Publications

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December 2018
Case

Choosy

By: Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Julia Kelley

Founded in 2017, Choosy is a data-driven fashion startup that uses algorithms to identify styles trending on social media. After manufacturing similar items using a China-based supply chain, Choosy sells them to consumers through its website and social media pages.... View Details

2013
Working Paper

J. Richard Hackman (1940-2013)

By: Ruth Wageman and Teresa M. Amabile

When J. Richard Hackman died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 8, 2013, psychology lost a giant. Six and a half feet tall, with an outsize personality to match, Richard was the leading scholar in two distinct areas: work design and team effectiveness. In both... View Details

Keywords: Social Psychology; Organizational Design; Groups and Teams; Personal Development and Career; Education Industry; Cambridge

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25 May 2022
News

Meet the 2022-23 Leadership Fellows

December 2019 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Impossible Foods

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Natalie Kindred

Impossible Foods founder and CEO Pat Brown started the company out of concern over livestock production’s impact on climate change. Impossible’s mission is to end consumption of animals by 2035, and its strategy is to develop and market plant-based foods so similar to... View Details

November 2005
Case

Playgrounds and Performance: Results Management at KaBOOM! (A)

By: Herman B. Leonard, Marc J. Epstein and Laura Winig

KaBOOM!, a successful playground-building social enterprise funded through corporate partnerships, wants to develop a performance measurement system that will enable the organization to expand its impact substantially. The board of directors and management are trying... View Details

Keywords: Governing and Advisory Boards; Growth and Development Strategy; Social Enterprise; Performance Evaluation; Management Systems; Design; Construction Industry

27 Jul 2020
Blog Post

HBS Summer Fellows Respond to COVID-19

reminded me how much I love to have meaning in the work I'm doing in terms of impacting the world and the people who need help the most. The internship made me even more committed to the mission of using business and View Details

21 May 2021
Blog Post

Alumni Spotlight: Cissy Chen (MBA 2019)

Cissy Chen (MBA 2019) reflects on how her experience at HBS shaped her career and inspired her to make a difference in her home region of Asia through impact investing. How has your education at HBS helped to shape your career in View Details

March 2022
Case

Metric

By: Christina Wallace, Rebecca Cink and Maria Lappas

Megan Murday, the founder of Metric, an environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) analytics startup, must decide which customer segment to target as a beachhead market. She received positive feedback from a Swiss venture capital (VC) firm, indicating their... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Marketing; Mission and Purpose; Customers

January 2021
Case

Bespoken Spirits: Disrupting Distilling

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

On October 7, 2020, Bespoken Spirits publicly announced it had received $2.6 million of seed funding for its “sustainable maturation process,” a process that could produce award-winning whiskeys in just days rather than years using a novel technology and data science. ... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Disruption; Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Cash Flow; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation Strategy; Brands and Branding; Business Model; Consumer Products Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry; United States; California

28 Jun 2022
Book

The Moral Enterprise: How Two Companies Profit with Purpose

How can government and business work together in this fractious political moment, when finding solutions to pressing problems like inequality and climate change are more urgent than ever? Rebecca Henderson, Harvard University’s John and Natty McArthur University... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

23 Mar 2023
Research & Ideas

As Climate Fears Mount, More Investors Turn to 'ESG' Funds Despite Few Rules

Investor interest in social responsibility has skyrocketed in the past three years, even as US regulations to hold companies accountable remain in flux and the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) label itself draws backlash. Investors are willing to pay a... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

2017
Other Teaching and Training Material

Organizational Behavior Reading: Leading Organizational Change

By: Ryan Raffaelli

This reading combines conceptual frameworks and research-based knowledge to provide practical guidance about how to lead organization change. The essential reading outlines key choices leaders must make when managing a change and the common traps that can cause a... View Details

Keywords: Leading Change; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management

2013
Article

Ethically Adrift: How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How we Can Fix It

By: C. Moore and F. Gino

This chapter is about the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals' inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework to help us understand social reasons why our moral compass can come under others' control, leading... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Moral Sensibility; Behavior

Find at Harvard

Research Summary

Trust

By: Sandra J. Sucher

In this research, I aim to provide a practical orientation to trust—how to build it, how it can be damaged, how it might be repaired—grounded in my experience as an executive and in the research on organizational trust and moral philosophy. As a case researcher, I... View Details

2022
Chapter

Luxury Tourism and Environmentalism

By: Geoffrey Jones

This chapter examines the evolution of luxury tourism and its environmental impact. Whilst mass tourism is widely seen as environmentally damaging, the impact of luxury tourism is nuanced. During the first stage of the growth in the nineteenth century, the numbers of... View Details

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2011
Working Paper

Fractionalization and the Municipal Bond Market

We study the impact of ethnic and religious fractionalization on the U.S. municipal debt market and find that issuers from more ethnically and religiously fractionalized counties pay higher yields on their municipal debt. A two standard deviation increase in religious... View Details

Keywords: Ethnicity Characteristics; Bonds; Financial Markets; Investment Return; Geographic Location; City; Religion; United States