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• Supplement | HBS Case Collection | May 2019

  Engineering Company Culture at Zaimella Ecuador (B)

  Gary P. Pisano and Francesca Gino

  Citation:

  Pisano, Gary P., and Francesca Gino. "Engineering Company Culture at Zaimella Ecuador (B)." Harvard Business School Multimedia/Video Supplement 919-706, May 2019.  View Details

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• Working Paper | 2019

  Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015

  Giovanni Dosi, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano and Federico Tamagni

  Firm growth is an essential feature of market economies, shaping together macroeconomic performance and the evolution of industry structures. As a po-tential indicator of organizational “fitness” within a competitive environment, firm growth is also a central concern to both the practice and theory of business strategy. Despite both its theoretical and practical importance, though, growth remains a poorly understood property of firms. While previous studies have documented the highly skewed nature of firm growth rates, we know far less about the persistence of growth rates over long-periods of time. For instance, do “fast growers” tend to maintain their relative growth rates advantages over long-periods or is superior growth a transitory phenomenon? Is, as predicted by evolutionary and capability based theories of the firm, the process of firm growth path-dependent or is it more akin to a random walk? The answers to these questions are central to building a robust theory of firm growth. This paper attempts to address this gap in our empirical knowledge of firm growth using a dataset that spans 50 years, which al-lows the abandonment of the assumption, common to all incumbent studies, that the stochastic paths of all firms stem from the same generating process. These exploratory results indicate that growth rate persistence is there and my be even substantial for some firms, but it is rare. We also study the links between the micro-properties of firm growth within sectors and the patterns of aggregate growth of these same sectors. Indeed, we find circumstantial but widespread evidence that heterogeneity across firms correlates with industry dynamism.

  Citation:

  Dosi, Giovanni, Marco Grazzi, Daniele Moschella, Gary P. Pisano, and Federico Tamagni. "Long-Term Firm Growth: An Empirical Analysis of US Manufacturers 1959-2015." Working Paper, May 2019.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Business Review | May–June 2019

  Cross-Silo Leadership

  Amy C. Edmondson, Tiziana Casciaro and Sujin Jang

  Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

  Keywords: cross-functional management; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Groups and Teams; Employees; Attitudes;

  Citation:

  Edmondson, Amy C., Tiziana Casciaro, and Sujin Jang. "Cross-Silo Leadership." Harvard Business Review 97, no. 3 (May–June 2019): 130–139.  View Details

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