Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

Structured Empowerment: How to Achieve Growth While Promoting Agility addresses one of the most critical challenges growing ventures face: how to scale effectively without stifling the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that fuel them. Based on her research and work with retail and service organizations across multiple markets, Professor Sandino introduces the concept of "structured empowerment," a method that allows companies to grow by expertly balancing flexibility with structure. The book examines how to empower employees within a structured framework, enabling them to make choices from curated practices that propel growth while contributing ideas that enhance those practices from the bottom up. Drawing on insights from service and retail companies that have both succeeded and failed, it illustrates the principles of effective growth management—and the costly consequences of getting them wrong.

• Political Science Research and Methods 14, no. 2 (April 2026): 255–275.

Social scientists often compare survey responses before and after important events to test how those events impact respondent beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. This article offers a formal analysis of such pre-event/post-event survey comparisons, including designs that seek to reduce bias using quota sampling, rolling cross-sections, and panels. Our analysis distinguishes major sources of bias and clarifies the comparative strengths and weaknesses of each approach. We then introduce a modified panel design—the dual randomized survey—to reduce bias in cases where asking respondents to complete the same survey twice could impact their Wave 2 responses. Our formalization of bias and novel research design improve scholars’ ability to study the causal impact of events through surveys.

• Strategic Management Journal 47, no. 6 (2026): 1730-1763.

How do new ventures strategically position their products to accelerate regulatory clearance? We investigate this question in the medical device industry, where regulatory clearance is a prerequisite for market entry. We examine 239 new firms' 510(k) device clearances by the FDA between 2001 and 2019. Our approach combines quantitative analysis of firms' claims of similarity with extensive field research. We find that strategic positioning significantly impacts time to clearance, and that effective strategies evolve over time. For first products, firms accelerate clearance by citing fewer reference products while strategically positioning relative to same-category products and to category exemplars; for second products, firms accelerate clearance by referencing their own products. These findings extend positioning theory into regulatory contexts and reveal how a firm's optimal strategic positioning changes across successive products.

• Featured Case

In December 2022, Michelin was evaluating Project Gemini, a $100 million investment to expand production capacity for agricultural rubber tracks in the United States, following demand growth driven by the shift from tires to tracks in modern farming. Students are asked to assess the incremental cash flows from the project and to determine an appropriate cost of capital. The case also demonstrates how corporate sustainability objectives can be integrated into capital budgeting through internal carbon pricing.

• Featured Case

In 2024, the AI biotech firm Insilico Medicine faced a pivotal decision about its new drug, Rentosertib. Discovered and designed using artificial intelligence to treat a lung disease, Rentosertib had successfully advanced to Phase II trials—a first in global pharmaceutical history. Insilico could license the drug, consistent with its low-risk, revenue-generating model, or continue internal development to validate its full-stack AI capabilities. The decision would shape not only the future of Rentosertib, but also how Insilico balanced risk and ambition in deploying its AI tools—defining its identity as either a bold full-stack clinical innovator or a disciplined pioneer in early-stage discovery.

• HBS Working Paper

Most international retail expansions fail not in the market—but before entry. The strategic error is not poor localisation. It is an absence of balanced adaptation: the disciplined ability to identify precisely what must never change—the secret sauce that makes the economics work—and to adapt everything else to what the market structurally demands. Retailers that cannot draw that line before entry will have it drawn for them, expensively, after.

• HBS Working Paper

This paper examines the human capital drawn to the private debt industry and its implications for the banking sector. Using a novel dataset of 2,336 professionals who entered private debt funds between 2000 and 2024, we show that entrants are drawn disproportionately from top universities. Only about a quarter come directly from banks, as private debt is recruited broadly across finance, including private equity, asset management, and insurance. We find that structuring expertise, high-yield debt experience, proactive deal-making, and industry specialization—rather than traditional commercial lending—are central to the private debt model. At the same time, private debt constitutes a sustained drain of talent from megabanks, with clustered senior departures leading to measurable declines in banks’ leveraged loan market share.