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• Case | HBS Case Collection | 2013

  Coach Hurley at St. Anthony High School

  Scott A. Snook and Bradley Lawrence

  Coach Bob Hurley of St. Anthony High School is one of the winningest coaches in the history of high school basketball. At age 65, he has won more than 1,000 games and 25 New Jersey State Championships. His players come from the toughest streets in the country and yet all but 3 have gone on to college. As head coach, he earns less than $10,000 a year; his circa 1917 school building doesn't even have a gym. And yet, for almost 40 years he has turned down all offers to leave a small, aging, Catholic school in Jersey City, NJ. This is a biographical case about a tough-love leader who epitomizes what it means to be authentic. It was written for a course on authentic leadership development to highlight the origins and potential of deep self-knowledge and passion. Class discussion focuses on the tensions between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations and the role that this plays in our lives.

  Keywords: leadership; leadership development; Authentic Leadership Development; Authenticity; Sports; coaching; Leadership; Leadership Style; Leadership Development; Groups and Teams; Sports Industry; Education Industry; New Jersey;

  Citation:

  Snook, Scott A., and Bradley Lawrence. "Coach Hurley at St. Anthony High School." Harvard Business School Case 413-091, March 2013.

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | November 2012

  A Whole New Way of Looking at the World

  Nitin Nohria

  Citation:

  Nohria, Nitin. "A Whole New Way of Looking at the World." Harvard Business Review 90, no. 11 (November 2012): 91.

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• Article | Management Science | 2012

  Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

  B. Staats and F. Gino

  Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design-related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition and variety (i.e., working on different tasks) to keep workers motivated and provide them opportunities to learn. In this paper, we investigate how these two strategies may bring different productivity benefits over time. For our empirical analyses, we use two-and-a-half years of transaction data from a Japanese bank's home loan application-processing line. We find that over the course of a single day, specialization, as compared to variety, is related to improved worker productivity. However, when we examine workers' experience across a number of days, we find that variety helps improve worker productivity. Additionally, we show that part of this benefit results from workers' cumulative experience with changeovers. Our results highlight the need for organizations to transform specialization and variety into mutually reinforcing strategies rather than treating them as mutually exclusive. Overall, our paper identifies new ways to improve operational performance through the effective allocation of work.

  Keywords: Boundaries; Performance Productivity; Organizations; Research; Strategy; Motivation and Incentives; Opportunities; Market Transactions; Resource Allocation; Performance; Goals and Objectives; Learning;

  Citation:

  Staats, B., and F. Gino. "Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank." Management Science 58, no. 6 (2012): 1141–1159.

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