Measuring the Efficacy of the World's Managers
| Published: | January 30, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 16 Comments posted |
Over the past seven years, Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun and a team of researchers have interviewed managers at some 10,000 organizations in 20 countries. The goal: to determine how and why management practices differ vastly in style and quality not only across nations, but also across various organizations and industries.
Published in 2011
Building a Business in the Context of a Life
| Published: | October 13, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
| Forum: | open for comment; 10 Comments posted |
Careers rarely run on a track from Point A to Point B—life experiences often change our goals. At Harvard Business School, Senior Lecturer Janet J. Kraus teaches students to take a life plan as seriously as they would a business plan.
Salience in Quality Disclosure: Evidence from the U.S. News College Rankings
| Authors: | Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith |
|---|---|
| Published: | September 27, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | September 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Why are the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings so influential? According to this paper by Michael Luca and Jonathan Smith, it's at least in part because U.S. News makes the information so simple. While earlier college guides had already provided useful information about schools, U.S. News did the work of aggregating the information into an easy-to-use ranking, making it more salient for prospective students. The authors show that these rankings matter in a big way: a one-rank improvement leads to a 0.9 percent increase in applicants. However, students tend to ignore the underlying details even though these details carry more information than the overall rank.
Business Plan Contest: 15 Years of Building Better Entrepreneurs
| Published: | August 18, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
| Forum: | open for comment; 1 Comment posted |
Since 1997, Hundreds of student-entrepreneurs have tested their ideas at Harvard Business School's annual Business Plan Contest. Here is what they have learned about success, failure, and themselves. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin.
How Disruptive Innovation is Remaking the University
| Published: | July 25, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 19 Comments posted |
In The Innovative University, authors Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring take Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation to the field of higher education, where new online institutions and learning tools are challenging the future of traditional colleges and universities.
Accounting Scholarship That Advances Professional Knowledge and Practice
| Author: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 9, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | March 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Accounting scholars generally do a fine job of analyzing how we process accounting data, but they ought to spend more time looking at how that data is produced, says Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan. In this paper—in response to a newly minted professor who sought his advice—Kaplan reminds young scholars that accounting is more of a professional discipline than an academic subject. To that end, he advises them not just to teach their students the common body of accounting knowledge, but also to advance that body of knowledge by bridging the gap between scholarship and practice.
From Social Control to Financial Economics: The Linked Ecologies of Economics and Business in Twentieth Century America
| Authors: | Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 4, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
No transformation looks more consequential for the history of American higher education than the extraordinary rise of business schools and business degrees in the twentieth century. Marion Fourcade (UC Berkeley) and Rakesh Khurana (HBS) analyze the changing place of economics in American business education as reflected in the teaching of three elite business schools over the course of the twentieth century: the Wharton School (1900-1930), the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration (post World War II), and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (1960s-present).
How Foundations Think: The Ford Foundation as a Dominating Institution in the Field of American Business Schools
| Authors: | Rakesh Khurana, Kenneth Kimura, and Marion Fourcad |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 1, 2011 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2011 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
What causes institutions to change? This paper adds organizational and exogenous perspective to existing theories by looking at the idea of "dominating institutions"—a class of formal organizations purposively designed to change other institutions. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana and colleagues look at the Ford Foundation and its work reshaping America's graduate schools of management between 1952 and 1965 through funding of "centers of excellence" at a number of schools, including Harvard Business School.
Creating the Founders' Dilemmas Course
| Published: | February 7, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
| Forum: | open for comment; 12 Comments posted |
In HBS professor Noam Wasserman's second-year MBA course, Founders' Dilemmas, students study the quandaries that virtually all entrepreneurs will face when trying to realize the dream of launching a start-up—from deciding when to start the company to learning how to make a graceful exit. Guest speakers discussing their experiences include All-Star pitcher-turned-entrepreneur Curt Schilling and Tom & Tom, the Nantucket Nectars guys.
Published in 2010
New Dean Sets Five Priorities for HBS
| Published: | December 20, 2010 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Harvard Business School's new Dean Nitin Nohria outlines five priorities that will shape the agenda for the School during his tenure: curriculum innovation, intellectual ambition, internationalization, inclusion, and closer ties to the University.
How to Fix a Broken Marketplace
| Published: | November 8, 2010 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
| Forum: | open for comment; 5 Comments posted |
A pioneer in the field of market design, Harvard Business School professor Alvin E. Roth has helped to repair flawed market systems in fields ranging from kidney donation to high-school student placement.
Panel on Pedagogical Innovations in MBA Courses
| Published: | October 22, 2010 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | HBS Faculty Research Symposium: 2010 |
Faculty Research Symposium 2010: Multiple pedagogical innovations are taking place at HBS that are fundamentally changing students' learning experiences.
What Top Scholars Say about Leadership
| Q&A with: | Rakesh Khurana |
|---|---|
| Published: | May 10, 2010 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
As a subject of scholarly inquiry, leadership—and who leaders are, what makes them tick, how they affect others—has been neglected for decades. The Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice, edited by Harvard Business School's Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, brings together some of the best minds on this important subject. Q&A with Khurana, plus book excerpt.
Introductory Reading For Being a Leader and The Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological Model
| Authors: | Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron, and Kari L. Granger |
|---|---|
| Published: | May 6, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Effective leadership does not come from mere knowledge about what successful leaders do; or from trying to emulate the characteristics or styles of noteworthy leaders; or from trying to remember and follow the steps, tips, or techniques from books or coaching on leadership. And it certainly does not come from merely being in a leadership position or in a position of authority or having decision rights. This paper, the sixth of six pre-course reading assignments for an experimental leadership course developed by HBS professor emeritus Michael C. Jensen and coauthors, accompanies a course specifically designed to provide actionable access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one's natural self-expression.
What Is the Future of MBA Education?
| Q&A with: | Srikant M. Datar and David A. Garvin |
|---|---|
| Published: | May 3, 2010 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Why get an MBA degree? Transformations in business and society make this question increasingly urgent for executives, business school deans, students, faculty, and the public. In a new book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads, Harvard Business School's Srikant M. Datar, David A. Garvin, and Patrick G. Cullen suggest opportunities for innovation. Q&A with Datar and Garvin plus book excerpt.
The Great Leap Forward: The Political Economy of Education in Brazil, 1889-1930
| Authors: | André Martínez-Fritscher, Aldo Musacchio, and Martina Viarengo |
|---|---|
| Published: | April 29, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | March 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
In 1890, with only 15 percent of the population literate, Brazil had the lowest literacy rate among the large economies in the Americas. Yet between 1890 and 1940, Brazil had the most rapid increase in literacy rates in the Americas, catching up with and even surpassing some of its more educated peers such as Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela. This jump in literacy was simultaneously accompanied by a brisk increase in the number of teachers, number of public schools, and enrollment rates. Why were political elites in Brazil willing to finance this expansion of public education for all? André Martínez-Fritscher of Banco de México, Aldo Musacchio of HBS, and Martina Viarengo of the London School of Economics explain how state governments secured funds to pay for education and examine the incentives of politicians to spend on education. They conclude that the progress made in education during these decades had mixed results in the long run.
Investing in Improvement: Strategy and Resource Allocation in Public School Districts
| Author: | Stacey Childress |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 10, 2010 |
| Paper Release Date: | January 2010 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The operating environments of public school districts are largely void of the market forces that reward a company's success with more capital and exert pressure on it to eventually abandon unproductive activities. Stacey Childress describes the strategic resource decisions in 3 of the 20 public school districts that she and colleagues have studied through the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard. The stories in San Francisco, New York City, and Maryland's Montgomery County occurred largely before the districts faced dramatic decreases in revenues, though they show the superintendents facing budget concerns near the end of the narratives. Even so, the situations share common principles that superintendents and their leadership teams can use to make differentiated resource decisions—reducing spending in some areas and increasing it in others with a clear rationale for why these decisions will produce results for students.
Published in 2009
HBS Begins Teaching Consumer Finance
| Q&A with: | Peter Tufano |
|---|---|
| Published: | October 28, 2009 |
| Feature: | Lessons from the Classroom |
Last spring HBS became the first top-ranked U.S. business school to offer a course in consumer finance. Professor Peter Tufano talks about the course and his determination to make consumer finance a broadly accepted academic pursuit. From the HBS Alumni Bulletin.
HBS Past and Present
| Published: | October 7, 2009 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | HBS Business Summit |
Eight enduring themes have characterized Harvard Business School from its earliest years, and remain as integral as ever to the way the School thinks and operates.
Harvard and HBS: The Next 100 Years
| Published: | September 30, 2009 |
|---|---|
| Feature: | HBS Business Summit |
Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust reflected on Harvard Business School's past 100 years and shared her vision of the future, while HBS Dean Jay Light discussed the School's history and highlighted key focus areas for the future.
