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    • COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      COVID-19 Business Impact Center
      Cold Call
      A podcast featuring faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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      • 06 Apr 2021
      • Cold Call Podcast

      Disrupting the Waste Industry with Technology

      Rubicon began with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management platform, providing efficient service anywhere in the US. Their mobile app did for waste management what Uber had done for taxi service. Five years after the case’s publication, Harvard Business School Associate Professor Shai Bernstein and Rubicon founder and CEO Nate Morris discuss how the software startup leveraged technology to disrupt the waste industry and other enduring lessons of professor Bill Sahlman’s case about Rubicon.  Open for comment; 0 Comment(s) posted.

      Read the Transcript

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      Performance EffectivenessRemove Performance Effectiveness →

      New research on performance effectiveness from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including the rise of the functional manager, marketing analysis tools for managers, how to adapt collaboration to a variety of organizational structures and projects.
      Page 1 of 62 Results →
      • 25 Nov 2019
      • Research & Ideas

      When Your Passion Works Against You

      by Dina Gerdeman

      Passion is supposed to be the secret sauce that transforms average managers into dynamic leaders. The reality is more complicated, says Jon M. Jachimowicz. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 21 Aug 2019
      • Research & Ideas

      What Machine Learning Teaches Us about CEO Leadership Style

      by Michael Blanding

      Tarun Khanna and Prithwiraj Choudhury use machine-learning technology to look for links between a CEO's communications style and company performance. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 03 Apr 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance

      by Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai, and Tatiana Sandino

      Games-based training is widely used to engage and motivate employees to learn, but research about its effectiveness has been scant. This study at a large professional services firm adopting a gamified training platform showed the training helps performance when employees are already highly engaged, and harms performance when they’re not.

      • 11 Feb 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Gender Stereotypes in Deliberation and Team Decisions

      by Katherine B. Coffman, Clio Bryant Flikkema, and Olga Shurchkov

      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.

      • 22 Jan 2019
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Corporate Sustainability: A Strategy?

      by Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

      Between 2012 and 2017, companies within most industries adopted an increasingly similar set of sustainability practices. This study examines the interplay between common and strategic practices. This dynamic distinction helps for understanding whether and how sustainability practices can help companies establish a competitive advantage over time.

      • 27 Dec 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Team Learning Capabilities: A Meso Model of Sustained Innovation and Superior Firm Performance

      by Jean-François Harvey, Henrik Bresman, and Amy C. Edmondson

      In strategic management research, the dynamic capabilities framework enables a “helicopter view” of how firms achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This paper focuses on the critical role of work teams, arguing that managers must leverage the knowledge generated by teams to support innovation and strategic change. It matches types of team learning to innovation activities.

      • 05 Dec 2018
      • Research & Ideas

      Why Managers Should Reveal Their Failures

      by Dina Gerdeman

      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; Comment(s) posted.

      • 26 Nov 2018
      • Book

      Make Your Employees Feel Psychologically Safe

      by Martha Lagace

      To do their best work, people need to feel secure and safe in their workplace. In a new book, Amy C. Edmondson details how companies can develop psychological safety. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 12 Nov 2018
      • Research & Ideas

      'Always On' Isn't Always Best for Team Decision-Making

      by Roberta Holland

      Is it possible for teams to communicate too frequently? Research by Ethan Bernstein and colleagues suggests that groups that meet less often may be better at problem-solving. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 28 Aug 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Homesick or Home Run? Distance from Hometown and Employee Performance: A Natural Experiment from India

      by Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon

      In the short and long term, distance from one’s hometown has a different effect on individual work performance. First-year performance ratings tend to be high the farther employees work from their hometown. Three years later, however, longer travel times are associated with lower ratings, with implications for managers.

      • 09 May 2018
      • Research & Ideas

      A Simple Way for Restaurant Inspectors to Improve Food Safety

      by Carmen Nobel

      Basic tweaks to the schedules of food safety inspectors could prevent millions of foodborne illnesses, according to new behavioral science research by Maria Ibáñez and Michael Toffel. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 02 Mar 2018
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Evidence of Decreasing Internet Entropy: The Lack of Redundancy in DNS Resolution by Major Websites and Services

      by Samantha Bates, John Bowers, Shane Greenstein, Jordi Weinstock, and Jonathan Zittrain

      Stabilizing the domain name resolution (DNS) infrastructure is critical to the operation of the internet. Single points of failure become more consequential as a larger proportion of the internet's biggest sites are managed by a small number of externally hosted DNS providers. Providers could encourage diversification by requiring domain owners to select a secondary DNS provider.

      • 03 Oct 2017
      • Sharpening Your Skills

      7 Effective Ways to Lead Teams

      by Sean Silverthorne

      Managers of teams require communications skills, organizational capabilities, and a knack for judging how people might work together. Research from Harvard Business School investigates the challenges of team leadership. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

      • 12 Jul 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

      by Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki, and Francesca Gino

      Employees facing increased workloads usually tackle easier tasks first. This study tests the performance implications of such prioritization. Findings show that it happens because people feel positive emotions after task completion, yet it could hurt long-term performance. Workloads could be structured to help employee development as well as organizational performance.

      • 26 Jan 2017
      • Working Paper Summaries

      Relative Performance Benchmarks: Do Boards Get It Right?

      by Paul Ma, Jee Eun Shin, and Charles C.Y. Wang

      Use of relative performance based (RPE) grants has been steadily increasing. Common wisdom is that such grants help induce costly effort from the CEO by shielding them from performance shocks that are outside of their control. This study raises questions about the use of index-based benchmarks in lieu of a narrower set of specific peers.

      • 26 May 2015
      • Research & Ideas

      Corporate Field Researchers Share Tricks of the Trade

      by Carmen Nobel

      In a panel discussion, several professors shared practical findings and tricks-of-the-trade from recent field research. Among the discoveries: how to prompt employees to get a flu shot. Closed for comment; 1 Comment(s) posted.

      • 04 May 2015
      • Research & Ideas

      Need to Solve a Problem? Take a Break From Collaborating

      by Carmen Nobel

      Organizations spend a lot of money enabling employees to solve problems collectively. But inducing more collaboration may actually hinder the most important part of problem-solving: actually solving the problem. Research by Jesse Shore, Ethan Bernstein, and David Lazer. Open for comment; 11 Comment(s) posted.

      • 17 Mar 2015
      • Research & Ideas

      Where Did My Shopping Mall Go?

      by Sean Silverthorne

      The growing popularity of online shopping is remaking the world of offline shopping—stores are getting smaller, malls are getting scarcer. Rajiv Lal and José Alvarez look ahead five years at our radically transforming shopping experience. Plus: Book excerpt. Open for comment; 13 Comment(s) posted.

      • 07 Apr 2014
      • Research & Ideas

      Negotiation and All That Jazz

      by Michael Blanding

      In his new book The Art of Negotiation, Michael Wheeler throws away the script to examine how master negotiators really get what they want. Open for comment; 2 Comment(s) posted.

      • 01 Apr 2014
      • Research & Ideas

      When Do Alliances Make Sense?

      by Michael Blanding

      Analyzing drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico, John Beshears explores a question as old as business itself: When does it pay to make an alliance? Open for comment; 2 Comment(s) posted.

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