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• Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised September 2018)

  Gene Lee Navigates the Darden Takeover

  Joshua D. Margolis, H. Lawrence Culp, James Barnett and Aldo Sesia

  Following a full takeover of Darden Restaurant’s Board of Directors, Darden COO Gene Lee is weighing an offer to become interim CEO.

  Keywords: shareholder activism; Investment Activism; Crisis Management; Personal Development and Career; Decision Choices and Conditions; Food and Beverage Industry; United States;

  Citation:

  Margolis, Joshua D., H. Lawrence Culp, James Barnett, and Aldo Sesia. "Gene Lee Navigates the Darden Takeover." Harvard Business School Case 418-015, March 2018. (Revised September 2018.)  View Details

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• Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | August 28, 2018

  How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence

  Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore and David Lazer

  People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time. We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs. Human subjects solved the canonical traveling salesperson problem in groups of three, randomized into treatments with constant social influence, intermittent social influence, or no social influence. Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found the optimum solution frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration. Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation. We also show that storing subjects’ best solutions so that they could be reloaded and possibly modified in subsequent rounds—a ubiquitous feature of personal productivity software—is similar to constant social influence: it increases mean performance but decreases exploration.

  Keywords: transparency; social influence; Collective Intelligence; Interaction; problem solving; collaboration; intermittant; Breaks; always on; communication technologies; communication; Communication; Design; Information; Management; Leadership; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Performance; Social and Collaborative Networks; Information Technology;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Ethan, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer. "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 35 (August 28, 2018).  View Details

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• Background Note | HBS Case Collection | August 2018

  Note on Hackathons

  Ethan Bernstein

  Organizations have often sought to meet the pressures of rapid change through novel ways of managing human capital to boost innovation and productivity. Hackathons have emerged as one of the latest approaches to do just that. How can those responsible for managing human capital use hackathons as a new tool in their toolkit? This note is meant as a guide for academics and practitioners to understand what hackathons are, how they work, when and how they can be useful, and how they complement other more traditional tools for organizational innovation and productivity. The note ends with a summary of questions and additional resources for more detail.

  Keywords: hackathon; crowdsourcing; hack; innovation; productivity; minimum viable product; time; transparency; bootcamp; Design; Entrepreneurship; Human Resources; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Management; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Technology; Technology Industry;

  Citation:

  Bernstein, Ethan. "Note on Hackathons." Harvard Business School Background Note 419-021, August 2018.  View Details

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