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  • Summer 2013
  • Article

Analyzing Performance of Service Organizations: Balanced Benchmarking Can Identify Best Practices That Are Often Hidden

By: H. David Sherman and Joe Zhu
Just as sports teams have increasingly relied on rigorous quantitative analyses, so have many businesses. In particular, a growing number of service organizations have been investigating the use of a sophisticated linear programming technique called DEA, or data... View Details
Keywords: Balanced Benchmarking; Management
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  • 09 Jan 2006
  • Research & Ideas

When Benchmarks Don’t Work

Benchmarking certainly has its virtues. Comparing production time or the cost of a standard process to that of peer companies can yield important insights about your own efficiencies—and ultimately, competitiveness. But View Details
Keywords: by Robert S. Kaplan; Service
  • 2017
  • Working Paper

Lessons Unlearned? Corporate Debt in Emerging Markets

By: Laura Alfaro, Gonzalo Asis, Anusha Chari and Ugo Panizza
This paper documents a set of new stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility for emerging market firms following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators during the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Debt; Financial Fragility; Firm-level Data; Large Firms; Emerging Markets; Borrowing and Debt; Corporate Finance; Financial Condition
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  • 19 Aug 2008
  • First Look

First Look: August 19, 2008

managers, investors, and regulators. The basic analytical tool is the risk-adjusted balance sheet, which shows the sensitivity of the enterprise's assets and liabilities to external "shocks." At the national level, the sectors... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 17 Aug 2020
  • Research & Ideas

What the Stockdale Paradox Tells Us About Crisis Leadership

neighborhood. Research by Leach and others indicates that people who survive disasters are able to regain cognitive function quickly after the event, assess their new environment accurately, and take goal-directed action to survive within it. This is the View Details
Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams
  • 01 Nov 2017
  • What Do You Think?

What Are the Real Lessons of the Wells Fargo Case?

David DeSteno, Who Can You Trust?, reminded us that “90% of people—most of whom identify themselves as morally upstanding—will act dishonestly to benefit themselves if they believe they won’t get caught.” Possible remedies were suggested by Dino Ferrari (“They should... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett; Banking
  • 18 Mar 2013
  • HBS Case

HBS Cases: LEGO

Out of work for a year following a serious illness in 1993, Kjeld appointed a five-person management team to help him run the company when he returned. The group focused mainly on driving growth. When a benchmarking study revealed LEGO's... View Details
Keywords: by Maggie Starvish; Entertainment & Recreation
  • 20 Oct 2010
  • Op-Ed

Export Competitiveness: Reversing the Logic

empirical data confirms the presence of this effect but does not indicate that it renders export-driven growth strategies infeasible (Wood/Mayer, 2009). Overall, the discussion remains far from having reached a consensus. At the minimum, there is a sense that there is... View Details
Keywords: by Christian Ketels
  • 16 Jul 2013
  • First Look

First Look: July 16

from shareholders than directors in a benchmark sample. They are also more likely than other independent directors to leave sued firms. Overall, shareholders use litigation along with director elections and director retention to hold some... View Details
Keywords: Anna Secino
  • 14 Jul 2020
  • Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

establishing or revising their safety protocols or preemptively stacking inventory. Adaptation sometimes meant being able to strike a fine balance between leveraging existing capabilities and finding innovative ways to integrate old... View Details
Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa
  • 31 Jan 2017
  • First Look

First Look at New Research: January 31, 2017

from the CEO—a process entailing the judicious selection of benchmarks for relative performance evaluation (RPE). We evaluate the efficacy of firms' chosen RPE benchmarks and document that, relative to a... View Details
Keywords: Carmen Nobel
  • 14 Dec 2010
  • Op-Ed

Tax US Companies to Spur Spending

holdings--estimates of the amount held by US public corporations easily exceed $1 trillion; several technology companies alone are sitting on cash balances in excess of $20 billion--are thought to result from the absence of investment... View Details
Keywords: by Mihir A. Desai
  • 01 Oct 2008
  • Research & Ideas

How Much Time Should CEOs Devote to Customers?

the current economic downturn, companies need marketing skills more than ever. But while every corporate mission statement pays lip service to respecting customer needs, actual customer expertise is typically a mile wide and an inch deep. A good CEO knows how to View Details
Keywords: by John Quelch
  • 03 Dec 2018
  • Research & Ideas

How Companies Can Increase Market Rewards for Sustainability Efforts

flavijus For the first time, a link has been drawn between public sentiment about a company’s sustainability practices and how that company is valued in the market. The results are important both for investors searching for under-valued, socially responsible companies,... View Details
Keywords: by Rachel Layne
  • 07 Jun 2004
  • What Do You Think?

How Important are Big Ideas?

big ideas guide us to put our brain to work." And Don Martin added, "Management concepts provide a benchmark against which the desired direction within a company both externally and internally can be measured." Others... View Details
Keywords: by James Heskett
  • 14 May 2013
  • First Look

First Look: May 14

benchmark setting, the marketplace mode is preferred if and only if the variance of local information exceeds the squared value of spillovers from marketing activities across products. We explore several generalizations, showing how the... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 11 Apr 2007
  • Research & Ideas

Adding Time to Activity-Based Costing

the 1980s, with time dimension modifications introduced by Anderson for clients of Acorn Systems. We asked Kaplan to describe the problems with traditional costing approaches, the improvements made by TDABC, and how it works with the View Details
Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert
  • 03 Oct 2017
  • First Look

First Look at Research and Ideas, October 3, 2017

Charles C.Y. Wang Abstract—Relative TSR (rTSR) is increasingly used by market participants to judge and incentivize managerial performance. We evaluate the efficacy, reasons, and implications of firms' benchmarks in rTSR-based contracts.... View Details
Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne
  • 03 Jan 2017
  • First Look

January 3, 2017

powerful machine learning technique known as Thompson sampling to address the challenge of balancing the exploration-exploitation tradeoff under the presence of inventory constraints. Our algorithms prove to have both strong theoretical... View Details
Keywords: Carmen Nobel
  • 10 Mar 2015
  • First Look

First Look: March 10

Fink had asked Global Head of HR Jeff Smith to outline to the GEC the firm's Diversity and Inclusion efforts, benchmarking its progress against eight practices associated with building more inclusive cultures. At the July 2014 off-site,... View Details
Keywords: Carmen Nobel

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