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In 2016, LA Fitness was the largest chain of non-franchised fitness clubs in North
America, operating 676 clubs, serving 4.9 million...
- 2021
- Working Paper
T-Shaped Managers—One Size Does Not Fit All: Exploratory Study from the Military
By: Hise O. Gibson
People are an organization’s most important resource. Managers who are collaborative and innovative ensure that organizations remain competitive. This type of manager has been referred to as a T-shaped manager. “T” given that the vertical portion represents the depth...
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- May–June 2021
- Article
Why Start-ups Fail
If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds...
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- April 2021
- Background Note
HEAD vs. LEAD: Disruptions Originating at the High- vs. Low-End of the Market
By: Elie Ofek, Olivier Toubia and Didier Toubia
Twenty five years after it was initially proposed, Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation continues to be a major reference for entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors. However, the term “disruptive innovation” is often used in ways and contexts...
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- April 2021
- Case
Glass-Shattering Leaders: Jack Rivkin
By: Boris Groysberg and Colleen Ammerman
Jack Rivkin’s innovative approach to hiring, developing, and retaining employees created opportunities for female analysts to thrive at the equity research department he led, and also made the entire department more effective. Rivkin fostered a culture of gender...
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- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic...
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Keywords:
Impact Investing;
Development Economics;
Developing Countries and Economies;
Renewable Energy;
Climate Change;
Environmental Sustainability;
Borrowing and Debt;
Credit;
Equity;
Bonds;
Financing and Loans;
Growth and Development;
Emerging Markets;
Non-Governmental Organizations;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Investment;
Decision Making;
Financial Services Industry;
Energy Industry;
Zambia
- 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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- 2021
- Article
New Sales Realities
Business leaders need to understand that it’s the fit of People, Process, Pricing, and Partners that drives sales effectiveness. As firms confront new buying processes, required sales competencies affect hiring, training, and development (People). Without a coherent...
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- February 2021
- Case
A Cultural Transformation at Southeastern Grocers
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Jonah S. Goldberg and Joseph A. Paul
When Anthony Hucker, the CEO of Southeastern Grocers (SEG), took over in that role in July 2017, the company was in dire financial and operational condition and was headed towards bankruptcy. SEG, the fifth largest grocery chain in the U.S. in early 2021, operated...
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- January 2021
- Article
Using Models to Persuade
By: Joshua Schwartzstein and Adi Sunderam
We present a framework where "model persuaders" influence receivers’ beliefs by proposing models that organize past data to make predictions. Receivers are assumed to find models more compelling when they better explain the data, fixing receivers’ prior beliefs. Model...
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- July 8, 2020
- Article
Making a Difference: Developing Actionable Knowledge for Practice and Theory
By: Michael Beer
There is a widely acknowledged gap between academic research and practice. While the field of organizational studies and development has had an impact on management practice in some organizations, it has had only a modest impact on widely accepted management practice...
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- Article
Soul and Machine (Learning)
By: Davide Proserpio, John R. Hauser, Xiao Liu, Tomomichi Amano, Burnap Alex, Tong Guo, Dokyun (DK) Lee, Randall Lewis, Kanishka Misra, Eric Schwarz, Artem Timoshenko, Lilei Xu and Hema Yoganarasimhan
Machine learning is bringing us self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language translation, but how can machine learning help marketers improve marketing decisions? Machine learning models predict extremely well, are scalable to “big data,” and are a natural fit to...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 2 Transactions in a Task Network
From the 1930s through today, many economists have conceived of large technical systems for the production of goods and services as a series of transactions. This point of view has led eminent economists to assert that transactions are the fundamental unit of analysis...
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- September–October 2020
- Article
When It's Time to Pivot, What's Your Story?: How to Sell Stakeholders on a New Strategy
By: Rory McDonald and Robert Bremner
To succeed, a new company must rally investors, staff, customers, and the media around a good story. But often that narrative turns out to be wrong, and entrepreneurs realize they need to change direction. How that shift is communicated can have a huge impact on a...
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- July 2020
- Case
Karen Bruck: Growing Managers at MercadoLibre
By: Joshua D. Margolis, Fernanda Miguel and Mariana Cal
Karen Bruck, Corporate Sales Director at MercadoLibre, Latin America's largest e-commerce platform, needs to make a decision about one of her managers, who, while analytically savvy, has an approach that does not fit in with the company's culture.
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- Summer 2020
- Article
Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn
By: Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda
Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real limitations in its...
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- June 2020
- Teaching Note
Shiseido Acquires Drunk Elephant
By: Jill Avery
On October 7, 2019, the Shiseido Group announced that it would acquire clean skincare brand Drunk Elephant for $845 million, a valuation of 8.5 times sales. Did Shiseido pay too much or too little for this brand asset? How much was the Drunk Elephant brand worth and...
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Keywords:
Brand Management;
Brand Valuation;
Brand Equity;
Brand Value;
Mergers ＆ Acquisitions;
Startup;
DTC;
Brand Portfolio Strategy;
Marketing;
Marketing Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Mergers and Acquisitions;
Valuation;
Entrepreneurship;
Business Startups;
Beauty and Cosmetics Industry;
Consumer Products Industry;
United States;
Japan;
Asia;
North America
- 2020
- Working Paper
The Pursuit of Passion Propagates Privilege
By: Josephine Tan and Jon M. Jachimowicz
For many graduating college students entering the workforce, “pursue your passion” is not only a frequently repeated graduation mantra but also a commonly embraced ideal. In line with this view, prior academic research finds that passion connotes work-related benefits,...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
EMEs and COVID-19: Shutting Down in a World of Informal and Tiny Firms
By: Laura Alfaro, Oscar Becerra and Marcela Eslava
Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on...
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- May 2020
- Supplement
Valuing Peloton
Peloton Interactive, a well-known unicorn in the connected fitness space, had gone public with a market capitalization of over $8.0 billion. In the weeks following its public debut, Peloton’s stock price fell by over 25%. Taylor Knox, a stock analyst and enthusiastic...
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- May 2020
- Case
Valuing Peloton
Peloton Interactive, a well-known venture-capital-backed unicorn in the connected fitness space, recently had gone public with a market capitalization of over $8.0 billion. However, in the weeks following its public debut, Peloton’s stock price had fallen by over 25%....
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