Technology & Operations Management

- November–December 2024
- Article
How to Avoid the Agility Trap

By: Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu

Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off, because the environment is evolving much faster than firms can respond to. The consequences of trying to keep up with every change are stark: the erosion of competitive advantages, a myopic focus on the short term, and organizational chaos. In their research the authors have repeatedly seen that in volatile environments, firms anchoring their strategies in a few enduring factors, rather than many transient ones, are more likely to achieve sustainable growth. This approach is called strategic constancy. It involves recognizing the fundamental aspects of the company’s business model—its core values, customer relationships, brand identity, and key competencies—and remaining dedicated to them despite external pressures. It emphasizes depth over breadth—deepening the company’s competitive advantage in its core areas rather than spreading efforts thinly over many.
- November–December 2024
- Article
How to Avoid the Agility Trap

By: Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu

Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off, because the environment is evolving much faster than firms can respond to. The...
- November 2024
- Case
Polish Agro: Where Do We Grow From Here?

By: Willy C. Shih, Lena Duchene and Daniela Beyersdorfer

By July 2024, Polish Agro had grown into one of Poland’s fastest-growing agribusinesses, with 230 million in revenue, 82 employees, and operations across Northern Poland. The company supported farmers with essential agricultural inputs like fertilizers and seeds, while purchasing, aggregating, and reselling their outputs. Led by CEO Mathias Eisert, Polish Agro had also ventured into biofertilizers, aligning with new EU sustainability regulations and aiming to differentiate itself in a highly competitive market. These innovative products offered a buffer against commoditization, yet scaling them posed challenges due to Polish Agro’s highly consultative business model and limited sales force. This case study examines Polish Agro’s growth journey amidst disruptions like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine and evaluates strategic options for sustaining and expanding its market position, including enhancing trading capabilities, investing in brand development, and digitalizing sales channels.
- November 2024
- Case
Polish Agro: Where Do We Grow From Here?

By: Willy C. Shih, Lena Duchene and Daniela Beyersdorfer

By July 2024, Polish Agro had grown into one of Poland’s fastest-growing agribusinesses, with 230 million in revenue, 82 employees, and operations across Northern Poland. The company supported farmers with essential agricultural inputs like fertilizers and seeds, while purchasing, aggregating, and reselling their outputs. Led by CEO Mathias...
- November 2024
- Case
Fire at Notre Dame de Paris

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jerome Barthelemy

In early 2019, the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral was severely damaged by a fire. Though many people still believe that the fire was due to errors made at the “sharp end”, the case suggests that it resulted from the combination of various types of errors that could have been avoided.
- November 2024
- Case
Fire at Notre Dame de Paris

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jerome Barthelemy

In early 2019, the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral was severely damaged by a fire. Though many people still believe that the fire was due to errors made at the “sharp end”, the case suggests that it resulted from the combination of various types of errors that could have been avoided.

About the Unit

As the world of operations has changed, so have interests and priorities within the Unit. Historically, the TOM Unit focused on manufacturing and the development of physical products. Over the past several years, we have expanded our research, course development, and course offerings to encompass new issues in information technology, supply chains, and service industries.

The field of TOM is concerned with the design, management, and improvement of operating systems and processes. As we seek to understand the challenges confronting firms competing in today's demanding environment, the focus of our work has broadened to include the multiple activities comprising a firm's "operating core":

the multi-function, multi-firm system that includes basic research, design, engineering, product and process development and production of goods and services within individual operating units;
the networks of information and material flows that tie operating units together and the systems that support these networks;
the distribution and delivery of goods and services to customers.

Recent Publications

How to Avoid the Agility Trap

By: Jianwen Liao and Feng Zhu

November–December 2024 |
Article |
Harvard Business Review

Agility is all the rage in strategy circles these days. According to conventional wisdom, organizations should rapidly react to technological advances, new market dynamics, and shifting consumer preferences. But in practice this is nearly impossible to pull off, because the environment is evolving much faster than firms can respond to. The consequences of trying to keep up with every change are stark: the erosion of competitive advantages, a myopic focus on the short term, and organizational chaos. In their research the authors have repeatedly seen that in volatile environments, firms anchoring their strategies in a few enduring factors, rather than many transient ones, are more likely to achieve sustainable growth. This approach is called strategic constancy. It involves recognizing the fundamental aspects of the company’s business model—its core values, customer relationships, brand identity, and key competencies—and remaining dedicated to them despite external pressures. It emphasizes depth over breadth—deepening the company’s competitive advantage in its core areas rather than spreading efforts thinly over many.

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Competitive Advantage; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Model

Citation

Find at Harvard

Polish Agro: Where Do We Grow From Here?

By: Willy C. Shih, Lena Duchene and Daniela Beyersdorfer

November 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

By July 2024, Polish Agro had grown into one of Poland’s fastest-growing agribusinesses, with 230 million in revenue, 82 employees, and operations across Northern Poland. The company supported farmers with essential agricultural inputs like fertilizers and seeds, while purchasing, aggregating, and reselling their outputs. Led by CEO Mathias Eisert, Polish Agro had also ventured into biofertilizers, aligning with new EU sustainability regulations and aiming to differentiate itself in a highly competitive market. These innovative products offered a buffer against commoditization, yet scaling them posed challenges due to Polish Agro’s highly consultative business model and limited sales force. This case study examines Polish Agro’s growth journey amidst disruptions like COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine and evaluates strategic options for sustaining and expanding its market position, including enhancing trading capabilities, investing in brand development, and digitalizing sales channels.

Citation

Educators

Cheerful Music

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Feng Zhu and Nancy Hua Dai

November 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Established by Snow Jiang in 2019 in Shenzhen, China, Cheerful Music was a record label company that had created many hit songs in China. “Yi Xiao Jiang Hu,” its most famous hit song, gained 50 billion views on TikTok as the background music for the Subject Three dance. In April 2023, Cheerful Music established an office in London, UK. In August 2024, Snow Jiang was considering two important issues: How could the company develop a new hit making model that would enable it to succeed in the UK? And should Cheerful Music double down on using generative AI tools like Suno?

Keywords: Music Entertainment; Global Strategy; Generative Ai; China; UK

Citation

Educators

Fire at Notre Dame de Paris

By: Amy C. Edmondson and Jerome Barthelemy

November 2024 |
Case |
Faculty Research

In early 2019, the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral was severely damaged by a fire. Though many people still believe that the fire was due to errors made at the “sharp end”, the case suggests that it resulted from the combination of various types of errors that could have been avoided.

Keywords: France

Citation

Educators

Allbirds: Decarbonizing Fashion (A) and (B) Video Supplement

By: Michael W. Toffel, Kenneth P. Pucker and Stacy Straaberg

November 2024 |
Supplement |
Faculty Research

Citation

Purchase

Is a Single-Family Office Right For You?

By: Christina R. Wing, George Jackoboice and Justin Huang

November 2024 |
Technical Note |
Faculty Research

Citation

Educators

Outcome-Driven Dynamic Refugee Assignment with Allocation Balancing

By: Kirk Bansak and Elisabeth Paulson

November–December 2024 |
Article |
Operations Research

This study proposes two new dynamic assignment algorithms to match refugees and asylum seekers to geographic localities within a host country. The first, currently implemented in a multi-year pilot in Switzerland, seeks to maximize the average predicted employment level (or any measured outcome of interest) of refugees through a minimum-discord online assignment algorithm. Although the proposed algorithm achieves nearoptimal expected employment compared to the hindsight-optimal solution (and improves upon the status quo procedure by about 40%), it results in a periodically imbalanced allocation to the localities over time. This leads to undesirable workload inefficiencies for resettlement resources and agents. To address this problem, the second algorithm balances the goal of improving refugee outcomes with the desire for an even allocation over time. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated using real refugee resettlement data from a large resettlement agency in the United States. On this dataset, we find that the allocation balancing algorithm can achieve near-perfect balance over time with only a small loss in expected employment compared to the pure employment-maximizing algorithm. In addition, the allocation balancing algorithm offers a number of ancillary benefits compared to pure outcome-maximization, including robustness to unknown arrival flows and greater exploration.

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Refugees; Geographic Location; Employment

Citation

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Purchase

Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Kirk Doran, Astrid Marinoni and Chungeun Yoon

November–December 2024 |
Article |
Organization Science

We study how restrictive immigration policies that result in the unexpected loss of co-workers affect the performance of skilled migrants employed in organizations. Specifically, we examine the impact of the loss of team members on their co-workers’ performance in response to the unexpectedly increased denials of extensions of H-1B work visas in the United States beginning in 2017. Losing a team member generally has a positive albeit economically insignificant effect on the performance of workers left behind. However, we find that individuals who lost peers of the same ethnic background experience a substantial decrease in their performance. To confirm that our results are not plagued by the presence of unobservable team or individual features that might impact visa-denial decisions, we build an instrumental variable that exploits the fixed duration of the H-1B visa. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that our result is driven by workers in small teams, teams working on atypical tasks, and ethnically homogeneous teams. These analyses hint at the fact that ethnic ties may boost individual performance through preferential channels of knowledge and information spillovers.

Keywords: Immigration; Performance Productivity; Employees; Human Capital; Ethnicity; Groups and Teams