First Look

Abstract—As the Ottoman Empire crumbled, the Middle East and Balkans became the site of contestation and cooperation between the traditional forces of religion and the emergent machine of the sovereign state. Yet such strategic interaction rarely yielded a decisive victory for either the secular state or for religion. By tracing how state-builders engaged religious institutions, elites, and attachments, this book problematizes the divergent religion-state power configurations that have developed. There are two central arguments. First, states carved out more sovereign space in places like Greece and Turkey, where religious elites were integral to early centralizing reform processes. Second, region-wide structural constraints on the types of linkages that states were able to build with religion have generated long-term repercussions. Fatefully, both state policies that seek to facilitate equality through the recognition of religious difference and state policies that seek to eradicate such difference have contributed to failures of liberal democratic consolidation.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55801

Abstract—Corporations are being pushed to dial down their single-minded pursuit of financial gain and pay closer attention to their impact on employees, customers, communities, and the environment. But changing an organization’s DNA may require upending the existing business model and lowering profitability, at least in the short term. The authors’ research suggests that successful dual-purpose companies build a commitment to creating both economic and social value into their core activities. This approach, which they call hybrid organizing, includes: setting and monitoring social goals alongside financial ones, structuring the organization to support both, hiring and mobilizing employees to embrace them, and practicing dual-minded leadership.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55837

Abstract—Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes, causing them to place a lower value on the product or service being offered. To address this problem, managers should experiment with operational transparency—the deliberate design of windows into and out of the organization's operations to help customers understand and appreciate the value being added. Witnessing the hidden work performed on their behalf makes customers more satisfied, more willing to pay, and more loyal. It can also make employees more satisfied by demonstrating to them that they are serving their customers well. However, managers should be aware of certain conditions in which transparency can backfire.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55804

Abstract—No abstract available.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55802

Abstract—Objectives: To determine how overall cost of anticoagulation therapy for warfarin compares with that of Novel Oral Anticoagulants (NOACs). Also, to demonstrate a scientific, comprehensive, and an analytical approach to estimate direct costs involved in monitoring and management of anticoagulation therapy for outpatients in an academic primary care clinic setting, post-initiation of therapy. Methods: Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) was applied in a population-based cross-sectional study at Mayo Clinic’s warfarin anticoagulation clinic. The study measured the personnel and supplies costs to monitor and manage anticoagulation therapy for 5,526 patients. Results: The cost of warfarin management for patients who display unstable International Normalized Ratio (INR) is more than three times those who display stable INR over time. For complex anticoagulation patients, the total cost of medication and monitoring for warfarin anticoagulation therapy is similar to that for NOACs. Conclusion: Despite warfarin being significantly less expensive to purchase than NOACs, overall warfarin management incurs higher costs due to laboratory monitoring and provider time than NOACs. NOAC treatment, therefore, may not be more expensive than warfarin therapy management for complex anticoagulation patients.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55836

Abstract—Objectives: To apply time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) methodology to determine emergency medicine physician documentation costs with and without scribes. Methods: Two research assistants shadowed attending physicians for a total of 64 hours in the adult emergency department. A tablet-based time recorded was used to obtain estimates for physician documentation time on both control (no scribe) and intervention (scribe) shifts. Results: Control shifts yielded approximately 3 hours of documentation time per 8 hours of clinical time. When paired with a scribe, attending physician documentation decreased to 1 hour and 45 minutes during a shift and 15 minutes of post-shift documentation. The physician cost estimate for documentation without and with a scribe is $644 and $488, respectively. Conclusions: TDABC methodology demonstrated that scribes afford a cost-effective solution to ED clinical documentation. The costing approach enables clinicians to understand utilization and cost of medical resource at a more granular level.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55832

Abstract—New ventures often experience deviations from their plans that oblige them to reorient in pursuit of better fit between their evolving products and their target customers. Yet research is largely silent on how managers explain such changes and justify their ventures in the wake of fundamental redirections in strategy. Ventures initially attain legitimacy and amass resources on the strength of aims that audiences find compelling; later, those early claims can complicate course corrections. To shed light on how ventures manage strategic reorientations, we conducted an inductive, comparative case of software-based financial advisors. The ventures pursued parallel reorientations and produced comparable end products but diverged conspicuously in managing audiences during transitions. Our process model, inspired by these differences, proposes a sequence of stratagems that may enable entrepreneurs to alter strategy while portraying faithfulness to enduring aims. Our theoretical framework posits that for ventures, reorientation without penalty may depend on how they anticipate, justify, and stage changes to various audiences.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55811

Abstract—Prior research advances several explanations for entrepreneurial success in nascent markets but leaves a key imperative unexplored: the business model. By studying five ventures in the same nascent market, we develop a novel theoretical framework for understanding how entrepreneurs effectively design business models: parallel play. Similar to parallel play by preschoolers, entrepreneurs engaged in parallel play interweave action, cognition, and timing to accelerate learning about a novel world. Specifically, they (1) borrow from peers and focus on established substitutes; (2) test assumptions, then commit to a broad business-model template; and (3) pause before elaborating the activity system. The insights from our framework contribute to research on optimal distinctiveness and to the learning and evolutionary-adjustment literature on search. More broadly, we blend organization theory with a fresh theoretical lens—business-model processes—to highlight how organizations actually work and create value.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55809

Abstract—The need for leadership development has never been more urgent. Companies of all sorts realize that to survive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, they need different leadership skills and organizational capabilities from those that helped them succeed in the past at all levels of the firm. But the leadership development industry is in a state of upheaval. The number of players offering courses to impart the hard and soft skills required of corporate managers has expanded well beyond traditional business schools, corporate universities, and dedicated consultancies. And yet organizations that spend billions of dollars annually to train current and future executives are growing frustrated with the results. There are three main reasons for the disjointed state of leadership development. The first is a gap in motivations. In executive development, the “customer” is not the “client.” The organization pays for the individual to enhance his or her skills—and résumé—and thereby benefit from participating. The second is the gap between the skills that executive development programs build and the skills that organizations require—particularly the interpersonal skills essential to thriving in today’s flat, networked, increasingly collaborative organizations. The third reason is the skills transfer gap. Simply put, most executives do not seem to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to their jobs. For organizations to develop essential leadership and managerial talent, they will need to bridge these three gaps. The good news is that the growing assortment of online courses, social and interactive platforms, and learning tools from both traditional institutions and upstarts—which we call the personal learning cloud (PLC)—offers a solution. Organizations can select components from the PLC and tailor them to the needs and behaviors of individuals and teams. The PLC is flexible and immediately accessible, and it enables employees to pick up skills in the context in which they must be used. In effect, it’s a 21st-century form of on-the-job learning.

Publisher's link: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=55833

Abstract—When organizations need input into their innovation or production process, they have traditionally faced the decision to make the input themselves or buy it through the market. However, rapidly decreasing information costs allow firms to harness external communities that are neither employees of the firm hierarchy, nor traditional contracted market participants such as supply chain partners. We introduce the managed ecosystem governance form in which a central organization engages external communities and also manages these communities by maintaining some degree of control over their activities. This model is evident in various organizational approaches including multi-sided platforms, crowdsourcing, and the gig economy. Building upon the knowledge-based view of the firm, we argue that these increasingly common governance models offer a wealth of opportunities but require organizations to adopt a translucent institutional logic that is in-between the traditional closed logic of the firm and the open logic of the market. To successfully employ this model, firms must learn to shepherd communities, leverage them without exploiting them, and share intellectual property rights.

Abstract—This paper documents the effects of last place aversion in queues and its implications for customer experiences and behaviors, as well as for operating performance. An observational analysis of customers queuing at a grocery store, and four online field studies in which participants waited in virtual queues, revealed that waiting in last place diminishes wait satisfaction while increasing the probabilities of switching and abandoning queues, with detrimental implications for service capacity. The research suggests that last place aversion can lead to maladaptive customer behaviors—switching behaviors that increase wait times and abandoning when the benefits of waiting are most pronounced. The results indicate that this behavior is partially explained by the inability to make a downward social comparison; namely, when no one is behind a queuing individual, that person is less certain that continuing to wait is worthwhile. Furthermore, this paper provides evidence that queue transparency is an effective service design lever that managers can use to reduce the deleterious effects of last place aversion in queues. When people can’t see that they’re in last place, the behavioral effects of last place aversion are nullified, and when they can see that they’re not in last place, the tendency to renege is greatly diminished. Finally, a system-level experiment, in which pairs of queues were created and analyzed, reveals that when the effects of last place aversion are addressed, overall abandonment decreases, such that with equivalent arrival and service rates, total service capacity can be increased.

Abstract—We examine how changing the allocation of hiring decision rights in a multiunit organization affects employee-firm match quality, contingent on a unit’s local circumstances. Our research site switched from its traditional decentralized hiring model (hiring by business unit managers—in our case, store managers of a U.S. retail chain) to centralized hiring (in this study, by the head office). While centralized hiring can ensure that enough resources are invested in hiring people aligned with company values, it can also neglect the unit managers’ local knowledge. Using difference-in-differences analyses, we find that the switch is associated with relatively higher employee departure rates (poorer matches) if the business unit manager has a local advantage; that is, if the store serves repeat customers, serves a demographically atypical market, or poses higher information-gathering costs for headquarters. In these cases, the unit manager may be more informed than headquarters about which candidates would best match local conditions.

Download working paper: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=50576

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This note discusses how multiunit organizations incorporate flexibility into their management control systems, some by authorizing all or a select number of their dispersed units to make input and process decisions, some by investing in data-analytic technologies to drive experiments and make decisions more centrally, and others by combining both approaches. The note highlights important tradeoffs in designing management systems for control and new-market adaptation and the need to incorporate a focus on results and on learning within those systems.

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