Publications

30 May 2024
Research & Ideas

Racial Bias Might Be Infecting Patient Portals. Can AI Help?

registered nurses. The statistical evidence suggests that medical teams tended to prioritize messages from white patients, says Ariel Stern, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and one of the study’s authors. As mobile... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Health

Web

Seen and Unseen | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

Tender Act in 1862, which introduced the US currency known as “greenbacks,” was the first step toward creating a unified monetary system for the United States, and by 1876, a law was passed to mark... View Details

August 2002 (Revised January 2003)
Case

Australia-Japan Cable: Structuring the Project Company

By: Benjamin C. Esty and Carrie Ferman

In late September 1999, representatives from Telstri, Japan Telecom, and Teleglobe met to discuss the structure of the Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) project, a $520 million submarine cable system that would run from Australia to Japan. The sponsors, excited by the... View Details

Keywords: Information Infrastructure; Cooperative Ownership; Organizational Structure; Investment; Ownership; Capital; Corporate Governance; Management Teams; Communication Technology; Projects; Compensation and Benefits; Corporate Finance; Telecommunications Industry; Australia; Japan

26 Apr 2020
Other Presentation

Towards Modeling the Variability of Human Attention

By: Kuno Kim, Megumi Sano, Julian De Freitas, Daniel Yamins and Nick Haber

Children exhibit extraordinary exploratory behaviors hypothesized to contribute to the building of models of their world. Harnessing this capacity in artificial systems promises not only more flexible technology but also cognitive models of the developmental processes... View Details

Keywords: Exploratory Learning Behaviors; Modeling; Artificial Intelligence; AI and Machine Learning

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27 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

These Management Practices, Like Certain Technologies, Boost Company Performance

What’s the best way to run a company? The question has bedeviled economists as long as companies have existed. How, after all, do you measure something as soft as management style across the range of different types and sizes of companies... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

Teaching Interest

Overview

By: David S. Scharfstein

I teach an MBA course in the elective curriculum called Managing and Innovating in Financial Services. I focus on key functions of the financial system including credit, liquidity, insurance and payments provided by a variety of financial intermediaries including... View Details

April 2012 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Dovernet

By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred

This case illustrates the implications of using stringent performance measurement systems to create performance pressure, motivate employee achievement, and sharpen a firm's competitiveness. It opens by describing the downsides of the ruthlessly competitive culture at... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Information Technology; Competitive Advantage; Decision Choices and Conditions; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Compensation and Benefits; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Vancouver

April 2011 (Revised July 2014)
Case

Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd.: Driving Change Through Internal Communication

By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind

Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee... View Details

Keywords: Communication Strategy; Interpersonal Communication; Employee Relationship Management; Innovation and Management; Leading Change; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Corporate Strategy; India

Feng Zhu is the MBA Class of 1958 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he leads the Platform Lab within the Digital, Data, and Design Institute, co-chairs the Harvard Business Analytics Program, and serves as the course head for the... View Details

04 Sep 2013
What Do You Think?

How Relevant is Long-Range Strategic Planning?

conclusions resulting from a reading of responses to this month's column. In defense of strategic planning, Greg Martin said, "Same story, different day: in times of change it is practically irresistible to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. While View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

10 Apr 2014
Research & Ideas

John Kotter’s Plan to Accelerate Your Business

organizational design that has not one, but two "operating systems." One system conducts the everyday business of business, while the second system, more like an agile network, sits alongside to focus on the... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard

October 2015
Article

How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Companies

By: Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann

The evolution of products into intelligent, connected devices is revolutionizing business. In a November 2014 article, "How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition," Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and PTC president and CEO James... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Technological Innovation; Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Operations; Business Strategy

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May 2004 (Revised December 2004)
Case

Slingshot Technology, Inc. (B)

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Elizabeth Collins

Slingshot Technology Inc. (STI) is a privately held software start-up founded in 1995 focused on identifying emerging spaces in the IT services industry and partnering with vendors selling promising but unproven technologies in those spaces. The vendors used STI to... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Private Ownership; Opportunities; Partners and Partnerships; Information Technology; Entrepreneurship; Applications and Software; Intellectual Property; Business Startups; Information Technology Industry

29 Oct 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Robots in the Boardroom

artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century Making Sense of RecommendationsWe compare computer recommender systems to human recommenders in a... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

September 2002 (Revised October 2002)
Case

Oklahoma VISION Project

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Susan Saltrick

Describes the two-year-old pilot phase of a public/private initiative in Oklahoma called the Virtual Internet School in Oklahoma Network (VISION) project. VISION was a first-of-its-kind, standards-based, vendor-neutral technology infrastructure developed to enable... View Details

Keywords: Measurement and Metrics; Internet and the Web; Performance Evaluation; Technological Innovation; Partners and Partnerships; Service Delivery; Innovation and Management; Entrepreneurship; Education; Information Technology Industry; Information Technology Industry; Oklahoma; Western United States

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April 1995 (Revised July 1995)
Case

Power Play (B): Sega in 16-bit Video Games

Home video-game systems were pioneered by the U.S. company Atari in the mid-1970s. After going through boom and bust in the early 1980s, the industry was resurrected in the mid-1980s by the Japanese company Nintendo. With its 8-bit video-game system, Nintendo... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Competition; Video Game Industry; Japan; United States

October 2013
Article

The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care

By: Michael E. Porter and Thomas H. Lee

In health care, the days of business as usual are over. Around the world, every health care system is struggling with rising costs and uneven quality, despite the hard work of well-intentioned, well-trained clinicians. Health care leaders and policy makers have tried... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Value; Customer Focus and Relationships; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry

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July 2004 (Revised July 2005)
Case

Linux in 2004

By: Pankaj Ghemawat, Brian Subirana and Christina Pham

A new technology platform conceived in the early 1990s, Linux developed into a force to be reckoned with in the operating system marketplace. At first, Linux was dismissed as a renegade option used only by tech geeks. By 2004, however, Linux had exploded into the... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Open Source Distribution; Information Technology; Applications and Software; Digital Platforms; Information Technology Industry