Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(914)
- Faculty Publications (238)
- Article
Creating Value Together
By: Maxim Sytch and Ranjay Gulati
Conventional wisdom suggests that companies should avoid growing dependent on their business partners. If one company, the thinking goes, grows too dependent on a counterpart by getting the entire input for a particular activity from it and is not able to switch... View Details
- June 2008 (Revised July 2009)
- Case
COFCO Xinjiang Tunhe Co., Ltd.
By: David E. Bell and Aldo Sesia
In 2005, COFCO Ltd., one of China's largest and most successful companies, acquired Xinjiang Tunhe, a tomato processing firm, which had been, in recent years, poorly managed. COFCO changed Tunhe's management team and set out to create a culture of professionalism and... View Details
- Article
Unconventional Insights for Managing Stakeholder Trust
By: Michael Pirson and Deepak Malhotra
Initiatives to build and maintain trust with various stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers and investors, are at the top of the executive agenda at many organizations. But most companies don't really understand how to manage stakeholder trust... View Details
- April 2008
- Case
Engstrom Auto Mirror Plant: Motivating in Good Times and Bad
By: Michael Beer and Elizabeth Collins
In May 2007, the Engstrom Auto Mirrors plant, a relatively small supplier based in Indiana, faces a crisis. The business was in the second year of a downturn. Sales had started to decline in 2005; a year later, plant manager Ron Bent had been forced to lay off more... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised August 2011)
- Case
Olympia Machine Company, Inc.
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Benson P. Shapiro
The management team of an industrial equipment supplier is debating the company's method of compensating salespeople. Different executives have offered different alternatives to the current method of straight salary plus expenses. Each option has different implications... View Details
- February 2008 (Revised July 2008)
- Case
Wanxiang Group: A Chinese Company's Global Strategy
By: Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan, Keith Chi-ho Wong and Tracy Manty
With an almost forty-year history as a business in China, the Wanxiang Group has navigated through the significantly different political and economic changes in China to succeed as a global leader in the auto parts industry and to develop into a broad business... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised December 2011)
- Case
Inner Mongolia Yili Group: China's Pioneering Dairy Brand
By: Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, F. Warren McFarlan and Tracy Yuen Manty
Setting up the goal to become one of the top 20 enterprises in the world dairy industry by 2010, the Inner Mongolia Yili Group had ambitious plans. As one of China's biggest national dairy companies, its main challenge was competing as a local company against... View Details
- January 2008
- Article
The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. In 1979, a young associate professor at Harvard Business School published his first... View Details
- September 2007
- Case
Tetra Pak Argentina
By: Tarun Khanna, Krishna G. Palepu and Gustavo A. Herrero
Deals with the hands-on management of a difficult situation facing the subsidiary of a multinational corporation (Tetra Pak) in a developing country (Argentina). The situation arises from a major economic, social, and institutional breakdown that jeopardizes the... View Details
- September 2007
- Article
Investigative Negotiation
By: Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman
This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Negotiators often fail to achieve results because they channel too much effort into... View Details
- July 2007 (Revised March 2008)
- Background Note
Staging Two-Sided Platforms
By: Thomas R. Eisenmann and Andrei Hagiu
Firms that aspire to develop two-sided platforms face a formidable challenge. Prospective users on each side will not invest in the platform until they are confident there will be enough users on the other side. Traditional strategies for dealing with this... View Details
- 2007
- Working Paper
What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns
By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr
Many industries are geographically concentrated. Many mechanisms that could account for such agglomeration have been proposed. We note that these theories make different predictions about which pairs of industries should be coagglomerated. We discuss the measurement of... View Details
- November 2006
- Case
Sarah Talley and Frey Farms Produce: Negotiating with Wal-Mart (A)
By: James K. Sebenius and Ellen Knebel
Describes the retailer-supplier negotiations of Frey Farms Produce in its growth from a small local produce supplier to becoming a supplier for Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer. The (A) case sets up three negotiations led by Sarah Talley of Frey Farms Produce in... View Details
- May 2006 (Revised November 2006)
- Case
IKEA's Global Sourcing Challenge: Indian Rugs and Child Labor (A)
By: Christopher A. Bartlett, Vincent Marie Dessain and Anders Sjoman
Traces the history of IKEA's response to a TV report that its Indian carpet suppliers were using child labor. Describes IKEA's growth, including the importance of a sourcing strategy based on its close relationships with suppliers in developing countries. Details the... View Details
- April 2006 (Revised June 2008)
- Case
New Balance Athletic Shoe, Inc.
By: H. Kent Bowen, Robert S. Huckman and Carin-Isabel Knoop
Considers whether New Balance, one of the world's five largest manufacturers of athletic footwear, should respond to Adidas' planned acquisition of Reebok--a transaction that would join the second- and third-largest companies in the industry. Highlights the unique... View Details
- November 2005 (Revised August 2007)
- Case
ConAgra Foods: The Next Chapter
By: Ray A. Goldberg and Mary L. Shelman
In 2005, CEO Bruce Rohde has almost completed the integration of ConAgra Foods' collection of 90 independent operating companies into a focused, value-added firm and was beginning to think about his successor. ConAgra had become the second largest food company and No.... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Corporate Strategy; Leading Change; Management Succession; Strategic Planning; Brands and Branding; Food; Agribusiness; Product Marketing; Management Teams; Transformation; Customer Focus and Relationships; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; United States
- June 2005 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Amazon.com's European Distribution Strategy
By: Janice Hammond and Claire Chiron
Describes how Amazon's distribution system evolved from the company's inception. In 2003, Amazon Europe must decide how to reconfigure its distribution network in light of expected growth, products proliferation, and geographical expansion in Europe. Examines how... View Details
- December 2004 (Revised May 2005)
- Case
Nestle: Sustainable Agriculture Initiative
Swiss food giant Nestle attempts to improve the performance of its suppliers of agricultural commodities to raise quality, lower costs, and contribute to sustainable development. Its initiatives focus first on coffee, cocoa, and milk. Nestle managers assert that the... View Details
- September 2004 (Revised December 2004)
- Case
Metso Paper: Globalization of Finnish Metal Workshops
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Marikka Heikkila and Kalle Lyytinen
Metso Paper, the world's largest producer of paper machines, aims to transform itself into a knowledge- and information-based service and solution provider for the paper industry by aggressively exploiting information technologies. In the fall of 2002, Jorma Hujala, a... View Details
- May 2004 (Revised April 2006)
- Case
Ultra: The Quest for Leadership (A)
By: Dwight B. Crane and Ricardo Reisen de Pinho
Ultra is one of a small group of competing Brazilian petrochemical companies, each of which buys raw material and is a minority owner of Copene, a "cracking" company that provides ethylene and other materials. Because of an industry restructuring, an auction of shares... View Details