Case | HBS Case Collection | 2007 (Revised from original 2006 version)
by Richard L. Nolan and Suresh Kotha
Harley-Davidson Co. exemplifies a remarkable management-led business transformation of a long standing manufacturing company. The company successfully met global competition and continues to innovate to maintain its market position.
Keywords: Brands and Branding; Transformation; Change Management; Innovation and Invention; Competitive Strategy; Manufacturing Industry; Motorcycle Industry;
Citation:
Nolan, Richard L., and Suresh Kotha. "Harley-Davidson: Preparing for the Next Century." Harvard Business School Case 906-410, April 2007. (Revised from original March 2006 version.)
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Book | 2012
Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a Twenty-First Century Leader
Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan and Shannon O'Donnell
Case | HBS Case Collection | 2010
The iPhone at IVK
Richard L. Nolan and Robert D. Austin
Keywords: Mobile Technology; Technology Platform; Salesforce Management; Transition; Technology Adoption; Hardware; Software; Change Management;
Article | Academy of Management Learning & Education | September 2009
The Technology Manager's Journey: An Extended Narrative Approach to Educating Technical Leaders
Technology management poses particular challenges for educators because it requires a facility with different kinds of knowledge and wide-ranging learning abilities. We report on the development and delivery of an information technology (IT) management course designed to address these challenges. Our approach is built around a narrative, the "IVK extended case series," a fictitious but reality-based story about a newly appointed, not technically trained chief information officer (CIO) in his first year on the job. We designed the course around a narrative and composed the narrative in a specific way to achieve two key objectives. First, this format allowed us to combine the active student orientation typical of case-based approaches with the systematic construction of cumulative theoretical frameworks more characteristic of lecture-based methods. Second, basing the narrative on the monomyth-a literary pattern common to important narratives around the world that encourages students to more fully inhabit the story's hero-leads to fuller engagement and more active learning. We report results using this approach with undergraduate and graduate students in two universities located in different countries, with executives at a major multinational corporation, and with participants in an open-enrollment program at a major business school. Student course feedback and a follow-up survey administered about one year after the course suggest that the extended narrative approach mostly achieves its design objectives. We suggest that the approach might be used more widely in teaching technology management, particularly with "digital natives," who have come of age in an environment crowded with engaging approaches to communication and entertainment competing for their attention.
Keywords: Information Technology; Management; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Business Education; Multinational Firms and Management; Entertainment; Communication; Curriculum and Courses; Framework; Design; Goals and Objectives; Learning; Information Technology Industry;