57 Posts found for Source: Harvard Business School (HBS)

Too often, workers are evaluated based on results rather than on the quality of the decision. Given that most consequential business decisions involve some uncertainty, the upshot is that organizations wind up rewarding luck rather than wisdom. From a rational decision-making perspective, people’s decisions should be evaluated based on the information the decision maker had available to him or her at the time, and not … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Don A. Moore, Francesca Gino, Max H. Bazerman | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

Michael Porter published an article in the January 2008 Harvard Business Review updating his famous five forces model. Here is an interview with him (12:57 minutes) on the relevance of the 5 Forces in today’s world.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Michael E. Porter | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: People, Strategy

This online diagnostic tool is part of a Harvard Business Review package on organizational learning aimed at helping you judge your own organization’s learning capabilities. It will help you answer key questions, including: To what extent is your unit functioning as a learning organization? and what are the relationships among the factors that affect learning in your unit?

Content: Online Resource | Authors: Amy Edmondson, David Garvin | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

In this skillful lecture, Professor Patrick Winston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers tips on how to give an effective talk, cleverly illustrating his suggestions by using them himself. He emphasizes how to start a lecture, cycling in on the material, using verbal punctuation to indicate transitions, describing “near misses” that strengthen the intended concept, and asking questions. He also talks about using the … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Patrick Winston | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Personal Development

“We tend to assume that great leaders must make difficult choices between two or more conflicting outcomes. In an interview study with 26 CEOs of top American and European companies (incl. IKEA, Campbell Soups, Nokia, H&M), we find that instead of choosing between conflicting outcomes such as long-term strategy or short-term performance drivers, top tier managers argue that their role is to embrace such paradoxes … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Flemming Norrgren, Michael Beer, Nathaniel Foote, Russell Eisenstat, Tobias Fredberg | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Best Practices, Management

HBS Professor Andrew McAfee blogs about social networking software (SNS) like Facebook and its direct applicability within companies. Notably, he discusses the work of Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who wrote “The Strength of Weak Ties” (SWT) in 1973, a seminal article which argues that weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing.

Content: Article | Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior

The digital interactive transformation in marketing is not unfolding, as many thought it would, on the model of direct marketing. That model anticipated that digital media using rich profiling data would intrude marketing messaging more deeply and more precisely into consumer lives than broadcast media had been able to do. But the technology that threatened intrusion is delivering seclusion. The transformation is unfolding on a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: John A. Deighton, Leora Kornfeld | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Wolfe argues, in a distinction particularly powerful as we grapple with the limits to the information age, that information is what machines can pass back and forth, or construct by analysis, while meaning is what only people can make. Meaning, as he defines it, is a macrophenomenon that involves making larger sense out of smaller bits, while information reduces larger complexity into smaller, and presumably … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Information, Knowledge

These two questions are the fundamental questions in strategy. How can you understand your industry and your competitive environment, and how can you understand how to position your company within that environment?

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Strategy

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of deals. Even if they might make some money. Strategy means saying no to certain types of [customers] that you are not really interested in. Strategy means making some people unhappy. If you are willing to do anything that looks economic, that’s a danger signal. You … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Strategy

Despite the rash of corporate scandals and the resulting rush to address the problem by adding more laws and regulations, seemingly little attention has been paid to how the nature (not the substance) of rules may or may not affect ethical decision-making. Drawing on work in the law, ethics, management, psychology, and other social sciences, this paper explores how several characteristics of rules may interfere … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael L. Michael | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Ethics

Abstract: Although observers of human behavior have long been aware that people regularly struggle with internal conflict when deciding whether to behave responsibly or indulge in impulsivity, psychologists and economists did not begin to empirically investigate this type of want/should conflict until recently. In this paper, we review and synthesize the latest research on want/should conflict, focusing our attention on the findings from an empirical … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Katherine L. Milkman, Max H. Bazerman, Todd Rogers | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Why do some shopping malls, retail stores, popular magazines, and even Internet portals seem to purposefully make it hard for consumers to find what they want? HBS professor Andrei Hagiu and Bruno Jullien challenge the conventional wisdom that intermediaries create value by reducing search and transaction costs. Their paper sheds light on the economic motivations that in some contexts may lead intermediaries to make it … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Andrei Hagiu, Bruno Jullien | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Economics, Strategy | Industry: Retail

Ratings of corporations’ environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of “socially responsible” investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we examine how well the most widely used ratings-those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD)-provide transparency about past and likely future environmental performance. We find KLD “concern” ratings to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron K. Chatterji, David I. Levine, Michael W. Toffel | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

In this paper, we seek to use quantitative models to help appreciate the behavioral processes associated with successful cross-functional and cross-firm alignment in supply/demand planning. We model the interaction between a sales and a manufacturing function within a firm, or between an upstream and downstream firm. We claim that misalignment is costly both to the involved functions/firms and to the rest of the organization or … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Noel Watson, Santiago Kraiselburd | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Operations, Organizational Behavior

Capitalism is often defined as an economic system where private actors are allowed to own and control the use of property in accord with their own interests, and where the invisible hand of the pricing mechanism coordinates supply and demand in markets in a way that is automatically in the best interests of society. Government, in this perspective, is often described as responsible for peace, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bruce R. Scott | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Economics

Ratings of corporations’ environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of “socially responsible” investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. Unfortunately, there is little evidence about the validity of these ratings. We examine how well two of the most widely used ratings-those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD) and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors-predict environmental performance. We find that firms … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Aaron K. Chatterji, David I. Levine, Michael W. Toffel | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Social Responsibility (ESG)

This article provides an overview on the rise and fall of cartels since the late 19th century when the modern cartel movement properly arrived with the rise of big business based on scale and scope. The general narrative about cartels may not be a story of rise and fall, but rise, boom, collapse, revitalization, gradual decline, and then criminalization. Yet, until the 1980s, the global … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jeffrey Fear | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: History

Do statistics tell the entire story? Managers must make effective use of the numbers they generate. Here are five tips to help ensure that you can rely on the numbers.

Content: Article | Sources: Harvard Business School (HBS), Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Statistics

This software enables users to download financial statements for a company, standardize them to a common format, make any needed adjustments to the company’s accounting, and make assumptions about the company’s future performance. The model then provides financial ratios for the company, with benchmarks for the U.S. economy, company pro forma financial statements, and a company valuation using several standard valuation techniques.

Editor’s Note: read … [ Read more ]

Content: Online Resource | Authors: Arleen Ahearn, Jonathan Barnett, Krishna Palepu, Paul Healy | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Finance