Publications

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October 2009 (Revised June 2011)
Case

Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture

By: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely and Laura Winig

On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its board of directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Choices and Conditions; Governing and Advisory Boards; Service Delivery; Organizational Culture; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry

02 Nov 2018
News

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

November 2019 (Revised September 2022)
Case

TripAdvisor: An Itinerary for Growth

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Spencer Rascoff and Susie L. Ma

In 2019, TripAdvisor was one of the best-known and most-trafficked online travel sites. For nearly 20 years, its founder and CEO Steve Kaufer had steered TripAdvisor through many phases of growth and profitability, but recently the company’s growth had started to slow.... View Details

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Operations; Customer Value and Value Chain; Information Technology; Travel Industry; Massachusetts

September 2003 (Revised January 2004)
Case

Wal-Mart Stores in 2003

By: Pankaj Ghemawat, Stephen P. Bradley and Ken Mark

Examines Wal-Mart's development over three decades and provides financial and descriptive detail of its domestic operations. In 2003, Wal-Mart's Supercenter business has surpassed its domestic business as the largest generator of revenues. Its international operation... View Details

Keywords: Wages; Fairness; Corporate Strategy; Operations; Labor Unions; Problems and Challenges; Gender; Globalized Firms and Management; Competitive Advantage; Retail Industry; United States

12 Dec 2017
First Look

New Research and Ideas, December 12, 2017

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=53601 Harvard Business School Case 718-008 'Clarín Lies!': Bias, Post-Truth, and Populism in Argentina's Media War In 2012, Argentine media conglomerate Grupo Clarín and President Cristina... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

05 Oct 2021
Cold Call Podcast

How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition

Keywords: Re: Meg Rithmire

18 Apr 2018
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, April 18, 2018

companies is evaluated by linking the 2007 SBO to the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). We quantify the dependency of the United States as a whole, as well as individual states, on the contributions of... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

12 Jul 2016
First Look

July 12, 2016

gaining information. Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51329 July–August 2016 Harvard Business Review How to Pay for Health Care By: Porter, Michael E., and Robert S. Kaplan Abstract—The View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

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

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

01 Jul 2008
First Look

First Look: July 1, 2008

Working PapersCollaborative Architectures for Innovation Authors:Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti Abstract Collaborative innovation has become a hot topic in innovation today. Scholars, consultants, and the business press all urge... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

29 Jul 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Can Paying Firms Quicker Affect Aggregate Employment?

Keywords: by Jean-Noel Barrot and Ramana Nanda

23 Nov 2015
Book

The Historian Who Came in from the Cold

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

07 Jul 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron

Legacy of Enron's Collapse (Harvard University Press), the devastation of Enron was total—yet there is much that business today can gain from a postmortem of the once-triumphant company. Salter had access to an extensive library of public... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Energy; Utilities

05 Aug 2015
Research & Ideas

How Hormones Foretell Whether People Will Cheat

play a role in regulating hormone levels in employees. The bad news is that far too many business situations actually fuel the very hormones that trigger unethical behavior. The findings are detailed in the paper Hormones and Ethics:... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

July 2001 (Revised February 2004)
Case

Gerdau (A)

By: Joseph L. Bower, Luiz Felipe Monteiro and Sonja Ellingson Hout

Gerdau Group is a family-controlled Brazilian manufacturer and distributor of long steel products. Describes the evolution of the company's strategy, organization, and smart management, making it the No. 2 steel producer in Brazil. The company must decide whether to... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Family Business; Decision Choices and Conditions; Developing Countries and Economies; Globalization; Competitive Strategy; Steel Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Brazil; United States

Earl Sasser is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and has been a member of the faculty there since 1969. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Duke University in 1965, an MBA from the University of North Carolina in 1967, and a Ph.D. in... View Details

September 2013 (Revised March 2014)
Case

Progress Energy and Duke Energy (A)

By: Guhan Subramanian and Charlotte Krontiris

Just as Duke Energy and Progress Energy announce their merger—forming the largest utility company in the United States, to be led by the current Progress CEO—a nuclear reactor owned by Progress suffers major damage and must be taken offline. While Progress grapples... View Details

Keywords: Duke; Progress; Nuclear Energy; Mergers and Acquisitions; Corporate Governance; Energy Sources; Energy Industry; United States