Publications

December 2002 (Revised October 2006)
Case

Tesco Plc.

By: David E. Bell

Tesco, a supermarket chain, has been transformed from a third-rate retailer to a global leader in the past ten years. This case describes how that was accomplished. Interviews with Tesco employees explain the company's approach to understanding customers, motivating... View Details

Keywords: History; Motivation and Incentives; Leadership; Internet and the Web; Supply Chain Management; Global Strategy; Globalization; Customer Focus and Relationships; Business Strategy; Retail Industry

12 Nov 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Finance and Social Responsibility in the Informal Economy: Institutional Voids, Globalization, and Microfinance Institutions

Keywords: by Hao Liang, Christopher Marquis & Sunny Li Sun

November 2004 (Revised July 2006)
Case

Patrimonio Hoy

By: Arthur I Segel, Michael Chu and Gustavo Herrero

Patrimonio Hoy is a program targeting the housing needs of the low-income population by CEMEX, a major Mexican company and a leading global cement producer. Originally conceived as a project to understand the customers in the self-construction segment better, a major... View Details

Keywords: Housing; Construction; Product Design; Globalized Firms and Management; Microfinance; Income; Market Entry and Exit; Emerging Markets; Entrepreneurship; Construction Industry; Mexico

July 2009 (Revised August 2011)
Case

What Happened at Citigroup? (A)

By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia

What went wrong at Citigroup? In 1998, the Travelers Group and Citicorp merged to create Citigroup Inc., considered the first true global "financial supermarket" and a business model to be envied, feared, and emulated. By year-end 2006 the firm had a market... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Globalized Firms and Management; Leadership; Risk Management; Failure; Financial Services Industry

February 1998 (Revised May 2007)
Case

Airborne Express

By: Jan W. Rivkin

In the wake of a highly successful quarter, senior managers of Airborne Express, the third largest player in the express mail industry, review the firm's competitive position. Airborne has survived, and recently prospered, in an industry with significant economies of... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Business Strategy; Partners and Partnerships; Global Strategy; Rank and Position; Service Industry

Research Summary

Overview

Observing how globalization and technological innovation are transforming economies, Professor Steinwender is motivated by understanding what drives these factors. She uses the careful empirical identification of causal effects—and often the lens of history—to examine... View Details

Keywords: Economic History; Productivity; Innovation; Information Technology; Telegraph; Technological Change; Firm Behavior

2004
Chapter

Building the Microeconomic Foundations of Prosperity: Findings from the Business Competitiveness Index

By: Michael E. Porter

In The Global Competitiveness Report 2003-2004
Competitiveness has become a central preoccupation of both advanced and developing countries in an increasingly open and integrated world economy. Despite its acknowledged importance, the concept of competitiveness... View Details

Keywords: Economics; Growth and Development

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October 2006 (Revised October 2007)
Case

Grosvenor Group Limited

By: Andre F. Perold, Arthur I Segel, Oliver Corlette and Soyoun Song

A global real estate investment firm is trying to decide whether to enter into a property-derivative transaction to help it effect a change in asset allocation. The market for real estate derivatives is beginning to grow quite rapidly and the firm is trying to... View Details

Keywords: Asset Management; Financial Instruments; Financial Markets; Business or Company Management; Property; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry

September 10, 2014
Article

Getting Cross-Cultural Teamwork Right

By: Tsedal Neeley

People struggle with global teamwork, even though it’s essential to success in multinational firms. Despite their efforts to nimbly manage differences in time zones, cultures, and languages, cross-border collaborators often fail to reach shared understanding or common... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Globalized Firms and Management; Conflict Management

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2017
Book

Extreme Teaming: Lessons in Complex, Cross-Sector Leadership

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey

Today's global enterprises increasingly involve collaborative work by teams of experts operating across different professions, organizations, and industries. Extreme Teaming provides new insights into the world of complex, cross-industry projects and the ways... View Details

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Leadership; Complexity

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2021
Chapter

Renewing the Relevance of IB: Can Some History Help?

By: Geoffrey Jones

International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or... View Details

Keywords: International Business; Globalization; History; Multinational Firms and Management

15 Oct 2007
Research & Ideas

Businesses Beware: The World Is Not Flat

view of such differences, to figure out the ones that matter the most in your industry, and to look at them not just as difficulties to be overcome but also as potential sources of value creation. Q: You say Toyota is an example of a company that View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

April 2013
Teaching Plan

Barclays and the LIBOR Scandal

By: Clayton S. Rose and Aldo Sesia

In the summer of 2012, Barclays plc, one of the largest banks in the world, agreed to settle with authorities and acknowledged that the firm had manipulated LIBOR (London Inter-Bank Offered Rate)—a benchmark reference rate that was fundamental to the operation of... View Details

Keywords: Financial Systems; Financial Services; Corruption; Regulation; General Management; Management; Leadership; Economic Systems; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Culture; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; United Kingdom

2024
Working Paper

The Value of Open Source Software

By: Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle and Yanuo Zhou

The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy and is foundational for most technology we use today. However, it is... View Details

Keywords: Valuation; Open Source Distribution; Applications and Software

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2023
Book

Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World

By: Mattias Fibiger

After the murder of senior generals in the Indonesian army by elements of the country's communist party in 1965, General Suharto orchestrated the mass killing of some half a million leftists and fellow travelers. But his ambitions spanned far beyond perpetrating a... View Details

Keywords: Indonesia; Cold War; Political Economy; Foreign Aid; International Investment; International Relations; International Finance; History; War; Economic Systems; Government and Politics; Indonesia; Southeast Asia

09 Dec 2002
Research & Ideas

Unilever—A Case Study

This article considers key issues relating to the organization and performance of large multinational firms in the post-Second World War period. Although foreign direct investment is defined by ownership and control, in practice the nature of that "control"... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation; Food & Beverage; Manufacturing; Retail

August 2008
Article

From Clusters to Cluster-Based Economic Development

By: Christian H.M. Ketels and Olga Memedovic

Over the last decades, changes in the global economy and the emergence of Global Value Chains (GVCs) have raised the interest in understanding the specific conditions and cross-company interactions within and across locations. For companies, the need to choose the... View Details

Keywords: Development Economics; Economy; Value; Business Strategy; Competition; Performance Productivity; Cost; Natural Environment; Policy; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Framework; Industry Clusters