of distributing financial information, Bloomberg has added print, broadcast, and other media, with 400 reporters in 70 bureaus writing 3,000 business and nonbusiness stories daily for outlets... View Details

Keywords: Nancy O. Perry and Susan Young; profiles by Garry Emmons

April 1999 (Revised March 2001)
Case

Be Our Guest, Inc.

By: Dwight B. Crane and Penny Joseph

Be Our Guest is a rapidly growing equipment rental company with substantial seasonality in its revenues and profits. In the spring of 1998, the senior management team is reviewing its financial plans in preparation for a meeting with the company's bank. The case... View Details

Keywords: Financial Strategy; Borrowing and Debt; Banks and Banking; Revenue; Management Teams; Business Plan; Forecasting and Prediction; Utilities Industry; Service Industry

Web

Holiday Shopping 2024: The Year of Cheapflation, TikTok, and Economic Jitters | Working Knowledge

has forecast holiday sales to grow between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent this year, slowing from 3.9 percent in 2023. How are merchants to stay nimble? We asked Harvard Business School faculty members to share... View Details

February 2024
Module Note

Data-Driven Marketing in Retail Markets

By: Ayelet Israeli

This note describes an eight-class sessions module on data-driven marketing in retail markets. The module aims to familiarize students with core concepts of data-driven marketing in retail, including exploring the opportunities and challenges, adopting best practices,... View Details

I’ve worked at startup companies and I’ve run development teams inside large public companies. In both environments, executives spend far more time forecasting how successful they’ll be than planning what they will do if something breaks down.

View Details

May 2018 (Revised October 2019)
Case

Managing the Future of Work

By: William R. Kerr, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga

By 2019, leaders from the public and private sector had become increasingly anxious about how advanced technologies and aging global populations could affect labor markets, workplaces, and workers’ lives. Some analysts forecasted that hundreds of millions of workers... View Details

Keywords: Labor Markets; Workplace; Employment; Technological Innovation; Demographics; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Problems and Challenges; Opportunities

October 2002 (Revised May 2021)
Case

Group Process in the Challenger Launch Decision (A)

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Laura Feldman

The night before the launch of the Challenger shuttle, officials from Morton Thiokol (Solid Rocket Booster manufacturer) and NASA participated in a teleconference to discuss whether to postpone the shuttle launch due to predicted low temperatures at Kennedy Space... View Details

Keywords: Process Analysis; Problems and Challenges; Groups and Teams; Engineering; Risk Management; Analysis; Decision Making; Aerospace Industry; United States

15 Sep 2015
First Look

September 15, 2015

Operations Management Analytics for an Online Retailer: Demand Forecasting and Price Optimization By: Ferreira, Kris J., Bin Hong Alex Lee, and David Simchi-Levi Abstract—We... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Web

Building the Road to 'Small Business Utopia' with AI and Fintech | Working Knowledge

services made it easier to create what one investor calls a “truth file”—a set of information that could quickly and accurately predict the creditworthiness of a small business, much like a consumer’s... View Details

June 2023 (Revised May 2024)
Case

Optimalen Capital

By: Malcolm Baker, Elisabeth Kempf and Jonathan Wallen

A new client portfolio manager at a quantitative investment management firm must explain why her firm, Optimalen Capital, has rebalanced a client portfolio with a set of trades that seem unintuitive. In particular, Optimalen has added to its position of Walmart (ticker... View Details

Keywords: Investments; CAPM; Capital Asset Pricing Model; Investment Portfolio; Asset Pricing

April 1983
Case

National Chemical Corp.: Tiger-Tread

A large chemical company has developed a novel industrial maintenance item, for which a marketing program and budget must be prepared. Case requires students to forecast demand at end-user and industrial customer levels to identify elements of the marketing mix, and to... View Details

Keywords: Product Marketing; Consumer Products Industry; Industrial Products Industry

22 Dec 2015
News

Algorithms Need Managers, Too

15 Dec 2015
News

The Year in Ideas 2015

will continue to see creative uses. I predict we’ll see more and more ‘line-waiting tasks’ for restaurants that don’t take reservations and for product launches.” —Jamie... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna, Christine Lejeune, Dan Morrell, and April White

20 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Getting the Marketing Mix Right

their FSL model, however, the results provided much greater detail about the potential effects of different marketing investments. For example, the model predicted that sales gains from DTCA and M&E... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

The Limits of Algorithmic Measures of Race in Studies of Outcome Disparities

We show that the use of algorithms to predict race has significant limitations in measuring and understanding the sources of racial disparities in finance, economics, and other contexts. First, we derive theoretically the direction and magnitude of measurement... View Details

October 1960 (Revised December 1982)
Case

Texas Instruments, Inc. (B)

Discusses the reorganization of Texas Instruments Metals & Controls Division, the formulation of the profit plan, and the courses of action available to the manager in the face of his department's failure to meet forecasted sales and profits. View Details

Keywords: Restructuring

28 Jul 2009
Research Event

Business Summit: Real Estate

next steps in real estate? This panel discussed the global real estate crisis, the future of securitization, and predictions for the future of the U.S. real estate market. After years of abundant capital... View Details

Keywords: Re: Howard H. Stevenson; Construction; Real Estate

April 1994 (Revised November 1998)
Case

Kendall Square Research Corporation (A)

By: William J. Bruns Jr.

Kendall Square Research was a small competitor in the supercomputer industry. As sales grew rapidly in 1992 and early 1993, the company sold stock to the public for the first time and analysts forecast higher earnings for 1993. However, when the company's revenue... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Standards; Accounting Audits; Computer Industry