Sapient Corporation

Rakesh  Khurana; Joel  Podolny

Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2004 (Revised October 2005)

Sapient Corporation

Abstract

Describes the start-up, growth, organizational design, and operations over the first 10 years of a professional services firm. Focuses on the creative use of organizational purpose and values as an integral part of strategy and alignment of organizational activities.

Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Operations; Knowledge Management; Strategy; Service Industry;

Format: Print

34 pages

Educators Purchase

Citation:

Khurana, Rakesh, and Joel Podolny. "Sapient Corporation." Harvard Business School Case 405-045, September 2004. (Revised October 2005.)

The Still Leading case series includes an introductory note, “Still Leading (A): Issues in Transitioning to New Forms of Service Later in Life” and 10 supplementary cases that cover the transition of highly accomplished and prolific leaders (Hon. Robert McDonald, Hon. Mike Bloomberg, Gerry House, Lee Iacocca, General Claudia Kennedy, Sherry Lansing, Dr. Evelyn Murphy, Paul Newman, Hon. Colin Powell, and Louis Gossett Jr.). The Still Leading cases are part of an opening series of cases used in the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The cases document a number of individual’s lifetime personal and professional trajectories. They focus on the nature of career processes and transitions. The materials offer an opportunity for readers to inductively reason about the structure of significant career transitions and the developmental patterns across different arenas. The cases also create a context for participants to engage in introspection by asking them to reflect on patterns of development in their own career histories.

Article | History of Political Economy | June 2017

The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital

Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

This paper traces the career of Michael Jensen, a Chicago finance PhD turned Harvard Business School professor to reveal the intellectual and social conditions that enabled the emergence and institutionalization of what we call the “neoliberal common sense of capital,” what others have called the “shareholder value” view of the American firm. Jensen's work was embraced by a generation of corporate raiders aggressively advancing new financial practices and discourses. His contribution, commonly understood as “agency theory,” was intertwined with the transformations in corporate management and governance of the last decades of the twentieth century—from the junk bond market in the 1980s to the exponential growth of CEO pay in the 1990s to the shareholder value management strategies of the 2000s. While debates about the spread of neoliberal ideas and governance tools have largely centered on the transformations of the state and international institutions or the role of actively organized intellectual networks, this essay emphasizes the importance of identifying specific carriers of particular transformations within the space of American “business discourse.”

Keywords: agency theory; corporate governance; executive pay; the firm; Michael Jensen; Neo-Liberalism; shareholder value; Agency Theory; Corporate Governance; Executive Compensation; Business and Shareholder Relations; Transformation;