Publications

22 Jan 2019
First Look

New Research and Ideas, January 22, 2019

elements that executives need to align and strengthen. This article describes how companies have used the matrix to clarify their relationships with daughter brands, retool their identities to support new businesses, revamp their overall... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

June 2008
Case

Threadless: The Business of Community

By: Karim R. Lakhani and Zahra Kanji

Threadless.com, the online, Chicago-based t-shirt company, was not your typical fashion apparel company. The company, run by Jake Nickell, Jacob DeHart, and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, turned the fashion business on its head by enabling anyone to submit designs for t-shirts and... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; Innovation and Invention; Product Design; Partners and Partnerships; Social and Collaborative Networks; Apparel and Accessories Industry

08 Feb 2016
Blog Post

Applying to Business School as a Couple

together, or as a couple? Yes! We have some wonderful couple friends that we have gotten to know together. A lot of our business school social life revolves around dinners and drinks with friends and their partners, which has been a... View Details

07 Feb 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Earnings Management from the Bottom Up: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives Below the CEO

Keywords: by Felix Oberholzer-Gee & Julie Wulf

November 1990 (Revised April 1999)
Case

General Motors: Packard Electric Division

By: Steven C. Wheelwright

Packard Electric is the division of General Motors (GM) that does all of the electrical wiring and cabling for GM automobiles. They developed a new approach for passing the cables through the firewall between the engine and passenger compartments. The new technology... View Details

Keywords: Business Divisions; Cost; Management Style; Product Design; Product Development; Production; Projects; Groups and Teams; Conflict and Resolution; Technology; Auto Industry

November 2007 (Revised September 2010)
Background Note

The Rong Family: A Chinese Business History

By: Elisabeth Koll

Provides the complex historical background to understanding the development of family businesses in China from the late 19th century to the present. Using the example of the Rong family, China's most prominent industrialist family in pre-1949 China, analyzes the... View Details

Keywords: Family Business; Business History; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Structure; Alliances; Business and Government Relations; Social and Collaborative Networks; China

June 2012
Article

The Transparency Paradox: A Role for Privacy in Organizational Learning and Operational Control

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

Using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I theorize and test the implications of transparent organizational design on workers' productivity and organizational... View Details

28 Jan 2016
Blog Post

Why Get an MBA?

teach the basics as well. Given my undergrad business program and consulting experience, I felt comfortable enough. I was more looking forward to tackling these topics from a different angle. ACCESS: If I learned anything in my four years after college, it was that... View Details

February 2021
Background Note

Jobs to Be Done: A Toolbox

By: Derek C. M. van Bever, Bob Moesta, Iuliana Mogosanu, Shaye Roseman and Katie Zandbergen

The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Acquisition; Attitudes; Perception; Theory; Behavior; Customer Relationship Management

19 May 2021
Op-Ed

Why America Needs a Better Bridge Between School and Career

relationships tend to be lacking. Perhaps the most troubling finding in our research was that only 35 percent of applicants report working directly with employers. The most effective programs in the social... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph B. Fuller and Rachel Lipson

2013
Working Paper

Where do the Most Active Customers Originate and How Can Firms Keep Them Engaged?

By: Clarence Lee, E. Ofek and Thomas Steenburgh

In this paper, we study how firms offering Web services can acquire and develop an active customer base. We focus on two basic questions. First, how does the method of customer acquisition affect the way customers use the service to meet their own needs and to interact... View Details

Keywords: Customer Engagement; Adoption Routes; Hidden Markov Models; Search; Word-of-Mouth; Digital Media; Customer Relationship Management; Internet and the Web; Mathematical Methods; Consumer Behavior; Entrepreneurship; Marketing Reference Programs; Web Services Industry

Web

Why HBS? - Doctoral

300 Academic Publications $ 140 m. Investment in Research Student Research Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers By: Mengjie Cheng and Shunyuan Zhang 01 JUL 2025 | Management Science... View Details

11 May 2009
Research & Ideas

The IT Leader’s Hero Quest

a context apart from the complexity and sensitivity of their own company; this allows executives to engage in important discussions about, for example, risk trade-offs and relationships with peers, subjects that might be too sensitive in... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

Profile

Ramya Sundar

for the first time here. Being part of the HBS community is like... ...being part of a truly global community. I’ve met some incredible people here at HBS. Even though social interactions have been impacted to a certain extent due to... View Details

June 2021
Case

Acelero Learning

By: Mario Small, Kathleen L. McGinn, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen

In November 2020, Henry Wilde, co-founder and CEO of Acelero, Inc., must decide whether to change his company’s program model for delivering early childhood education to low-income children. One of the only for-profit Head Start providers in the United States, Acelero... View Details

Keywords: Early Childhood Education; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Growth and Development Strategy; Adoption; Customer Focus and Relationships; Operations; Education Industry; North and Central America; United States