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- 2021
- Working Paper
Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm
By: Jorge Tamayo, Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jean-Francois Gauthier and Anant Nyshadham
We study relational contracts among managers using a unique dataset that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Time Dependency, Data Flow, and Competitive Advantage
Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of organizations (businesses, government...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China
By: Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen
A large literature on state-business relations in China has examined the political role of capitalists and collusion between the state and the private sector. This paper contributes to that literature, and our understanding of the internal differentiation among China’s...
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- March 2021
- Case
CashDrop (A)
By: Rembrand Koning, Paul A. Gompers and Sarah Gulick
In July 2020, Ruben Flores-Martinez had launched a startup, CashDrop, which provided easy and cheap sales options for small businesses. The COVID-19 pandemic helped CashDrop quickly grow. Flores-Martinez, who had previously sought and been denied venture capital...
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- March 2021
- Case
Seeding and Selling Asana
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal
This case explores a radical new way of organizing a sales team to sell a SaaS product with tremendous organic growth. In 2019, Oliver Jay was head of global revenue and business development at Asana, a company whose namesake product was a work management software app...
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Keywords:
Saas;
Customer Journey;
Sales;
Salesforce Management;
Technology;
Software;
Technology Industry;
United States
- March 2021
- Case
Bill Wilson: Changing the World
By: Robert L. Simons and Max Saffer
This case describes the life choices of Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. A young man with tremendous potential, Wilson hit rock bottom as a drunk. An epiphany, coupled with his personal drive, led him to build a worldwide organization that has helped...
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- March 2021
- Case
Cedar Environmental: Innovation vs. Corruption in Lebanon?
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Youssef Abdel Aal
The case follows Ziad Abi Chaker, founder and CEO of Cedar Environmental, an environmental engineering company in Lebanon, as he weighs his options for how to grow the company despite facing barriers to growth, most notably the prevalent public corruption in his...
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Keywords:
Waste Management;
Recycling;
Sustainability;
Corruption;
Leadership & Corporate Accountability;
Business And Government;
Social Entrepreneurship;
Environmental Sustainability;
Green Technology;
Pollution;
Entrepreneurship;
Business and Government Relations;
Crime and Corruption;
Technological Innovation;
Growth and Development Strategy;
Business Strategy;
Expansion;
Green Technology Industry;
Middle East;
Lebanon
- 2021
- Chapter
Renewing the Relevance of IB: Can Some History Help?
By: Geoffrey Jones
International business (IB) as a discipline has given limited attention to contemporary grand challenges of inequality, global warming, aging populations, endemic health crises, and de-globalization, in all of which multinationals are either central to the problem or...
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- March–April 2021
- Article
Manage the Suppliers That Could Harm Your Brand: Know When to Avoid, Engage, or Drop Them
By: Jodi L Short and Michael W. Toffel
The pandemic has placed a new spotlight on working conditions in factories that supply global companies. To avert problems, firms often impose codes of conduct on their suppliers and perform audits to assess compliance. Do these measures help identify unethical...
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Keywords:
Auditing;
Agency Cost;
Quality And Safety;
Quality Management System;
Quality Management;
Unions;
Environmental Management;
Globalization;
Goods and Commodities;
Governance;
Labor;
Labor Unions;
Wages;
Working Conditions;
Operations;
Supply Chain;
Safety;
Quality;
China;
Bangladesh;
Asia;
Pakistan
- March–April 2021
- Article
How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions
By: Paul A. Gompers, Will Gornall, Steven Kaplan and Ilya Strebulaev
For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is known about what VCs actually...
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- March–April 2021
- Article
What Professional Service Firms Must Do to Thrive
By: Ashish Nanda and Das Narayandas
When the going gets tough, professional service firms (PSFs) often get desperate and chase all kinds of business just to keep the lights on. Consultancies, financial services firms, VC/PE firms, and the like offer services and sign up clients they should never have...
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- February 2021
- Case
SafeGraph: Selling Data as a Service
By: Ramana Nanda, Abhishek Nagaraj and Allison Ciechanover
Set in January 2021, the CEO of SafeGraph, a four-year-old startup that sold Data as a Service, looked to the future. His aim was to become the most trusted source for data about a physical place. The company provided points of interest (POI) and foot traffic data on...
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- February 2021 (Revised March 2021)
- Case
Shopify: The Conquest for Chinese E-Commerce
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Avani Patel, Ariel Yang and Samantha Lin
In mid-2020, Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, faced a critical decision on how to time a potential move into the China market. Over the prior 15 years, his Canadian software-as-a-service company had grown from a small e-commerce solutions provider to a full-service...
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- February 03, 2021
- Article
Reimagining the Balanced Scorecard for the ESG Era
By: Robert S. Kaplan and David McMillan
Companies are increasingly aware that their customers and society in general expect businesses to adopt and work towards social and environmental objectives as well as the traditional financial ones. This involves not only re-evaluating firms’ models but re-imagining...
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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
Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field
Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the...
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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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- Winter 2021
- Article
Making Economics More Useful: How Technological Eclecticism Could Help
By: Amar Bhide
Keynes thought it would be ‘splendid’ if economists became more like dentists. Disciplinary economics
has instead become more like physics in focusing on concise, universal propositions verified
through decisive tests. This focus, I argue, limits the practical utility...
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- January 2021
- Case
Brigad: The Future of Work
By: Nien-he Hsieh, Elena Corsi and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In 2019 Florent Malbranche, CEO and co-founder of the French tech startup Brigad, pondered the next growth steps. Founded in 2015, Brigad’s objective was two-fold: to help restaurants and bars find qualified staff for punctual shifts, and to make it easier for...
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- January 2021
- Case
Snapp: Scaling Under Sanctions in Iran (A)
By: Meg Rithmire and Gamze Yucaoglu
"The case opens in November 2019 as Eyad Alkassar and Mahmoud Fouz, co-founders of Iran’s first and leading ride-hailing platform, Snapp, find out about Apple’s and Google’s decision to remove all Iranian apps from their respective application stores.
The case... View Details
The case... View Details