- 06 Oct 2023
- Book
Yes, You Can Radically Change Your Organization in One Week
Skip the committees and the multi-year roadmap. With the right conditions, leaders can confront even complex organizational problems in one week. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss explain how in their book Move Fast and Fix Things.
- 29 Nov 2022
- Cold Call Podcast
How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?
In January 2022, Microsoft announced its acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The deal would make Microsoft the world’s third largest video game company, but it also exposes the company to several risks. First, the all-cash deal would require Microsoft to use a large portion of its cash reserves. Second, the acquisition was announced as Activision Blizzard faced gender pay disparity and sexual harassment allegations. That opened Microsoft up to potential reputational damage, employee turnover, and lost sales. Do the potential benefits of the acquisition outweigh the risks for Microsoft and its shareholders? Harvard Business School associate professor Joseph Pacelli discusses the ongoing controversies around the merger and how gamers and investors have responded in the case, “Call of Fiduciary Duty: Microsoft Acquires Activision Blizzard.”
- 08 Jul 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-War Innovation
Investments made in World War II by the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development powered decades of subsequent innovation and the take-off of regional technology hubs around the country.
- 14 Apr 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Contractual Restrictions and Debt Traps
Microfinance has failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries, despite abundant evidence of high return on investment opportunities. What can account for this? This study presents a theory in which firms that borrow from an informal lender may see their growth stalled and remain in the relationship indefinitely, even though they would have continued to grow in the absence of a lender.
- 13 Jan 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Recognition Incentives for Internal Crowdsourcing: A Field Experiment at NASA
What to do if organizational hierarchy hinders a platform aimed at worker collaboration? A field experiment with NASA employees finds that they respond to managerial appreciation above other incentives.
- 27 Dec 2018
- Working Paper Summaries
Team Learning Capabilities: A Meso Model of Sustained Innovation and Superior Firm Performance
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.
- 30 Nov 2018
- What Do You Think?
What’s the Best Administrative Approach to Climate Change?
SUMMING UP: James Heskett's readers point to examples of complex environmental problems conquered through multinational cooperation. Can those serve as roadmaps for overcoming global warming? Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Nov 2018
- Research & Ideas
'Always On' Isn't Always Best for Team Decision-Making
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; 0 Comments.
- 06 Jun 2018
- Research & Ideas
Cut Salaries or Cut People? The Best Way to Survive a Downturn
When times are tight, companies usually respond with employee layoffs. But what if they held on to workers and cut their salaries instead? New research by Christopher Stanton and colleagues has the answer. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 22 Jan 2018
- Sharpening Your Skills
Why You Are Unhappy at Work
Sometimes the deck is stacked against you at work. Learn more about how you can overcome toxic co-workers, paycheck blues, and a job set up for failure. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 29 Sep 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
International Business and Emerging Markets: A Long-Run Perspective
This paper examines how strategies by Western multinational enterprises in emerging markets over the last century have been shaped by context. These strategies evolved from resolving logistical challenges to managing assertive governments. More recently the focus has been to locate activities in the lower end of global value chains, whilst responding to local competitors.
- 04 May 2017
- Cold Call Podcast
Leading a Team to the Top of Mount Everest
In a podcast, Amy Edmondson describes how students learn about team communication and decision making by making a simulated climb up Mount Everest. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Sep 2016
- Book
Resolve Your Toughest Work Problems with 5 Questions
In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers managers a five-question framework for facing murky situations and solving tough problems. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 08 Aug 2016
- Lessons from the Classroom
Panic Management: Keep Your Eyes on the Road
Many of us respond with a knee-jerk reaction when adversity hits, but a more considered approach is better for a successful resolution. Joshua Margolis discusses the resilience regimen. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 18 Feb 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics? China’s Gamble for Modernization
If the Chinese Communist Party has its way in the coming decades, it will urbanize hundreds of millions of people, transform agriculture, and sustain economic growth--all without political instability. This paper details the risks and opportunities of China’s new-style urbanization reforms, arguing that proposals for urbanization and economic transformation are not a radical departure from the institutions that have structured Chinese society for the last 30 years.
- 09 Sep 2015
- Research & Ideas
Leadership Lessons of the Great Recession: Options for Economic Downturns
In the new case study “Honeywell and the Great Recession,” Sandra Sucher and Susan Winterberg explore employer tradeoffs when a downturn hits: conducting layoffs vs. orchestrating furloughs. Plus: Video interviews with Honeywell CEO Dave Cote. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 Oct 2014
- What Do You Think?
Is Too Much Focus a Problem?
Summing Up—In a lively debate, Jim Heskett's readers see a downside to the too-focused manager. What do YOU think? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 26 Sep 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
Dangerous Expectations: Breaking Rules to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance
Before completing a task, we form expectations about its difficulty and of how well we will perform on it. It is psychologically uncomfortable to perform worse than we expected. This paper proposes that individuals are more likely to break rules if they have been led to expect that achieving high levels of performance will be easy rather than difficult. The authors argue that this phenomenon occurs because of the heightened cognitive dissonance people experience when their performance expectations go unmet. Consistent with these arguments, across three studies people were more likely to break rules when have been led to believe that performing well will be easy rather than hard. The authors also show that differences in rule breaking are not due to differences in legitimate performance as a function of how easy people expect the task to be or whether their expectations are set explicitly (by referring to others' performance, Study 1) or implicitly (as implied by their own prior performance, Study 2). In Study 3, the authors also show that cognitive dissonance triggered by unmet expectations drives these effects. These results have important implications for the ways in which colleges are setting students' expectations, as well as broader implications for how we set expectations in professional environments. Key concepts include: Academic and professional environments need to realistically manage how well their students and employees, respectively, should expect to perform. When people experience a disconnect between their expectations and reality, they are more likely to engage in dysfunctional behaviors in the form of rule breaking, even when breaking rules means crossing ethical boundaries. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 11 Aug 2014
- Working Paper Summaries
Decision Making Under Information Asymmetry: Experimental Evidence on Belief Refinements
Managers often have to make decisions in settings where they (1) know more about the prospects of their firm than other parties and (2) care about how the less-informed party responds to their decisions. For instance, a manager may care about how the stock market responds to the firm's expansion plans. In such situations, the manager's decision may signal the firm's prospects to the less-informed party. This phenomenon has been researched in a variety of situations, including new product and service introductions, competitive entry, supplier contracts, and capacity investments. A common assumption in researching such issues is that managers will make decisions that perfectly reveal the firm's prospects to the less-informed party, even if it is costly to do so. For example, a firm facing a big market opportunity will open more stores than is optimal in order to signal its favorable prospects. The number of stores the firm opens must be so high that a firm facing a small opportunity will find it too expensive to mimic the number of store openings. While such predicted outcomes underpin much of the operations theory developed in these settings, they have not been reconciled against the decisions made by actual decision makers. In a laboratory experiment involving more than 200 participants, the researchers conduct such an analysis. Their findings offer the first evidence that decision makers choose not to make decisions that reveal the firm's market opportunity and instead make the same decision regardless of the firm's prospects. The researchers go on to demonstrate that the discrepant predictions change the theoretical implications of prior research. Key concepts include: Pooling behavior, in which firms make the same choice regardless of their market prospects, was widespread among experimental participants, relative to separating behavior, in which firms make the distinct choices based on their market prospects. Participants were more than three times more likely to pool than to separate. Pooling behaviors were especially common among participants who reported a high level of understanding of the experimental setting, and the degree of pooling increased in later rounds of the experiment. Participants who made pooling decisions were rewarded by participants playing the role of an external investor and earned significantly more in the experimental market than participants who made separating decisions. Leveraging the behavioral insight that real decision makers will pool under certain circumstances can materially affect the implications of existing operations theory. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
Can AI Match Human Ingenuity in Creative Problem-Solving?
Generative AI handles a variety of business tasks, but can it develop creative solutions to problems? Yes, although some of the best ideas emerge when humans and machines work together, according to research by Jacqueline Ng Lane, Karim Lakhani, Miaomiao Zhang, and colleagues.