Publications

February 1998 (Revised June 1999)
Case

DigitalThink: Startup

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Christina L. Darwall

Describes a recent Berkeley MBA's attempts to start a business aimed at corporate training via the Internet. Describes the very early efforts at finding an attorney, accountant, and financing, and the interrelationships among these choices. View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Problems and Challenges; Business Startups; Service Industry

December 2010
Case

The Israeli-Palestinian Negotiating Partners: 2010 Strategic Re-assessment

By: James K. Sebenius and Shula Gilad

A network of influential Israelis and Palestinians, jointly trained in negotiation at Harvard since 2002, faces organizational, strategic, and funding challenges in 2010. Unlike "people-to-people" or "Track II" initiatives, the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiating Partners... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Negotiation Participants; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Conflict and Resolution; Conflict Management; Social and Collaborative Networks; Strategy

September 2020
Case

Wladimir Klitschko: F.A.C.E. Your Challenges

By: Boris Groysberg, Michael Norris and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In 2020, Olympic goal medal winning boxer and former heavyweight world champion Wladimir Klitschko had built himself a “second ring” to continue his career after retiring from professional boxing. He was a hotelier, boxing promoter, author, teacher, speaker, and had... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Business Education; Training; Entrepreneurship; Personal Development and Career; Sports; Sports Industry; Consulting Industry; Education Industry; Ukraine; Germany

March 2016 (Revised August 2022)
Case

Fair & Lovely vs. Dark is Beautiful

By: Rohit Deshpande and Saloni Chaturvedi

Women of Worth (WOW) is an organization that seeks to empower women through training and workshops. The organization has also fought against discrimination based on the color of a person's skin through its “Dark is Beautiful” campaign—endorsed by well-known... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Race; Marketing; Social Issues; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry

June 18, 2015
Article

What Makes FC Barcelona Such a Successful Business

By: Andres Hatum and Luciana Silvestri

This article explores how FC Barcelona's identity as "more than a club" fuels the team's impressive performance on the field. We focus on the role of La Masía, the club's youth academy, to explain how a strong sense of organizational identity underlies the team's style... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Identity; Organizational Culture; Performance; Sports Industry; Barcelona

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2014
Report

Bridge the Gap: Rebuilding America's Middle Skills

By: Joseph B. Fuller, Jennifer Burrowes, Manjari Raman, Dan Restuccia and Alexis Young

The market for middle-skills jobs—those that require more education and training than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree—is consistently failing to clear. That failure is inflicting a grievous cost on the competitiveness of American firms... View Details

Keywords: Business or Company Management; Human Capital; Education; Competency and Skills; Macroeconomics; United States

July – August 2011
Article

The New Psychology of Strategic Leadership

In this article, it is argued that today's dominant ideas about the practice of business strategy-defined by Porter three decades ago-hinge on a specific and therefore partial interpretation of competition. The result is an equally partial picture of the strategist's... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking; Leadership; Business Strategy; Training; Experience and Expertise; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Competition; Markets

October 2023 (Revised January 2025)
Case

Ӧzyeğin Social Investments: A Legacy of Giving

By: Christina R. Wing, Zeshan Gondal and Brittany L. Logan

This case explores the work of Özyeğin Social Investments, founded by Hüsnü Özyeğin, one of Turkey's most successful entrepreneurs. With a focus on education, health, gender equality, rural development, and disaster relief in Turkey, Özyeğin Social Investments and the... View Details

Keywords: Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Family Business; Business Model; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Enterprise; Turkey

May 2021
Article

Making Doctors Effective Managers and Leaders: A Matter of Health and Well-Being

By: Lisa Rotenstein, Robert S. Huckman and Christine K. Cassel

The COVID-19 crisis has forced physicians to make daily decisions that require knowledge and skills they did not acquire as part of their biomedical training. Physicians are being called upon to be both managers—able to set processes and structures—and leaders—capable... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Management; Leadership; Health Pandemics; Health Industry

19 Apr 2016
First Look

April 19, 2016

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=50952 The Great Training Robbery By: Beer, Michael, Magnus Finnstrom, and Derek Schrader Abstract—In 2012 U.S. corporations spent $164.2 billion on training and... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

January 2003 (Revised February 2003)
Case

Office Depot, Inc.: Business Transformation (A)

By: James L. Heskett, Dan Maher, Daniel F. OBrien, Thomas Watson and Jeffrey F. Rayport

The company's management is considering the possibility of launching a rebranding campaign around the promises "What you need. What you need to know." The questions are whether and when to launch the campaign in view of the large number of training efforts and... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship; Advertising Campaigns; Brands and Branding; Business Strategy; Technology Adoption; Transformation; Market Timing; Growth and Development; Training; Retail Industry

February 2024
Case

SundaySky: Changing Customer Experiences through Personalized Video

By: David C. Edelman and James Barnett

In June 2023, SundaySky CEO Jim Dicso considers growth strategies. The software-as-a-service company provided software to create advertising videos, customer service videos, and other videos, like employee training modules, and had begun to pilot a new generative... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Strategy; Technology Adoption; AI and Machine Learning; Applications and Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Advertising Industry; Technology Industry; United States

February 2023
Case

SIMmersion: Simulating Crucial Conversations

By: Alison Wood Brooks, Julian Zlatev and F Katelynn Boland

This case introduces readers to SIMmersion, a company founded in 2002 that creates and sells training programs to firms, government agencies, educational institutions, and individuals (B2B and B2C). Their training programs are built around simulations (“sims”) that... View Details

Keywords: Decision Making; Interpersonal Communication; Training

Article

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Corporate Compliance Programs: Establishing a Model for Prosecutors, Courts, and Firms

By: Eugene F. Soltes

When prosecutors, courts, and regulators make charging and sentencing decisions, they must evaluate whether firms have effective compliance programs. Such evaluations are difficult because of the challenges associated with measuring effectiveness. Notably, these... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Governance Compliance; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Evaluation

Article

Why Compliance Programs Fail: And How to Fix Them

By: Hui Chen and Eugene Soltes

Firms spend millions of dollars annually on whistle-blower hotlines, training, and other efforts to ensure adherence to laws, regulations, and company policies. Yet malfeasance remains entrenched in the corporate world. Why? Too many firms treat compliance as a... View Details

Keywords: Governance Compliance; Programs; Employees; Training; Performance Effectiveness; Measurement and Metrics

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09 Feb 2017
Cold Call Podcast

Black Business Leaders Series: Putting Diversity to Work

Keywords: Re: Robin J. Ely

2023
Working Paper

Feature Importance Disparities for Data Bias Investigations

By: Peter W. Chang, Leor Fishman and Seth Neel

It is widely held that one cause of downstream bias in classifiers is bias present in the training data. Rectifying such biases may involve context-dependent interventions such as training separate models on subgroups, removing features with bias in the collection... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Prejudice and Bias

2022
Working Paper

Machine Learning Models for Prediction of Scope 3 Carbon Emissions

By: George Serafeim and Gladys Vélez Caicedo

For most organizations, the vast amount of carbon emissions occur in their supply chain and in the post-sale processing, usage, and end of life treatment of a product, collectively labelled scope 3 emissions. In this paper, we train machine learning algorithms on 15... View Details

Keywords: Carbon Emissions; Climate Change; Environment; Carbon Accounting; Machine Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Digital; Data Science; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Environmental Accounting

SSRN

2019
Working Paper

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms

By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details

Keywords: Gender Norms; Economics; Gender; Employment; Income; Societal Protocols; India