Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive market, fall victim to those who do understand cause-and-effect links between buying and selling. This book helps managers and investors distinguish signal from noise in five key areas: People (hiring, training, and performance management), Process (constructing and reconstructing a coherent sales model), Pricing (and price testing in information-rich markets), Partners (crafting a multi-channel response to omni-channel buying behavior), and Productivity (why, in services-oriented economies, sales productivity is about social impact as well as enterprise value).

• Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 165 (July 2021): 197-212.

The many benefits of finding meaning in work suggest the importance of identifying activities that increase job meaningfulness. The current paper identifies one such activity: engaging in rituals with workgroups. Five studies (N = 1,099) provide evidence that performing group rituals can enhance the meaningfulness of work, and that in turn this meaning can enhance organizational citizenship behaviors (to the benefit of those groups).

• Health Care Initiative

Biologic drugs account for a disproportionate share of the increase in pharmaceutical spending in the U.S. and worldwide. Against this backdrop, many look to the expanding market for biosimilars—follow-on products to biologic drugs—as a vehicle for controlling pharmaceutical spending. This study explores the early years of entry of biosimilars and related follow-on products in the US. Using monthly sales data from the period 2005–19 for ten drug classes, we examine how quickly biosimilars/follow-on products gained market share and the subsequent trajectory of prevailing (national average invoice) prices. Our analysis suggests that although uptake has been slower than what is typically seen in generic drug markets, the most recent entrants have captured market share more rapidly than comparable earlier biosimilars/follow-on products.

• Featured Case

In February of 2021, Tesla revealed that it had purchased $1.5 billion of Bitcoin, totaling 7.5% of the company's cash. This announcement came after a series of cryptocurrency-related tweets from Elon Musk, the company's CEO, and a surge in cryptocurrency values. The announcement was met with mixed reactions by stock investors and market participants. This case centers around the accounting treatment of Bitcoin at Tesla: what does the company's choice of accounting treatment say about Bitcoin as an asset, and what are its implications for Tesla's profitability measures under the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles? The case also raises questions about whether investing in Bitcoin is consistent with the company's strategy, and whether Musks' public communications constitute a form of market manipulation.

• Featured Case

Five years after the company’s founding, Andela, a company that built and trained remote engineering teams, became arguably Africa’s greatest technology unicorn. By January 2019, Andela raised $100 million in Series D funding. As Andela looked to scale in an increasingly competitive landscape, its goal was to democratize trust and become an “Amazon Web Services” (AWS) for software engineering talent. With their windfall investment and the advent of COVID, Andela had to figure out their “2.0 model” to permit scaling. How would Andela stack up in a growing landscape of global remote talent companies? Could Andela become not just Africa’s, but the world’s AWS for trusted software engineering talent?

• HBS Working Knowledge

This study of field and lab data strongly suggests that people do not necessarily make better decisions when the stakes are very high. Results highlight the potential economic consequences of cognitive biases.

• HBS Working Paper

We examine the influence of proxy advisors on firms’ shareholder engagement behavior. Our analyses exploit a quasi-natural experiment using Say-On-Pay voting outcomes near a threshold that triggers a review of engagement activities by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). Firms receiving ISS treatment exhibit a swift and substantive increase in engagement, especially those with weaker ex-ante governance. The elevated engagement persists beyond the period of ISS scrutiny. Treated firms alter elements of compensation and pay transparency that align with shareholder feedback, and enjoy ex-post economic benefits. Our findings indicate a disciplinary spillover effect of ISS through enhanced and enduring firm-shareholder interactions.