Publications

07 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron

growth and skyrocketing stock price made it difficult for most directors to challenge management's strategy and tactics. Still, board members understood that Enron was trying to move underperforming assets... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

Better, Not Perfect

Every day, you make hundreds of decisions. They’re largely personal, but these choices have an ethical twinge as well; they value certain principles and ends over others. Max H. Bazerman argues that we can better balance both dimensions—and we needn’t seek... View Details

March 2025
Case

Harvey: AI for Lawyers

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Charles Krumholz and Radhika Kak

In early 2025, Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra, co-founders of Harvey AI, reflected on the company’s meteoric rise as a pioneer in AI-powered legal technology. Since its founding in 2022, Harvey had transformed how lawyers approached research, drafting, and document... View Details

Keywords: Innovation Strategy; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Product Positioning; Legal Services Industry; Technology Industry; New York (city, NY); San Francisco; London

January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)

By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg

In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details

March 2021 (Revised July 2021)
Case

Resident

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones

Launched in 2016, Resident was a leading player in the direct-to-consumer bed-in-a-box mattress market, where it was one of at least 175 venture-backed companies competing in the space. By late 2020, it had realized over $500 million in revenue, profitability in the... View Details

Keywords: Digital Marketing; Business Growth and Maturation; Operations; Entrepreneurship; Competitive Strategy; Initial Public Offering; Decisions; Marketing Strategy; Cash Flow; Demand and Consumers

Herman B. ("Dutch") Leonard is Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and the George F. Baker, Jr. Professor of Public Sector Management at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. In... View Details

Keywords: education industry; federal government; health care; nonprofit industry; state government

15 Apr 2024
Book

Struggling With a Big Management Decision? Start by Asking What Really Matters

what will work. Published with permission by Springer. Doing Well by Doing Good? One Industry’s Struggle to Balance Values and Profits Lessons in Decision-Making: Confident People Aren't Always Correct... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

16 Oct 2014
Working Paper Summaries

Government Debt Management at the Zero Lower Bound

Keywords: by Robin Greenwood, Samuel G. Hanson, Joshua S. Rudolph & Lawrence H. Summers

June 2021 (Revised November 2021)
Case

Asian Corporate Governance Association: Stemming a 'Race to the Bottom' by Stock Exchanges?

By: Charles C.Y. Wang and Billy Chan

This case describes the movement towards dual-class listings on Asian stock exchanges and the efforts of the Asian Corporate Governance Association (ACGA), a not-for-profit shareholder advocacy group, to discourage this trend. As a not-for-profit organization with no... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Governance Controls; Nonprofit Organizations; Stocks; Financial Markets; Financial Services Industry; Hong Kong; China; Asia

03 Mar 2015
First Look

First Look: March 3

on a sustained and balanced growth trajectory? Purchase this case: https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/product/715008-PDF-ENG Harvard Business School Case 514-078 Ghurka Ghurka was a 38-year-old luxury leather... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2007
Article

Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions

By: Matthew Cary, Aparna Das, Benjamin Edelman, Ioannis Giotis, Kurtis Heimerl, Anna Karlin, Claire Mathieu and Michael Schwarz

How should players bid in keyword auctions such as those used by Google, Yahoo! and MSN? We consider greedy bidding strategies for a repeated auction on a single keyword, where in each round, each player chooses some optimal bid for the next round, assuming that the... View Details

Keywords: Auctions; Bids and Bidding; Strategy; Revenue; Search Technology

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15 May 2015
Research & Ideas

Kids Benefit From Having a Working Mom

©iStockphoto Here's some heartening news for working mothers worried about the future of their children. Women whose moms worked outside the home are more likely to have jobs themselves, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility at those jobs, View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

2024
Working Paper

Igniting Innovation: Evidence from PyTorch on Technology Control in Open Collaboration

By: Daniel Yue and Frank Nagle

Many companies offer free access to their technology to encourage outside addon innovation, hoping to later profit by raising prices or harnessing the power of the crowd while continuing to steer the direction of innovation. They can achieve this balance by opening... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; Power and Influence; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Corporate Governance

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08 Mar 2020
News

The Reflective Leader

Research Summary

Models of optimal experience (flow)

Flow is a state of profound task-absorption, involvement, and intrinsic enjoyment that makes the person feel one with the activity. Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory states that flow is more likely to occur in situations in which the person feels that the activity is very... View Details

August 2019
Case

Bark Gift Shop Ltd.

By: Susanna Gallani, Jan Bouwens and Peter Kroos

This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in... View Details

Keywords: Data Analytics; Employees; Behavior; Performance; Management; Goals and Objectives; Motivation and Incentives; Analysis