The Capitalist's Contract - Publications - Faculty & Research

29 Jun 2007
First Look

First Look: June 29, 2007

boards (PCBs) in-house rather than buying them from third-party contract manufacturers. Stryker Corporation's Instruments business is considering the proposal in response to difficulties with existing... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

15 Dec 2015
First Look

December 15, 2015

forthcoming Journal of Marketing Research The Role of (Dis)similarity in (Mis)predicting Others' Preferences By: Barasz, Kate, Tami Kim, and Leslie John Abstract—Consumers readily indicate liking options that appear dissimilar—for... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

18 Mar 2001
Research & Ideas

Want to Be an Entrepreneur? [Part I]

"The core idea — an innovation in entrepreneurial finance—is to make prominent the role of people in making decisions." Thus an early reading for the "Entrepreneurial Finance" course, on... View Details

Keywords: by John S. Rosenberg

23 Oct 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, October 23, 2018

Focusing on relative total shareholder returns (rTSR), the predominant metric specified in these contracts and used by market participants to evaluate managers, we document that 60% of firms—those that... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

20 Sep 2007
Research & Ideas

How to be a Customer

the contract price if the seller's costs clearly exceed expectations or promise to refer the supplier to a friend. You may want to do business... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

16 Dec 2015
Research & Ideas

What Happens When Zambian Schoolgirls Receive Negotiation Training

Many Zambian girls face major challenges early in life. They drop out of eighth and ninth grade at three times the rate of their male counterparts and contract HIV twice as often. Many will die due to... View Details

Keywords: Re: Kathleen L. McGinn

24 May 2004
Research & Ideas

When Reputation Trumps Regulation

in locally listed firms. Many local exchanges around the world are struggling to grow, and some are even contracting to a significant degree. Weak legal and regulatory institutions deserve a major part of... View Details

Keywords: by Ann Cullen

19 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Your Customers: Use Them or Lose Them

working in a spectacular way is the cell phone industry. It sees the customer as an adversary, [asking the customer to sign] contracts for View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

04 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

Don’t Lose Money With Customers

rewarded by GE. In contrast, a supplier of circuit boards to Ford Motor Company was never able to overcome a preoccupation with the contract terms. The supplier's failure to... View Details

Keywords: by Peter K. Jacobs

24 Apr 2006
Research & Ideas

Managing Alignment as a Process

large contract from the U.S. Army that put its combat boots on the feet of more than two million soldiers. Its success carried into the postwar... View Details

Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan & David P. Norton; Apparel & Accessories; Fashion; Consumer Products; Retail

15 Aug 2024
Op-Ed

Post-CrowdStrike, Six Questions to Test Your Company's Operational Resilience

When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update in July, it impacted a staggering 8.5 million devices. The crisis rippled through commercial airline operations, package delivery logistics, ecommerce, and health... View Details

Keywords: by Hise Gibson and Anita Lynch

31 Mar 2002
Research & Ideas

You’re Wasting Your Employees! What You Can Do About It

that the owners of the scarce resources are no longer only the shareholders but also the employees. The... View Details

Keywords: by Christopher A. Bartlett & Sumantra Ghoshal

02 Jan 2007
Research & Ideas

Most Popular Articles of 2006

In the six-year history of Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, some types of articles have always been popular with our readers. Want to generate a lot of reader buzz? Then write about negotiation strategy, managing IT,... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

28 May 2012
Research & Ideas

A Pragmatic Alternative for Creating a Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy

Thousands of large, profitable companies have all the right intentions of giving back to society—and yet a sizable number of them have corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs that provide little benefit to either View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

04 Jan 2021
What Do You Think?

How Do We Sustain Organization Diversity?

low-wage workers.” Another point of view rejects the notion that such a competition exists. David Wittenberg commented, “Workers don’t ‘compete for your profits,’ they contract to provide services for a wage... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

30 Jun 2003
Research & Ideas

Computer Security is For Managers, Too

operations tell their materials suppliers exactly what specifications to meet. Similarly, companies should demand reasonable levels of security from software vendors. Look at the wording of this contract... View Details

Keywords: by Robert D. Austin & Christopher A.R. Darby

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Shareholders Key to Corporate Reform

be actually brought home to the investor." Most of our social contracts are built on the assumption that individual accountability influences human behavior. Indeed, View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia A. Montgomery & Rhonda Kaufman

25 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

Hiding From Managers Can Increase Your Productivity

while studying the manufacturing floor at a leading, technologically advanced global contract manufacturer's plant in Southern China, where tens of thousands of workers assembled mobile devices under close... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Manufacturing

09 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

Warring Algorithms Could Be Driving Up Consumer Prices

requires substantial resources, both in terms of computing power and human capital. Even companies that contract with third-party providers to run pricing algorithms on their websites need significant data storage capacity, processing... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail

04 Dec 2007
First Look

First Look: December 4, 2007

real and sustainable; to decide how low a company must bid in order to win a competitive contract from a rival; to identify opportunities for internal cost reduction; to estimate, in the context of an... View Details