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- July–August 2025
- Article
How to Identify the Perfect Cofounder
By: Julia Austin
One of the first and most important decisions entrepreneurs make is whether to go it alone or bring on cofounders. Many investors favor startups with multiple founders, believing that a team reduces business risk by diversifying skills, sharing responsibilities, and... View Details
- March 7, 2025
- Article
Leaders Can Move Fast and Fix Things
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
The assumption embedded in Silicon Valley’s famous “move fast and break things” ethos is that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for creating the future. The authors have spent... View Details
- September–October 2024
- Article
Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong
By: Michael Luca and Amy C. Edmondson
When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any... View Details
- May 2024
- Case
Net Protections (A)
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Nobuo Sato and Akiko Kanno
In Case A, set in early 2017, Net Protections (NP) is the largest Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) fintech service in Japan and is experiencing a slowdown in growth of its core product, NP Atobarai. Launched in 2002 as non-membership service, the NP Atobarai product has given... View Details
- 2023
- Book
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss
Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Davide Sola and Martin Kupp
Many start-ups experience enormous popularity and runaway growth, but only a few go on to become stable giants. What separates them from the pack? They all go through a developmental stage called extrapolation, say three business school professors.
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- November 2022
- Technical Note
Leader Action Orientations
By: Ryan Raffaelli, Akshaya Varghese and Laura Weimer
Leaders are responsible for planning and executing actions that advance organizational goals. As individuals gain career experience, they tend to develop and rely on implicit mental models that shape how they go about “getting things done.” Without knowing it, most... View Details
- 14 Jan 2022
- Interview
Why We Need to Think of the Office as a Tool, with Very Specific Uses, Interview with Adi Ignatius
By: Tsedal Neeley and Adi Ignatius
HBR professor Tsedal Neeley has focused for years on a pair of essential business imperatives: how to go global, and how to become truly digital. More recently she has established herself as an expert in the nitty gritty aspects of the new workplace – how to hire and... View Details
- September 28, 2021
- Editorial
A Guide to Implementing the 4-Day Workweek
By: A.V. Whillans and Charlotte Lockhart
As organizations continue to explore a variety of flexible work options, one promising avenue is the four-day workweek: The standard 40 hours per week is reduced to 32 hours, with the same pay and the same productivity expectations. Research suggests reducing hours can... View Details
- July–August 2021
- Article
SPACs: What You Need to Know
By: Max Bazerman and Paresh Patel
Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion... View Details
- 16 Jun 2021
- Interview
Harvard Business School: How to Build Fearless Organizations
By: Amy C. Edmondson and Ron Lovett
Our guest is Amy Edmondson - Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Amy has authored multiple books, including her most recent, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and... View Details
- May–June 2021
- Article
Eliminate Strategic Overload
As companies respond to intensifying competitive pressures and challenges, they ask more and more of their employees. But organizations often have very little to show for the efforts of their talented and engaged workers. By selecting fewer initiatives with greater... View Details
- March 29, 2021
- Editorial
Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost
By: Shibeal O'Flaherty, Michael Sanders and A.V. Whillans
As organizations large and small face the twin challenges of increasingly strained budgets and burned out workforces, what can managers do to keep employees engaged—without breaking the bank? In this piece, the authors share new research on the power of symbolic awards... View Details
- March 2021 (Revised March 2024)
- Case
M-KOPA: Empowering Lives
By: V. Kasturi Rangan, Wale Lawal and Pippa Tubman Armerding
The Pay As You Go solar power company in East Africa had sales of $71 million in 2019. It wished to grow to $300 million by 2025. M-KOPA, founded by three entrepreneurs in 2011, had grown nicely in Kenya and Uganda to reach nearly 750,000 households with an innovative... View Details
- August 6, 2020
- Article
Companies Must Go Beyond Random Acts of Humanitarianism
By: Frank Cooper and Ranjay Gulati
Any organization can write a check or mobilize resources when confronted with a crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic or a social movement such as Black Lives Matter. But corporate crisis response becomes much more meaningful when stakeholders know that the organization... View Details
- 2020
- Book
The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven World
By: Michael Luca and Max H. Bazerman
Have you logged into Facebook recently? Searched for something on Google? Chosen a movie on Netflix? If so, you've probably been an unwitting participant in a variety of experiments—also known as randomized controlled trials—designed to test the impact of changes to an... View Details
- March–April 2020
- Article
What's Really Holding Women Back? It's Not What Most People Think
By: R. Ely and Irene Padavic
Ask people to explain why women remain so dramatically underrepresented in the senior ranks of most companies, and you will hear from the vast majority a lament that goes something like this: High-level jobs require extremely long hours, women's devotion to family... View Details
- January 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
LOLA: Do You Know What's in Your Tampon?
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Aldo Sesia
LOLA is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) business launched in 2015. What started as a company to provide women with organic and transparent material-labeled tampons via a subscription model, had, by 2019 evolved to include additional menstrual and sexual wellness products.... View Details
- November 2018 (Revised July 2023)
- Case
The Weir Group: Reforming Executive Pay (A)
By: Lynn S. Paine and Federica Gabrieli
In February 2018, the Remuneration Committee together with the full Board of Directors of the Scotland-based engineering company The Weir Group had to decide whether to seek a shareholder vote at the upcoming Annual General Meeting in April on a proposal to reform the... View Details
Keywords: General Management; Board Of Directors; Executive Committees; Human Resource Management; Compensation; Pay For Performance; Incentives; Bonuses; Incentive Programs; Employee Stock Ownership Plans; Performance Measurement; Corporate Governance; Governing and Advisory Boards; Human Resources; Management; Executive Compensation; Change; Performance Evaluation; Employee Stock Ownership Plan; Europe; United Kingdom; Scotland
- February 2018 (Revised August 2018)
- Case
Blue Haven Initiative: The PEGAfrica Investment
By: Vikram S. Gandhi, Caitlin Reimers Brumme and Amram Migdal
This case examines Blue Haven Initiative (BHI), an impact investing fund and family office, and one of its investments, PEGAfrica (PEG). BHI founder Liesel Pritzker Simmons’ motivations for using her family wealth to start a family office focused on impact investing,... View Details
Keywords: Impact Investing; Family Office; Development; International Development; International Development Investing; Development Fund; Sustainability; Solar Energy; Solar; Pay As You Go; PAYG; MFI; Social Venture; Business Ventures; Acquisition; Business Growth and Maturation; Business Startups; Economics; Development Economics; Energy; Energy Conservation; Energy Sources; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Finance; Assets; Asset Pricing; Capital; Capital Budgeting; Capital Structure; Venture Capital; Cash; Cash Flow; Currency; Currency Exchange Rate; Equity; Private Equity; Financial Instruments; Debt Securities; Stock Shares; Financing and Loans; Microfinance; International Finance; Investment; Investment Return; Investment Activism; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Price; Geography; Geographic Location; Emerging Markets; Ownership; Ownership Stake; Private Ownership; Social Enterprise; Value; Valuation; Value Creation; Energy Industry; Financial Services Industry; Green Technology Industry; Africa; United States