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14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

social distancing measures to keep the operations running and their employees safe. In addition to the use of PPE and temperature checks, PetFoodCo applied social distancing by parceling production workers into small teams that could... View Details

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

01 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

The Big Influence of Small Countries in the United Nations Secretariat

Who really runs the world? We're not talking in a power-brokers-conspiring-in-the-back-room sort of way. Rather, by looking at the institutions that countries themselves have set up to organize the world's affairs, can we determine who is... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

02 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

Negotiating in Three Dimensions

Tactics, deal design, and set-up are three crucial components of the most effective negotiations. Yet many negotiators focus only on the tactical part, running the risk of undermining their own best interests. How can you negotiate more... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

31 Jul 2017
HBS Case

It’s Hard to Fix the Family Business Without Offending the Family

1981. Opened in 1992, Pho Hoa has been run with few formal processes in place and no regular income statement reporting, forecasting, or budgeting. Thanh, wanting to take a well-deserved retirement after 25 years of hard work, has named... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

20 Jan 2022
Op-Ed

3 Steps to Help Companies Rebuild Trust During the Pandemic

struggled with whether to lay off or furlough employees. Business leaders have had to make tough calls amid rapidly changing conditions with official guidance that keeps changing, and their decisions have run the gamut from trust building... View Details

Keywords: by Sandra J. Sucher and Shalene Gupta

20 Oct 2010
Op-Ed

Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic

the export-orientation is still feasible if it is being pursued by a large number of countries in parallel. It might have negative terms-of-trade effects if all exports focus on the same industries. It might to lead to unsustainable macroeconomic imbalances with... View Details

Keywords: by Christian Ketels

06 Jan 2020
Research & Ideas

Motivate Your High Performers to Share Their Knowledge

telecommunications company in which there was a greater than 50 percent difference in revenue-per-call between top-quartile and bottom-quartile employees. “There are common pitfalls that people face in the sales process,” says Stanton. “People repeatedly View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

04 Feb 2014
What Do You Think?

Has Listening Become a Lost Art?

leadership strategy at Harvard Business School is based on this assumption: It is that a discussion leader should avoid calling on students whose hands have been in the air for several minutes. The assumption, which is nearly always borne out, is that they will bring... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

18 Dec 2019
Book

6 Skills That Wise Companies Harness for World-Changing Innovation

applying knowledge in pursuit of innovation. “When you peel back the layers of these companies, you find that these six qualities are practiced, and often they have family edicts that are passed down from one generation to the next,” says... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

04 Jul 2005
What Do You Think?

How Can Business Schools Be Made More Relevant?

are not the skills that most doctoral candidates are asked to master as part of their training." Leonard Lane reinforces this view in saying that "Relevancy requires that the MBA-level instructor be a true practitioner-scholar who has . . . View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

08 Sep 2015
Research & Ideas

Knowledge Transfer: You Can't Learn Surgery By Watching

transfer doesn’t quite happen that way, and organizations that practice watch-and-learn vicarious learning run the risk of undertraining their key employees, says Myers. He challenges the theory in a new working paper, Coactive Vicarious... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

08 Feb 2000
Research & Ideas

Building Effective R&D Capabilities Abroad

present an instructive contrast. Xerox established a home-base-augmenting laboratory in Grenoble, France. Its objective: to tap new knowledge from the local scientific community and to transfer it back to its home base. Having already... View Details

Keywords: by Walter Kuemmerle

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

Back in the early 1990s, managers of U.S. companies were justifiably proud of the well-oiled machines they'd made of their supply chains. Over the previous fifteen to twenty years, they'd wrung costs from the mechanisms and processes by... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

30 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

The New Rules for Remote Work: Pandemic Edition

table or at least put them on a back burner for now, and let workers know which projects should be prioritized, says HBS Senior Lecturer Julia Austin, who provides leadership coaching to companies. “While now is a time to foster trust and... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

26 Nov 2001
Op-Ed

Why Corporate Budgeting Needs To Be Fixed

truth. It turns business decisions into elaborate exercises in gaming. It sets colleague against colleague, creating distrust and ill will. And it distorts incentives, motivating people to act in ways that run counter to the best... View Details

Keywords: by Michael C. Jensen

13 Apr 2021
Book

How Inclusive Managers Create Glass-Shattering Organizations

self-confidence. Add in a devastating pandemic that has forced many mothers to scale back professional duties to support children at home, and deeply embedded stereotypes about women as caregivers and men as breadwinners start to... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

20 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Getting the Marketing Mix Right

when a company attempts to move in on its market share, perhaps by offering price discounts. Since this strategy is viewed as more threatening, the competitor can be expected to retaliate with prejudice—often by firing off a campaign to win View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

15 Jun 2007
Research & Ideas

Remembering Alfred Chandler

Podcast with: Interviewer: Running Time: Alfred D. Chandler Jr., the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar whom many credited with founding the discipline of business history, died at age 88 on May 9, 2007. His work is legendary, but so too was... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

journals. “Academic research can be helpful, but it tends to be overly complex, hard to digest, and not backed by real quantitative insights from customer populations or engagements,” says Neale-May, executive director of the Chief... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

12 Mar 2014
Lessons from the Classroom

Managing the Family Business: Firing the CEO

knew more than others, even though the top management team had been in place for 20 years and had helped secure the father-son transition. The son felt the business could be run in a more profitable way. He was probably right, but the... View Details

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