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Leadership Transitions | Baker Library | Bloomberg Center | Harvard Business School

concern took its place as the fourth-largest investment bank in the country. [13] Lehman Brothers, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. expanded its global financial markets, opening offices in Europe and Asia and serving in a... View Details

22 Aug 2022
Research & Ideas

Can Amazon Remake Health Care?

at Harvard Kennedy School. Chandra spoke to the Gazette about Amazon’s latest gamble and what it may mean for consumers. Harvard Gazette: Given the size of its investment, what could Amazon’s recent View Details

Keywords: by Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Health

May 2010 (Revised May 2011)
Case

Kent Thiry: "Mayor" of DaVita

By: William W. George and Natalie Kindred

Kent Thiry, CEO of dialysis provider DaVita, is considering how to integrate employees from recently acquired Gambro Healthcare without damaging DaVita's robust, unconventional internal culture. When Thiry joined DaVita in 1999, breaking an important promise to his... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Experience and Expertise; Employee Relationship Management; Leadership Style; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Personal Development and Career; Integration; Health Industry

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Sporting Goods, Hobby, Musical Instrument, and Book Stores; Sporting Goods, Hobby, Musical Instrument, and Book Stores; Sporting Goods, Hobby, Musical Instrument, and Book Stores; Sporting Goods, Hobby, Musical Instrument, and Book Stores

01 Jun 2023
News

Pet Project

data will confirm. The relative investment in driving new customer acquisition via retail is much lower than ecommerce, where driving site traffic is costly, and even SEO and... View Details

March 2018 (Revised July 2018)
Case

Whole Foods Under Amazon

By: Dennis Campbell, Tatiana Sandino, James Barnett and Christine Snively

In August 2017, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. Whole Foods was struggling with high costs and faced growing competition from traditional supermarkets offering more organic products. Prior to the acquisition, Whole Foods began rolling out a new... View Details

Keywords: Performance Efficiency; Performance Improvement; Employee Relationship Management; Acquisition; Change Management; Food and Beverage Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

11 Jul 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Deconstructing 'Customer Experience'

Legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt warned his students and industry executives against “marketing myopia”—that is, adopting an insular marketing approach where the business puts its own needs ahead of... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail; Service

February 2021
Background Note

Jobs to Be Done: A Toolbox

By: Derek C. M. van Bever, Bob Moesta, Iuliana Mogosanu, Shaye Roseman and Katie Zandbergen

The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Acquisition; Attitudes; Perception; Theory; Behavior; Customer Relationship Management

01 Dec 2023
News

Case Study: Staking a Claim

Illustration by Nhung Lê Kate Terry (MBA 2005) knows that no one attends their fifth-grade career fair and comes home hoping to pursue a career in insurance—but that’s exactly where she wound up. “I really fell in love with it,” she says. As cofounder and CEO of... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; Insurance Carriers and Related Activities; Finance

Web

Curriculum - Business & Environment

concepts: Business and Government Relations, Business Ethics, Corporate Governance Leadership and Corporate Accountability Aviva plc: Examining Net Zero Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: Unilever View Details

01 Oct 1999
News

Banking on Success

Acquisitions department and presided over some of the largest deals transacted during the merger-crazed 1980s. He joined Morgan Stanley in 1988 as a managing director and later... View Details

Keywords: Deborah E. Blagg

May 2013
Case

Launching Krispy Natural: Cracking the Product Management Code

By: Frank V. Cespedes and Heather Beckham

Pemberton Products is a U.S. market leader in the cookie and bakery snacks segment of the sweet snack market. Looking to expand into the salty snack market, the company acquires Krispy Inc., a maker of salty snack crackers located in the southeastern U.S. To compete... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Competition; Organizational Culture; Management Teams; Brands and Branding; Expansion; Marketing Strategy; Product Launch; Acquisition; Food and Beverage Industry; Ohio; United States

06 Sep 2004
Research & Ideas

The Innovator’s Battle Plan

When companies have the same capabilities and motivation, they care about the battle and have the necessary skills to fight it. Skills in execution make the difference here—and because other scholars have... View Details

Keywords: by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott D. Anthony & Erik A. Roth

July 2022 (Revised September 2022)
Case

Birla Carbon Egypt: Building Soft Power in a Foreign Country

By: Jeremy Friedman and Malini Sen

Birla Carbon, a flagship business of the nearly $60-billion global conglomerate and India-headquartered Aditya Birla Group (ABG), is one of the world's top manufacturers and suppliers of high-quality carbon black. The largest among its 16 manufacturing plants is Birla... View Details

02 Oct 2006
Research & Ideas

Negotiating in Three Dimensions

entrepreneurs who must come to productive terms with investors, potential employees and board members, technology partners, distributors, and possible acquisitions as well as... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

September 2018
Case

Clayton, Dubilier & Rice at 40

By: Josh Lerner, Abhijit Tagade and Terrence Shu

In 2018, private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice celebrated its 40th anniversary and its 20th year under the leadership of CEO Don Gogel. In those decades, CD&R showed solid portfolio performance and generated strong returns for its investors - accomplishments... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Succession; Buyout; Leveraged Buyout; Turnaround; Operations; Private Equity; Management Succession; Business Model; Leveraged Buyouts; Trends; Organizational Change and Adaptation

June 1975 (Revised September 2004)
Case

Angus Cartwright III

By: Kenneth J. Hatten, William J. Poorvu, Howard H. Stevenson, Arthur I. Segel and John H. Vogel, Jr.

Judy and John DeRight, looking to diversify their investment portfolios, have retained Angus Cartwright, Jr. to identify prospective real estate acquisitions. Mr. Cartwright has four potential properties that he feels merit an in-depth financial analysis. The case... View Details

Keywords: Acquisition; Cash Flow; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Taxation; Balanced Scorecard; Valuation

April 2002
Background Note

Consolidation of Highly Fragmented Service Industries, The

Designed to familiarize students with the consolidation of highly fragmented labor-dependent service industries, offering insights into service firm growth and the ways services can, and cannot, increase their efficiency and effectiveness. Two frameworks are presented... View Details

Keywords: Consolidation; Acquisition; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Industry

15 Jul 2019
Book

Many Executives Are Afraid of Finance. Here's How They Can Gain Confidence

and how investors can disagree so sharply on controversial companies ranging from Netflix to Uber to Tesla. Gerdeman: When a company has a lot of cash, a CEO can choose to grow the company organically—through expansion—or... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

2016
Working Paper

Pay Now or Pay Later? The Economics within the Private Equity Partnership

By: Victoria Ivashina and Josh Lerner

The economics of partnerships have been of enduring interest to economists, but many issues regarding intergenerational conflicts and their impact on the continuity of these organizations remain unclear. We examine 717 private equity partnerships and show that (a) the... View Details

Keywords: Partnerships; Leveraged Buyout; Venture Capital; Private Equity; Partners and Partnerships; Leveraged Buyouts