Publications

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February 2016 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Greening Walmart: Progress and Controversy

By: Rebecca Henderson and James Weber

In 2005, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, launched a sustainability initiative aimed at reducing waste and making the company more environmentally and socially conscious. By 2015, the company had made progress on multiple dimensions: energy efficiency in its... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Business or Company Management; Motivation and Incentives; Reputation; Environmental Sustainability; Retail Industry; United States

March 2018
Teaching Note

Making Target the Target: Boycotts and Corporate Political Activity (A) and (B)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Victor Wu

Through the challenges facing Target, the case examines the ways in which corporations can become involved in political and legislative debates and processes, ranging from campaign contributions to lobbying. In 2016, Target CEO Brian Cornell must determine how to... View Details

April 2020
Case

Cockpit Dynamics in Air France 447 and United 232

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Joshua Raymond

This case compares leadership and team dynamics between the cockpit crews in two renowned passenger airline crashes, twenty years apart: Air France 447 in 2009 and United 232 in 1989. The key dimensions of difference across the cases include organization and task... View Details

Keywords: Teams; Team Launch; Crisis Management; Groups and Teams; Leadership; Communication; Air Transportation Industry

September 2022
Case

HPP: Tapping the Netherlands’ Potential

By: Brian Trelstad and Idelès Kaandorp

Stichting Het Potentieel Pakken (HPP) was launched to solve a systemic problem in the Dutch Labor Market: gender inequity that was leading to a large number of women to work part-time in fields that were in desperately short supply of labor, like health care, child... View Details

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; Grants; Scaling And Growth; Nonprofit Organizations; Opportunities; Gender; Income; Employment; Health Care and Treatment; Human Capital; Mission and Purpose; Motivation and Incentives; Growth and Development Strategy; Employment Industry; Health Industry; Education Industry; Consulting Industry; Europe; Netherlands

March 2017
Case

Swagbucks

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Matthew G. Preble

In early 2016, Chuck Davis, chairman and CEO of Prodege LLC, parent company of the brand promotion business Swagbucks, and Josef Gorowitz, Prodege’s founder and president, must decide whether to acquire MyPoints, a competitor to Swagbucks, after the company’s... View Details

24 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

Boards and Corporate Governance: A Balanced Scorecard Approach

The Balanced Scorecard helps organizations manage the value creation process at each of these levels. In each situation, the Balanced Scorecard creates a strategy map that links financial results with the... View Details

Keywords: Re: Robert S. Kaplan & Krishna G. Palepu

March 2011 (Revised December 2012)
Teaching Note

Bono and U2 (TN)

By: Nancy F. Koehn, Nora N. Khan and Elizabeth Legris

Teaching Note for 809148. View Details

Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Transformation; Information Technology; Business Model; Arts; Entrepreneurship; Leadership; Music Industry

July 2019 (Revised May 2020)
Case

AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow

By: William R. Kerr, Joseph B. Fuller and Carl Kreitzberg

By the late 2000s, rapid changes in the telecommunications industry forced AT&T’s management team to take on a task that CEO Randall Stephenson called the “biggest logistical challenge” they had ever seen: retraining 100,000 workers by 2020. In 2012, internal company... View Details

October 2003 (Revised April 2005)
Case

Innovation Corrupted: The Rise and Fall of Enron

By: Malcolm S. Salter

Presents an historical overview of Enron's rise and fall and summarizes what is currently known about (1) the evolution of Enron's business model, (2) the organizational processes Enron officials relied on to drive and monitor the business, (3) emergent behavior... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Behavior; Governing and Advisory Boards; Success; Transformation; Failure; Business Processes; Energy Industry; United States

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June 1991 (Revised October 1991)
Case

General Electric: Reg Jones and Jack Welch

By: Francis Aguilar and Christopher A. Bartlett

When GE's retiring Reginald Jones turned the job of CEO over to Jack Welch on April 1, 1981, the Wall Street Journal reported that GE had "decided to replace a legend with a live wire." Some wondered if the young dynamo could fill the elder statesman's very large... View Details

Keywords: Management Teams; Business or Company Management; Change Management; Leading Change; Restructuring; Investment; Strategic Planning; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Succession

September 2019 (Revised June 2021)
Case

Dove and Real Beauty: Building a Brand with Purpose

By: Mark R. Kramer, Myriam Sidibe and Gunjan Veda

Unilever subsidiary Dove soap became a "brand with a purpose" and created shared value when the company decided to launch a Campaign for Real Beauty to combat the artificial media-driven stereotype of female beauty that causes appearance anxiety in women and girls... View Details

Keywords: Stereotype; Body Image; Female; Self-Esteem; Brands and Branding; Mission and Purpose; Advertising Campaigns; Gender; Resource Allocation

Organizations today can use both crowds and experts to produce knowledge. While prior work compares the accuracy of crowd-produced and expert-produced knowledge, we compare bias in these two models in the context of contested knowledge, which involves subjective,... View Details

16 Feb 2021
Cold Call Podcast

Fostering Authenticity and Employee Engagement at John Deere

Keywords: Re: Anthony Mayo; Manufacturing

June 2018
Teaching Note

Zurich Insurance

By: Boris Groysberg, David Lane and Joni Coughlin

This teaching note addresses six cases in the Zurich Insurance series, the overview case (HBS No. 417-035) and five cases focused on particular change efforts (HBS Nos. 417-036 through 417-040).
Zurich Insurance was undergoing organizational change after... View Details

October 2021 (Revised February 2022)
Case

Hospital 57357: Aligning Performance Towards a Vision of a Cancer-Free Childhood

By: Susanna Gallani and Youssef Abdel Aal

The case follows the Children Cancer Hospital in Egypt, also known as Hospital 57357, as it goes through the roll-out of a new performance management system, which Dr. Sherif Abouel Naga, founder and CEO of the hospital, had championed. This was a critical juncture as... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Performance Management; Performance Incentives; Strategic Alignment; Health Care and Treatment; Nonprofit Organizations; Strategy; Alignment; Performance Evaluation; Mission and Purpose; Change Management; Health Industry; Egypt; Middle East