Publications

November 2005 (Revised December 2006)
Case

Jeanette Clough at Mount Auburn Hospital

Jeanette Clough, the CEO of Mt. Auburn Hospital, successfully leads a turnaround for the struggling local hospital. When she assumed leadership of Mt. Auburn in 1998, the hospital had recently suffered a $10 million loss. During her first six months, several members of... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Change Management; Leading Change; Expansion; Health Care and Treatment; Business and Community Relations; Health Industry; Cambridge

April 2006
Case

Adrian Ivinson at the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair

By: Robert Steven Kaplan and Ayesha Kanji

Adrian Ivinson is the director of Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair (HCNR), a not-for-profit research center at the Harvard Medical School (HMS). The center was started in late 2000 with a gift of $37.5 million from an anonymous donor. Its mandate was to... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Style; Power and Influence; Organizational Culture; Research and Development; Nonprofit Organizations; Motivation and Incentives; Change Management; Alignment; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Health Industry; Massachusetts

June 2012 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Best Buy in Crisis

By: John R. Wells and Galen Danskin

In June 2012, Best Buy was in crisis. In 1996, Best Buy overtook Circuit City as the world's leader in consumer electronics retailing; however, 18 years later, Best Buy now found this position threatened. With $51 billion in revenues, it was still the biggest CE... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Decision Choices and Conditions; Forecasting and Prediction; Competitive Strategy; Ethics; Management Teams; Consumer Products Industry; Electronics Industry; Retail Industry

15 Sep 2021
Research & Ideas

Don't Bring Me Down: Probing Why People Tune Out Bad News

versions, Exley and Judd Kessler, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, took a new approach to exploring reasons people avoid information. Separating excuses from other motives... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

17 Jan 2019
Blog Post

MBA Curriculum Spotlight: Short Intensive Programs (SIPs)

will evaluate innovative strategies to create new marketplaces and opportunities, we will examine the key challenges in competing with large incumbent firms, and how incumbents can defend their market... View Details

May 2024
Case

HarvEast

By: Jeremy Friedman and Natalie Kindred

In late 2023, Dmitry Skornyakov, CEO of Ukrainian agribusiness HarvEast, was navigating the turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in 2014 and escalated into full-scale war in February 2022. Before the full-scale invasion, HarvEast managed 127,000... View Details

Keywords: Goods and Commodities; Natural Resources; Food; Problems and Challenges; Adaptation; Innovation and Management; Crisis Management; Logistics; Supply Chain; Risk and Uncertainty; Loss; Trust; Human Needs; War; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Chile; South America; Latin America; Ukraine

16 Dec 2008
First Look

First Look: December 16, 2008

b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=509012 Finland's S Group: Competing with a Cooperative Approach to Retail Harvard Business School Case 709-409 The case looks at the two dominant Finnish retailers: S Group... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November–December 2023
Article

Iterative Coordination and Innovation: Prioritizing Value over Novelty

By: Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu

An innovating organization faces the challenge of how to prioritize distinct goals of novelty and value, both of which underlie innovation. Popular practitioner frameworks like Agile management suggest that organizations can adopt an iterative approach of frequent... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Novelty; Goals; Specialization; Coordination; Field Experiment; Software Development; Agile; Scrum; Iteration; Iterative; Organizations; Innovation and Invention; Value; Goals and Objectives; Integration; Applications and Software

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Teaching

Overview

Laura taught undergraduate Military Leadership and Intro to Sociology for 6 and 4 semesters, respectively, at the United States Military Academy (West Point) from 2013-2016 (see course descriptions and links below). She was promoted from instructor to Assistant... View Details

July 2020
Supplement

Instabeat—Crossing the Finish Line

By: Shikhar Ghosh, Nicole Tempest Keller and Alpana Thapar

Lebanese entrepreneur Hind Hobeika was just 21 years old when she launched her startup, Instabeat, which had developed the first real-time bio-feedback device for swimmers to monitor and improve their performance. It had been an extremely testing 10-year journey to... View Details

Keywords: Start-up; Wearables; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Strategy; Operations; Management; United States; Lebanon

23 Mar 2010
First Look

First Look: March 23

United States. In recent years, however, this centralized approach to the collection and analysis of adverse events through doctor-initiated case reports has been superseded by innovative, though episodic,... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2015
Working Paper

Fake It Till You Make It: Reputation, Competition, and Yelp Review Fraud

By: Michael Luca and Georgios Zervas

Consumer reviews are now part of everyday decision-making. Yet, the credibility of these reviews is fundamentally undermined when businesses commit review fraud, creating fake reviews for themselves or their competitors. We investigate the economic incentives to commit... View Details

Keywords: Information; Competition; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Reputation; Social and Collaborative Networks; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry