Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(13,857)
- Faculty Publications (1,550)
- March 2012
- Article
New Project? Don't Analyze—Act
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown
In a predictable world, getting a new initiative off the ground typically involves analyzing the market, creating a forecast, and writing a business plan. But what about in an unpredictable environment? The authors recommend looking to those who are experts in... View Details
- 2012
- Chapter
Schumpeterian Competition and Diseconomies of Scope: Illustrations from the Histories of Microsoft and IBM
By: Timothy F. Bresnahan, Shane Greenstein and Rebecca M. Henderson
We address a longstanding question about the causes of creative destruction. Dominant incumbent firms, long successful in an existing technology, are often much less successful in new technological eras. This is puzzling, since a cursory analysis would suggest that... View Details
- February 2012 (Revised June 2012)
- Case
Rospil.info
By: Paul Healy, Karthik Ramanna and Matthew Shaffer
What should business leaders do about corruption? In December 2011, four HBS alumni met to debate how to engage the unprecedented protests against Vladimir Putin's corrupt government, which had erupted in Russia in response to alleged fraud in the recent parliamentary... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
Americans Do IT Better: US Multinationals and the Productivity Miracle
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
US productivity growth accelerated after 1995 (unlike Europe's), particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). Using two new micro panel datasets we show that US multinationals operating in Europe also experienced a "productivity miracle."... View Details
- February 2012
- Article
CEO Relational Leadership and Strategic Decision Quality in Top Management Teams: The Role of Team Trust and Learning from Failure
By: Abraham Carmeli, Asher Tishler and Amy C. Edmondson
In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership, may improve the quality of strategic decisions of their top management teams (TMTs) by creating psychological conditions of trust and facilitating learning from failures... View Details
- Article
Matching in Networks with Bilateral Contracts
By: John William Hatfield and Scott Duke Kominers
We introduce a model in which firms trade goods via bilateral contracts which specify a buyer, a seller, and the terms of the exchange. This setting subsumes (many-to-many) matching with contracts, as well as supply chain matching. When firms' relationships do not... View Details
- 2012
- Book
Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
By: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance—for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the... View Details
- 2012
- Working Paper
~Why Do We Redistribute so Much but Tag so Little? Normative Diversity, Equal Sacrifice and Optimal Taxation
Tagging is a free lunch in conventional optimal tax theory because it eases the classic tradeoff between efficiency and equality. But tagging is used in only limited ways in tax policy. I propose one explanation: conventional optimal tax theory has yet to capture the... View Details
- Article
Market Heterogeneity and Local Capacity Decisions in Services
By: Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei
We empirically document factors that influence how local operating managers use discretion to balance the tradeoff between service capacity costs and customer sensitivity to service time. Our findings, using data from one of the largest financial services providers in... View Details
- December 2011
- Article
Platform Envelopment
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne
Due to network effects and switching costs in platform markets, entrants generally must offer revolutionary functionality. We explore a second entry path that does not rely upon Schumpeterian innovation: platform envelopment. Through envelopment, a provider in one... View Details
- October 2011 (Revised December 2022)
- Background Note
Ethical Analysis: Moral Disengagement
By: Sandra J. Sucher and Celia Moore
Moral disengagement is a process that enables people to engage in negative behaviors, from small misdeeds to great atrocities, without believing that they are causing harm or doing wrong. When Conrad Black, the fallen Canadian mogul convicted of multiple counts of... View Details
- September 2011
- Article
Global Capitalism at Risk: What Are You Doing About It?
Market capitalism, a system that has proven to be a remarkable engine of wealth creation, is poised for a breakdown. That sounds dire, and it is. Increasing income inequality, migration, weaknesses in the global financial system, environmental degradation, and... View Details
- September – October 2011
- Article
Manage the Culture Cycle
By: James L. Heskett
Organizational culture—the shared assumptions, values, and behaviors that determine "how we do things around here"—can be measured and shaped. In organizations with large numbers of customer-facing employees, it can account for up to half of the difference in operating... View Details
- Article
Market Interest in Nonfinancial Information
By: R. G. Eccles, Michael P. Krzus and George Serafeim
Market interest in nonfinancial (e.g., Environmental, Social, and Governance [ESG]) information, including data produced by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), is growing. Using data from Bloomberg we analyze this interest from a variety of different perspectives, and... View Details
- August 2011 (Revised April 2013)
- Case
Language and Globalization: 'Englishnization' at Rakuten (A)
By: Tsedal Neeley
Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, (Japan's largest online retailer), is at the helm of an organization that is rapidly expanding into global markets. In a critical stride toward becoming the world's No. 1 Internet services company, Mikitani announces... View Details
- August 2011
- Supplement
InnoCentive.com (C)
By: Karim R. Lakhani and Eric Lonstein
InnoCentive.com enables clients to tap into internal and external solver networks to address various business issues. This case focuses on the outcome of InnoCentive's decision to post challenges related to environmental issues created by the Gulf Oil Spill. It reviews... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
The Organization of Firms Across Countries
By: Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local... View Details
- July 2011 (Revised January 2013)
- Case
Digital Microscopy Is Making Me Crazy!
By: Willy Shih
For Carl Zeiss Microimaging, modular hardware and software enabled customers to tailor Zeiss's broad range of microscopy systems hardware and software to meet a wide range of needs from basic scientific research in the biological and medical sciences to clinical... View Details
- 2011
- Book
Flying Without a Net: Turn Fear of Change into Fuel for Success
By: Thomas J. DeLong
Confronted by omnipresent threats of job loss and change, even the brightest among us are anxious. In response, we're hunkering down, blocking ourselves from new challenges. This response hurts us and our organizations, but we fear making ourselves even more vulnerable... View Details
- June 2011 (Revised October 2012)
- Case
Patagonia Sur: For-Profit Land Conservation in Chile
By: Arthur I Segel, Nicolas Ibanez and Jay Verjee
Warren Adams founded Patagonia Sur in 2007 as one of the world's first for-profit land conservation businesses. His goal was to purchase over 100,000 acres of land in southern Chile and to run a variety of sustainable businesses to generate annual returns for... View Details