Publications

12 Jul 2004
Research & Ideas

Enron’s Lessons for Managers

said. They used "turbo incentives" but turbo incentives also require turbo controls. The innovation they sparked at the beginning was real, but it flew out of their hands. As amateurs, Salter said, "they unknowingly... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

16 Sep 2019
Research & Ideas

Crowdsourcing Is Helping Hollywood Reduce the Risk of Movie-Making

or what their personal incentives might be for listing it. (Oftentimes by the time scripts are listed, they’ve already been sold to studios, who might want to list their own scripts in order to attract top actors and directors.) “If you... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Motion Pictures & Video

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Porter’s Perspective: Competing in the Global Economy

problems that hold back the rest of their economy. The problem is, isolated zones for processing foreign inputs and exporting all these outputs are the antithesis of cluster development. Emerging nations must create programs and View Details

Keywords: Re: Michael E. Porter

March 2017
Case

Intellectual Ambition at Harvard Business School: Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger

By: Jan W. Rivkin and Amram Migdal

This case, set in the 1920s and 1930s, discusses the contributions of Harvard Business School (HBS) Professors Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger to management research and to the Human Relations Movement in management scholarship. The case focuses on their research... View Details

04 Apr 2012
Research & Ideas

When Founders Recruit Friends and Family as Investors

observers might question whether such persistence is virtue or vice, skewing founders' incentives and possibly leading them to throw away years of their lives, or to throw good money after bad. Some founders refer to taking money from... View Details

Keywords: by Noam Wasserman

22 Aug 2005
Research & Ideas

The Hard Work of Failure Analysis

resources, and incentives to bring multiple perspectives and multiple minds together to carefully analyze what went wrong and how to prevent the occurrence of similar failures in the future are lacking in most organizations. Conducting an... View Details

Keywords: by Amy Edmondson & Mark D. Cannon

31 Jul 2019
Research & Ideas

Distressed Employees? Try Resilience Training

getting up from their desks and taking a long walk. Companies can even build in incentives or rewards for workers who follow through. “Employees aren’t going to ask for time to work on their own wellness. In fact, workers will say they... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Health

29 Aug 2023
News

Helping Consumers Decarbonize their Purchases

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Spotify More Skydeck episodes Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck. In this episode, we’re going to be highlighting an episode of another HBS podcast: Climate Rising, which focuses on what businesses are doing, can do, and should do... View Details

February 2006 (Revised September 2006)
Case

Sippican Corporation (A)

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Presents a time-driven version of the Wilkerson Co. activity-based costing case (101092). Faced with declining profits, Sippican Corp. is struggling to understand why it is encountering severe price competition on one product line. The controller collects data that... View Details

Keywords: History; Business Model; Strategic Planning; Cost Accounting; Motivation and Incentives; Resource Allocation; Activity Based Costing and Management; Profit; Business Strategy; Budgets and Budgeting

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

February 2022
Case

US Foods: Driving Post-Pandemic Success?

By: David E. Bell, Olivia Hull and Amy Klopfenstein

In November 2021, US Foods CEO Pietro Satriano must decide his company’s trajectory following the COVID-19 pandemic. US Foods suffered due to business closures and social distancing during the height of the pandemic. While the situation improved following the return of... View Details

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

local convenience stores, whose owners received incentives per order. This increased job efficiency by two or three times, as delivery moved from door-to-door to the pick-up station. Meanwhile, the work to pick and pack items also... View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

I am also looking at how incentive systems can be designed to promote long-run performance. Excerpt From rethinking The Mba: Business Education At A Crossroads By Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen Voices from the... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

December 2019
Case

Steemit: A New Social Media?

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Alexander White and Karen Elterman

This case discusses the alternative social media site Steemit, including the principles it was founded on in 2016 and the challenges it faced in 2019. Steemit was a blockchain-based platform that aimed to differentiate itself from other social media companies by... View Details