Publications

June 2013 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Procter & Gamble

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Kathleen Durante

On July 12, 2012, Bill Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management announced publicly that it had purchased about $2 billion of Procter and Gamble (P&G) stock. Shares in the company closed up 3.75% the day the disclosure was made public. Ackman told the New York... View Details

Keywords: Ackman; P＆G; Pershing Square Capital Managment; Disruption; Management Succession; Crisis Management; Acquisition; Consumer Products Industry; Financial Services Industry

01 May 2013
What Do You Think?

Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?

What do you think? Original Article Servant leadership is an age-old concept, a term loosely used to suggest that a leader's primary role is to serve others, especially employees. I witnessed a practical example of it at a ServiceMaster board meeting in the 1990s when... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

March 2022 (Revised May 2022)
Case

Reclaiming the Land of Purple: Purpl’s Mission to Unlock Finance in Lebanon

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Karl Naim, Co-Founder and CEO of Purpl, embarked on a venture to lower remittance costs for his native Lebanon. Since October 2019, the Lebanese economy had entered a free fall as its banking sector collapsed and large swathes of its population were plunged into... View Details

Keywords: Business Startup; Fintech; Inflation; Deflation; Cross-border Frictions; Remittances; Business Startups; Diasporas; Financial Crisis; Money; Entrepreneurship; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Poverty; Financial Institutions; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; Lebanon

08 Dec 2022
HBS Case

The War in Ukraine and Nestlé’s Moral Dilemma: Stay or Leave Russia?

Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company, faced a difficult choice last February as Russian tanks rolled across Ukraine, and the 24/7 news and social media cycle amplified the company’s every move. View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Consumer Products

13 Mar 2007
First Look

First Look: March 13, 2007

Management: Founder Decisions Harvard Business School Case 807-125 Scott Taylor, CEO & founder of NLM, is a serial entrepreneur faced with an important decision. As his industry consolidates, he knows that his company must grow... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

18 Mar 2024
Research & Ideas

When It Comes to Climate Regulation, Energy Companies Take a More Nuanced View

Common wisdom holds that oil and gas companies, electric utilities, and other industries known for their large carbon emissions generally oppose clean energy policies. Now, a study of corporate advocacy spanning 30 years reveals that many companies are more flexible... View Details

Keywords: by Desmond Dodd; Energy; Utilities

12 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

What Great American Leaders Teach Us

the context in which specific CEO candidates were successful. It is all too easy to ignore both the past contextual framework of success and the present one. Are they aligned? Does success in one context predict success in a View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

27 Sep 2018
Research & Ideas

Religion in the Workplace: What Managers Need to Know

direction of CEO Michael Jeffries, the company held onto a hint of its hallmark safari style while putting a greater emphasis on casual clothes and ballooned to more than 1,000 stores worldwide, with revenues exceeding $3.5 billion by... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage; Apparel & Accessories

02 Apr 2015
Research & Ideas

Digital Initiative Summit: Who Has the Power in the Music Industry?

you now have to think about how the searchability of an artist can influence the kind of music you ultimately hear [as a consumer]," said Jim Lucchese, a panelist and CEO of Echonest, which was acquired by Spotify last year. "But the... View Details

Keywords: Re: Felix Oberholzer-Gee; Music

30 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Political Polarization: Why We All Just Can't Get Along

A recent study suggests that America’s political polarization is driven more by incorrect beliefs and stereotypes about the other side than distaste with those people. That should be good news for those wondering how to knit polarized... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Banking; Financial Services

12 Jul 2016
First Look

July 12, 2016

lines every week. Based in the United Kingdom, ASOS shipped products to 240 countries and territories, and international sales represented more than 50% of total revenues. But when new CEO Nick Beighton took... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

04 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees

We often expect corporate executives to conform to certain extroverted CEO stereotypes: C for charismatic, E for effusive, and O for outgoing. To wit: Virgin Group chairman Richard Branson, who very publicly flew around the world in a hot... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

22 Dec 2003
Research & Ideas

How to Build a Better Board

should pause and ask, "Are we working the way we want to work, have conditions changed, should we do something different because we have a new CEO or because the new View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

16 Nov 2021
HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

enter new markets, bidding unprecedented sums to purchase competitors and buying up pricey technology. The spending spree sunk the company deep into debt, according to the research. When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

12 Sep 2023
What Do You Think?

Who Gets the Loudest Voice in DEI Decisions?

seemed small, but you’ve seen your counterparts in other organizations brought to task over DEI issues. Do you approve making the proposed orientation program mandatory for new employees? Or, alternatively, would you alter the material to... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

02 Sep 2015
What Do You Think?

What's Wrong With Amazon’s Low-Retention HR Strategy?

This past month, a New York Times report on Amazon’s personnel strategies prompted several days of intense debate. A number of questions can be raised about the article itself, given the fact that much of it was based on interviews with... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett; Web Services; Retail; Apparel & Accessories; Consumer Products; Fashion

September 2020
Case

Minerva 2020: Clinical Trials

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

In March 2020, Dr. Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Inc. (Minerva), was reviewing the first results of human clinical trials for the company’s novel CAR-T drug therapeutic, one of the first ever to target solid cancer tumors. The results... View Details

Keywords: Biotechnology; Strategic Decision Making; Entrepreneurship; Health Testing and Trials; Decision Choices and Conditions; Strategy

2019
Article

Go-Shops Revisited

By: Guhan Subramanian and Annie Zhao

A go-shop process turns the traditional M&A deal process on its head: rather than a pre-signing market canvass followed by a post-signing “no shop” period, a go-shop deal involves a limited pre-signing market check, followed by a post-signing “go shop” process to find... View Details

Keywords: Go-shop Process; Mergers and Acquisitions; Negotiation Process; Negotiation Deal; Performance Effectiveness; Technological Innovation