Cold Call

Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn discusses the life and vision of Milton Hershey, the entrepreneur behind Hershey chocolate. Topics include Hershey's childhood, the building of Hershey Town, worker dissent, Hershey's philanthropy, and the possibility of replicating his success.

Harvard Business School professor Ray Goldberg discusses his case study, “Wegmans and Listeria: Developing a Proactive Food Safety System for Produce” — how Wegmans CEO faced a food safety issue and then helped the industry determine how it could become more proactive in the future.

How deeply does the culture of a startup matter? Can it be shaped? Harvard Business School professor Jeffrey Rayport discusses his case “WeWork” regarding cofounder Miguel McKelvey’s innovative role in building a company culture to support rapid growth.

Was Eastern Labs a huge success or an expensive mistake? Eastern Bank CEO Bob Rivers innovates from within by partnering with fintech entrepreneur Dan O’Malley to launch a completely automated small business lending product. Harvard Business School professor Karen Mills discusses key questions from her case, “Eastern Bank; Innovating Through Eastern Labs”: Did Rivers have the right intrapreneurship model? Did he change the culture at Eastern? Did he make a mistake spinning off Numerated into a separate company?

After thirty years of research and development, the HondaJet is now the top selling jet in the very light jet segment of the market. Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano discusses his case study entitled, “Flying into the Future: HondaJet” — how Honda Aircraft Corporation CEO Michimasa Fujino brings the jet to life, and must now decide on ways to grow the business.

Feeding America is the third largest nonprofit in America, managing a network of more than 200 food banks nationwide. Harvard Business School professor Scott Duke Kominers and University of Chicago professor Canice Prendergast discuss Kominers’ case, “Feeding America (A)” — how the organization designed a marketplace that was efficient and fair for all participants.

Is it time to throw out the creative director and rely on big data to predict what consumers want to wear next? Harvard Business School professor Ayelet Israeli discusses her case study, “Predicting Consumer Tastes With Big Data at Gap” — how Gap CEO Art Peck considers this bold idea to boost sales.

Harvard Business School professor Bill Kerr discusses how Vodafone, one of the largest companies in the telecommunications space, incorporated technological advancements like big data, automation, and artificial intelligence to improve productivity while ensuring new opportunities were created for the next generation of workers. Kerr is the author of the case study, “Vodafone: Managing Advanced Technologies and Artificial Intelligence.”

Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane brought a data driven and unconventional approach to winning baseball games. By setting strategy and articulating the metric to evaluate and acquire the players who would ultimately implement his strategy on the field, Beane’s sabermetrics approach brought about a cultural shift in baseball from the players and managers to coaches and scouts. Harvard Business School professor Srikant Datar discusses his case study entitled, “The Oakland Athletics: Strategy and Metrics for a Budget,” co-written with Caitlin N. Bowler about how strategy and metrics work hand-in-hand, and how Beane’s story provides companies with important lessons in data science.

Harvard Business School professor Geoffrey Jones examines the career of Ernesto Tornquist, a cosmopolitan financier considered to be the most significant entrepreneur in Argentina at the end of the 19th century. He created a diversified business group, linked to the political elite, integrating Argentina into the trading and financial networks of the first global economy. The case, “Ernesto Tornquist: Making a Fortune on the Pampas,” provides an opportunity to understand why Argentina was such a successful economy at this time, and to debate whether its very success laid the basis for the country’s subsequent poor economic performance.