Publications

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21 Aug 2023
Book

You’re More Than Your Job: 3 Tips for a Healthier Work-Life Balance

The days of sticking with one job through retirement are long gone. Younger workers are prioritizing happiness over workplace loyalty, often out of necessity. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wallace offers a roadmap for... View Details

Keywords: by Kara Baskin

March 2018
Supplement

Sandra Brown Goes Digital (C): Raising Quality in a Healthcare Company

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jonathan Cohen

Using digital and social media tools and lessons learned from prior change campaigns as a middle manager in a large biotech company, Sandra Brown continued in a new role in the quality division, engaging staff in a quality movement at the company. She had found a new... View Details

Keywords: Digital; Grassroots Movement; Managing Change; Career Path; Stakeholder Engagement; Engagement; Health Care Industry; Quality; Leading Change; Performance Improvement; Personal Development and Career; Social Media; Health Industry

16 Nov 2021
HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

Markets Unit at HBS. The cases hold a crucial lesson for business leaders: Tormenting workers can result in dire consequences. While the cases describe an extreme example, Montgomery wonders if the improper pressure tactics used at France... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

23 Aug 2006
Op-Ed

The Real Wal-Mart Effect

This opinion piece, first published in the New York Times in August 2005, has been updated by Pankaj Ghemawat for HBS Working Knowledge.Mighty Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, must feel less like a hotbed of retailing and more like a war room. There is... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat & Ken A. Mark; Retail

22 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

Manager Visibility No Guarantee of Fixing Problems

Motions: An Empirical Test of Management Involvement in Process Improvement," HBS professor Anita L. Tucker and Harvard School of Public Health professor Sara J. Singer show that communicating with... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Health

29 Nov 2021
Research & Ideas

How Bonuses Get Employees to Choose Work Over Family

pay—and that has the potential to lay the groundwork for an overworked, unhappy existence, according to research by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit. The research shows that View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka

April 1, 2020
Article

A Detailed Plan for Getting Americans Back to Work

By: Amitabh Chandra, Mark Fishman and Douglas Melton

Given the different impact that the pandemic is having on individual communities across the country, the notion that all workers should be allowed to return to work on one date is unrealistic. Instead, individual states should make that determination. This article lays... View Details

Keywords: Return To Work; Health Pandemics; Employment; Safety; Planning; United States

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07 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

Supervisor of Sandwiches? More Companies Inflate Titles to Avoid Extra Pay

see it happening at the Gap and Pizza Hut, but we also see it happening at Facebook, JPMorgan, and health care firms.” There are now hundreds of thousands of workers across the US with dubious managerial... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

29 Jan 2018
Book

How 'Teaming' Saved 33 Lives in the Chilean Mining Disaster

Workers test the NASA-engineered capsule used to lift trapped miners to the surface. Hugo Infante/Government of Chile via Wikimedia Commons (Editor's Note: Amy Edmondson advises managers to think of teams as a verb, "teaming," which means... View Details

Keywords: by Amy C. Edmondson; Mining

June 2017
Case

Obesity Management at Kaiser Permanente: A New Mindset for Healthcare Delivery?

By: Kevin Schulman, Gregory Leya and Christina Beveridge

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is the largest managed care organization in the United States with over 10 million members. KP evolved from a prepayment or capitation model that focuses the organization around the efficiency of care and the health of the population it serves.... View Details

Keywords: Operations; Health Care and Treatment; Business Model; Strategy; Health Industry; United States

October 1993 (Revised July 1994)
Case

A Brush with AIDS (A)

By: Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. and Jerry Useem

A product manager at a health products company is responsible for marketing sharps containers, which hospitals use to store used needles in order to protect medical workers from being pricked with AIDS-contaminated needles. After hospitals report repeated instances of... View Details

Keywords: Health; Cost vs Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Safety; Values and Beliefs; Profit; Goals and Objectives; Compensation and Benefits; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry

22 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees

workers over the past several months, Neeley says managers should keep three things in mind as they develop long-term plans for hybrid work. 1. Trust in employee autonomy While working from home, employees have enjoyed an unprecedented... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

23 Sep 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Operational Failures and Problem Solving: An Empirical Study of Incident Reporting

Keywords: by Julia Adler-Milstein, Sara J. Singer & Michael W. Toffel; Health

November–December 2020
Article

Our Work-from-Anywhere Future

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury

The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Best Practices; Employment; Health Pandemics; Geographic Location; Opportunities; Problems and Challenges

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July 3, 2025
Article

A New Framework for Reducing Healthcare Disparities

By: Susanna Gallani, Mary Lynch Witkowski, Lidia M. V. R. Moura and Katie Sonnefeldt

Despite decades of initiatives to address healthcare inequities in the U.S., disparities across race, gender, geography, and income remain stubbornly persistent. This article introduces the Strategic Fingerprint Framework for Health Equity, a practical, principle-based... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Demographics; Outcome or Result; Health Care and Treatment; Framework; Health Industry

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April 2010 (Revised September 2011)
Case

The Dannon Company: Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility (A)

By: Christopher Marquis, Pooja Mehta Shah, Amanda Elizabeth Tolleson and Bobbi Thomason

At the end of 2009, The Dannon Company was considering pro actively communicating its CSR efforts to consumers. With the strong connection between Dannon's production of health foods and its commitment to health and nutrition-based CSR activities, communicating these... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Nutrition; Marketing Communications; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Risk and Uncertainty; Natural Environment; Food and Beverage Industry

March 2010 (Revised October 2011)
Case

Highland District County Hospital: Gastroenterology Care in Sweden

By: Michael E. Porter, Jennifer F Baron and Martin Rejler

Sweden's Highland District County Hospital, similar to a community hospital in the US, undertook a major restructuring to integrate care delivery for medical conditions served by the Department of Medicine. Each subspecialty within the Department would form a single,... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Sweden