Publications

August 1995 (Revised December 2003)
Case

Cricket Road, 503

By: William J. Poorvu and Donald A. Brown

In September 2003, Mason Sexton, a young, inexperienced developer, was making plans to replace a rooming house he had inherited next to the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville with a new 14-unit, 5-story apartment house. His attempts to assemble the... View Details

Keywords: Property; Entrepreneurship; Housing; Buildings and Facilities; Construction; Risk and Uncertainty; Management Practices and Processes; Real Estate Industry; United States

12 Aug 2008
First Look

First Look: August 12, 2008

foreknowledge and/or control. Experiment 4 indicates that effects of indirect agency result from a failure to automatically consider the potentially dubious motives of agents who cause harm indirectly. Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-012.pdf... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2018 (Revised January 2019)
Case

The Financial Crisis: Timothy Geithner and the Stress Tests

By: Samuel G. Hanson, Robin Greenwood, David Scharfstein and Adi Sunderam

In February and March 2009, the U.S. economy was in the midst of a terrifying financial and economic crisis. Between the beginning of 2008 and early 2009, four of the 25 largest U.S. financial institutions had failed, and nine of these 25 institutions had taken... View Details

Keywords: Bailout; Regulation; Stress Test; Financial Crisis; History; Economy; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Decision Making; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; United States

01 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

How to Choose the Best Deal

alternative—in this case, continuing to search for a viable site. The next step is to double-check your calculations by comparing the hypothetical deals. If Jim discovers that he'd subjectively prefer the orchard property, then he should... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Wheeler

31 Jul 2017
HBS Case

It’s Hard to Fix the Family Business Without Offending the Family

processes and procedures work, dealing with problematic financial accounting, and facing the possibility of deteriorating service as the patriarch pulls away. “This is much harder than anything I find in my big-company cases, and it’s all... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

May 2021 (Revised September 2021)
Case

CPE and SUS Environmental: You've Got to Know When to Hold 'Em

By: Josh Lerner and Franko Jira

In July 2016, Di Yang and Grace Guo of the leading Chinese private equity group CPE faced a dilemma—a happy dilemma, but a challenge nonetheless. CPE’s investment in the waste-to-energy firm SUS Environment had proved to be exceedingly successful. This success had... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Private Equity; Financial Liquidity; Investment Return; Growth and Development

April 1994 (Revised August 1996)
Case

American Express (A)

By: Jay W. Lorsch

In January 1993, the American Express board met to decide who would succeed James D. Robinson, III as chairman and CEO. The board needed to act in the spotlight of intense media and investor scrutiny, and after leaks had revealed that there was a conflict among the... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Corporate Governance; Resignation and Termination; Leadership; Management Succession; Performance Evaluation

July–August 2025
Article

How to Identify the Perfect Cofounder

By: Julia Austin

One of the first and most important decisions entrepreneurs make is whether to go it alone or bring on cofounders. Many investors favor startups with multiple founders, believing that a team reduces business risk by diversifying skills, sharing responsibilities, and... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Partners and Partnerships; Experience and Expertise

14 Sep 2021
Blog Post

How to Support Your Employees' Career Development

that you tend to enjoy really creative work when a project is not defined and you’re able to come up with something on your own.’ Or on the flip side, ‘I’ve noticed you really love following a process and having View Details

02 Mar 2009
Research & Ideas

When Goal Setting Goes Bad

goals, but we recommend doing so with caution, and our paper discusses the needed steps to take (e.g., strong leaders who model appropriate behavior, oversight to prevent unethical behavior, etc.). Q: One of the most famous stretch goals... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 16 Capturing Value by Controlling Bottlenecks in Open Platform Systems

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the means by which firms capture value in open platform systems. I begin by arguing that the surplus value created by complementarities within a technical system will be split among the owners of the unique and essential... View Details

Keywords: Open Platforms; Bottlenecks; Flow Production; Value Capture; Disintermediation; Production; Management; Digital Platforms

SSRN

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10 Jan 2018
Blog Post

EXPERTS SHARE 5 TIPS TO BECOME A BETTER MANAGER

manage. 1. Have a process At its core, good management is all about processes. A process is a series of steps or actions that results in a particular outcome. When you look at... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

August 2019 (Revised March 2020)
Background Note

Note on Structured Interviewing

By: Ethan Bernstein and Amy Ross

Making good hiring decisions is a critical management activity, yet many leaders just “wing it” when interviewing candidates to fill openings by having an organic conversation to assess the candidate’s fit, unknowingly subjecting the process to unconscious bias.... View Details

Keywords: Interviewing; Job Interviews; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Human Resources

2020
Article

Subjective Semantic Surprise Resulting from Divided Attention Biases Evaluations of an Idea’s Creativity

By: Goran Calic, Nour El Shamy, Isaac Kinley, Scott Watter and Khaled Hassanein

The evaluation of an idea’s creativity constitutes an important step in successfully responding to an unexpected problem with a new solution. Yet, distractions compete for cognitive resources with the evaluation process and may change how individuals evaluate ideas. In... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Cognition and Thinking