Publications

January 2018 (Revised May 2018)
Case

AT&T Managing Technological Change and the Future of Telephone Operators in the 20th Century

By: Daniel P. Gross and William R. Kerr

By the 1930s, AT&T dominated the American phone industry, serving 10 million telephones and employing over 100,000 switchboard operators. But beginning in the mid-1910s, the company began changing from manually operated switchboards to mechanical switching systems that... View Details

Keywords: AT＆T; Bell Telephone; Phone Lines; Phone Operators; Mechanical Switching; Layoffs; Technological Change; Transition; History; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Disruption; Change Management; Communications Industry; Telecommunications Industry; United States

October 2003 (Revised April 2004)
Case

Jamcracker: Pivot Path

A medium-size company considers entering into a high-tech "over-the-Net" outsourcing arrangement that hinges on buying an integration platform from Jamcracker. Introduces students to the many options available in modern IT outsourcing and challenges them to develop a... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Information Technology; Decision Making

November 2008
Case

Malaysia Airlines (A)

In the first six weeks on the job, the new CEO of Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has developed an ambitious turnaround plan, including aggressive job cuts and route eliminations, but MAS's largest shareholder, Khazanah Nacional, the sovereign wealth fund, is tasked with... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Economic Growth; Investment Funds; Sovereign Finance; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business and Government Relations; Business and Shareholder Relations; Air Transportation Industry; Malaysia

14 Aug 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, August 14, 2018

forthcoming Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth By: Edmondson, Amy C. Abstract—The Fearless Organization offers practical... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

December 2010 (Revised March 2011)
Background Note

Layoffs: Management Implications and Best Practices

By: Sandra J. Sucher, Elana Sara Green and David Alberto Rosales

This note reviews decision criteria for carrying out a layoff, best practices for implementation, and ways that managers can prepare themselves to conduct a layoff. View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing

06 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful

entrepreneurial leaders as they collect more data. Differentiating serial founders and first-time founders Not all founders are cut from the same cloth, the study underscores. Analysis of the pilot data also... View Details

Keywords: by HBS Working Knowledge

October 2020
Case

Israelis, Palestinians and the Technology Bridge Between Them: A Work in Progress

By: Elie Ofek and Lia Weiner

In Israel of 2020 the demand for software engineers was endless. Meanwhile just miles away, Palestinian universities were graduating 3,000 engineers a year, and many of them could not find jobs in the still nascent Palestinian tech sector. Could these dots be... View Details

Keywords: Geopolitics; Technology Ecosystem; Software Engineers; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Business Startups; International Relations; Cooperation; Opportunities; Problems and Challenges; Technology Industry; Israel; Palestinian state

February 2008 (Revised January 2009)
Background Note

Offshoring Day in BGIE and Strategy

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Troy Smith

Describes a set of activities in which students will participate before and during a day of classes on offshoring. The day's classes will examine the implications of offshoring for policy makers, business leaders, and workers. View Details

Keywords: Policy; Employees; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Labor; Management; Strategy

03 Jul 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, July 3, 2018

basis of systematic performance. 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

17 Jul 2023
Research & Ideas

Money Isn’t Everything: The Dos and Don’ts of Motivating Employees

Those might be the very parts of the job that your workers find most enjoyable, and loving their work is an important motivational factor for many workers. “The way that AI will change View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

October 2008
Case

Tegan c.c.c.

Examines a struggling IT outsourcing project from the perspective of the customer--Tegan. It should be used in conjunction with Hrad Technika (9-609-039), which illustrates the supplier's point of view. When Tegan, a Welsh toy distributor, outsources the development of... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Information Technology; Service Operations; Business Processes; Information Technology Industry; Wales; Czech Republic

18 Aug 2022
Op-Ed

Your Best Employees Are Burning Out: A Framework for Retaining Talent

people leaving my organization or refusing to return to the office in such high numbers? What is my response, and how are my employees receiving it? At a time when people are getting choosier about where they work View Details

Keywords: by Hise Gibson and MaShon Wilson

15 Jun 2009
Research & Ideas

GM: What Went Wrong and What’s Next

history of this American corporate icon. The U.S. cannot afford to lose the thousands of middle-class jobs of GM workers and management, nor the cutting edge R&D that GM... View Details

Keywords: by Staff; Auto

April 1990 (Revised April 1993)
Case

Bridgeton Industries: Automotive Component & Fabrication Plant

Bridgeton Industries was experiencing reduced sales. To become more competitive it introduced a classification procedure for products based upon their productivity and other factors. Products were classified into three groups: world class, potentially world class, and... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Competition; Cost Management; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry

15 Dec 2024
News

Alumni and Faculty Books

Edited by Margie Kelley Alumni Books The Power of Imperfect Eating By Kavita Bhatnagar (SELP 11, 2022) Penguin Enterprise Rather than dictating which foods are good or bad, this book weaves together stories that mirror the intricate, emotional, and often imperfect... View Details

Keywords: Publishing Industries (except Internet); Information

01 Jun 2023
News

Alumni and Faculty Books

Balance Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents ’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy,... View Details

Keywords: Publishing Industries (except Internet); Information

June 2004 (Revised July 2005)
Case

Procter & Gamble: Global Business Services

By: Thomas J. DeLong, Warren Brackin, Alex Cabanas, Phil Shellhammer and David L. Ager

Dave Walker, vice-president of business service opportunities and chairman of the governance team at Procter & Gamble, must decide what to do with P&G's 5,700 employee Global Business Services (GBS) group. GBS brought together internal services such as finance,... View Details

Keywords: Business Units; Change Management; Decision Making; Globalized Firms and Management; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Organizational Design