Publications
- October 2014
- Harvard Business Review Press
Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors That Drive Effective Selling
Abstract—There are many books that provide strategy advice and selling methodologies. But there is a gap in the management literature when it comes to linking sales efforts with strategy. Part 1 of this book provides data indicating how and why sales remain (by far) the biggest part of strategy implementation in most firms, the issues involved in linking selling investments with strategic goals, and a framework for analyzing the relevant processes. Part 2 discusses strategic choices, what research tells us about selling effectiveness, and how to translate a strategy into customer-selection and sales-call criteria. Part 3 focuses on core sales management issues: account management practices, hiring and development, compensation and incentives, performance reviews, and measuring sales effectiveness. Part 4 examines broader organizational requirements for effective selling and strategy implementation: developing sales managers who can manage and improving coordination between sales and other functions.
Publisher's link: http://hbr.org/product/aligning-strategy-and-sales-the-choices-systems-and-behaviors-that-drive-effective-selling/an/11964-HBK-ENG
- October 2014
- Oxford University Press
Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
Abstract—The business case for acting sustainably is becoming increasingly compelling-reducing our global footprint to sustainable levels is the defining issue of our times, and it is one that can only be addressed with the active participation of the private sector. However, persuading well-established organizations to act in new ways is never easy. This book is designed to support business leaders and organizational scholars who are grappling with this challenge by pulling together leading-edge insights from some of the world's best researchers as to how organizational change in general-and sustainable change in particular-can be most effectively managed. The book begins by laying out the economic case for change, while subsequent chapters describe how leaders at firms such as Du Pont, IBM, and Cemex have transformed their organizations, exploring issues such as the role of the senior team and the ways in which firms shift their identities, build innovative cultures and processes, and begin to change the world around them. Business leaders will find the book a source of both powerful examples and immediately actionable ideas, while scholars will be deeply intrigued by the insights that emerge from the cross cutting exploration of one of the toughest challenges our society has ever faced.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
- October 2014
- Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
The Role of Multiplier Firms and Megaprojects in Leading Change for Sustainability
Abstract—In both the private and public sectors, organizations around the world face increasingly pressing questions about how to stimulate and manage change for long-term environmental, social, and economic sustainability. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the roles of multiplier firms and megaprojects in leading change for sustainability around the world, particularly in the context of the built environment. Multiplier firms are organizations that work with and offer ongoing sustainability solutions to a range of client organizations. Megaprojects are finite-duration initiatives involving multiple diverse entities in the design and delivery of a large-scale development, such as a brand new ecologically sustainable city. Drawing on four illustrative case studies of multiplier firms and megaprojects engaged in sustainability-related initiatives, we also explain the value of learning logic, in contrast to blueprint logic, for leading change for sustainability.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
- October 2014
- Annual Review of Financial Economics
Payout Policy
Abstract—We survey the literature on payout policy, with a particular emphasis on developments in the last two decades. Of the traditional motives of why firms pay out (agency, signaling, and taxes), the cross-sectional empirical evidence is most persuasive in favor of agency considerations. Studies centered on the May 2003 dividend tax cut confirm that differences in the taxation of dividends and capital gains have only a second-order impact on setting payout policy. None of the three traditional explanations can account for secular changes in how payouts were made over the last 30 years, during which repurchases have replaced dividends as the prime vehicle for corporate payouts. Other payout motives such as changes in compensation practices and management incentives are better able to explain the observed variation in payout patterns over time than the traditional motives. The most recent evidence suggests that further insights can be gained from viewing payout decisions as an integral part of a firm's larger financial ecosystem, with important implications for financing, investment, and risk management.
Publisher's link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2400618
- October 2014
- Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
How Purpose-based Companies Master Change for Sustainability: A Systemic Approach to Global Social Change
Abstract—No abstract available.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
- October 2014
- Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
Chief Sustainability Officers: Who Are They and What Do They Do?
Abstract—No abstract available.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
- October 2014
- Handbook of Conflict Management Research
Reframing Hierarchical Interactions as Negotiations to Promote Change in Health Care Systems
Abstract—No abstract available.
Publisher's link: http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/bookentry_main.lasso?currency=US&id=14987
- October 2014
- Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
From Periphery to Core: A Process Model for Embracing Sustainability
Abstract—There is a growing call for business enterprises to adopt sustainability principles and practices, yet many established organizations continue to struggle in their quest to embrace them. In this chapter, we analyze how organizations that relegate sustainability to the periphery and those that incorporate it into their core differ in their approaches to identity (how they think about sustainability), strategy (how they plan for sustainability), and design (how they act toward sustainability). Advocating a holistic approach to these three organizational elements, we present a process model that shows, along four specific stages, how an established organization can bring sustainability into its core. We illustrate the model through the experience of the Ford Motor Company.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
- October 2014
- Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
Leading Proactive Punctuated Change
Abstract—This chapter focuses on leading proactive punctuated change. Based on the institutional and organizational change literatures and our extended involvement with IBM between 1999 and 2008, we suggest that proactive punctuated change can be effectively managed through an engineered social process designed and led by the senior leadership team. Where reactive punctuated change is driven by crisis conditions, the motivation and energy required to lead proactive punctuated change is rooted in an overarching aspiration coupled with a contradictory strategic challenge. The challenge to simultaneously explore and exploit provides the logic, tension, and requirement for experimentation that helps an extended management community collectively learn how to execute strategic organizational renewal. This change process involves disciplined conversations, actions, and associated learning by the senior team, diffusing these learning capabilities to the extended senior leadership team and, over time, to the larger leadership community. We connect principles for leading proactive punctuated change to organizational change dilemmas associated with sustainability.
Publisher's link: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198704072.do
Working Papers
Individual Experience of Positive and Negative Growth Is Asymmetric: Global Evidence from Subjective Well-being Data
Abstract—Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in macroeconomic growth? Using subjective well-being measures across three large data sets, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced, with losses having more than twice as much impact on individual happiness as compared to equivalent gains. We use Gallup World Poll data drawn from 151 countries, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data taken from a representative sample of 2.5 million U.S. respondents, and Eurobarometer data that cover multiple business cycles over four decades. This research provides a new perspective on the welfare cost of business cycles with implications for growth policy and our understanding of the long-run relationship between GDP and subjective well-being.
Download working paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-021_500f17e8-a78c-4301-a2be-755a1fdd6679.pdf
Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia
Abstract—Which source of information contains greater bias and slant-text written by an expert or that constructed via collective intelligence? Do the costs of acquiring, storing, displaying, and revising information shape those differences? We evaluate these questions empirically by examining slanted and biased phrases in content on U.S. political issues from two sources-Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. Our overall slant measure is less (more) than zero when an article leans towards Democrat (Republican) viewpoints, while bias is the absolute value of the slant. Using a matched sample of pairs of articles from Britannica and Wikipedia, we show that, overall, Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democrat than Britannica articles, as well as more biased. Slanted Wikipedia articles tend to become less biased than Britannica articles on the same topic as they become substantially revised, and the bias on a per word basis hardly differs between the sources. These results have implications for the segregation of readers in online sources and the allocation of editorial resources in online sources using collective intelligence.
Download working paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-023_145191c4-220f-4dd8-8d41-ee2d1f693716.pdf
Housing Collateral, Credit Constraints and Entrepreneurship-Evidence from a Mortgage Reform
Abstract—We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral channel. We find that a $30,000 increase in credit availability led to a 12 basis point increase in entrepreneurship, equivalent to a 4% increase in the number of entrepreneurs. New entrants were more likely to start businesses in sectors where they had no prior experience and were more likely to fail than those who did not benefit from the reform. Our results provide evidence that credit constraints do affect entrepreneurship but that the overall magnitudes are small. Moreover, the marginal individuals selecting into entrepreneurship when constraints are relaxed may well be starting businesses that are of lower quality than the average existing businesses, leading to an increase in churning entry that does not translate into a sustained increase in the overall level of entrepreneurship.
Download working paper: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2506111
Evaluating Firm-Level Expected-Return Proxies
Abstract—We develop and implement a rigorous analytical framework for empirically evaluating the relative performance of firm-level expected-return proxies (ERPs). We show that superior proxies should closely track true expected returns both cross sectionally and over time (that is, the proxies should exhibit lower measurement-error variances). We then compare five classes of ERPs nominated in recent studies to demonstrate how researchers can easily implement our two-dimensional evaluative framework. Our empirical analyses document a tradeoff between time-series and cross-sectional ERP performance, indicating the optimal choice of proxy may vary across research settings. Our results illustrate how researchers can use our framework to critically evaluate and compare a growing body of ERPs.
Download working paper: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/15-022_50419693-7f15-4638-8e35-1943c9cfac81.pdf
Cases & Course Materials
- Harvard Business School Case 915-001
Pivots and Incentives at LevelUp
LevelUp's mobile payments service lets users scan a smartphone barcode rather than swipe a credit card. Will consumers embrace the service? Will merchants? LevelUp considers adjustments to make the service attractive to both consumers and merchants, while trying to accelerate deployment at reasonable cost.
Purchase this case:
http://hbr.org/product/Pivots-and-Incentives-at-/an/915001-PDF-ENG
- Harvard Business School Case 815-055
Rent the Runway (Abridged)
Two months after a successful launch in November 2009, the cofounders of Rent the Runway (RTR), a website that rented designer dresses, are debating whether to grow their startup at a measured pace and focus on improving operational effectiveness or raise a new round of venture capital sooner than originally planned. Raising more venture capital would allow RTR to aggressively expand its inventory and customer acquisition efforts in order to serve a broader range of customer segments with a wider selection of products (e.g., accessories, maternity wear).
Purchase this case:
http://hbr.org/product/Rent-the-Runway--Abridged/an/815055-PDF-ENG
- Harvard Business School Case 515-024
Conjoint Analysis: A Do It Yourself Guide
Conjoint Analysis has become one of the most commonly used quantitative market research methods. It has been successfully employed across a wide variety of industries to quantify consumer preferences for products and services. This technical note is intended to provide practical guidelines for designing, conducting, and analyzing a conjoint analysis survey. The note discusses the six steps needed to effectively run a conjoint analysis study and includes advice on best practices to follow and what pitfalls to avoid. Several user-friendly Microsoft Excel spreadsheets accompany this note and can be used as aids when implementing and analyzing a conjoint study.
Purchase this case:
http://hbr.org/product/Conjoint-Analysis--A-Do-i/an/515024-PDF-ENG
- Harvard Business School Case 215-003
Making Room for the Baby Boom: Senior Living
Tom Alperin's National Development has purchased a building site in affluent Wellesley, MA, and is in the process of deciding whether to build apartments, a combination of independent living and assisted living units for seniors, or perhaps even higher acuity facilities. The case describes several issues for the continuum of senior care alternatives for residents and developers. What motivates seniors to leave their homesteads for much smaller spaces? How can they afford to do so? What are the physical as well as operational challenges for operators when serving the different levels of acuity? The case also describes what zoning issues may be faced by developers who seek to build in attractive but challenging neighborhoods. Furthermore, how can a successful operator branch out into new businesses? When should operators form joint ventures to help them achieve their strategic ends? Analytical tools discussed include development metrics, impact of financing on projects, as well as analytical methods to forecast market demand.
Purchase this case:
http://hbr.org/product/Making-Room-for-the-Baby-/an/215003-PDF-ENG