This paper addresses primarily two questions. First, when (and why) should a company’s strategy be developed by its CEO versus by some outside analyst or other insider? Second, how does strategy interact with vision (in the sense of a strong belief about the right...

A company commits to providing investors a 200% return on their investment if either the firm or its founder is investigated for corruption.

This case describes how Robert Fadel, as CEO and chairman of ABC, one of Lebanon’s leading retail and real estate groups, professionalized the family business amid ongoing disputes with his siblings. Robert was the second son of Maurice Fadel, who had founded the...

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems. Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a...

For a modular presentation of the same material, please see “Christine Lagarde (A): A French Prime Minister Calls” (HBS No. 419-017), “Christine Lagarde (B): Being a Public Servant” (HBS No. 419-018), and “Christine Lagarde (C): Managing the IMF” (HBS No. 419-019)....

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into “open,” transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors, and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on...

How do teams working on complex projects get the help they need? Our qualitative investigation of the help provided to project teams at a prominent design firm revealed two distinct helping processes, both characterized by deep, sustained engagement that far exceeds...

In the spring of 2018, Kinya Seto, president and CEO of LIXIL Group Corporation, a major housing and building products and services company, called a meeting at the company’s head office in central Tokyo to discuss how to implement the new three-year strategic plan....

Since its founding eight years earlier, Hidrovias do Brasil (“Hidrovias”), an integrated logistics provider serving corporate customers exporting products from South America via the Atlantic Ocean, had grown to 900 employees and $253 million in annual revenues....

On November 13, 2015, Dr. Marie Borel, Dr. Emmanuelle Dolla, Dr. Frédéric Le Saché, and Prof. Mathieu Raux were the doctors in charge of the trauma center at L’Hôpital de la Pitié Salpêtrière in Paris, where dozens of wounded and dying patients, most with severe...

In 2006 Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria launched a study tracking how large companies’ CEOs spent their time, 24/7, for 13 weeks: where they were, with whom, what they did, and what they were focusing on. To date, Porter and Nohria have...