Faculty News
May 22 2012
Politicians can find start-ups hard to resist 
The conflicting findings on government incentives led Josh Lerner, a Harvard Business School professor, to study the issue in his 2009 book, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." His conclusion: "For every success story out there, you can find a whole host of failed efforts."
May 21 2012
What your posture says about you
Every wonder how some people just seem to excude power and confidence? According to Harvard professor Amy Cuddy, its all in the way you sit and stand. TODAY's Amy Robach explores how changing your posture can change your life.
May 18 2012
Facebook IPO creates tech giant
The decision to offer more shares, gives a larger group of investors a chance buy into the company, said William Sahlman , a Harvard Business School professor. As an iconic brand of the Internet age, with more than 900 million users worldwide, "Facebook is something that almost everyone might want to have a piece of in their portfolio," Sahlman said.
May 18 2012
Workers told, ditch local languages for English
According to Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, companies that don't adopt English as a standard for their entire organization will, at some point, "experience some form of bottleneck."
May 18 2012
Surf's up
In a 2004 paper Gregor Andrade, now of AQR Capital Management, and Erik Stafford of Harvard Business School examined data for 1970-94. They found that merger waves were most likely when an industry shock had resulted in spare capacity, prompting efficient firms to take over weaker ones. In another paper Mr Andrade and Mr Stafford showed that regulatory shocks are important, too; the shock of deregulation triggered many deals in the late 1990s.
May 17 2012
Eight Things That Must Be Done About JPMorganChase
Underlying all the other problems is of course the issue of C-suite compensation, which is driving much of the asocial behavior. Professor Mihir Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School wrote in the March 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review that the C-Suite is so grossly overcompensated that US competitiveness is being systematically undermined.
May 17 2012
Harvard study: workplace inspections save money
"Across the numerous outcomes we looked at, we never saw any evidence of inspections causing harm," Toffel said in a statement. "If OSHA inspections conducted in all 50 states are as valuable as the ones we studied, inspections improve safety worth roughly $6 billion to employers and employees, ignoring pain and suffering.
May 17 2012
Study finds government job-safety inspections reduce injuries without hurting profits
"These inspections ironically appear to be creating value for the firms that they are visiting in terms of reduced workers comp costs and frequency of injuries," said Michael Toffel, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the study.
May 17 2012
Safety inspections don't hurt businesses-study
Random inspections of U.S. industrial workplaces lower the risk of workers being injured on the job and have no measurable negative effect on the companies inspected, according to a study in the journal Science.
May 17 2012
How To Stop Sleeping With Your Smartphone
In her new book, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow details her years-long research project with The Boston Consulting Group, an attempt to improve the work-life balance at the hard-driving firm with incremental but meaningful changes in attitude and behavior.
May 16 2012
Businesses brace for Greek exit
Analysts and academics say life would be tougher for companies that are highly indebted. "They would find it more difficult than companies that have lower leverage and cash liquidity," says George Serafeim, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.
May 16 2012
Amazon consumer book reviews as reliable as media experts
Professor Michael Luca and his co-authors analysed the top 100 non-fiction reviews from 40 media outlets, including the New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, between 2004 and 2007 for their paper What Makes a Critic Tick? The academics used data from reviews aggregator metacritic.com, which summarises professional reviews and then awards ratings, if not given, based on content. They also looked at Amazon reviews for each title.
May 16 2012
Harvard Professor Discovers A Cool Secret To Making Employees Feel Like They've Got More Time
Since nobody can put more physical hours into a day, managers who want to give their employees a sense that they have free time need to address "psychological time," says Michael Norton associate professor of business administration for Harvard Business School.
May 16 2012
Robert Kaplan on JPMorgan Trading Loss
Robert Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and a former vice chairman at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., talks about JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s $2 billion trading loss and the ability of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon to manage the firm.
May 15 2012
Power Postures Can Make You Feel More Powerful
Sit up straight and listen: Amy Cuddy has a plan to help you change your life. And it's easy. The Harvard psychologist recently completed a study demonstrating that positioning our bodies a certain way doesn't just tell people we're powerful, it actually makes us more powerful.
May 15 2012
Best Buy scandal brings lessons about corporate governance
"You know, its sad. I wish, personally for his sake, he'd left a decade ago. Because now, it's like a Shakespearian tragedy. He's had an amazing career. Been entrepreneur of the year, and company of the year in 2004, and you know, he's done everything right until this point," George said.
May 14 2012
Unplugging At Night May Be A Smarter Way To Work
The idea is the brainchild of Harvard Professor Leslie Perlow, author of the book "Sleeping with your Smartphone." So what's wrong with constantly having our smartphones within arm's reach? "The downfall is that it's unnecessary and we convince ourselves that it's a requirement of the job," says Perlow.
May 14 2012
Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen on his book "How Will You Measure Your Life?"
May 14 2012
Book Review: How Will You Measure Your Life?
Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, rose to fame with The Innovator's Dilemma, a book that looks at how companies stay cutting-edge and relevant through disruption. It caught the attention of many Silicon Valley stars, most prominently former Intel chief Andy Grove, who famously asked Christensen to talk about what disruptive innovation meant for Intel.
May 14 2012
Learning curve
The terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel in Mumbai in November 2008 has had an impact on Harvard. Impressed by the courage the hotel employees showed during the attack, Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Rohit Deshpande decided to take a deeper look at the valiant act. The result was a full-fledged case study in the form of a documentary.
May 14 2012
Clayton Christensen On Truth, God and Personal Courage
Clayton Christensen discusses his new book How Will You Measure Your Life?.
May 14 2012
Style and substance
It takes a bold, or perhaps shameless, writer to venture once more into this particular breach, but Cynthia Montgomery, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, does just this. But we should thank her, because in a brisk 158 pages, she offers a clear summary of how to think about the overlap between strategy and execution. In terms of basic usefulness, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs outshines books several times its length.
May 10 2012
Life lessons for the office
How Will You Measure Your Life? is a big departure compared with, say, his breakthrough book The Innovator's Dilemma. Karen Dillon, one of his co-authors, says: "In the Venn diagram of Clay Christensen's core stuff, this is on the fringes. But I think he did it in the end because he was genuinely persuaded by his students."
May 09 2012
Blackstone Counters Fee Pressure Via Custom Pension Deals
"There has been a noticeable change over the past 18 months with a lot going on below the surface, with side letters being written by investors cutting special deals," Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School in Boston, said in an interview. "The bulk of the discounts are going to the large investors."
May 09 2012
Erasing the Regifting Taboo
The taboo against regifting was considerably weakened when researchers—Gabrielle S. Adams, of London Business School, Francis J. Flynn, of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Michael I. Norton, of Harvard Business School — introducing the idea of National Regifting Day (which really exists but has little traction). Hypothetical gift recipients who were informed about that holiday altered their judgment of regifting to the point where it matched that of givers.
May 06 2012
FTC Wants in on Google Antitrust Action
Another prominent critic of Google, Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, said that it's Google's practice to "enter a new sector, create an information aggregation platform and use their power over algorithmic search to direct users to their platform, even though Google is typically late to these new sectors."
May 06 2012
RLJ's newest executives are young and taking charge
That can be especially true in industries such as financial services, where a proven ability to make money has long been a key to advancement, said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, director of Harvard University's Advanced Leadership Initiative.
May 04 2012
Energy Clusters
In the wake of deep recession, cities all over America are finding ways to re-establish their identities or to create new ones. Charlotte is on its way to becoming an energy hub but how close are we to getting there and what do we have to do to compete as an ‘energy cluster’ in the global marketplace? The term ‘energy cluster’ is one used by two Harvard Professors as part of a study of U.S. competitiveness. They are in Charlotte this week to release a report on Charlotte as an energy cluster and they'll explain what that means.
May 04 2012
How McDonald's Came Back Bigger Than Ever
In exchange for perks like free trips, access to important people and sometimes financial compensation, bloggers are encouraged or even contractually bound to write about a company, says Thales Teixeira, an assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School who has studied the trend. Some bloggers, he notes, get paid as much as $20,000 for the work, which by McDonald's ad-campaign standards isn't much money.
May 04 2012
Manufacturing very important to India
The world of manufacturing is changing. Globalisation and technological shifts is changing the order in the manufacturing world. Few understand it better than Willy C Shih, the professor of management at Harvard Business School.
