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- HBS Book
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne MorrissSpeed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future. Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is deeply flawed—and that it keeps you from building a great company. Helping executives and entrepreneurs solve their toughest problems over the past decade, Frei and Morriss learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best leaders solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations—employees, customers, and shareholders—even stronger. They move fast and fix things.
- HBS Book
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems
By: Frances X. Frei and Anne MorrissSpeed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Facebook made "Move fast and break things" an informal company motto, it fueled a widely held belief that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. That a certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for inventing the future. Leadership experts...
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- Journal of Marketing Research 60, no. 6 (December 2023): 1095-1113.
Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design
By: Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo BenartziTo encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when pre-commitment is effective at increasing adoption of farsighted behaviors and when it is not. Specifically, the authors theorize that simultaneously offering consumers the opportunity to adopt a farsighted behavior now or later (i.e., offering “simultaneous pre-commitment”) may signal that the behavior is not urgently recommended; however, offering consumers the opportunity to adopt that behavior immediately and then, only if they decline, inviting them to adopt it later (i.e., offering “sequential pre-commitment”) may signal just the opposite.
- Journal of Marketing Research 60, no. 6 (December 2023): 1095-1113.
Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design
By: Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo BenartziTo encourage farsighted behaviors, past research suggests that marketers may be wise to invite consumers to pre-commit to adopt them “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of pre-commitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when pre-commitment is effective at...
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- Social Enterprise
Prime Coalition: Estimating Climate Impact
By: Natalia Rigol, Benjamin N. Roth, Brian Trelstad and Amram MigdalA case on CRANE, a tool to help investors and green technology companies estimate the future climate impact of new technologies and products, called emissions reduction potential (ERP). The case includes material on CRANE’s methodology for estimating future carbon emissions, including the variables and parameters of the tool’s model. CRANE was created by Prime Coalition (Prime), which organized hundreds of investors to establish industry standard terminology, methodologies, and best practices for estimating the climate impact of new investments. In 2022, Keri Browder, director of Project Frame, a nonprofit program convened by Prime, was focused on how to improve CRANE’s technical capabilities, integrate with other available tools for pre- and post-investment decision-making, and make the effort as useful as possible for Prime and Project Frame’s mission to mitigate climate change.
- Social Enterprise
Prime Coalition: Estimating Climate Impact
By: Natalia Rigol, Benjamin N. Roth, Brian Trelstad and Amram MigdalA case on CRANE, a tool to help investors and green technology companies estimate the future climate impact of new technologies and products, called emissions reduction potential (ERP). The case includes material on CRANE’s methodology for estimating future carbon emissions, including the variables and parameters of the tool’s model. CRANE was...
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- Featured Case
Fermenting Accounting Problems at Vermont Kombucha Corp.
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal HerrmannFounded in 2005, Vermont Kombucha Corp. (V-Ko) was an early mover in the fledgling U.S. market for kombucha, a drink brewed for its health benefits. Early on, the company captured more than 90% of market share. Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Joe Williams, V-Ko went public in 2015. On the first day of trading, V-Ko’s shares doubled in price, and the company closed the year with a market capitalization of approximately $2.5 billion. However, the company’s growth began to slow as competitors entered the market. Though V-Ko’s market share began to shrink, Williams continued to set aggressive sales targets that were increasingly difficult to reach.
- Featured Case
Fermenting Accounting Problems at Vermont Kombucha Corp.
By: Tatiana Sandino and Marshal HerrmannFounded in 2005, Vermont Kombucha Corp. (V-Ko) was an early mover in the fledgling U.S. market for kombucha, a drink brewed for its health benefits. Early on, the company captured more than 90% of market share. Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Joe Williams, V-Ko went public in 2015. On the first day of trading, V-Ko’s shares doubled in...
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- Featured Case
Trilling Foods: Managing People with Data
By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Jeffrey T. PolzerTrilling Foods, a regional bricks-and-mortar grocery chain, has recently provided its frontline managers with new tools for using data. Allison Andersen, Trilling’s VP of Data Science, has spearheaded these efforts. Yet, as she works with Kent Wade, the general manager of one of Trilling’s grocery stores, Andersen quickly discovers that many frontline workers are not bought into it. Taking the perspectives of managers from across multiple levels of the organization, the case examines how individuals with different backgrounds and experiences manage digital transformation.
- Featured Case
Trilling Foods: Managing People with Data
By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Jeffrey T. PolzerTrilling Foods, a regional bricks-and-mortar grocery chain, has recently provided its frontline managers with new tools for using data. Allison Andersen, Trilling’s VP of Data Science, has spearheaded these efforts. Yet, as she works with Kent Wade, the general manager of one of Trilling’s grocery stores, Andersen quickly discovers that many...
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- HBS Working Paper
Money, Time, and Grant Design
By: Kyle Myers and Wei Yang ThamThe design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we offer participants a hypothetical grant with randomized attributes and ask how the grant would influence their research strategy. Longer grants increase researchers’ willingness to take risks, but only among tenured professors, which suggests that job security and grant duration are complements. Both longer and larger grants reduce researchers’ focus on speed, which suggests a significant amount of racing in science is in pursuit of resources.
- HBS Working Paper
Money, Time, and Grant Design
By: Kyle Myers and Wei Yang ThamThe design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we offer participants a hypothetical grant with randomized attributes and ask how the grant would influence...
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- HBS Working Paper
Estimating Productivity in the Presence of Spillovers: Firm-Level Evidence from the U.S. Production Network
By: Ebehi IyohaThis paper examines the extent to which productivity gains are transmitted across U.S. firms through buyer-supplier relationships. Many empirical studies measure firm-to-firm spillovers using firm-level productivity estimates derived from control function approaches. However, these methods implicitly rule out the interdependence of firms' outcomes and decisions through productivity spillovers. To address this limitation, I develop a framework to jointly estimate network effects and firm-level productivity, while accounting for common productivity shocks across firms and non-random buyer-supplier matching. Using this method, I characterize productivity spillovers over the US production network from 1977 to 2016. My results suggest that having 1% more productive trading partners on average leads to 0.076% higher productivity in the long run.
- HBS Working Paper
Estimating Productivity in the Presence of Spillovers: Firm-Level Evidence from the U.S. Production Network
By: Ebehi IyohaThis paper examines the extent to which productivity gains are transmitted across U.S. firms through buyer-supplier relationships. Many empirical studies measure firm-to-firm spillovers using firm-level productivity estimates derived from control function approaches. However, these methods implicitly rule out the interdependence of firms' outcomes...
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Recent Publications
Do Safety Management System Standards Indicate Safer Operations? Evidence from the OHSAS 18001 Occupational Health and Safety Standard
- 2024 |
- Article |
- Safety Science
Accounting Red Flags or Red Herrings at Catalent? (B)
- January 2024 |
- Supplement |
- Faculty Research
Computer Science for Strategists
- January 2024 |
- Technical Note |
- Faculty Research
[Invited Presentation]
- 2024 |
- Conference Presentation |
- Faculty Research
[Invited Presentation]
- 2024 |
- Conference Presentation |
- Faculty Research
Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the PROGRESA Experiment
- January 2024 |
- Article |
- Economic Journal
A Cost Model for a Low Threshold Clinic Treating Opioid Use Disorder
- January 2024 |
- Article |
- Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research
Clinician Response to Patient Medication Prices Displayed in the Electronic Health Record
- October 2023 |
- Article |
- JAMA Internal Medicine