Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

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?

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

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.

• Social Enterprise Initiative

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.

• Featured Case

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

• Featured Case

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?

• Working Paper

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.

• HBS Working Paper

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.