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- March 2021
- Article
Last Place Aversion in Queues
By: Ryan W. Buell
This paper documents the effects of last place aversion in queues and its implications for customer experiences and behaviors as well as for operating performance. An observational analysis of customers queuing at a grocery store, and four online studies in which...
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- February 2021
- Case
Barbarians at the Gate or Turnaround Gurus? Private Equity and the Rise of the LBO
By: Tom Nicholas and John Masko
During the 1980s, leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and the private equity (PE) firms responsible for carrying them out revolutionized both investment and management in the U.S. Between 1980 and 1989, buyout activity in the U.S. surged from $1 billion per year to $60 billion....
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Keywords:
Leveraged Buyouts;
Mergers And Acquisitions;
Business Conglomerates;
Restructuring;
Borrowing And Debt;
Private Equity;
Bonds;
Investment Return;
Institutional Investing;
Profit Sharing;
Business History;
management Style;
Private Ownership;
Performance effectiveness;
Value Creation;
Financial Services Industry;
United States
- February 15, 2021
- Article
How Real Sales Learning Happens: In the Flow of Work
By: Yuchun Lee, Mark Magnacca and Frank V. Cespedes
Most learning in sales is through peer learning in task-specific contexts, and the effects are cumulative because modeling behavior is a big driver of how salespeople develop. This is very different from the experience in most training seminars, especially if the...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
From Online Content to Offline Results: Effects of a Best Practices Initiative on an Enterprise Social Network
By: Shelley Xin Li and Tatiana Sandino
We examine the effects of a best practices initiative on an enterprise social network (ESN) with a natural field experiment in a large grocery store chain. Our results do not show an immediate improvement in sales, but do show 3.67-percent higher sales for the...
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- 2021
- Book
Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing
Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Harbinger Categories
By: Eric Anderson, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli and Duncan Simester
Past spending by a customer is generally a positive signal of future spending at the same retailer. We show that there exist “Harbinger Categories” for which the reverse is true. The more purchases customers make in these categories, the less likely these customers are...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
Do white collar workers with lower social status in the occupational hierarchy die younger? The influential Whitehall studies of British civil servants identified a strong inverse relationship between employment rank and mortality, but we do not know if this effect...
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- January 2021
- Technical Note
Strategy as Core Guidance
This note gives managers a concrete perspective on what ‘a strategy’ really is and what makes a decision ‘strategic.’ It also gives them practical frameworks to assess whether some set of decisions is really a strategy and how to assess a strategy’s effectiveness. It...
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- January 2021 (Revised February 2021)
- Case
TCS: From Physical Offices to Borderless Work
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Malini Sen
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a multinational IT services company headquartered in Mumbai, is a subsidiary of one of India’s most reputed conglomerates, the Tata Group. In 2020, TCS was valued at $144.7 billion, the highest for any company in the IT sector,...
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- January 2021
- Article
The Effects of Menu Costs on Retail Performance: Evidence from Adoption of the Electronic Shelf Label Technology
By: Ioannis Stamatopoulos, Achal Bassamboo and Antonio Moreno
We use the adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) by an international grocery retailer in 2015 to identify the effects of physical menu costs (i.e., labor and material costs of price adjustment) on retail performance. We find that the installation of ESLs increased...
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- January 2021
- Article
Turbulence, Firm Decentralization and Growth in Bad Times
By: Philippe Aghion, Nicholas Bloom, Brian Lucking, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
What is the optimal form of firm organization during “bad times”? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information...
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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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- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Influence in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Community Establishments’ Closure Decisions Follow Those of Nearby Chain Establishments
By: Abhishek Nagaraj, Mathijs de Vaan, Saqib Mumtaz and Sameer Srivastava
As conveners that bring various stakeholders into the same physical space, firms can powerfully influence the course of pandemics such as COVID-19. Even when operating under government orders and health guidelines, firms have considerable discretion to keep their...
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- November 2020
- Teaching Note
Social Salary Setting at Spiber
By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears
This case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their own salary. In the course of...
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- November 2020
- Article
When the Boss Comes to Town: The Effects of Headquarters' Visits on Facility-Level Misconduct
By: Jonas Heese and Gerardo Pérez Cavazos
We study the effects of headquarters’ visits on facility-level misconduct. We use the staggered introduction of airline routes to identify exogenous travel-time reductions between headquarters and facilities and test whether such reductions affect facility-level...
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- October 2020
- Article
Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance
By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work...
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- September 2020
- Case
Minerva 2004: Discovery
By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock
After nearly five years in operation, Doctor Cynthia Bamdad, founder and CEO of Minerva Biotechnologies Corporation (Minerva), was reflecting on the company’s next steps. In a few short years, she and her small team had managed to develop a nanoparticle process for...
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- 2020
- Chapter
Reserve Accumulation, Sovereign Debt, and Exchange Rate Policy
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
In the past decade, foreign participation in local-currency bond markets in emerging countries increased dramatically. Additionally, emerging countries are increasingly deviating from inflation targeting regimes, managing their exchange rate and engaging in...
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- September 2020
- Teaching Note
Uber: Competing Globally
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 720-404.
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Keywords:
Business Ventures;
Business Growth And Maturation;
Business Model;
Geography;
Geographic Location;
Geographic Scope;
Global Strategy;
Globalization;
Multinational Firms And management;
Globalized Markets And Industries;
Governance;
Governance Controls;
Governing Rules, Regulations, And Reforms;
Innovation And Invention;
Disruptive Innovation;
Innovation Strategy;
Law;
management;
Growth And Development;
Growth management;
Markets;
Demand And Consumers;
Consumer Behavior;
Network effects;
Emerging Markets;
Market Design;
Market Entry And Exit;
Market Participation;
Supply And Industry;
Industry Structures;
Planning;
Strategic Planning;
Relationships;
Business And Community Relations;
Business And Government Relations;
Business And Stakeholder Relations;
Labor And management Relations;
Networks;
Adaptation;
Strategy;
Business Strategy;
Competition;
Competitive Advantage;
Competitive Strategy;
Expansion;
Technology;
Mobile Technology;
Technology Platform;
Transportation Networks;
Transportation;
Transportation Industry;
Technology Industry;
Africa;
Ghana;
Asia;
China;
Shanghai;
Shanghai Shi;
India;
New Delhi;
Europe;
United Kingdom;
London;
England;
Latin America;
North And Central America;
United States;
New York (city, Ny);
New York (state, Us);
South America;
Colombia
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
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