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Faculty & Research

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    • HBS Book

    Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

    By: Charles A. O'Reilly III and Michael Tushman

    Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change—to innovate? In the past ten years, the importance of this question has increased as more industries and firms confront disruptive change. The pandemic has accelerated this crisis, collapsing the structures of industries from airlines and medicine to online retail and commercial real estate. Today, leaders in business have an obligation not only to investors but to their employees and communities. At the core of this challenge is helping their organizations to survive in the face of change.

    • HBS Book

    Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

    By: Charles A. O'Reilly III and Michael Tushman

    Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change—to innovate? In the past ten years, the importance of this question has increased as more industries and firms confront disruptive change. The pandemic has accelerated this crisis, collapsing the structures of industries from airlines and medicine to online retail and...

    • Strategic Management Journal 42, no. 10 (October 2021): 1909–1938.

    Board Design and Governance Failures at Peer Firms

    By: Shelby Gai, J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Andy Wu

    Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others are more substantive. As a baseline, we argue that boards in general respond to financial restatements at peer firms by symbolically appointing new directors who are relatively inexperienced and unlikely to have a substantive impact. In contrast, boards with audit–nomination MCDs are more likely to take the substantive action of appointing new directors with the prior experience necessary to reduce the risk of their own future financial restatement.

    • Strategic Management Journal 42, no. 10 (October 2021): 1909–1938.

    Board Design and Governance Failures at Peer Firms

    By: Shelby Gai, J. Yo-Jud Cheng and Andy Wu

    Our study introduces board committees as a crucial determinant of board actions. We examine how directors who structurally link different board committees—referred to as multi-committee directors (MCDs)—explain why some board actions are merely symbolic while others are more substantive. As a baseline, we argue that boards in general respond to...

    • Leadership Initiative

    When to Go and How to Go? Founder and Leader Transition in Private Equity Firms

    By: Josh Lerner and Diana Noble

    Leadership transition in private equity firms is an understudied field, despite the important, albeit controversial, role such firms play in developed economies. We analyzed 260 firms in an empirical study, supplemented by qualitative interviews with a small sample of highly experienced (limited partners) (LPs) and general partner (GP) founders and leaders who have experienced such transitions first-hand.

    • Leadership Initiative

    When to Go and How to Go? Founder and Leader Transition in Private Equity Firms

    By: Josh Lerner and Diana Noble

    Leadership transition in private equity firms is an understudied field, despite the important, albeit controversial, role such firms play in developed economies. We analyzed 260 firms in an empirical study, supplemented by qualitative interviews with a small sample of highly experienced (limited partners) (LPs) and general partner (GP) founders...

    • Featured Case

    Coca-Cola: Preparing for the Next 100 Years

    By: Cynthia A. Montgomery and James Weber

    In early 2020, James Quincey, the 14th chair of the 133-year old The Coca-Cola Company, was in the midst of a years-long transformation of Coca-Cola from being the leading carbonated soft drink (CSD) beverage company into a total beverage company. The company’s flagship product, Coca-Cola, had been the world’s best-selling beverage for 100 years, yet some consumers were turning away from CSDs due to health concerns over sugar consumption and a proliferation of other beverage options. The company had both acquired and developed many new beverage brands. It was in the process of changing its culture to be faster moving and more willing to take risks, and a culture where the new brands meant as much to the company as did its flagship product, which was still the company's largest selling beverage.

    • Featured Case

    Coca-Cola: Preparing for the Next 100 Years

    By: Cynthia A. Montgomery and James Weber

    In early 2020, James Quincey, the 14th chair of the 133-year old The Coca-Cola Company, was in the midst of a years-long transformation of Coca-Cola from being the leading carbonated soft drink (CSD) beverage company into a total beverage company. The company’s flagship product, Coca-Cola, had been the world’s best-selling beverage for 100 years,...

    • Featured Case

    Harambe: Mobilizing Capital in Africa

    By: Anywhere (Siko) Sikochi, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and Francesco Tronci

    Harambe was a non-profit organization whose mission was to build an ecosystem to identify promising young African entrepreneurs and provide them access to training, markets, capital, and support networks. From 2007 to 2021, Harambe had grown to a network of 367 entrepreneurs, known as “Harambeans”. They had collectively raised over $800 million in capital, created more than 3,500 jobs, and claimed three of the six African startup unicorns in 2021. There was mounting pressure for Harambe to evolve to take advantage of its momentum, the changing entrepreneurship landscape in Africa, and increasing investor interest.

    • Featured Case

    Harambe: Mobilizing Capital in Africa

    By: Anywhere (Siko) Sikochi, Dilyana Karadzhova Botha and Francesco Tronci

    Harambe was a non-profit organization whose mission was to build an ecosystem to identify promising young African entrepreneurs and provide them access to training, markets, capital, and support networks. From 2007 to 2021, Harambe had grown to a network of 367 entrepreneurs, known as “Harambeans”. They had collectively raised over $800 million in...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record

    By: Zoë B. Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman

    State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record later in the hiring process or make inaccurate judgments based on an applicant’s demographic characteristics. In this paper, we use a field experiment conducted in partnership with a nationwide staffing platform to test policies that more directly address the reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Increasing the Demand for Workers with a Criminal Record

    By: Zoë B. Cullen, Will Dobbie and Mitchell Hoffman

    State and local policies increasingly restrict employers’ access to criminal records, but without addressing the underlying reasons that employers may conduct criminal background checks. Employers may thus still want to ask about a job applicant’s criminal record later in the hiring process or make inaccurate judgments based on an applicant’s...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data

    By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael

    We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to counterfactual outcomes based on a “traditional model” used for regulatory reporting purposes, we find that the latter would result in a 60% higher probability of being rejected and higher interest rates for those approved.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data

    By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael

    We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to counterfactual outcomes based on a “traditional model” used for regulatory reporting...

Initiatives & Projects

U.S. Competitiveness

The U.S. Competitiveness Project is a research-led effort to understand and improve the competitiveness of the United States. The project is committed to identifying practical steps that business leaders can take to strengthen the U.S. economy.
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Seminars & Conferences

Nov 30
  • 30 Nov 2021

Samantha Keppler, University of Michigan

Dec 01
  • 01 Dec 2021

Hanno Lustig, Stanford Graduate School of Business

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Recent Publications

Putting Your Corporate Purpose to Work

By: Hubert Joly
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Making a company purpose come to life is an arduous journey that requires a multi-pronged and sustained approach. Yet as hard as it is, the journey is well worth it and will yield positive transformation not only for the company, but also for the people who work there. And by changing how the company and its people relate to customers, suppliers, shareholders, and communities, that transformation radiates well beyond the organization itself. The author presents five steps for turning a company purpose into reality, using both the head and the heart.
Citation
Related
Joly, Hubert. "Putting Your Corporate Purpose to Work." Harvard Business Review 99, no. 6 (November–December 2021).

Surgeons and Administrators Co-Creating Value

By: Robert S. Kaplan, Michael Nurok, Thoralf Sundt and Bruce Gewertz
  • Article |
  • Annals of Surgery
Most hospitals have arms-length relationships with physicians, viewing them as people they must ‘‘manage,’’ not as potentially valuable strategic partners. But surgeons make clinical decisions every day that have great influence on both patient outcomes and hospital costs. The separation of the two groups is a consequence of a narrow interpretation of the accountability principle in which physicians are responsible only for their performance in operating rooms and interventional suites, while administrators are responsible only for operations and finances. The paper illustrates how allowing proceduralists to influence both upstream and downstream components of the surgical episode will improve patient outcomes and lower costs, allowing administrators to better match resources to care needs. Such collaboration will be necessary for successful value-based health care delivery.
Citation
Related
Kaplan, Robert S., Michael Nurok, Thoralf Sundt, and Bruce Gewertz. "Surgeons and Administrators Co-Creating Value." Annals of Surgery 274, no. 6 (December 2021).

Should We Embrace Crypto?

By: Charles C.Y. Wang
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Citation
Related
Wang, Charles C.Y. "Should We Embrace Crypto?" Harvard Business Review 99, no. 6 (November–December 2021). (Case Study and Commentary.)

Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight

By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu
  • December 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Strategic Management Journal
We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that entrepreneurs make less accurate predictions as they gain experience executing projects: they miss their predicted timeline to bring a product to market by nearly six additional weeks on each successive project. Although learning should improve prediction accuracy in principle, we argue that entrepreneurs also learn of opportunities to augment each successive product, which drastically expands the interdependencies beyond what an entrepreneur can anticipate. We find that entrepreneurs encounter more unforeseen interdependencies in their subsequent projects, and they sacrifice on-time delivery to address these interdependencies.
Citation
Related
Peterson, Aticus, and Andy Wu. "Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight." Art. 1. Strategic Management Journal 42, no. 13 (December 2021): 2357–2388. (Lead article.)

Trade Policy Uncertainty and Stock Returns

By: Marcelo Bianconi, Federico Esposito and Marco Sammon
  • December 2021 |
  • Article |
  • Journal of International Money and Finance
A recent literature has documented large real effects of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) on trade, employment, and investment, but there is little evidence that investors are compensated for bearing such risk. To quantify the risk premium associated with TPU, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in exposure to TPU arising from Congressional votes to revoke China’s preferential tariff treatment between 1990 and 2001. A long-short portfolio designed to isolate exposure to TPU earns a risk-adjusted return of 3.6-6.2% per year. This effect is larger in sectors less protected from globalization, and more reliant on inputs from China. Industries more exposed to trade policy uncertainty also had a larger drop in stock prices when the uncertainty began, and more volatile returns around key policy dates. Our results are not explained by the effects of policy uncertainty on expected cash-flows, investors’ forecast errors, and import competition from China.
Citation
SSRN
Related
Bianconi, Marcelo, Federico Esposito, and Marco Sammon. "Trade Policy Uncertainty and Stock Returns." Art. 102492. Journal of International Money and Finance 119 (December 2021).

Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence

By: Ethan Rouen, Eric C. So and Charles C.Y. Wang
  • Article |
  • Journal of Financial Economics
Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms' GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the 10-K. Excluding them from GAAP earnings yields a core earnings measure that distinguishes between the recurring and non-recurring components of net income and forecasts future performance. Analysts and market participants are slow to impound these earnings components' implications, particularly the amounts disclosed in footnotes. Trading strategies that exploit non-core earnings produce abnormal returns of 8% per year.
Citation
SSRN
Related
Rouen, Ethan, Eric C. So, and Charles C.Y. Wang. "Core Earnings: New Data and Evidence." Journal of Financial Economics 142, no. 3 (December 2021): 1068–1091.

Alleviating Time Poverty among the Working Poor

By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
  • 2021 |
  • Working Paper |
  • Faculty Research
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal field experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of working mothers, a population who is especially likely to experience severe time poverty. Participants received vouchers for services designed to reduce their burden of unpaid labor. The effect of these vouchers were compared against equivalently valued unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) and a neutral control condition. Using a pre-post design, in contrast to our pre-registered hypotheses, a pre-registered Bayesian ANCOVA indicated that the time-saving, UCT, and control conditions led to similar increases in subjective well-being, reductions in perceived stress, and decreases in relationship conflict. Exploratory analyses revealed that the time-saving vouchers and UCTs produced these benefits through distinct psychological pathways. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for economic development initiatives.
Citation
Related
Whillans, A.V., and Colin West. "Alleviating Time Poverty among the Working Poor." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22-032, November 2021.

West Virginia: Finding the Right Path Forward

By: Matthew C. Weinzierl, Christine Keung and Reggie Smith
  • November 2021 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
Citation
Educators
Related
Weinzierl, Matthew C., Christine Keung, and Reggie Smith. "West Virginia: Finding the Right Path Forward." Harvard Business School Case 722-024, November 2021.
More Publications

In The News

    • 23 Nov 2021
    • Everyday Health

    Five Ways to Give Better Gifts, According to Science

    Re: Michael Norton
    • 23 Nov 2021
    • CNBC

    TEC Members Interview the Authors of the Books That Have Influenced Them

    Re: Rosabeth Moss Kanter
    • 23 Nov 2021
    • Boston Magazine

    The Death of the Office Friendship

    Re: Tsedal Neeley
    • 23 Nov 2021
    • HBS Working Knowledge

    What It Takes to Build an Organizational Culture That Wins

    Re: Frank Cespedes
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The Case Method

Introduced by HBS faculty to business education in 1925, the case method is a powerful interactive learning process that puts students in the shoes of a leader faced with a real-world management issue and challenges them to propose and justify a resolution.
Today, HBS remains an authority on teaching by the case method. The School is also the world’s leading case-writing institution, with HBS faculty members contributing hundreds of new cases to the management curriculum a year via the School’s unique case development and writing process.
→Browse HBS Case Collection
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Faculty Positions

Harvard Business School seeks candidates in all fields for full time positions. Candidates with outstanding records in PhD or DBA programs are encouraged to apply.
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