Publications

Find at Harvard

December 2014
Article

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

By: Stefan Thomke and Jim Manzi

The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a... View Details

Find at Harvard

Register to Read

December 2020
Supplement

Video Interview with Pandwe Gibson

By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Joyce J. Kim

Four diverse women entrepreneurs launched their ventures in a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem that was part of a shift to a creative technology-driven economy for Miami. Although Miami was rated the #1 U.S. city for startups in 2017, the region contained structural... View Details

Keywords: Female Entrepreneur; Entrepreneurial Ecosystems; Sexism; Racism; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Diversity; Gender; Race; Prejudice and Bias; City; Culture; Miami

2012
Book

Talk, Inc. : How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organizations

By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

How can leaders make their big or growing companies feel small again? How can they recapture the "magic"--the tight strategic alignment, the high level of employee engagement--that drove and animated their organization when it was a start-up? As more and more... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Interpersonal Communication; Organizational Culture; Social and Collaborative Networks; Spoken Communication

09 Apr 2024
Book

Why Work Rituals Bring Teams Together and Create More Meaning

scientists have traditionally approached rituals from a cultural or religious perspective, but we all have our own idiosyncratic rituals we conduct throughout our days,” says Norton, author of the new book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

October 2022
Case

Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim

Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to... View Details

March 2010 (Revised February 2014)
Case

Community Health Workers in Zambia: Incentive Design and Management

By: Nava Ashraf and Natalie Kindred

This case examines the various considerations relevant to selecting and compensating workers in a context where their work involves a pro-social component. This is relevant to not only health care in Zambia, but to NGO and public sector workers who are both motivated... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Training; Health Care and Treatment; Compensation and Benefits; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Mission and Purpose; Non-Governmental Organizations; Motivation and Incentives; Health Industry; Zambia

Why you should watch: A new and important NBER working paper, by Cohen, Gurun and Nguyen, takes a long hard look at innovation in the energy industry - and concludes that divestment campaigns targeted at fossil fuel companies may not just be ineffective.... View Details

November 2015 (Revised January 2016)
Teaching Note

McDonald's Corporation: Managing a Sustainable Supply Chain—From Amazon Soya to Cage Free Eggs

By: Michael W. Toffel

This case provides an opportunity for students to consider how large, multinational corporations should respond when targeted by activists regarding environmental and social concerns in their supply chains. Greenpeace targeted McDonald's because its chicken supplier... View Details

Keywords: Supply Chain; Supply Chain Management; Welfare; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Service Industry; Brazil; United States; United Kingdom

24 Feb 2015
First Look

First Look: February 24

adequacy, actuarial standards, accounting standards, and auditing practice. In these areas, corporate managers and financial experts such as auditors and bankers possess the technical expertise necessary for informed regulation, enjoy... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

13 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

Should Men’s Products Fear a Woman’s Touch?

to an intensive study of a defining moment in the history of an iconic brand: when Porsche launched its first sport-utility vehicle, dubbed the Cayenne, after a long history of creating sports cars. Porsches are culturally associated with... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products; Food & Beverage; Auto

March 2025 (Revised March 2025)
Case

Good for the Seller, Good for the Buyer and Good for Society: Sampo-yoshi, Sustainability and Trust at ITOCHU

By: Sandra J. Sucher and Bethelehem Y Araya

In 2024, ITOCHU CEO Masahiro Okafuji was at a crossroads. As the thirteenth CEO since ITOCHU’s founding in 1858, he had fueled the company’s growth since 2011 by bringing ITOCHU’s founding philosophy of Sampo-yoshi (good for the seller, good for the buyer and... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Trust; Profit; Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Mission and Purpose; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Japan

Web

Live from Klarman Hall - Alumni

normal seasons of our lives? Professor Shikhar Ghosh will examine some of the implications of technologies like synthetic biology and AI that have passed commercial viability and are on track to change the foundations of business and society in the next decade. How... View Details

The Discipline of Business Experimentation

The data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As... View Details

Research Summary

Managing International Trade and Investment

By: Debora L. Spar

Introduced by Debora Spar in 1995, Managing International Trade and Investment is an elective course that prepares students to deal with the distinct set of management challenges that face cross-border businesses. Building on experience that suggests that what works... View Details

2011
Working Paper

Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

By: Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African... View Details

Keywords: Ethnicity; Development Economics; Geography; Government and Politics; Africa

Read Now

June 2017 (Revised December 2017)
Case

CJ E&M: KCON Goes Global

By: Elie Ofek and Michael Norris

In January of 2017, CJ Entertainment & Media (E&M) proudly announced that it will be holding its first ever KCON in Mexico City just two months later. CJ Group Chairman Jay Lee and Vice Chairwoman Miky Lee are pleased at the progress that KCON, a Korean-oriented music... View Details

Keywords: Music Entertainment; Cultural Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Food; Music Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

January 2021 (Revised May 2023)
Case

Pearson: Efficacy 2.0

By: Elie Ofek, Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg and James Weber

Pearson, which billed itself as the "world's learning company," faced a host of critical decisions in mid-2020. Several years prior, it had embarked on a new path that put the learner at the heart of the business and committed to a new strategic orientation. The new... View Details

Keywords: Efficacy; Learning; Outcome or Result; Measurement and Metrics; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Strategic Planning; Education Industry

April 2009 (Revised July 2009)
Module Note

Delivering Personally on Responsibility

By: Joshua D. Margolis

How can individuals equip themselves to exercise leadership in the face of moral adversity? This six-session module aims to prepare students to meet moral responsibility when it is simultaneously most essential and most difficult. Moral adversity refers to situations... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Leadership; Moral Sensibility; Leadership Development

September 2012 (Revised September 2015)
Case

Doing Business in Ghana

By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Elena Corsi

An entrepreneur considered investing in tomato paste manufacturing in Ghana, an emerging economy, and pondered the opportunities and challenges of investing here. Ghana's economy had been growing over the last decade, reaching a peak of 14.4% growth rate in 2011. Now a... View Details

Keywords: Emergent Countries; Strategy; Opportunity Cost; Emerging Markets; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Ghana