Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,651)
- Faculty Publications (264)
- 2010
- Chapter
Managing Technical Debt in Software-Reliant Systems
By: Alan MacCormack, N. Brown, Y. Cai, Y. Guo, R. Kazman, M. Kim, P. Kruchten, E. Lim, R. Nord, I. Ozkaya, R. Sangwan, C. Seaman, K. Sullivan and N. Zazworka
- October 2010 (Revised December 2015)
- Supplement
Toyota Motor Corporation: 1990-2010
By: Roy D. Shapiro and Stephanie van Sice
This case follows Toyota's remarkable growth and geographic expansion from 1990 to 2010 and, in the recalls of 2009 and 2010, poses questions about the impact of that growth. Issues of increasing technological complexity also play a part. View Details
- August 2010 (Revised March 2012)
- Supplement
The Dow Acquisition of Rohm and Haas (E)
By: Jay W. Lorsch and Melissa Barton
Dow completed the acquisition of Rohm and Haas and escaped a battle in a Delaware courtroom View Details
- 2010
- Other Paper
Matching and Sub-Specialization by Technical Complexity in Cardiac Surgery
By: Kyna Fong and Robert S. Huckman
- March 2010 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
Systems Infrastructure at Google (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Stecker
This case describes how a senior vice president of engineering at Google, Bill Coughran, leads a high-performing engineering organization. The case focuses specifically on Coughran's encouraging two teams of engineers to develop competing solutions for application... View Details
- March 2010 (Revised August 2010)
- Supplement
Systems Infrastructure at Google (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Stecker
This case is a thick description of how a Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, Bill Coughran, leads a high-performing engineering organization. The case focuses specifically on Coughran's use of encouraging two teams of engineers to develop competing... View Details
- February 2010 (Revised May 2010)
- Case
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes
The case, in a non-profit project-oriented setting, introduces fundamental risk management principles and processes that are easily applicable to private sector settings. Gentry Lee, senior systems engineer and de-facto chief risk officer, is applying a new... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
When Open Architecture Beats Closed: The Entrepreneurial Use of Architectural Knowledge
This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying "bottlenecks" in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture... View Details
- January 2010 (Revised December 2011)
- Case
Jiamei Dental: Private Health Care in China
By: William C. Kirby and G.A. Donovan
With the recent announcement from the Chinese government that the country's healthcare system was going to undergo reform, Jiamei Dental Chairman Liu Jia wondered what that meant for his 15 year-old dental clinic business. Founded in 1993, Jiamei Dental Medical... View Details
- January 2010 (Revised August 2010)
- Background Note
Advanced Leadership Note: An Institutional Perspective and Framework for Managing and Leading
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Rakesh Khurana
Large-scale societal issues increasingly appear on the agenda of business leaders, including poverty, health, education, business-government relations, and the degradation of the environment. These problems are not entirely new, but the forces of globalization and the... View Details
- 2010
- Chapter
Leadership in a Globalizing World
In this chapter, world-renowned business expert, author, and Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter asks the question, "Is leadership different in a globalizing world--one of broadening horizons and burgeoning sources of ideas and supplies--than in... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
The Architecture of Complex Systems: Do Core-periphery Structures Dominate?
By: Alan MacCormack, Carliss Y. Baldwin and John Rusnak
Any complex technological system can be decomposed into a number of subsystems and associated components, some of which are core to system function while others are only peripheral. The dynamics of how such "core-periphery" structures evolve and become embedded in a... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions
The mirroring hypothesis predicts that the organizational patterns of a development project (e.g. communication links, geographic collocation, team and firm co-membership) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the system under development. Scholars... View Details
- Article
Mission-Driven Governance
By: Raymond Fisman, Rakesh Khurana and Edward Martenson
The purpose of this paper is to provide a useful, easily applied theory of governance performance. The existing model is fundamentally adversarial, rooted in the paradigm of principal-agent conflict. At its base is an image of governance as a never-ending struggle... View Details
- May 2009
- Case
Tokyo Electron Ltd.
By: Willy C. Shih and Andrew A. King
Tokyo Electron Ltd. operates in a constrained innovation environment, defined by modular boundaries that are long standing in the industry that it serves, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. While the original motivation for these boundaries was division... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised June 2014)
- Supplement
CityCenter (B): Economics and Delivery
By: A. Eugene Kohn, John D. Macomber and Ben Creo
Bill Smith is informed by his general contractor that a key component of the Aria Resort is going to be delayed. Aria is the centerpiece of CityCenter: a $9 billion complex and a bet-the-firm decision for MGM Mirage. Smith must make a decision as to whether to force... View Details
- September 2008
- Article
Firm Heterogeneity and Credit Risk Diversification
By: Samuel G. Hanson, M. Hashem Pesaran and Til Schuermann
This paper examines the impact of neglected heterogeneity on credit risk. We show that neglecting heterogeneity in firm returns and/or default thresholds leads to under estimation of expected losses (EL), and its effect on portfolio risk is ambiguous. Once EL is... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Architecture of Platforms: A Unified View
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and C. Jason Woodard
The central role of "platform" products and services in mediating the activities of disaggregated "clusters" or "ecosystems" of firms has been widely recognized. But platforms and the systems in which they are embedded are very diverse. In particular, platforms may... View Details
- August 2008
- Case
System on a Chip 2008: Ardentec Corporation
By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien, Chintay Shih and Ting-Chen Chen
Ardentec Corporation is a specialist in "wafer probing," a highly specialized niche sandwiched between the "front-end" and the "back-end" of semiconductor manufacturing. Because the semiconductor industry uses modular processes and has standard containers for the... View Details
- July 2008 (Revised March 2010)
- Case
McDonald's Plan to Win (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Karla Ingrid Gravis and Annette Kristine Rodriguez
As of 2007, McDonald's had made significant progress on its “Plan to Win,” and the company was rewarded by reaching an all-time high share price. However, McDonald's competitors had expanded beyond the typical fast food giants, such as Wendy's and Burger King, as... View Details