Publications

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Podcast - Business & Environment

Sustainability Officer & Senior Managing Director at Haveli Investments, Lucas Joppa discusses the strategies and tools Microsoft developed to meet its ambitious carbon negative goals, including setting an internal price on carbon,... View Details

Article

Fixing What Really Ails Japan

By: Michael E. Porter and Hirotaka Takeuchi

Conventional wisdom claims that Japan’s “economic miracle” stemmed from its unique model of government guidance and its revolutionary corporate management techniques. An in-depth study proves this seriously wrong. Rampant government intervention has caused more... View Details

Keywords: Leadership; Competition; Innovation and Invention; Business and Government Relations; Japan

Find at Harvard

21 Jul 2006
Op-Ed

Enron Jury Sent the Right Message

The most noteworthy message of the Enron trial is that corporate executives can be convicted in a court of law for a pattern of deception that may or may not be illegal. Left unaddressed in the trial were many financial transactions and... View Details

Keywords: by Malcolm S. Salter

May 2008 (Revised August 2009)
Case

Intel NBI: MXP Digital Media Processor

By: Willy C. Shih and Thomas Thurston

"Gila" was a high-performance image processor project housed in Intel's New Business Initiatives (NBI) group. NBI was an incubator for corporate entrepreneurs, and it had an established methodology for ensuring a degree of autonomy while these ventures got started. But... View Details

Keywords: Business Divisions; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Change Management; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Integration; Semiconductor Industry; United States

April 1995 (Revised July 1996)
Case

Governance at Metallgesellschaft (A)

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Samanta Graff

MG Corp., a U.S. subsidiary of Germany's international conglomerate, Metallgesellschaft, engaged in a disastrous hedging strategy that nearly dragged the entire enterprise into bankruptcy. This case explores issues of responsibility and accountability among the... View Details

Keywords: Business Subsidiaries; Corporate Accountability; Business Conglomerates; Governing and Advisory Boards; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Corporate Governance; Mining Industry; Chemical Industry; Germany; United States

15 Jul 2019
Blog Post

Exploring the World of Electric Adventure Vehicles

not only graduate school at HBS—but also a summer 2019 retail strategy internship with Ford- and Amazon-backed electric car startup, Rivian Automotive. Founded in 2009, Rivian is an independent American automaker that develops electric... View Details

Keywords: Manufacturing; Consumer Products / Retail

Willy C. Shih

Willy Shih is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Management Practice in Business Administration. He is part of the Technology and Operations Management Unit, and he teaches in the MBA and Executive Education Programs. His expertise is in manufacturing, product... View Details

Keywords: aerospace; automotive; biotechnology; communications; computer; digital imaging; electrical equipment; electronics; entertainment; high technology; industrial goods; information technology industry; manufacturing; retailing; semiconductor

December 2007 (Revised July 2011)
Case

Leadership in Energy: Jim Rogers at Cinergy

By: Boris Groysberg, Nitin Nohria, Colleen Kaftan and Geoff Eckman Marietta

Jim Rogers, CEO of the energy company Cinergy, has led the company from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the premier energy companies through selecting a focused strategy, aligning the organization to support it, and mobilizing all the employees to implementation. The... View Details

Keywords: Communication Strategy; Leading Change; Organizational Culture; Organizational Structure; Alignment; Corporate Strategy; Energy Industry

May 2022
Case

Rawbank's Illico Cash: Can 'Fast Money' Overcome Cash Dependency in the DRC?

By: Lauren Cohen and Grace Headinger

Thomas de Dreux-Brézé, the Head of Strategy and Project Management at Rawbank Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was perplexed as he reviewed annual adoption rates for the bank’s launch of Illico Cash 2.0. As the bank’s mobile money app, Illico Cash... View Details

September 2010 (Revised December 2010)
Case

Santander Consumer Finance

By: J. Gunnar Trumbull, Elena Corsi and Andrew Barron

A Spanish company has to decide if they should expand into the fragmented European consumer finance market and has to make important organizational strategy decisions in the midst of the world economic downturn that followed the 2007 U.S. credit crunch. Since 2002, the... View Details

Keywords: Borrowing and Debt; Financial Markets; International Finance; Personal Finance; Consolidation; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Financial Services Industry; European Union; Spain

Web

The Founding of U.S. Steel and the Power of Public Opinion | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

wrote, “The corporate balance sheet is nowadays affected not only by conditions within the business—but also by the rules and regulations of government bureaus, the probings and acts of Congress, and the View Details

Web

Marketing - Faculty & Research

long term success. Keywords: Corporate Entrepreneurship ; Health Care and Treatment ; Global Strategy ; Competitive Strategy ; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry ; Health... View Details

July 1996 (Revised December 2001)
Case

Becton Dickinson--Designing the New Strategic, Operational, and Financial Planning Process

By: Robert L. Simons, Antonio Davila and Afroze A Mohammed

Describes management's attempts to design and install a sophisticated planning and control system in an international company as it changes its strategy. Issues of strategy implementation, accountability, and performance measurement are at the core of the analysis, as... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Strategy; Business or Company Management; Corporate Accountability; Governance Controls; System; Performance Evaluation

14 Dec 2021
Op-Ed

To Change Your Company's Culture, Don't Start by Trying to Change the Culture

CEOs who had led successful corporate transformations and came to the same conclusion in a Harvard Business Review article: “[These leaders] say that culture isn’t something you 'fix.' Rather, in their experience, cultural change is what... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Beer

Web

Class Profile - Doctoral

Pricing Corporate Governance Corporate Strategy Corporate Finance Diversity Emerging Markets Environment Ethics Experimental Economics Game... View Details

Web

Curriculum - Case Method Project

the various strategies employed by civil rights activists, with a special emphasis on the civil disobedience protests of the modern Civil Rights Movement, and culminates in Martin Luther King’s decision of whether to lead protesters... View Details

January 2009 (Revised November 2011)
Case

The Tip of the Iceberg: JP Morgan Chase and Bear Stearns (A)

By: Clayton S. Rose, Daniel Baird Bergstresser and David Lane

"Bear Stearns & Co. burned through nearly all of its $18 billion in cash reserves during the week of March 10, 2008, and an unprecedented provision of liquidity support from the Federal Reserve on Friday, March 13 was insufficient to reverse the decline in Bear's... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Financial Crisis; Capital; Financial Liquidity; Financial Strategy; Corporate Governance; Crisis Management; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Competition; Valuation; Financial Services Industry

November 1995
Case

"Marketing" at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

By: Jay W. Lorsch and Samanta Graff

Describes the history and unique operating principles of the most successful corporate law firm in the country. Closes with a lengthy quotation by Martin Lipton, who is one of the firm's founding partners and who is described in an American Lawyer article as the "Elvis... View Details

Keywords: Marketing Strategy; Reputation; Business Strategy; Legal Services Industry