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Getting to Net Zero: The Climate Standards and Ecosystem the World Needs Now

by Rachel Layne

What can companies and regulators do as climate predictions grow grimmer? They should measure impact, strengthen environmental institutions, and look to cities to lead, say Robert Kaplan, Shirley Lu, and Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

How Could Harvard Decarbonize Its Supply Chain?

Re: Robert S. Kaplan & Shirley Lu

Harvard University aims to be fossil-fuel neutral by 2026 and totally free of fossil fuels by 2050. As part of this goal, the university is trying to decarbonize its supply chain and considers replacing cement with a low-carbon substitute called Pozzotive®, made with post-consumer recycled glass. A successful pilot project could jump start Harvard’s initiative to reduce embodied carbon emissions, but it first needs credible information about the magnitude and validity of potential carbon reductions. Harvard Business School professor emeritus Robert Kaplan and assistant professor Shirley Lu discuss the flow of emissions along the supply chain of Harvard University’s construction projects, the different methods of measuring carbon emissions, including the E-liability approach, and the opportunity to leverage blockchain technology to facilitate the flow of comparable and reliable emissions information in the case, “Harvard University and Urban Mining Industries: Decarbonizing the Supply Chain.”

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2020

by Staff

Harvard Business School faculty are both voracious book readers and frequent book authors. Here is what they are reading this summer, and what they have written over the last year. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Post-COVID Health Care: More Screens, Less Red Tape?

by Danielle Kost

The coronavirus pandemic might lead to major changes in patient care, physician compensation, and regulation. Experts from Harvard Business School's Health Care Initiative share their predictions. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Novel Risks

by Robert S. Kaplan, Dutch Leonard, and Anette Mikes

Companies can manage known risks by reducing their likelihood and impact. But such routine risk management often prevents them from recognizing and responding rapidly to novel risks, those not envisioned or seen before. Setting up teams, processes, and capabilities in advance for dealing with unexpected circumstances can protect against their severe consequences.

Businesses Need a 'Catalyst' to Make CSR Practices Stick

by Michael Blanding

Despite best intentions, many corporate social responsibility programs fail. One answer: Companies need community partners to sustain work over the long term, says Robert Kaplan. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Intelligent Design of Inclusive Growth Strategies

by Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim, and Eduardo Tugendhat

How companies, working with a catalyst, can redesign supply chains to achieve economic, environmental, and social returns.

Reverse the Curse of the Top-5

by Robert S. Kaplan

Scholars and those who evaluate them for promotion can overweight publications ranked in a discipline’s five top journals. This paper explains the origins of journal rankings, the errors and distortions when journal rankings are used to evaluate faculty research, how they inhibit innovative research on emerging practice issues, and possible reforms to reduce their perverse incentives.

How Cost Accounting is Improving Healthcare in Rural Haiti

by Carmen Nobel

The cost of healthcare in rural Haiti was found to vary widely, even inside the same health organization. A pioneering cost accounting system co-developed by Robert Kaplan was called in to determine the cause. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

The Creative Consulting Company

by Robert S. Kaplan, Richard Nolan, and David P. Norton

Management theories cannot be tested in laboratories; they must be applied, tested, and extended in real organizations. For this reason the most creative consulting companies balance conflicting demands between short‐term business development and long‐term knowledge creation.

Electronic Health Records Were Supposed to Cut Medical Costs. They Haven't.

by Roberta Holland

Digitizing patient information promised to cut health care costs by driving down administrative expenses. So why can it cost a doctor more than $200 to process a single bill? New research by Robert Kaplan and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

A Good Thing Happens When Doctors Start Talking to Their Patients

by Michael Blanding

A longer visit with your doctor before a procedure can improve results and save money, according to Robert S. Kaplan. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Risk Management―The Revealing Hand

by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes

This article explores the role, organization, and limitations of risk identification and risk management, especially in situations that are not amenable to quantitative risk modeling. It argues that firms can avoid the artificial choice between quantitative and qualitative risk management, allowing both to play important roles in surfacing and assessing risks. Managers can then make decisions and allocate resources to mitigate the risks in a cost-efficient and moral manner.

How Should We Pay for Health Care?

by Michael E. Porter & Robert S. Kaplan

Improving provider incentives and reimbursement must become a central component in health care reform. Payments need to align with the value delivered to patients: better health outcomes delivered at lower costs. Today, however, deeply‐flawed reimbursement approaches actively discourage providers from delivering value to their patients. In this paper the authors argue that reimbursement through bundled payments is the only approach that aligns providers, payers, and suppliers in a healthy competition to increase patient value. The authors describe the principles of value‐based bundled payments, how such bundles should be constructed, and why they believe this reimbursement method best aligns everyone's interests around value. They show how recent improvements in measuring patient's outcomes and the cost of care are overcoming the past barriers to wider adoption of bundled payments. They conclude by describing how bundled payments can transform competition in health care, and the longer‐term implications for providers, payers, employers, and health care delivery systems. Key concepts include: A value‐based bundled payment is a single payment for treating a patient with a specific medical condition across a full cycle of care. A bundled payment should cover all the procedures, tests, drugs, devices, and services during inpatient, outpatient, and rehabilitative care for a patient's medical condition. The limited adoption of value‐based bundles to date has been caused by today's fragmented structure for delivering healthcare, and inadequate or non‐existent measurement of costs and outcomes at the medical‐condition level. Recent advances in value‐based healthcare delivery concepts set the stage for much more widespread adoption of value-based bundled payments. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

The Long-Term Fix to US Competitiveness

by Stephanie Schorow & Harvard Gazette

Participants at a Harvard Business School event were urged by professors Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin to chart a new path forward to improve US competitiveness. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Accounting Scholarship That Advances Professional Knowledge and Practice

by Robert S. Kaplan

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. Key concepts include: Accounting professors have a responsibility not just to dispense knowledge but also to advance it, especially in a time when the profession is changing rapidly. Risk management is a great issue for accounting academics to tackle. One, it is clearly relevant, due to the massive bank failures in the past few years. Two, it encompasses issues important to both academic study and professional practice-including reporting, disclosure, management control, and auditing. Young accounting professors should spend time teaching in executive education programs, which will give them an opportunity to get feedback from experienced professionals. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard

by Robert S. Kaplan

This article documents the precursors of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) strategic performance management tool and describes the evolution of the BSC since its introduction in 1992 in the Harvard Business Review. During the last 15 years, the BSC has been adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the world. HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan, who created the concept and tool with David Norton, explains the roots and motivation for their original article as well as subsequent innovations that connect it to a larger management literature. Key concepts include: The BSC was not original for advocating that nonfinancial measures be used to motivate, measure, and evaluate company performance. Early pioneers included General Electric, Nobel Economics Laureate, Professor Herb Simon, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie-Mellon University), and management theorist Peter Drucker in his now-classic book, The Practice of Management in the 1950s. The BSC differs from stakeholder theory by embedding stakeholder interests within a strategy framework. It also extends the economics-based agency theory by offering the instrumentation to guide a multi-period shareholder value creation process. The BSC continues to grow and evolve. Future developments will, for example, formally embed enterprise risk management into the strategy execution framework. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

Sharpening Your Skills: Leading Change

by Staff

Nothing like a global recession to test your change-management skills. We dig deep into the Working Knowledge vault to learn about building a business in a down economy, motivating the troops, and other current topics. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

Business Summit: Enterprise Risk Management

Re: Robert S. Kaplan

Risk management is a key to sustained firm growth, says professor Robert S. Kaplan. Key ingredients to a successful risk management program include the proper culture, clear parameters, discipline, measurement, and accountability. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.

Strategy Execution and the Balanced Scorecard

by Martha Lagace

Companies often manage strategy in fits and starts, with strategy execution lost along the way. A new book by Balanced Scorecard creators Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton aims to make strategy a continual process. Key concepts include: An excellent strategy often fades from memory as the organization tackles day-to-day operations issues. The operational plan and budget should be driven from the revenue targets in the strategic plan. The senior management team needs to have regular, probably monthly, meetings that focus only on strategy. The Office of Strategy Management is a small cadre of professionals that orchestrate strategy management processes for the executive team. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.