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- December 2022 (Revised June 2023)
- Case
KKR at CHI Overhead Doors (A)
By: Dennis Campbell and Ethan Rouen
This case examines the decision by private equity firm KKR to grant equity to every employee at portfolio company CHI Overhead Doors upon purchasing the company in 2015. The case explores whether this initiative will create shared value, growing profits through better... View Details
- December 8, 2022
- Article
What Companies Still Get Wrong about Layoffs
By: Sandra J. Sucher and Marilyn Morgan Westner
Research has long shown that layoffs have a detrimental effect on individuals and on corporate performance. The short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are often overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
I Don't 'Recall': The Decision to Delay Innovation Launch to Avoid Costly Product Failure
By: Byungyeon Kim, Oded Koenigsberg and Elie Ofek
Innovations embody novel features or cutting-edge components aimed at delivering desired customer benefits.
Oftentimes, however, we observe the need to recall new products shortly after their introduction. Indeed, a firm
may rush an innovation to market in an attempt... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
Social Skills Improve Business Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial with Entrepreneurs in Togo
By: Stefan Dimitriadis and Rembrand Koning
Recent field experiments demonstrate that advice, mentorship, and feedback from randomly assigned peers improve entrepreneurial performance. These results raise a natural question: what is preventing entrepreneurs and managers from forming these peer connections... View Details
- December 2022
- Article
The Task Bind: Explaining Gender Differences in Managerial Tasks and Performance
This multi-method study of managers in a grocery chain identifies a novel mechanism by which threats of gender stereotypes undermine women’s ability to be effective managers. I find that women managers face a task bind, a dilemma that managers experience as they try to... View Details
- November 2022
- Case
The Battle Among Channels for Marketing Pharmaceuticals: UpScript, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, and Direct-to-Consumer Sales
By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Tiffany Farrell
Can an online, direct-to-consumer pharmacy both improve the quality and speed of care for patients who need branded drugs and stabilize profits for pharmaceutical manufacturers? UpScript, after years spent achieving legal and regulatory compliance and simultaneous... View Details
- November 10, 2022
- Article
5 Ways Startups Can Prepare for a Recession
By: Lou Shipley
Startups face unique challenges during economic downturns. They typically aren’t yet profitable and so are reliant on outside funding—and therefore are especially exposed when macroeconomic conditions change. To make it through a recession, startup CEOs should hit the... View Details
- October 2022 (Revised February 2024)
- Case
Masdar City: Aiming for Sustainable and Profitable Real Estate
By: Boris Vallee and Fares Khrais
Masdar City broke ground in 2008 and was conceived by the Abu Dhabi government to be an international beacon of innovation in sustainable energy and real estate. It was also to be a profitable investment for the government. At first glance, the two goals pulled in... View Details
Keywords: Analysis; Business Growth And Maturation; Decisions; Public Sector; Financial Crisis; Construction; Climate Change; Green Technology; Borrowing And Debt; Corporate Finance; Capital; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Cost Of Capital; Equity; REIT; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Innovation; Growth And Development Strategy; Emerging Markets; Urban Development; Middle East; United Arab Emirates; Sustainable Cities; Green Building; Business and Government Relations; Decision Choices and Conditions; Financing and Loans; Real Estate Industry; Construction Industry; Energy Industry; Green Technology Industry; Abu Dhabi
- 2022
- Article
Diffusing Management Practices within the Firm: The Role of Information Provision
By: Michael J. Lenox and Michael W. Toffel
Why are some firms more successful in adopting profitable environmental management practices than others? A key role of corporate managers is to encourage subsidiaries to adopt innovative practices. We examine the conditions under which corporate managers use... View Details
- September 2022
- Case
Proactive for Her
By: Rembrand Koning and Kairavi Dey
Proactive for Her began amid the COVID-19 pandemic, in August 2020 as a digital platform to provide accessible, evidence-based, primary, preventive non-judgmental healthcare services for Indian women, who were often dissuaded from seeking help as premarital sex and... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
Giving a Buck or Making a Buck? Donations by Pharmaceutical Manufacturers to Independent Patient Assistance Charities
By: Leemore Dafny, Christopher Ody and Teresa Rokos
The federal Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits biopharmaceutical manufacturers from directly covering Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket spending for the drugs they manufacture, but manufacturers may donate to independent patient assistance charities and earmark donations... View Details
- August 2022 (Revised March 2023)
- Technical Note
Real Estate iBuying
By: Michael Luca, Jesse M. Shapiro and Julia Kelley
This note provides an overview of real estate iBuying, or instant buying, a business model that involves buying homes and then reselling them at a profit. Introduced in the mid-2010s, iBuying streamlined the process of selling a home by offering instant, all-cash... View Details
- August 2022
- Case
Air Wars: Deregulating the U.S. Airline Industry
By: Tom Nicholas and James Weber
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. government assisted in the development of an airline industry by subsidizing the delivery of mail and allowing mail carriers to also fly passengers. Because the government awarded mail routes to the lowest... View Details
Keywords: Government Regulation; Deregulation; Change Management; Economics; Entrepreneurship; Financial Management; Business History; Human Resources; Compensation and Benefits; Labor; Labor Unions; Leading Change; Leadership Style; Crisis Management; Industry Structures; Operations; Strategy; Adaptation; Competition; Air Transportation; Air Transportation Industry; United States
- August 2022 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Iluméxico: For Every Family to Have Power
By: Brian Trelstad, Isa Oliveres and Jenyfeer Martinez Buitrago
In 2022, Manuel Wiechers, the CEO of Iluméxico, a for-profit social enterprise that provided off-grid solar energy services in rural Mexico, was finalizing his presentation for the company’s upcoming board meeting. In the 12 years since Wiechers had co-founded... View Details
- 2022
- Book
Purpose + Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World
By: George Serafeim
The roadmap and best practices to reap the enormous value that can emerge when your business prioritizes social and environmental goals—such as climate change, diversity and inclusion, and sustainability—right alongside the pursuit of profit.
We not only... View Details
We not only... View Details
- 2022
- Book
The Heart of Business (ハート・オブ・ビジネス)――「人とパーパス」を本気で大切にする新時代のリーダーシップ
By: Hubert Joly and Caroline Lambert
A remarkable turnaround by a leader with a remarkable philosophy: Find your noble purpose. Put people at the center. Unleash human magic.
"It was fall in Minnesota. It was getting cold and we were supposed to die." This is how Hubert Joly describes the early,... View Details
"It was fall in Minnesota. It was getting cold and we were supposed to die." This is how Hubert Joly describes the early,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Do Collusive Norms Maximize Profits? Evidence From a Vegetable Market Experiment in India
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Greg Fischer, Dean Karlan, Matt Lowe and Benjamin N. Roth
Social norms have been shown to facilitate anti-competitive behavior in decentralized markets.
We demonstrate that these norms can also reduce aggregate profits. First, we present
descriptive evidence of competition-suppressing norms in Kolkata vegetable markets.... View Details
- June 2022
- Teaching Plan
Lifebank Nigeria
By: Brian Trelstad, Pippa Tubman Armerding and Wale Lawal
The aspiration of addressing maternal deaths in Nigeria, which were mostly caused by blood shortages, led Temie Giwa-Tubosun to found LifeBank in 2015. LifeBank developed an online platform that enabled hospitals to connect and purchase blood from local blood banks and... View Details
- June 2022 (Revised October 2022)
- Case
Can Goodr Fight Food Insecurity at Scale?
By: Daniel Isenberg and William R. Kerr
Jasmine Crowe founded Goodr to redirect food waste to people in need. Now a profitable enterprise, she’s searching for Series A funding and encountering pushback. Scaling and contract concerns are also at the forefront of her mind, but so are her values. Feeding... View Details
- May 2022
- Case
Byte
By: Boris Groysberg, Katherine Connolly Baden and Julia Kelley
In January 2021, Byte co-founders Scott Cohen and Blake Johnson reflected on how far their Los Angeles-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) orthodontics company had come since launching its clear aligners just a little over two years earlier. Cohen and Johnson were both... View Details