Publications

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21 Aug 2007
First Look

First Look: August 21, 2007

Working PapersNone this week Cases & Course MaterialsFinding the Right Job for Your Product Harvard Business School Note 607-028 Asserts that the typical ways that companies have learned to segment their markets, by product... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

15 May 2024
Research & Ideas

A Major Roadblock for Autonomous Cars: Motorists Believe They Drive Better

self-driving vehicles and other AI tools. De Freitas coauthored the study with HBS doctoral student Stuti Agarwal; Anya Ragnhildstveit, a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge; and Carey K. Morewedge, a professor at Boston University's Questrom School of... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Transportation; Auto

14 Nov 2023
What Do You Think?

Do We Underestimate the Importance of Generosity in Leadership?

learn.” Others echoed a similar sentiment. Akash Pant commented that leaders learn from failure when they adopt the right attitude. As he put it, “Once the leader becomes the student, then they would be more open to embrace the failure... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

16 Nov 2016
Research & Ideas

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

drivers, Uber today is arguably as well informed about low-wage workers as the US Department of Labor.) By gathering this information, Uber was able to use the online ads to identify the right drivers. Etsy followed a different track.... View Details

Keywords: by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding; Retail; Transportation; Accommodations

05 Jul 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Improve and Innovate

Keywords: by Mark D. Cannon & Amy C. Edmondson

September 2024
Case

Board Director Dilemmas: The Tradeoffs of Board Selection

By: David G. Fubini, Suraj Srinivasan and Patrick Sanguineti

After retiring from a long and successful career in financial auditing, Linda McGill looked forward to the prospect of joining a board. She felt the time was right to leverage the breadth of her experience while fulfilling one of her long-term goals. Though somewhat of... View Details

Keywords: Board Decisions; Corporate Boards; Board Networks; Cost vs Benefits; Governing and Advisory Boards; Retirement

July 2022 (Revised October 2022)
Case

Nestlé, Shared Value and KitKat Diplomacy

By: Geoffrey G. Jones and Sabine Pitteloud

The case revolves around the decision on March 23, 2022 by Mark Schneider, the chief executive of Swiss-based Nestlé, to withdraw the emblematic Kit Kat chocolate bar from sales in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine in the previous month, although not its... View Details

Keywords: Shared Value; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Globalized Economies and Regions; Ethics; War; Social Issues

January 2020 (Revised March 2020)
Case

LOLA: Do You Know What's in Your Tampon?

By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Aldo Sesia

LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products.... View Details

Keywords: Direct-to-consumer; Channels; Disruption; Business Model; Brands and Branding; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Retail Industry; United States; Canada

2019
Working Paper

Infringing Use as a Path to Legal Consumption: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer

Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Emails... View Details

Keywords: Copyright Infringement; Field Experiment; Intellectual Property; Lawfulness

SSRN

2019
Working Paper

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 15 The IBM PC

By: Carliss Y. Baldwin

The IBM PC was the first digital computer platform that was open by as a matter of strategy, not necessity. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the IBM PC as a technical system and set of organization choices in light of the theory of how technology shapes... View Details

Keywords: IBM; Personal Computer; Digital Platforms; System; Strategy

SSRN

Read Now

April 2011 (Revised July 2011)
Case

Renewing GE: The Africa Project (A)

By: David A. Thomas and Stephanie J. Creary

This case profiles the evolution of General Electric's African American Form (AAF), an employee affinity group, and its efforts to increase the company's involvement in Africa. The AAF formed in 1991 to help advance GE's recruitment, retention and development of black... View Details

Keywords: Diversity; Global Strategy; Multinational Firms and Management; Employees; Employee Relationship Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Africa; United States

2011
Other Unpublished Work

Military Ties, New Ventures, and Political Risk Management in Emerging Economies

By: Shon R. Hiatt and Wesley Sine

New ventures in emerging economies face a number of challenges such as political instability, corruption, and uncertain property rights that can severely hinder their ability to grow and survive, yet little is known about how startups can mitigate such risk. Using data... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Business Startups; Government and Politics; Developing Countries and Economies; Latin America

16 Aug 2021
News

Managers: Compassion and Accountability Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Code.org

During a break after starting and selling several successful technology based startups, Hadi Partovi decided to make a short film to inspire students to learn computer science. “Code.org started as a hobby project,” Hadi said. “I had helped pay my way through... View Details

August 2022
Case

Meaningful Gigs

By: Brian Trelstad and Rachel Philbin

In October 2020, just a year after founding their company Meaningful Gigs, founders Ronnie Kwesi Coleman and Stephanie Nachemja-Burton prepared for a vital investment meeting with Rethink Education. They had already reached $400,000 in annually recurring revenue (ARR)... View Details

Keywords: Venture Capital; Growth and Development Strategy; Revenue; Education Industry; Technology Industry; Africa; United States

March 2014 (Revised November 2020)
Case

The Novartis Malaria Initiative

By: Michael Chu, Vincent Marie Dessain and Emilie Billaud

The Novartis Malaria Initiative was designed, as a result of a precedent–setting agreement with the World Health Organization in 2001, to provide a breakthrough treatment for malaria—"at no profit"—for public health systems. What had begun as an exemplary act of... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Product Marketing; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Social Enterprise; Pharmaceutical Industry; Switzerland; Africa; Nigeria

15 Feb 2017
News

You Should Consider Buying a Small Business. But When?

15 Feb 2022
Book

When Working Harder Doesn’t Work, Time to Reinvent Your Career

in 1998 at the ripe old age of ninety-two), he would read what I have written up to this point and say right away that the professional decline I’ve been talking about—the initial abilities that fade all too early—comes from the fluid... View Details

Keywords: by Avery Forman

2021
Article

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

By: Katerina Linos, Laura Jakli and Melissa Carlson

As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a... View Details

Keywords: Demographics; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Communication Strategy; Civil Society or Community; Non-Governmental Organizations; Welfare; Greece