• June 2025
• Article

[Research Summary]: Framing is critical for leaders who must build support for strategic renewal. While research has concentrated on renewal that replaces one set of capabilities with another, we explore a distinctive challenge: how leaders persuade stakeholders to endorse the reprioritization of resources toward a capability set that must coexist with an existing one. Moreover, while research has focused on how leaders build employee support for renewal, we examine how to persuade those overseeing resource allocation. Our study analyzes Director Robert Mueller's 12-year effort at the FBI—after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—to build up counterterrorism capabilities while maintaining existing law enforcement capabilities. We offer a novel distinction between outcome frames and process frames and discuss how each frame, sequenced properly, is relevant to strategic renewal. [Managerial Summary]: This study examines how leaders can build support for strategic renewal when an organization must develop new capabilities while maintaining existing ones. We analyze how FBI Director Robert Mueller, in the wake of 9/11, used strategic communication—or framing—to persuade members of Congress overseeing the FBI's budget to support the development of new counterterrorism capabilities alongside its traditional law enforcement mandate. We highlight two types of frames: outcome frames (focused on what the organization seeks to achieve) and process frames (emphasizing how the organization operates). Our findings reveal that sequencing these types of frames is essential. By using outcome frames to address immediate concerns and shifting to process frames to resolve longer-term tensions, leaders can build stakeholder support for complex resource reprioritization efforts.

• May 2025
• Case

Netflix loses subscribers for the first time in over a decade—can the streaming pioneer reinvent itself before competitors, costs, and churn catch up? In 2022, facing fierce competition and shifting consumer behaviors, Netflix confronts its most critical strategic inflection point. With subscriber growth slowing, market value tumbling, and content costs skyrocketing, the company considers bold moves: live sports, advertising, and theatrical releases. Students must analyze Netflix’s evolving business model, assess emerging growth avenues, and decide how the platform can maintain its leadership in a maturing, fragmented, and rapidly converging entertainment industry.

• 2025
• Working Paper

We show better-managed firms are more dynamic in plant acquisitions, disposals, openings and closings in U.S. Census and international data. Better-managed firms also birth better-managed plants, and improve the performance of the plants they acquire. To explain these findings we build a model with two key elements. First, management is a combination of firm-level management ability (e.g. CEO quality), which can be transferred to all plants, and plant-level management practices, which can be changed through intangible investment (e.g. consulting or training). Second, management both raises productivity and also reduces the operational costs of dynamism: buying, selling, opening and closing plants. We structurally estimate the model on Census microdata, fitting our key dynamic moments, and then use it to establish three additional results. First, mergers and acquisitions raise economy-wide management and productivity by reallocating plants to firms with higher management ability. Banning M&A would depress GDP and management by about 15%. Second, greater product market competition improves both management and productivity by reallocating away from badly managed plants. Finally, management practices account for about a fifth of the cross-country productivity differences with the U.S.