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- March 2022
- Case
Auto Mag (Abridged)
By: David E. Bell
A young HBS graduate purchases a publisher of specialty magazines that advertises second hand cars, boats, trucks, etc. The magazines carry photographs and a brief description of each article for sale. The company faces the problem of deciding on how many magazines to...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
CRM and AI in Time of Crisis
By: Michelle Y. Lu and Navid Mojir
A crisis can affect the incentives of various players within a firm’s multi-layered sales and marketing organization (e.g., headquarters and branches of a bank). Such shifts can result in sales decisions against the firm’s best interests. Motivated by the backlash to...
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- Article
Accounting for Climate Change
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
Corporations are facing growing pressure—from investors, advocacy groups, politicians, and even business leaders themselves—to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their operations and their supply and distribution chains. About 90% of the companies in the S&P...
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- July 2021 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Americanas: “We Always Want More”
By: Boris Groysberg and Sarah L. Abbott
Beto Sicupira had joined Americanas, a leading retailer in Brazil, in 1981. 2021 marked forty years since Sicupira’s arrival, and the anniversary prompted him to reflect on what had been accomplished and on where the organization was headed. Americanas’ growth strategy...
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- June 23, 2021
- Article
Research: When A/B Testing Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
By: Eva Ascarza
When it comes to churn prevention, marketers traditionally start by identifying which customers are most likely to churn, and then running A/B tests to determine whether a proposed retention intervention will be effective at retaining those high-risk customers. While...
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Keywords:
Customer Retention;
Churn;
Targeting;
Market Research;
Marketing;
Investment Return;
Customers;
Retention;
Research
- 2021
- Chapter
Digital Transformation and the Salesforce: Observations, Warnings, and Recommendations
Sales is a crucial test for organizational change, including productive use (or not) of new technologies. Changes in selling always have wider organizational implications, because so many other decisions and resource commitments in firms depend upon demand forecasts...
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- March 2021
- Article
The Customer May Not Always Be Right: Customer Compatibility and Service Performance
This paper investigates the impact of customer compatibility – the degree of fit between the needs of customers and the capabilities of the operations serving them – on customer experiences and firm performance. We use a variance decomposition analysis to quantify the...
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- February 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Board Director Dilemmas—Back the SPAC?
By: Suraj Srinivasan, David G. Fubini and Amram Migdal
This case focuses on a board director of a diversified holding company. The firm’s longtime CEO had always exhibited a cautious, methodical approach to growth. Now, the CEO is raising the idea of joining with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to spin off...
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- February 2021
- Article
A Dynamic Theory of Multiple Borrowing
By: Daniel Green and Ernest Liu
Multiple borrowing—a borrower obtains overlapping loans from multiple lenders—is a common phenomenon in many credit markets. We build a highly tractable, dynamic model of multiple borrowing and show that, because overlapping creditors may impose default externalities...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Canary Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past customer spending in a category is generally a positive signal of future customer spending. We show that there exist “Canary Categories” for which the reverse is true. The more customers purchase in these categories, the less likely these customers are to return...
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- January–February 2021
- Article
Compensation Packages That Actually Drive Performance
By: Boris Groysberg, Sarah Abbott, Michael R. Marino and Metin Aksoy
By aligning executives’ financial incentives with company strategy, a firm can inspire its management to deliver superior results. But it can be hard to get pay packages right. In this article four experts break down the key elements of compensation and explain how to...
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- Article
Trust: The Foundation of Leadership
By: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
The authors contend that if leadership is about empowering others, in your presence and your absence, then trust is the emotional framework that allows that service to be freely exchanged. Based on their experiences advising individuals and organizations, their basic...
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Keywords:
Trustworthiness;
Authenticity;
Empathy;
Trust;
Leadership;
Competency and Skills;
Behavior
- October 2020
- Teaching Plan
Merck: COVID-19 Vaccines
By: Willy C. Shih
COVID-19 infections were still climbing across the U.S. and many other parts of the world in September 2020, and it seemed that every time Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. consented to an interview in recent months he always seemed to hear the same question,...
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- October 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
The Bronx Community Foundation
By: Brian Trelstad and Aldo Sesia
Derrick and Desmon Lewis were both successful professionals in the consulting and banking industries. They were born and raised in The Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough. The Lewis brothers had always wanted to give back to the community. In 2016 they launched a...
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- Fall 2020
- Article
Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa
Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from...
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- September 2020
- Case
Merck: COVID-19 Vaccines
By: Willy C. Shih
COVID-19 infections were still climbing across the U.S. and many other parts of the world in September 2020, and it seemed that every time Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck & Co. consented to an interview in recent months he always seemed to hear the same question,...
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- Fall 2020
- Article
Climate in the Boardroom: Struggling to Reconcile Business as Usual & the End of the World as We Know It
How does one witness to businesspeople about climate change? Climate change is a problem for the collective and the long term, whereas business often requires a ruthless focus on the individual and the quarter. Climate change is an ethical catastrophe whose solution...
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- August 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
Gogoro: From Electric Scooter to Energy Platform
By: Tarun Khanna and Billy Chan
The founder of Gogoro had always wanted to revolutionize the energy market from day one since he started the electric scooter business that featured an innovative battery swapping technology. Over the course of five years, he had developed a premium line of electric...
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- August 2020 (Revised December 2020)
- Case
General Dennis L. Via: People First, Mission Always
By: Boris Groysberg, Susan Seligson, Katherine Connolly Baden and Robin Abrahams
Dennis L. Via, was a retired four-star U.S. Army general and one of the world’s foremost experts on logistics, crisis management, supply chains, and maintaining a state of readiness at all times. As he reflected back on his career and leadership experience during the...
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- Article
The Importance of Being Causal
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Albert Chen and Min Liu
Causal inference is the study of how actions, interventions, or treatments affect outcomes of interest. The methods that have received the lion’s share of attention in the data science literature for establishing causation are variations of randomized experiments....
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