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- June 2025
- Case
Vail Resorts: Responding to Activist Pressure (A)
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
On January 27, 2025, the head of a relatively small hedge fund named Late Apex Partners sent a highly critical letter to the board of directors of Vail Resorts, the world’s largest ski resort operator. In his letter, and the 88-slide presentation that accompanied his... View Details
Keywords: Corporate Finance; Capital Budgeting; Corporate Governance; Competitive Advantage; Competitive Strategy; Leading Change; Valuation; Investment Activism; Climate Change; Management Succession; Financial Management; Risk Management; Business and Shareholder Relations; Sports Industry; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Travel Industry; United States; Australia; Canada
- April 2025 (Revised June 2025)
- Case
Governing Sustainability in a Shifting Context (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Will Hurwitz
In early 2025, boards of directors had to rethink corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts amid rapidly-shifting social, legal, regulatory, and economic forces. While just a few years earlier, calls to address racial justice and climate change reached into... View Details
Keywords: Climate Change; Corporate Governance; Diversity; Leadership; Business or Company Management; Mission and Purpose; Social Media; Race; Environmental Sustainability; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Governing and Advisory Boards; Lawfulness; Lawsuits and Litigation; Measurement and Metrics; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Business and Shareholder Relations; Social Issues; Retail Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; Banking Industry; United States
- March 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Case
ING Türkiye: Flexible Work in a Competitive Banking Environment
By: Ashley Whillans and Nico Schaefer
This case explores ING Türkiye’s journey toward workplace flexibility within the traditionally conservative Turkish banking sector. Beginning with early remote work experiments in 2015 and culminating in the FlexING model, by 2024 ING Türkiye had positioned itself as a... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships
between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant
challenges.... View Details
- January 2025 (Revised April 2025)
- Case
Blue Frontier: Disrupting Air Conditioning
By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jacob A. Small
Serial entrepreneur Daniel Betts founded Blue Frontier in South Florida to offer a climate-friendly solution to increase air conditioning efficiency and dehumidify using new technology he developed. Backed by significant venture capital, Blue Frontier had to choose... View Details
- January 2025
- Case
North Forty: Managing Liquidity Through Change
By: Luis M. Viceira and Brad Towne
This case explores the interaction between spending and investment decisions at a family office, specifically the family office of Jeff and Tricia Raikes, with special emphasis on the management of spending, portfolio investments, and asset liquidity in the presence of... View Details
- 2025
- Book
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
We all struggle with difficult conversations, but we're often not very good at easy ones either. Though we do it all the time, conversation is one of the most complex, demanding, and delicate of all human tasks, rife with possibilities for misinterpretation and... View Details
Keywords: Interpersonal Communication
- January–February 2025
- Article
Why People Resist Embracing AI
The success of AI depends not only on its capabilities, which are becoming more advanced each day, but on people’s willingness to harness them. Unfortunately, many people view AI negatively, fearing it will cause job losses, increase the likelihood that their personal... View Details
- January–February 2025
- Article
Why People Resist Embracing AI: The Five Main Obstacles—and How To Overcome Them
The success of AI depends not only on its capabilities, which are becoming more advanced each day, but on people’s willingness to harness them. Unfortunately, many people view AI negatively, fearing it will cause job losses, increase the likelihood that their personal... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Scaling Core Earnings Measurement with Large Language Models
By: Matthew Shaffer and Charles CY Wang
We study the application of large language models (LLMs) to the estimation of core earnings, i.e., a firm's persistent profitability from its core business activities. This construct is central to investors' assessments of economic performance and valuations. However,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Digital Platforms 2.0: Learnings, Opportunities, and Challenges
By: Shrabastee Banerjee, Ishita Chakraborty, Hana Choi, Hannes Datta, Remi Daviet, Chiara Farronato, Minkyung Kim, Anja Lambrecht, Puneet Manchanda, Aniko Oery, Ananya Sen, Marshall W Van Alstyne, Prasad Vana, Kenneth C Wilbur, Xu Zhang and Bobby Zhou
Platform-based digital ecosystems form the backbone of our interactions with the Internet. Over the past decade, digital ecosystems have witnessed significant growth, both in terms of industry footprint and academic research. Yet, the challenges associated with their... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
Major League Baseball: Changing the Rules of America's Pastime
By: Stephen A. Greyser, Mac Levin and Brent Schwarz
This case describes the efforts of Major League Baseball (MLB) to make meaningful changes in the rules affecting the ways the game is played. These changes are intended to speed the pace of the game and make it more appealing to younger fans. The principal changes... View Details
- June 2024
- Article
Rationalizing Outcomes: Interdependent Learning in Competitive Markets
By: Anoop R. Menon and Dennis Yao
In this article we use simulation models to explore interdependent learning in competitive markets. Such interactions require attention to both the mental representations held by the management of the focal firm as well as the beliefs of that management about the... View Details
- May 2024
- Case
Naked Wines: The Profit vs. Growth Decision
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Edward A. Meyer
Nick Devlin faced a difficult strategic decision in October 2022. As the CEO of a UK-based subscription business connecting wine drinkers in the US, UK, and Australia with winemakers from around the world (which one journalist called the “Netflix of Wine”), he had to... View Details
Keywords: Profit Vs. Growth; Platform Business; Economies Of Scale; Subscription Business; Wine; Scaling; Racing; Value Creation; Network Effects; Business Startups; Small Business; Financial Management; Financial Strategy; Growth Management; Business Strategy; Competitive Advantage; Expansion; Profit; E-commerce; Growth and Development Strategy; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Food and Beverage Industry; United States; Australia; United Kingdom
- May 2024
- Supplement
HubSpot and Motion AI (B): Generative AI Opportunities
By: Jill Avery
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) had progressed significantly since HubSpot’s acquisition of Motion AI in 2017. Generative AI was the newest major development. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies such as HubSpot were analyzing how generative AI... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Human-Computer Interactions in Demand Forecasting and Labor Scheduling Decisions
By: Caleb Kwon, Ananth Raman and Jorge Tamayo
We investigate whether corporate officers should grant managers discretion to override AI-driven demand forecasts and labor scheduling tools. Analyzing five years of administrative data from a large grocery retailer using such an AI tool, encompassing over 500 stores,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism: How Pervasive Cronyism and Restricted Suffrage Are Destroying Democratic Capitalism as a National Ideal…and What to Do about It
What are we to do about declining public trust and confidence in democratic capitalism, which many citizens consider a cornerstone of our national ideology and identity? While the answer is not entirely clear, I argue in this essay that any effort aimed at restoring... View Details
- January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
- Course Overview Note
Managing Customers for Growth: Course Overview for Students
By: Eva Ascarza
Managing Customers for Growth (MCG) is a 14-session elective course for second-year MBA students at Harvard Business School. It is designed for business professionals engaged in roles centered on customer-driven growth activities. The course explores the dynamics of... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
Sprouts Farmers Market
By: Rajiv Lal, Forest L. Reinhardt and Natalie Kindred
Sprouts Farmers Markets (Sprouts) is a Phoenix, Arizona-based chain of 400-plus natural foods stores in 23 U.S. states and $6.4 billion in sales as of 2022. In its product assortment, brand image, and store environment, Sprouts emphasizes freshness, health, innovation,... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
'Care in Every Drop': Ayala Corporation and Manila Water (A)
By: Debora L. Spar, Paul Healy, Tricia Peralta and Julia M. Comeau
Since 1834, eight generations of the Ayala family have used their conglomerate to fund nation-building projects in the Philippines, including investments in tramcars, telecommunications, hospitals, and schools. In 1997, Ayala’s subsidiary, Manila Water, took control of... View Details