Ken Hakuta: AllHerb.com

Teresa M. Amabile; Nicole  Tempest

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Case | HBS Case Collection | March 1999 (Revised February 2000)

Ken Hakuta: AllHerb.com

by Teresa M. Amabile and Nicole Tempest

Abstract

Ken Hakuta had been an entrepreneur all his life. Having started a number of consumer-oriented ventures, he became well-known as "Dr. Fad," the initiator of the "Wacky Wallwalker" toy craze in the 1980s. Wishing to strike out in an exciting new direction in 1998, he capitalized on his long-standing interest in herbal medicine to found AllHerb.com, the first e-commerce company devoted solely to herbal remedy products and information.

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Health; Information Publishing; Leadership Style; Problems and Challenges; Web Sites;

Format: Print

24 pages

Find at Harvard

Citation:

Amabile, Teresa M., and Nicole Tempest. "Ken Hakuta: AllHerb.com." Harvard Business School Case 899-250, March 1999. (Revised February 2000.)

About the Author

Teresa M. Amabile

Baker Foundation Professor, Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita

Entrepreneurial Management

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Course Overview Note | July 2014 (Revised August 2018)

FIELD Foundations

Anthony J. Mayo, Alan MacCormack, Teresa Amabile and Michael Norton

Citation:
Mayo, Anthony J., Alan MacCormack, Teresa Amabile, and Michael Norton. "FIELD Foundations." Harvard Business School Course Overview Note 415-011, July 2014. (Revised August 2018.) View Details

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Chapter | Individual Creativity in the Workplace | 2018

An Integrated Model of Dynamic Problem Solving within Organizational Constraints

Johnathan R. Cromwell, Teresa M. Amabile and Jean-François Harvey

Book Abstract: Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a variety of organizational settings. Individual Creativity in the Workplace identifies those factors, including what motivational and cognitive factors influence individual creativity, as well as the contextual factors that impact creativity such as teams and leadership. The book takes research findings out of the lab and provides examples of these findings put to use in real world organizations.

Keywords: Organizations; Problems and Challenges; Creativity;

Citation:
Cromwell, Johnathan R., Teresa M. Amabile, and Jean-François Harvey. "An Integrated Model of Dynamic Problem Solving within Organizational Constraints." In Individual Creativity in the Workplace, edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon, Victoria Kennel, and James C. Kaufman. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2018. View Details

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Article | Academy of Management Journal | August 2018

Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-Clearing Across Difficult Terrain

Colin M. Fisher, Julianna Pillemer and Teresa M. Amabile

How do teams working on complex projects get the help they need? Our qualitative investigation of the help provided to project teams at a prominent design firm revealed two distinct helping processes, both characterized by deep, sustained engagement that far exceeds the brief interactions described in the helping literature. Such deep help consisted of (1) guiding a team through a difficult juncture by working with its members in several prolonged, tightly clustered sessions, or (2) path-clearing by helping a team address a persistent deficit via briefer, intermittent sessions throughout a project's life. We present a model theorizing these processes, which has two noteworthy features. First, it emphasizes the socially constructed nature of helping behavior. That is, the parties must establish and maintain a helping frame for their interaction, especially when help-givers are high-status external leaders. Second, the model specifies that the rhythms of deep help—the duration and temporal patterns of giver-receiver interactions—are resource-allocation decisions that also contribute to the social meaning of help. These findings illuminate the theoretical and practical overlap between helping and external leadership in knowledge-intensive project work as well as the role of temporality in the helping process.

Keywords: helping; rhythm; prosocial behavior; external team leadership; social construction; time; qualitative methods; field research; Groups and Teams; Projects; Behavior; Leadership; Social and Collaborative Networks;

Citation:
Fisher, Colin M., Julianna Pillemer, and Teresa M. Amabile. "Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-Clearing Across Difficult Terrain." Academy of Management Journal 61, no. 4 (August 2018): 1524–1553. View Details

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Ken Hakuta: AllHerb.com

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