Publications

September 1988
Case

Skil Corp.

By: Michael E. Porter

The portable electric power tool market in the United States was approximately $1.1 billion in 1979. There were about a dozen manufacturers competing in the U.S. market, of which five were U.S. companies. Skil was the third largest U.S. competitor. Skil was acquired by... View Details

Keywords: Competition; Competitive Strategy; Mergers and Acquisitions; Business Strategy; Emerging Markets; United States

August 2018
Case

BlackBuck (A)

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

The case presents the challenges of scaling an asset-heavy company (that relies on its operations). It highlights how decisions on the early team impact a company’s ability to scale, linkage between growth and cash flows, as well the organizational impact of high... View Details

Keywords: Founders; Entrepreneurship; Growth and Development Strategy; Service Delivery; Cash Flow; Growth Management; Truck Transportation; Online Technology; India

July 2014 (Revised August 2014)
Case

AmazonFresh: Rekindling the Online Grocery Market

By: Rory McDonald, Clayton Christensen, Robin Yang and Ty Hollingsworth

More than a decade after the high-profile failures of several early online grocers, grocery remains the largest single U.S. retail category and one of the few that has not yet migrated online. Amazon began testing its grocery-delivery service, AmazonFresh, in Seattle,... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; New Markets; Grocery; Operations Strategy; Innovation and Invention; Strategy; Emerging Markets; Learning; Service Operations; Internet and the Web; Business Model; Food and Beverage Industry; United States

December 2008 (Revised March 2009)
Case

The World Food Programme during the Global Food Crisis (A)

By: Anette Mikes, Peter Tufano, Eric D. Werker and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

Rising food prices threatened an unprecedented number of people around the world with malnutrition or starvation in 2008. The new Executive Director of the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP)—the world's largest food relief agency—must not only address this... View Details

Keywords: Food; Globalized Firms and Management; Nutrition; Crisis Management; Business and Government Relations; Nonprofit Organizations; Welfare

02 Nov 2018
News

New Exhibit at HBS’s Baker Library Tells Tale of Rise and Fall of Lehman Brothers

23 Nov 2015
News

The Historian Who Came in from the Cold

26 Oct 2010
First Look

First Look: October 26, 2010

India, China), but they overlook significant ethnic markets within the United States. For example, the combined African-American and Hispanic markets in the U.S. are larger than the economies of all but 13 countries, and more than 2... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

25 Jan 2012
Working Paper Summaries

Who Lives in the C-Suite? Organizational Structure and the Division of Labor in Top Management

Keywords: by Maria Guadalupe, Hongyi Li & Julie Wulf

09 Jan 2012
Research & Ideas

Location, Location, Location: The Strategy of Place

what works in one location may not work somewhere else.” "The decision to expand is sometimes driven by the wrong reasons," says Associate Professor Juan Alcácer, who teaches in the Strategy Unit at Harvard View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Web

The Value Chain - Institute For Strategy And Competitiveness

HBS ISC Strategy Strategy Strategy Explained Business Strategy Creating a Successful Strategy Corporate Strategy The Role of Leaders Related Topics Business Strategy Business... View Details

2020
Working Paper

Bankruptcy and the COVID-19 Crisis

By: Jialan Wang, Jeyul Yang, Benjamin Iverson and Raymond Kluender

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 economic crisis on business and consumer bankruptcies in the United States using real-time data on the universe of filings. Historically, bankruptcies have closely tracked the business cycle and contemporaneous unemployment rates.... View Details

Keywords: Bankruptcy; Financial Distress; COVID-19; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Financial Crisis; Health Pandemics; United States

SSRN

Read Now

November 2011 (Revised May 2012)
Case

SecondMarket—Providing Liquidity for Shareholders of Privately Held iContact

By: William A. Sahlman, Ramana Nanda and James McQuade

In 2011, SecondMarket was an online platform that facilitated secondary transactions of illiquid assets, including private company stock. This case explores reasons for the decline in small-cap IPOs in the United States from the 1990s to the 2000s and how the emergence... View Details

Keywords: Business and Shareholder Relations

July 2005 (Revised September 2020)
Case

The U.S. Current Account Deficit

By: Laura Alfaro, Rafael Di Tella, Ingrid Vogel, Renee Kim, Sarah Jeong, Matthew Johnson and Jonathan Schlefer

Investors and policymakers throughout the world were confronted with the risk of painful economic consequences arising from the large U.S. current account deficit. In 2007, the U.S. current account deficit was $731 billion, equivalent to 5.3% of GDP. The implications... View Details

Keywords: World Economy; Macroeconomics; Borrowing and Debt; Currency; Foreign Direct Investment; Business and Government Relations; United States

31 Mar 2008
HBS Case

JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Crisis

of February 13, independent of this event. Do they think the elements of the structure and systems within the JetBlue operation are internally consistent with one another and externally consistent with the organization's overall business... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Air Transportation

19 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

$15 Billion in Five Years: What Data Tells Us About MacKenzie Scott’s Philanthropy

public policy and management at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Brian Trelstad is the William Henry Bloomberg Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Ethan Tran is an... View Details

Keywords: by Matthew Lee, Brian Trelstad, and Ethan Tran

January 2025 (Revised April 2025)
Case

Less Is More: Will Aldi's Expansion Plans Pay Off in a Crowded U.S. Grocery Market?

By: David Collis and Haisley Wert

In 2024, the discount grocery retailer Aldi announced bold U.S. expansion plans. Within five years, the German company would increase its store count by 30% to reach 3,200+ stores across the United States and approach becoming the fifth largest grocery retailer in the... View Details

Keywords: Scope; Grocery; Corporate Strategy; Expansion; Business Model; Competitive Strategy; Retail Industry; United States

Article

A Learning Perspective on Intraorganizational Knowledge Spill-Ins

By: James Oldroyd and Ranjay Gulati

This exploratory study examines the role of intraorganizational knowledge spill-ins in the process of inferential learning. Drawing on the notions of knowledge reliability (the creation of shared meanings) and validity (understandings of cause and effect), we explore... View Details

Keywords: Learning; Perspective; Knowledge; Business Units; Organizations

Find at Harvard