Publications

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03 Jun 2002
Research & Ideas

How to Succeed With Your New Boss

things fast when you know that the business has serious structural problems. So it is wise to get bad news on the table early and to lower unrealistic expectations. Be careful to assess your new organization's capacity for change before... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Watkins

27 Apr 2016
Research & Ideas

How the FBI Reinvented Itself After 9/11

on the United States, killing nearly 3,000 people with four hijacked airliners—and throwing the FBI’s structure and identity into question. Since its founding in 1908, the organization had focused primarily on solving domestic crimes and... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

01 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

How To Make Restructuring Work for Your Company

"prepackaged" bankruptcy plan. In addition, if ownership of the firm's equity changes significantly, say because creditors exchange their claims for new stock, the firm can lose the often sizable tax benefit of its net operating... View Details

Keywords: by Stuart C. Gilson

25 Jan 2021
Book

In a Nutshell, Why American Capitalism Succeeded

American. I structured the book around trying to understand why business had come to have such a central place in America and to assessing the consequences of a society so shaped by business. Silverthorne: What one finding in your book is... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Manufacturing

07 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Digital Transformation: A New Roadmap for Success

front lines of their organizations and, as a consequence, their customers. Leaders need to be aware of these blind spots and empower their employees—including those closest to the customer experience—to take ownership of customers’... View Details

Keywords: by Linda A. Hill, Ann Le Cam, Sunand Menon, and Emily Tedards

May 2007
Article

Aspects of Endowment: A Query Theory of Value Construction

By: Eric Johnson, Gerald Häubl and Anat Keinan

How do people judge the monetary value of objects? One clue is provided by the typical endowment study (D. Kahneman, J. L. Knetsch, & R. H. Thaler, 1991), in which participants are randomly given either a good, such as a coffee mug, that they may later sell ("sellers")... View Details

Keywords: Profit; Forecasting and Prediction; Theory; Valuation; Loss; Ownership; Decision Choices and Conditions

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08 Nov 2016
First Look

November 8, 2016

shifts in strategy with far-reaching consequences for the structure of industries, the way people behave, and the resources they use. Transformational reforms typically involve a decision to change a suite of institutional arrangements... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

November 2007 (Revised June 2011)
Case

ISS A/S (A)

By: Clayton S. Rose

Provides the opportunity to examine the nature and extent of a company's responsibilities to its bondholders, and to develop an enhanced understanding of the challenges in managing contractual obligations, and circumstances under which business leaders might agree to... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Bonds; Contracts; Private Equity; Leveraged Buyouts; Privatization; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Borrowing and Debt; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Europe

October 2017 (Revised April 2024)
Case

Snap Inc. Goes Public (A)

By: Lynn Sharp Paine and Will Hurwitz

Snap Inc.’s chairman must decide how to address investor concerns about the company’s unprecedented plans to issue only non-voting shares in its upcoming IPO. The case is set in early 2017 following the public availability of Snap’s IPO filing with the U.S. Securities... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Capital Structure; Corporate Accountability; Governing and Advisory Boards; Corporate Governance; Going Public; Business and Shareholder Relations; Leadership; Management; Mobile and Wireless Technology; Venture Capital; Technology Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Information Technology Industry; United States; California

November – December 2011
Article

Explaining Influence Rents: The Case for an Institutions-Based View of Strategy

By: Gautam Ahuja and Sai Yayavaram

Research in strategy has identified and tried to explain four types of rents: monopolistic rents, efficiency rents, quasi rents, and Schumpeterian rents. Building on previous work on political and institutional strategies, we add a fifth type of rent: influence rents.... View Details

Keywords: Institutions; Influence Rents; Generic Strategies; Strategy; Organizations; Renting or Rental; Economics

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18 Nov 2022
HBS Case

What Does It Take to Safeguard a Legacy in Asset Management?

structures follow a similar pattern. Brown decided to go another route—an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). In 2016, Brown agreed to sell 100 percent of his ownership... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Financial Services

September 2024
Case

Topaz: Navigating Governance, Legacy, and Change

By: Christina R. Wing and Carla Larangeira

Since its founding in 2011, the Garza Sada brothers and their father positioned Topaz among leading family offices in Monterrey, Mexico, with several assets under management. Topaz aspired to have a transformative impact across multiple Mexican industries. An industry... View Details

Keywords: Business Conglomerates; Family Business; Governing and Advisory Boards; Managerial Roles; Management Succession; Family Ownership; Corporate Governance; Organizational Structure; Adoption; Financial Services Industry; Real Estate Industry; Education Industry; Energy Industry; Latin America; Mexico

12 May 2009
First Look

First Look: May 12, 2009

implementation of radical routines and resource configuration. Structural arrangements, pre-set change routines, and existing decisional priorities are insufficient to fashion relevant capabilities into new core activities. Ad-hoc problem... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

15 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

Managing the Family Business: It Takes a Village

business, its owners, and the family in control—is that strong, long-term business performance also requires strong performance by the family and by the ownership group. You can't keep a family business performing well over many years... View Details

20 Aug 2020
Book

From the Plow to the Pill: How Technology Shapes Our Lives

it definitively, but the evidence is pretty clear: As society moved from hunting and gathering, and we developed settled agriculture, we moved out of the social structure that was known as a tribe to what we now think of as the family.... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

September 2019 (Revised August 2020)
Case

Engineering an Inclusive Bioeconomy

By: Tarun Khanna, Raffaella Sadun and Susie L. Ma

In 2019, entrepreneur Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio was developing a project he hoped could generate and share wealth from the natural resources of the Amazon without destroying those resources. His idea, called Earth Bank of Codes (EBC), would create a library of the... View Details