Publications

01 Jan 2004
News

August 1994 (Revised November 1994)
Case

Saturn: A Different Kind of Car Company

Saturn was General Motors' (GM) response to Japanese companies' dominance of the small car market during the mid-1980s. In the three-and-a-half years since its first sedan rolled off the assembly line, the Saturn Corp. had accumulated an impressive list of... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Advantage; Auto Industry; Retail Industry

04 Sep 2012
News

Harvard Business School Presents the 2012 Alumni Achievement Awards To Five Outstanding Graduates

Research Summary

Corporate Diplomacy

Michael Watkins is defining a top management function of increasing importance: the conduct of corporate diplomacy. Senior executives conduct the business equivalent of international diplomacy when they negotiate to sustain or transform relationships with influential... View Details

June 1991 (Revised April 1993)
Case

General Electric: Jack Welch's Second Wave (A)

By: Christopher A. Bartlett

By the mid 1980's Jack Welch had completely transformed General Electric with more than 300 divestitures and acquisitions since the beginning of the decade. Welch insisted that his business units be number one or number two in their markets, and have the strength of... View Details

Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Transformation; Employee Relationship Management; Planning; Corporate Strategy

2004
Working Paper

Are Perks Purely Managerial Excess?

By: Raghuram G. Rajan and Julie Wulf

Why do some firms tend to offer executives a variety of perks while others offer none at all? A widespread view in the corporate finance literature is that executive perks are a form of agency or private benefit and a way for managers to misappropriate some of the... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Performance Productivity; Executive Compensation; Corporate Finance

March 2016
Case

N12 Technologies: Building an Organization and Building a Business

By: David A. Garvin and Aldo Sesia

N12 Technologies was a startup founded in 2010 that employed nanotechnology to manufacture a patented material to improve the performance of carbon fiber composites, which were used in a wide variety of products, ranging from bicycles to automobiles to aircraft parts.... View Details

Keywords: Startup; Organizational Structure; Nanotechnology; Business Processes; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Management Systems; Commercialization; Industrial Products Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; Bicycle Industry; Transportation Industry; United States

2016
Article

Scandal and Stigma: Does Corporate Misconduct Affect the Future Compensation of Bystander Managers?

By: Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin and George Serafeim

This paper explores whether a firm’s misconduct can affect the compensation of former managers who were neither at the firm at the time of misdeeds nor involved in the scandal. Results suggest that stigma may influence compensation of former managers, even in cases... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Misconduct; Stigma; Executive Compensation

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23 Apr 2001
Research & Ideas

Brand Power from Wedgwood to Dell: Part Two

entrepreneurs, says HBS professor Nancy F. Koehn. In Part One of a discussion about her recent book—in the April 16 issue of HBS Working Knowledge—Koehn described the brand-building savvy of three entrepreneurs in the past, as well as their clear lessons for View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

26 Mar 2019
Working Paper Summaries

Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact

Keywords: by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell; Health

26 Nov 2012
Research & Ideas

New Winners and Losers in the Internet Economy

were produced by small self-starter companies. Together, smaller firms contributed 375,000 full-time equivalent jobs of the 2 million Internet-related jobs, and this work included people selling products on... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Publishing

David J. Collis

For the past thirty years David J. Collis has been a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he was only the second ever full-time Adjunct Professor appointed. Previously, he was the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Adjunct Professor, the MBA Class... View Details

December 2015
Article

What Is Disruptive Innovation?

By: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor and Rory McDonald

For the past 20 years, the theory of disruptive innovation has been enormously influential in business circles and a powerful tool for predicting which industry entrants will succeed. Unfortunately, the theory has also been widely misunderstood, and the "disruptive"... View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Theory

2022
Working Paper

The Need for Speed: The Impact of Capital Constraints on Strategic Misconduct

By: F. Christopher Eaglin

Under what conditions do firms engage in strategic misconduct? Why do they undertake actions that increase profitability yet break laws or violate strong norms often with costly consequences for public welfare? The strategic management literature offers two external... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Misconduct; Capital Constraints; Organizations; Crime and Corruption; Behavior; Situation or Environment; Capital

October 1998 (Revised December 1999)
Case

Gene Research, the Mapping of Life and the Global Economy

By: Ray A. Goldberg and Juan Enriquez-Cabot

A new firm is being created to speed up the process of mapping humans, animals, and plants by combining gene technology with rapid gene identification to improve the health and well being of the human population and the productivity of crops and animals. How does one... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Organizational Structure; Technological Innovation; Business Processes; Health Care and Treatment; Performance Productivity; Welfare; Agribusiness; Genetics; Science-Based Business; Biotechnology Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry

Research Summary

Implications of Limits of Arbitrage (with James Choi)

In this project we investigate the relationship between limits to arbitrage facing mutual fund managers and asset pricing anomalies. We measure changes in the limits to arbitrage by computing the average of slopes on current and past returns in quarterly... View Details

July 15, 2020
Article

How to Get People to Actually Use Contact-Tracing Apps

By: Chiara Farronato, Marco Iansiti, Marcin Bartosiak, Stefano Denicolai, Luca Ferretti and Roberto Fontana

The broad adoption of contact-tracing apps would greatly help combat the spread of COVID-19. But a number of barriers—especially privacy concerns—have hindered progress in many countries that can’t or won’t mandate adoption. A solution is to start with small... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19; Contact Tracing; Apps; Privacy; Health Pandemics; Behavior; Technology Adoption; Applications and Software

Article

Teaching with Cases to Graduate and Undergraduate Students

By: Robert Bruner, Benton E. Gup, Bennie H. Nunnally Jr. and Laurence C. Pettit

Case studies are tools that are widely used in graduate and undergraduate education. It takes time to learn how to get the most out of them for you and your students. The process involves trials and errors to determine the techniques that work best. What works for... View Details

Keywords: Higher Education; Cases