Publications

01 Aug 2005
What Do You Think?

Is There an “Efficient Market” in CEO Compensation?

smaller companies who are used to accountability." Stever Robbins commented, "Why do we even spend our time debating whether a Fortune 500 CEO is 'worth it'? Why, instead, don't we seek to hire... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

01 Dec 2023
News

Wide Horizon

world you have 50,000 entrepreneurs and hundreds of VCs, funding a wide variety of ideas, and out of that chaos come genuine breakthroughs. We really didn’t have that in the ASD field.” Plus, he figured, with so much time and money... View Details

Keywords: Dan Morrell; Photos by Sarah Wilson

February 2023 (Revised March 2025)
Case

Graphic Packaging: Project Cowboy (A)

By: Benjamin C. Esty and E. Scott Mayfield

In July 2019, Graphic Packaging CEO Michael Doss was proposing a $600 million investment in a new machine to produce coated recycled board (CRB), a type of paper packaging used for consumer products (cups, cereal boxes, beverage boxes, etc.) that utilized recycled... View Details

Keywords: Capital Budgeting; Growth Management; Demand and Consumers; Duopoly and Oligopoly; Competitive Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Expansion; Value Creation; Supply and Industry; Pulp and Paper Industry; Manufacturing Industry; United States; North America

Many firms can choose between an employment mode, in which the firm controls service provision by employing professionals, sales representatives or other types of agents, and an agency (or platform) mode, in which these agents take control... View Details

November 2016 (Revised December 2016)
Case

Anthology: Pivoting the Business Model

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Christopher Payton

In July 2014, after 18 months and eight unsuccessful product launches, the CEO of Yabbly has agreed to sell his company to a larger, well-funded startup, providing a return of capital for his investors and a home for his team. Two weeks prior to the scheduled closing,... View Details

Keywords: Mergers ＆ Acquisitions; Business Model; Business Plan; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Innovation Strategy; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Internet and the Web; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Exit or Shutdown; Fairness; Valuation; Technology Industry; Consumer Products Industry; North America; United States; Seattle

07 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

What Leaders Need to Do To Restore Investor Confidence

They do not punish with sufficient speed and force to eliminate the incentive for misconduct. At a time when the temptation before some managers is orders of magnitude greater than twenty or thirty years ago, the concern is that the... View Details

Keywords: by Harvard Management Update

10 Jun 2002
Research & Ideas

How to Look at Globalization Now

probably the single most remarkable thing about the historical narrative is the length of time for which firms' international economic activities were apparently motivated entirely by considerations of arbitrage, with no replication in... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

Blog

Take Control of Your Personal Brand

emotions, attitudes, and expectations others have about you. Let's say you’re in a high-stakes situation—you're applying for a new job, seeking a raise, promoting your company to investors, or trying to engage a new client. Whether you... View Details

2014
Working Paper

The Organizational and Geographic Drivers of Absorptive Capacity: An Empirical Analysis of Pharmaceutical R&D Laboratories

By: Francesca Lazzeri and Gary P. Pisano

Scholars and practitioners alike now recognize that a firm's capacity to assimilate and use know-how from external sources—what Cohen and Levinthal (1990) called "absorptive capacity"—plays a central role in innovation performance. In recent years, a common strategy... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Location; Industry Clusters; Knowledge Acquisition; Pharmaceutical Industry; San Francisco; San Diego; Massachusetts

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Web

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets - Faculty & Research

partnership had been successful, and the company had amassed promising data on the impact of ElliQ, the AI companion they had created to alleviate loneliness and social isolation among older adults. Now Intuition Robotics leadership had... View Details

October 2004 (Revised July 2011)
Case

AT&T 2000-2004

By: Stephen P. Bradley and Kerry Herman

Provides an update on CEO Michael Armstrong's "Project Grand Slam" strategy to build the value of AT&T by offering a complete, integrated telecommunications solution to both corporate and residential customers, including wireless and wire line telephone, Internet,... View Details

Keywords: Business Exit or Shutdown; Customers; Business or Company Management; Failure; Business and Shareholder Relations; Networks; Corporate Strategy; Internet; Wireless Technology; Value Creation; Telecommunications Industry

Web

Ways to Give Today - Alumni

412275 MA5-527-02-07 2 Morrissey Boulevard Dorchester, MA 02125 Maximize Your Gift Employer Matching To find out if your company matches employee gifts, use our online search tool. Upon receipt, all matching gifts count toward a donor’s... View Details

12 Sep 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, September 12, 2017

September–October 2017 Harvard Business Review GE's Global Growth Experiment: The Company Pushed Cross-Business Collaboration By: Gulati, Ranjay Abstract—Like many other companies, GE under Immelt had to figure out how to balance serving... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

October 2018 (Revised July 2019)
Case

Sidewalk Labs: Privacy in a City Built from the Internet Up

By: Leslie K. John, Mitchell Weiss and Julia Kelley

Email mking@hbs.edu for a courtesy copy.

By the time Dan Doctoroff, CEO of Sidewalk Labs, began hosting a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session in January 2018, he had only nine months remaining to convince the people... View Details