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Faculty & Research

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    • HBS Book

    Productive Tensions: How Every Leader Can Tackle Innovation's Toughest Trade-Offs

    By: Chris Bingham and Rory McDonald

    Why is leading innovation in nascent business environments so distressingly hit-or-miss? More than 90% of high-potential ventures don’t reach their projected targets. Surveys show that 80% of executives consider innovation crucial to their growth strategy, but only 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance. Should leaders aim for Steve Jobs-level genius, shower their projects with resources, or lean in to luck and embrace uncertainty? Drawing on cutting-edge inductive research and probing interviews with hundreds of leaders across three continents, we propose that the most effective leaders and successful innovators embrace the tensions that arise from competing aims: efficiency or flexibility? consistency or change? product or purpose?

    • HBS Book

    Productive Tensions: How Every Leader Can Tackle Innovation's Toughest Trade-Offs

    By: Chris Bingham and Rory McDonald

    Why is leading innovation in nascent business environments so distressingly hit-or-miss? More than 90% of high-potential ventures don’t reach their projected targets. Surveys show that 80% of executives consider innovation crucial to their growth strategy, but only 6% are satisfied with their innovation performance. Should leaders aim for Steve...

    • Accounting, Organizations and Society 105 (February 2023).

    The Effect of Systems of Management Controls on Honesty in Managerial Reporting

    By: Aishwarrya Deore, Susanna Gallani and Ranjani Krishnan

    While budgetary controls with capital rationing are optimal in theory and widespread in practice, empirical research documents their association with higher employee dishonesty compared to budgetary controls without rationing. In this study, we examine whether combining budgetary controls with mission statements in a system of management controls decreases employee dishonesty. We predict that the system’s effect on dishonesty depends on the interaction of the social norms conveyed by each control instrument within the system. We study two types of budgetary controls that differ in whether they include budget rationing and two types of mission statements that differ in whether they emphasize integrity or financial values.

    • Accounting, Organizations and Society 105 (February 2023).

    The Effect of Systems of Management Controls on Honesty in Managerial Reporting

    By: Aishwarrya Deore, Susanna Gallani and Ranjani Krishnan

    While budgetary controls with capital rationing are optimal in theory and widespread in practice, empirical research documents their association with higher employee dishonesty compared to budgetary controls without rationing. In this study, we examine whether combining budgetary controls with mission statements in a system of management controls...

    • Social Enterprise Initiative

    Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

    By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Priyank Narayan

    Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village families in return for development work (Cloth for Work). As Covid-19 struck India in March 2020, the organization pivoted its operational model to considerably broaden its set of activities in the field. In 2022 after nearly 70% of the country had been vaccinated against Covid-19, and with a semblance of normalcy returning, Anshu Gupta had to consider the future of the organization and its strategy, having raised twice the amount of funds ($20 million) as in the previous years.

    • Social Enterprise Initiative

    Social Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship

    By: V. Kasturi Rangan and Priyank Narayan

    Founded by the husband and wife team of Anshu and Meenakshi Gupta in 1999, Goonj had quickly emerged as one of the leading disaster relief and rural development organizations in India. Their main mode of development was through providing a clothing kit to the village families in return for development work (Cloth for Work). As Covid-19 struck...

    • Featured Case

    Enstitute

    By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann, Kumba Sennaar and Sarah Mehta

    Case on a social venture that could not scale beyond the founder, despite significant investment enthusiasm.

    • Featured Case

    Enstitute

    By: Lindsay N. Hyde, Thomas R. Eisenmann, Kumba Sennaar and Sarah Mehta

    Case on a social venture that could not scale beyond the founder, despite significant investment enthusiasm.

    • Featured Case

    Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems

    By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim

    Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to prominence, had evolved into a portfolio of 5 ventures, including executive recruiting and a VC fund, to remove systemic barriers to equity and inclusion in business and wealth creation in a long-racially-troubled region where she had also experienced discriminatory barriers. A strong commitment to partnerships, some controversial, had extended her reach, and Boston was changing, including its first elected female mayor of color. How could Phillips assess her impact as a leader, given the magnitude of the problems?

    • Featured Case

    Colette Phillips and GetKonnected!: Creating Inclusive Ecosystems

    By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Amy Chiu and Joyce Kim

    Colette Phillips’ marketing firm had just won the City of Boston’s 2nd largest contract in history to a Black-owned company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Get Konnected!, the networking organization for people of color that she founded 15 years earlier and led to prominence, had evolved into a portfolio of 5 ventures, including executive...

    • Working Paper

    Senior Team Emotional Dynamics and Strategic Decision Making at a Platform Transition

    By: Timo O. Vuori and Michael L. Tushman

    Based on an inductive case study, we develop an emotional-temporal process model of an incumbent’s strategic decision making at a platform transition. We describe the senior team’s emotional response to this transition and the impact of these emotions on their strategic decision making process. During a turbulent five-month period, we describe exhausting ambiguity and painful loss leading to an unbalanced evaluation process and eventually to a quasi-analytical strategic platform choice: top managers perceived they made an analytical choice, but the premises of the choice were substantially shaped by their emotional reactions and consequent micro-behaviors. Our findings extend theory on strategic decision making at platform transitions and illustrate the impact of emotions on strategic decision making.

    • Working Paper

    Senior Team Emotional Dynamics and Strategic Decision Making at a Platform Transition

    By: Timo O. Vuori and Michael L. Tushman

    Based on an inductive case study, we develop an emotional-temporal process model of an incumbent’s strategic decision making at a platform transition. We describe the senior team’s emotional response to this transition and the impact of these emotions on their strategic decision making process. During a turbulent five-month period, we describe...

    • HBS Working Paper

    Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing

    By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson

    This study proposes two new dynamic assignment algorithms to match refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country. The first, currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in Switzerland, seeks to maximize the average predicted employment level (or any measured outcome of interest) of refugees through a minimum-discord online assignment algorithm. Although the proposed algorithm achieves nearoptimal expected employment compared to the hindsight-optimal solution (and improves upon the status quo procedure by about 40%), it results in a periodically imbalanced allocation to the localities over time. This leads to undesirable workload inefficiencies for resettlement resources and agents. To address this problem, the second algorithm balances the goal of improving refugee outcomes with the desire for an even allocation over time.

    • HBS Working Paper

    Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing

    By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson

    This study proposes two new dynamic assignment algorithms to match refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country. The first, currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in Switzerland, seeks to maximize the average predicted employment level (or any measured outcome of interest) of refugees through a minimum-discord...

Initiatives & Projects

Business History

The Business History Initiative seeks to facilitate learning from the past through innovative research and course development, employing global and interdisciplinary perspectives.
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Seminars & Conferences

Mar 27
  • 27 Mar 2023

Michal Matejka, Arizona State University

Mar 28
  • 28 Mar 2023

Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, London Business School

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Recent Publications

The New-Collar Workforce

By: Colleen Ammerman, Boris Groysberg and Ginni Rometty
  • March–April 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Harvard Business Review
Many workers today are stuck in low-paying jobs, unable to advance simply because they don’t have a bachelor’s degree. At the same time, many companies are desperate for workers and not meeting the diversity goals that could help them perform better while also reducing social and economic inequality. All these problems could be alleviated, the authors say, if employers focused on job candidates’ skills instead of their degree status. Drawing on their interviews with corporate leaders, along with their own experience in academia and the business world, the authors outline a “skills-first” approach to hiring and managing talent. It involves writing job descriptions that emphasize capabilities, not credentials; creating apprenticeships, internships, and training programs for people without college degrees; collaborating with educational institutions and other outside partners to expand the talent pool; helping hiring managers embrace skills-first thinking; bringing on board a critical mass of non­degreed workers; and building a supportive organizational culture. IBM, Aon, Cleveland Clinic, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and Merck are among the companies taking this approach—and demonstrating its benefits for firms, workers, and society as a whole.
Citation
Related
Ammerman, Colleen, Boris Groysberg, and Ginni Rometty. "The New-Collar Workforce." Harvard Business Review 101, no. 2 (March–April 2023): 96–103.

The Subjective Expected Utility Approach and a Framework for Defining Project Risk in Terms of Novelty and Feasibility—A Response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘Uncertainty and Risk-Taking in Science’

By: Jacqueline N. Lane
  • April 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Research Policy
In their Discussion Paper, Franzoni and Stephan (F&S, 2023) discuss the shortcomings of existing peer review models in shaping the funding of risky science. Their discussion offers a conceptual framework for incorporating risk into peer review models of research proposals by leveraging the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) approach to decouple reviewers’ assessments of a project’s potential value from its risk. In my Response, I build on F&S’s discussion and attempt to shed light on three additional yet core considerations of risk in science: 1) how risk and reward in science are related to assessments of a project’s novelty and feasibility; 2) how the sunk cost literature can help articulate why reviewers tend to perceive new research areas as riskier than continued investigation of existing lines of research; and 3) how drawing on different types of expert reviewers (i.e., based on domain and technical expertise) can result in alternative evaluation assessments to better inform resource allocation decisions. The spirit of my Response is to sharpen our understanding of risk in science and to offer insights on how future theoretical and empirical work—leveraging experiments— can test and validate the SEU approach for the purposes of funding more risky science that advances the knowledge frontier.
Citation
Related
Lane, Jacqueline N. "The Subjective Expected Utility Approach and a Framework for Defining Project Risk in Terms of Novelty and Feasibility—A Response to Franzoni and Stephan (2023), ‘Uncertainty and Risk-Taking in Science’." Art. 104707. Research Policy 52, no. 3 (April 2023).

Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field

By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee-Eun Shin
  • 2023 |
  • Article |
  • Contemporary Accounting Research
This study examines how the design of incentive contracts for tasks defined as workers’ official responsibilities (i.e., standard tasks) influences workers’ propensity to engage in employee-initiated innovation (EII). EII corresponds to innovation activities that are not formally assigned to workers but are nonetheless encouraged and considered important for the company's success. We leverage field data obtained from a manufacturing company that uses a dedicated information system to track workers’ EII idea submissions. We find theory-consistent evidence that, compared to workers receiving fixed pay, employees rewarded for their standard tasks with variable compensation contracts exhibit a lower propensity to engage in EII. This result is particularly evident when we consider innovation ideas narrowly focused on the standard task (i.e., narrow-scope ideas) versus ideas benefiting other constituents and activities beyond the proponents’ standard task (i.e., broad-scope ideas). Our findings suggest that variable pay narrows employees’ conceptual focus around the standard task and hinders employee engagement in broad-scope innovation activities compared to fixed compensation contracts. We contribute to the nascent literature on incentives for employee-initiated innovation and to the growing stream of research examining the determinants of different types of innovation.
Citation
Purchase
Related
Cai, Wei, Susanna Gallani, and Jee-Eun Shin. "Incentive Contract Design and Employee-Initiated Innovation: Evidence from the Field." Contemporary Accounting Research 40, no. 1 (2023).

How to Build a Life: How Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable

By: Arthur C. Brooks
  • March 23, 2023 |
  • Article |
  • The Atlantic
Citation
Related
Brooks, Arthur C. "How to Build a Life: How Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable." The Atlantic (March 23, 2023).

The Traits of Entrepreneurs

By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo
  • March 2023 |
  • Technical Note |
  • Faculty Research
Entrepreneurship has the potential for extreme success but also comes with high risks. Given this risk-reward profile, we might wonder why individuals choose to become entrepreneurs. Are there personality traits that lead someone to become an entrepreneur? Can you predict entrepreneurial success? Although many questions still remain, there has been significant research on the “entrepreneurial personality.” This note provides an overview of the most frequently studied entrepreneurial traits, including the Big-5, need for achievement, locus of control, innovativeness, and risk tolerance. Where data exist, we chronicle what is correlated with a desire to be an entrepreneur and what is associated with actual success as an entrepreneur.
Citation
Educators
Related
Tango, Jo, and Alys Ferragamo. "The Traits of Entrepreneurs." Harvard Business School Technical Note 823-099, March 2023.

OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (C)

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
  • March 2023 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
In February 2023, Delta Air Lines (Delta) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ed Bastian, celebrated the airline’s OneTen partnership in a room full of Atlanta’s prominent business leaders, educators, and public servants in Atlanta, at a OneTen/Delta Launch Event. To support their commitment to OneTen’s strategy, Delta had designed and launched a skills-first apprenticeship program, and its IT department graduated its first cohort of the “Next Gen Academy,” a skills-first IT development program. Delta had also been building relationships with key stakeholders, including talent developers and non-profit initiatives, to create a local OneTen talent ecosystem. However, Delta remained the only Atlanta company signed up with OneTen. As Atlanta’s “OneTen City Lead,” Bastian hoped that the OneTen launch event would encourage other companies to help build out a robust ecosystem for Black talent.
Citation
Related
Hill, Linda A., and Lydia Begag. "OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (C)." Harvard Business School Supplement 423-075, March 2023.

OneTen At Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (B)

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
  • March 2023 |
  • Supplement |
  • Faculty Research
In January 2023, Delta Air Lines (Delta) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Ed Bastian and his team had just launched the third iteration of an internal skills-first apprenticeship program, designed to move frontline employees into "merit" positions in four job categories. The move to implement an apprenticeship program further advanced Delta’s commitment to OneTen’s “skills-first” strategy for Black talent. The DE&I and Talent teams launched the pilot program in March 2022 and the second iteration in July 2022. The program grew with each iteration, but the post-mortem of the third program revealed that Delta did not yet have the "bandwidth" to grow the program, and the program would require more leadership development and support for the managers and mentors of the apprentices. The team recognized that they had to figure out how to scale the program with some speed, but knew that change management would take a couple of years. Despite the challenges ahead, the skills-first apprenticeship program had only affirmed for Bastian that Delta was headed in the right direction, as they were better as a company when frontline employees graduated into different skills and opportunities and brought their knowledge of the business into corporate functions of the company. What, if anything, could they do to scale the program faster without sacrificing quality?
Citation
Related
Hill, Linda A., and Lydia Begag. "OneTen At Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (B)." Harvard Business School Supplement 423-073, March 2023.

OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (A)

By: Linda A. Hill and Lydia Begag
  • March 2023 |
  • Case |
  • Faculty Research
It was December 10, 2020, and Ed Bastian, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Delta Air Lines (Delta), had just finished a meeting with Joanne Smith, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, and Keyra Lynn Johnson, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. The objective of this meeting was to review Delta’s first public communication about Bastian’s decision to join the OneTen coalition, where he and 36 other CEOs committed to recruiting, hiring, training, and advancing 1 million Black Americans over the next ten years into family-sustaining jobs. For months, Bastian had been in continual dialogue with his colleagues about how to respond to the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and Brown people and an increase in racially motivated violence, including the murder of George Floyd. Bastian had committed Delta to being the “Atlanta City Lead” of OneTen. Although Delta had been “bulldozed by the pandemic,” he had signed onto OneTen with no hesitation. Smith and Johnson had raised many questions when first learning of OneTen, but they too had agreed that the initiative was consistent with Delta’s own anti-discriminatory action plan. He agreed with his colleagues that Delta’s approach to OneTen be strategic and sustainable. He recalled his response at the time: “I [don’t] know what this will turn into,” but “we have got to start somewhere.”
Citation
Educators
Related
Hill, Linda A., and Lydia Begag. "OneTen at Delta Air Lines: Catalyzing Family-Sustaining Careers for Black Talent (A)." Harvard Business School Case 423-072.
More Publications

In The News

    • 22 Mar 2023
    • Harvard Business School

    Behind the Research: Marlous van Waijenburg

    Re: Marlous van Waijenburg
    • 20 Mar 2023
    • Business Insider

    Mark Zuckerberg Is Leaning into Meta’s ‘Year of Efficiency’ the Wrong Way, and Multiple Rounds of Layoffs Will Be Damaging

    Re: Sandra Sucher
    • 20 Mar 2023
    • Forbes

    Want To Be An Entrepreneur? Think Like A Pilot

    By: Patrick Mullane
    • 20 Mar 2023
    • Entrepreneur Network Podcast

    Finding Your Company's Deep Purpose

    Re: Ranjay Gulati
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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.
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