Growth and Development →

Checking Your Ethics: Would You Speak Up in These 3 Sticky Situations?

Would you complain about a client who verbally abuses their staff? Would you admit to cutting corners on your work? The answers aren't always clear, says David Fubini, who tackles tricky scenarios in a series of case studies and offers his advice from the field.

Thriving After Failing: How to Turn Your Setbacks Into Triumphs

When we slip up, we are often filled with shame, and our instinct is to hide. Instead, people and businesses should applaud smart risk-taking, even when things don't work out, and closely examine their failures to learn from them, says Amy Edmondson.

Failing Well: How Your ‘Intelligent Failure’ Unlocks Your Full Potential

We tend to avoid failure at all costs. But our smarter missteps are worthwhile because they can force us to take a different path that points us toward personal and professional success, says Amy Edmondson.

STEM Needs More Women. Recruiters Often Keep Them Out

Tech companies and programs turn to recruiters to find top-notch candidates, but gender bias can creep in long before women even apply, according to research by Jacqueline Ng Lane and colleagues. She highlights several tactics to make the process more equitable.

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2023

Need a book recommendation for your summer vacation? HBS faculty members share their reading lists, which include titles that explore spirituality, design, suspense, and more.

Innovation Isn’t Just for Startups: How Big Companies Can Succeed

Innovation doesn't have to be limited to the Teslas and Amazons of the world. In a new book, Michael Tushman and Andrew Binns share how explorers lead change and help incumbent companies strike gold. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Updating the Balanced Scorecard for Triple Bottom Line Strategies

Society increasingly expects businesses to help solve problems of environmental degradation, inequality, and poverty. This paper explains how the Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Map should be modified to reflect businesses’ expanded role for society.

Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions

Professional success requires the ability to contribute ideas, and receive credit for them. This paper explores gender differences in how men and women communicate and reward each other in team decision-making problems. We find that women are recognized less often for their contributions in male-typed domains.

Marketplace Scalability and Strategic Use of Platform Investment

One well-known feature of marketplace platforms like Airbnb and eBay is their scalability. This paper identifies the strategic trade-off and implications for scalability when a platform provides services to existing and potential sellers that help reduce their fixed costs of running the business. Timing this investment is an important consideration for maximizing marketplace scalability.

Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures

If you want to get your messages through to employees, be ready to confess your own management shortcomings, counsels Alison Wood Brooks. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

When Does Domestic Saving Matter for Economic Growth?

The researchers begin with a simply stated question: Can a country grow faster by saving more? Long-run growth theories imply that a country can grow faster by investing more in human or physical capital or in R&D, but that a country with access to international capital markets cannot grow faster by saving more. Domestic saving is therefore not considered an important ingredient in the growth process because investment can be financed by foreign saving. From the point of view of standard growth theory, the positive cross-country correlation between saving and growth that many commentators have noted appears puzzling. HBS professor Diego Comin and colleagues develop a theory of local saving and growth in an open economy with domestic and foreign investors. Key concepts include: Domestic saving is more critical for adopting new technologies in developing rather than developed economies. Familiarity with the technology frontier reduces its cost of adoption. Advanced countries readily adopt the frontier technology, but for countries far from the technology frontier, it is too expensive to adopt such technology without outside help. Entrepreneurs in these countries need to rely on foreign investors. However, domestic entrepreneurs may not deliver on their input contribution unless they have invested sufficient capital in the project. This co-investment is in turn financed out of domestic saving, highlighting the role of domestic saving in economic growth. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.