Publications

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June 2018 (Revised February 2019)
Teaching Note

Home Nursing of North Carolina

By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld

In 2011, immediately after graduating HBS, Ari Medoff began a self-funded search for a small firm to buy and run as its CEO. After just three month of searching, he identified Home Nursing of North Carolina (HNNC), a home care agency based in Greensboro, NC, as a... View Details

Keywords: Small Firms Management; Acquisition; Negotiation Process; Investment; Small Business; Management; Personal Development and Career

April–May 2012
Article

Resources or Power? Implications of Social Networks on Compensation and Firm Performance

By: Joanne Horton, Yuval Millo and George Serafeim

Using a sample of 4,278 listed UK firms, we construct a social network of directorship-interlocks that comprises 31,495 directors. We use social capital theory and techniques developed in social network analysis to measure a director's connectedness and investigate... View Details

Keywords: Power and Influence; Social and Collaborative Networks; Compensation and Benefits; Performance; Relationships; Resource Allocation; United Kingdom

17 Jan 2018
Research & Ideas

If the CEO’s High Salary Isn't Justified to Employees, Firm Performance May Suffer

kutaytanir It’s no surprise that business executives make more money than lower-level employees. But when that pay disparity between a CEO and the average worker is perceived as unfair, the result may be more than unhappy workers: A... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

October 2014
Case

McKinsey & Company, 2012

By: John R. Wells and Galen Danskin

In 2012, McKinsey & Company (McKinsey) was the world's premier management consultancy, providing advice to CEO's and top executives of leading companies around the globe. Many consulting firms were bigger but few could match the reputation McKinsey had built over more... View Details

Keywords: Consulting Firms; McKinsey; Strategy; Consulting Industry; North America

15 Jul 2019
Book

Many Executives Are Afraid of Finance. Here's How They Can Gain Confidence

Finance can be intimidating, and many business executives don’t even try to get their arms around it. But Harvard Business School Professor Mihir Desai says business leaders need to engage with the world of finance in order to succeed.... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2020
Working Paper

The Effects of Hierarchy on Learning and Performance in Business Experimentation

By: Sourobh Ghosh, Stefan Thomke and Hazjier Pourkhalkhali

Do senior managers help or hurt business experiments? Despite the widespread adoption of business experiments to guide strategic decision-making, we lack a scholarly understanding of what role senior managers play in firm experimentation. Using proprietary data of live... View Details

Keywords: Experimentation; Innovation; Search; New Product Development; Innovation and Invention; Organizational Design; Learning; Performance

1999
Other Unpublished Work

Executive Ownership and Control in Newly Public Firms: The Role of Venture Capitalists

By: Malcolm Baker and Paul Gompers

We study the implications of CEO equity ownership for incentives and control in a sample of 1,011 newly public firms. Before an initial public offering, equity investments by venture capitalists reduce CEO ownership by about half, from an average of 35 percent to 19... View Details

Keywords: Equity; Ownership; Motivation and Incentives; Initial Public Offering; Investment; Venture Capital; Managerial Roles; Cost Management; Governance Controls; Executive Compensation

June 2020
Article

Lazy Prices

By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen

We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations... View Details

Keywords: Default Behavior; Inertia; Firms; Disclosure; Information; Business or Company Management; Behavior; Annual Reports; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Reporting; United States

SSRN

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2014
Working Paper

The Contract Year Phenomenon in the Corner Office: An Analysis of Firm Behavior During CEO Contract Renewals

By: Ping Liu and Yuhai Xuan

This paper investigates how executive employment contracts influence corporate financial policies during the final year of the contract term, using a new, hand-collected data set of CEO employment agreements. On the one hand, the impending expiration of fixed-term... View Details

Keywords: Management Style; Contracts; Behavior; Employment

2020
Working Paper

An Executive Order Worth $100 Billion: The Impact of an Immigration Ban's Announcement on Fortune 500 Firms' Valuation

By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Britta Glennon

On June 22, 2020, President Trump issued an Executive Order (EO) that suspended new work visas, barring nearly 200,000 foreign workers and their dependents from entering the United States and preventing American companies from hiring skilled immigrants using H-1B or L1... View Details

Keywords: Visa; Foreign Workers; Fortune 500; Immigration; Policy; System Shocks; Business Ventures; Valuation

SSRN

04 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

No News Is Good News: CSR Strategy and Newspaper Coverage of Negative Firm Events

Keywords: by Jiao Luo, Stephan Meier & Felix Oberholzer-Gee

12 Nov 2003
Lecture

Where Morals and Profits Meet: The Corporate Value Shift." Presenter. "CHCA Executive Dialogue

By: Lynn S. Paine

Keywords: Values and Beliefs; For-Profit Firms; Ethics

February 2005 (Revised November 2012)
Case

Chuck's Wagon Inc.

By: Paul W. Marshall and Derek Lewis

This case describes the experiences of an HBS student as he takes on the challege of transitioning from an intern to a president at a small consumer packaged goods firm in Southern Texas. This HBS student is confronted with the opportunity to perform an operational and... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Goods; Operations Strategy; Executive Development; Strategy; Small Business; Production; Transformation; Management Skills; Financial Strategy; Consumer Products Industry; Texas

March 2022 (Revised February 2024)
Case

Emeritus: Achieving Impact, Providing Access (A)

By: Ashish Nanda and Zack Kurtovich

In June 2019, Emeritus cofounders Ashwin Damera (HBS MBA 2005) and Chaitanya Kalipatnapu were thrilled with the rapid growth of Emeritus. Damera and Kalipatnapu believed that Emeritus, established in July 2015 to offer online executive education, was only in the early... View Details

Keywords: Education Technology; Professional Service Firm; Startup; Digital Strategy; Global Business; Global Firm; Platform Business; Business Startups; Growth and Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Executive Education; Strategy; Education Industry; India

September 2012
Case

Castronics, LLC

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Patrick Dickinson (HBS '09) and Michael Weiner (MIT's Sloan '07) acquired Castronics, a firm that specialized in threading pipe used in the oil and natural gas industry, at the end of 2009. The partners overcame significant hurdles during the first two years of... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Search Funds; Corporate Finance; Entrepreneurship; Financial Management; Energy Industry; Western United States

2017
Book

HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company

By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

Find, acquire, and run your own business. Are you looking for an alternative to a career path at a big firm? Does founding your own start-up seem too risky? There is a radical third path open to you: you can buy a small business and run it as CEO. Purchasing a small... View Details

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