Publications

March 2019
Technical Note

Control or Flexibility? Structured Empowerment Offers Both—Lessons from Retail & Service Chains (Abridged)

By: Tatiana Sandino

This note explains how several retail and service organizations use a practice described here as “structured empowerment” to balance control and flexibility as they grow. I define structured empowerment as a practice that grants employees both (a) the power to make... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Standards; Employees; Service Delivery; Decision Making; Power and Influence; Retail Industry; Service Industry

December 2011 (Revised December 2011)
Case

Cancer Treatment Centers of America: Scaling the Mother Standard of Care

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Matthew Bird

The CEO of a private and growing national network of specialty care hospitals focusing on advanced-stage and complex cancer treatments reflected on the firm's past phase of growth before meeting with the company's Chairman and founder to discuss how to further scale... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Business Growth and Maturation; Medical Specialties; Service Delivery; Innovation and Invention; Health Industry

September 2007
Case

Collaborating to Improve

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer and Ingrid M. Nembhard

Madison Memorial Hospital is deciding between a variety of quality improvement strategies. Highlights quality improvement collaborative—organized programs popularized by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in which teams from multiple institutions work together to... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Service Delivery; Performance Improvement; Quality; Groups and Teams; Cooperation; Integration; Health Industry

August 2007 (Revised June 2010)
Case

JetBlue Airways: Valentine's Day 2007 (A)

By: Robert S. Huckman, Gary P. Pisano and Virginia Fuller

Describes an operational crisis for JetBlue Airways during an ice storm in the eastern United States in February 2007 and chronicles the airline's immediate response. Provides detail concerning the history of the airline from its founding in 1999 through the February... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Crisis Management; Growth Management; Management Teams; Service Delivery; Air Transportation Industry; Eastern United States

April 2005 (Revised August 2012)
Supplement

MedCath Corporation (B)

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Louisa Neissa

Supplements the (A) case. A rewritten version of an earlier case. View Details

Keywords: Medical Specialties; Market Entry and Exit; Service Delivery; Conflict and Resolution; Horizontal Integration; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

June 2009 (Revised April 2011)
Case

Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

By: Anita L. Tucker and Amy C. Edmondson

The case describes an organization's use of the science of improvement to transform their process quality from below average to the top 10% in their industry. The case outlines the protagonist's strategy of developing internal experts who are trained in a common... View Details

Keywords: Change Management; Experience and Expertise; Leading Change; Measurement and Metrics; Service Delivery; Performance Improvement; Health Industry; Ohio

16 May 2017
Blog Post

Making the Move into Digital Health and Software Engineering

at Instacart, a same-day grocery delivery service. My team’s job was to handle everything that related to the ordering process: we worked with Stripe, our payments API, built the discounts infrastructure, and created an infrastructure to... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Health Care

07 Aug 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, August 8, 2018

entire cycle of acute pain medicine delivery for these patients. TDABC was used to identify possible improvements in personnel allocation, workflow changes, and epidural placement location and to model the cost savings of those... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

13 Jun 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, June 13

organization of these elements can vary across markets and can vary in terms of the different roles of the public and private sector in financing and delivery of health care services. Overall, the framework provides an opportunity for a... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

24 Sep 2007
Research & Ideas

The FDA: What Will the Next 100 Years Bring?

technologies together are pushing people to take an increasingly active role in managing their own health records. So the project will explore the relationship between, on the one hand, new technologies for predicting future disease and for capturing, recording, and... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Biotechnology; Consumer Products; Food & Beverage; Health

21 Aug 2000
Research & Ideas

Faculty Research Looks to Latin America

between the service delivery process, human resources and marketing policy, and on how these factors interact to affect service quality. Current research, with Professor Fernando Suarez: "Learning to Compete: Stages in the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

February 2025
Article

Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency

By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi

Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Customer Selection; Customer Compatibility; Retention; Service Operations; Service Delivery; Marketing Strategy; Marketing Communications; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Satisfaction; Banking Industry; Australia

Find at Harvard

August 2021
Teaching Note

Fair Park Covid-19 Mass Vaccination Site (A) and (B)

By: Willy Shih

Teaching Note for HBS Case Nos. 622-003 and 622-004. View Details

Keywords: Operations Improvement; Operations And Processes; Toyota Production System; Operations; Service Operations; Health Pandemics; Service Delivery; Problems and Challenges; Goals and Objectives; Measurement and Metrics; Health Industry; United States

February 2015
Supplement

MedCath Corporation (C)

By: Regina E. Herzlinger, Kevin Schulman and F. Fallon Upke

MedCath is a horizontally integrated chain of heart hospitals that partners with local cardiologists. It claims that its focus leads to better and cheaper results than those of an everything-for-everybody general hospital. Community hospitals generally vehemently... View Details

Keywords: Medical Specialties; Market Entry and Exit; Service Delivery; Conflict and Resolution; Horizontal Integration; Health Industry

December 2012
Case

Delwarca Software Remote Support Unit

By: Roy D. Shapiro and Paul E. Morrison

Delwarca Software provides business software to large corporate clients around the world. The firm serves customers who prefer to assemble corporate solutions using a combination of software programs from various suppliers rather than implementing a single enterprise... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Service Delivery; Mathematical Methods; Applications and Software; Problems and Challenges; Customer Satisfaction; Information Technology Industry

September 2002 (Revised January 2013)
Case

MedCath Corporation (A)

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Pete Stavros

MedCath is a horizontally integrated chain of heart hospitals that partners with local cardiologists. It claims that its focus leads to better and cheaper results than those of an everything-for-everybody general hospital. Community hospitals generally vehemently... View Details

Keywords: Medical Specialties; Market Entry and Exit; Service Delivery; Conflict and Resolution; Horizontal Integration; Health Industry

November 2016 (Revised August 2020)
Case

Improving Access at VA

By: Ryan W. Buell, Robert S. Huckman and Sam Travers

In 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ran the largest healthcare system in the United States, with over 1,700 sites of care that served nearly 9 million veterans. One year earlier, a scandal had erupted over a cover-up of the excessive wait times veterans... View Details

Keywords: Service Operations; Service Delivery; Social Issues; Health Care and Treatment; Government Administration; Performance Improvement; Public Administration Industry; Health Industry; United States

11 Jun 2020
In Practice

Are Digital Organizations Better at Overcoming COVID?

Government leaders rushing to contain the COVID-19 pandemic in March gave companies little time to shift to an all-virtual workforce. Ready or not, many businesses had to become more digital. But true digital transformation takes far more than a Zoom account. Using... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

Spring 2019
Article

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

By: Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the... View Details

Keywords: Teaming; Teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage