Business History →
- 04 Jan 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Historical Change and the Competitive Advantage of Firms: Explicating the 'Dynamics' in the Dynamic Capabilities Framework
This study contributes to the re-emerging dialogue between business history and strategy by examining how historical reasoning can contribute to the dynamic capabilities framework currently employed by strategy scholars. It explores how three distinct models of historical change—evolutionary, dialectical, and constitutive—were incorporated into the theoretical tenets of the origins, context, and micro-foundations of the dynamic capabilities framework. In each case, recognizing these historical models of change provides opportunities for sharpening the conceptualization of strategy-making processes and designing research to examine them more deeply. The paper argues that given the need for more extensive empirical research on dynamic capabilities, the methodological value of history for dynamic capabilities scholarship is significant.
- 18 Nov 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Standardized Color in the Food Industry: The Co-Creation of the Food Coloring Business in the United States, 1870–1940
Beginning in the late 19th century, US food manufacturers tried to create the “right” color of foods that many consumers would recognize and in time take for granted. The United States became a leading country in the food coloring business with the rise of extensive mass marketing. By 1938, when Congress enacted the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the food coloring business had become a central and permanent component of food marketing strategies. This paper shows how food manufacturers, dye makers, and regulators co-created the food coloring business. Food-coloring practices became integrated into an entire strategy of manufacturing and marketing in the food industry.
- 01 Jul 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Entrepreneurs and the Co-Creation of Ecotourism in Costa Rica
Costa Rica has grown as a mecca for ecotourism from the late twentieth century. Although biologists and other students of ecosystems and biodiversity were vital at the start of the process, as were conservation NGOs and the national government, this paper argues that entrepreneurs were also pivotal. While showing the benefits of ecotourism, it is also shown that as the industry scaled, there were increasing challenges of greenwashing.
- 13 Jun 2016
- Lessons from the Classroom
That's Classic: Modern-Day Business Lessons from Ancient Rome
What can MBAs learn from the Roman emperors Tiberius and Claudius? All Roads Lead to Rome, a course taught by HBS professor Frances Frei and Harvard history and classics professor Emma Dench, surfaces insights into the age-old issue of leadership. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 15 Apr 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Big History, Global Corporations, Virtual Capitalism
The hundred-year history of the Boeing Company takes us through the phases of the modern corporation, from its entrepreneurial founding to the transition to professional management and managerial capitalism during the first half of the twentieth century, and the subsequent transition to virtual capitalism during the last half of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. Virtual capitalism, enabled by modern IT technologies of real time networks, allows today’s global organizations to overcome many constraints, particularly the physical limitations faced in the past.
- 08 Mar 2016
- Research & Ideas
Solving an Economic Mystery Surrounding Argentina and Chile
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. In the twenty-first century, it is struggling, its economy eclipsed by Chile. A new book by Geoffrey Jones and Andrea Lluch helps explain the “Argentina Paradox” and the influence of globalism. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 22 Feb 2016
- Research & Ideas
The ‘Mother of Fair Trade’ was an Unabashed Price Protectionist
Historian Laura Phillips Sawyer unearths the story of little-known drug store owner Edna Gleason who, in a man’s world, helped fire a progressive movement to protect small-business owners from price-slashing chains. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 17 Feb 2016
- Cold Call Podcast
The Amazing Life of One of America’s Earliest Black, Female Entrepreneurs
Though not everyone may know her name, Madam C.J. Walker helped invent what have become staples of our modern country and economy: entrepreneurship, national sales forces, and corporate social responsibility, says Nancy Koehn. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 04 Feb 2016
- Cold Call Podcast
The Space Shuttle Columbia’s Final Mission
No organization wants to fail. But even for the best and the brightest, failure is inevitable, and occasionally that failure can be catastrophic. Professor Amy Edmondson describes her experience writing and teaching a case on the Columbia space shuttle’s final mission, including the organizational challenges within NASA that contributed to it, and the lessons that can be taken from the tragedy. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 14 Dec 2015
- Working Paper Summaries
Business Groups Exist in Developed Markets Also: Britain Since 1850
Looking at U.K. history, Geoffrey Jones finds that groups of companies bound through formal or informal ties can add value in developed markets as well as developing markets.
- 08 Dec 2015
- Research Event
Research Trends Discussed at India and South Asia Conference
Harvard Business School recently brought together scholars to discuss the business history and current research trends in India and South Asia. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 23 Nov 2015
- Book
The Historian Who Came in from the Cold
While much has been written about the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Jeremy S. Friedman’s Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World is the first book to explore in detail the significance of the “Second Cold War” that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the communist and capitalist struggle. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 02 Nov 2015
- Book
Dear Internet: You Are Extraordinary, But Not Exceptional
Professor Shane Greenstein is annoyed by “Internet exceptionalism,” the prevalent idea that the Internet defies economic logic, that there’s never been anything like it in business history, and that its impact supersedes everything. In his new book, Greenstein argues that the Internet actually follows classic patterns of economic behavior, detailing the commercial forces that guided the Internet’s path from cool invention to successful innovation. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 27 Oct 2014
- Research & Ideas
The Coffee Economy That Bloomed Out of Nowhere
How did a world-class coffee region arise out of a land once decimated by smallpox and measles? Casey Lurtz discusses the rise of a coffee economy in a desolate region of Mexico. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 May 2013
- What Do You Think?
Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?
Summing Up: After plowing through an unusually full inbox of reader e-mails, Jim Heskett wonders whether the term "servant leadership" is an oxymoron? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 28 Aug 2008
- Sharpening Your Skills
Sharpening Your Skills: History Matters
Business history is a rich source of knowledge and inspiration for today's executives. Do we pay enough attention to the past? Here are four Working Knowledge articles that provide lessons from history about leaders, leadership, and business organization. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 07 Jul 2008
- Research & Ideas
Innovation Corrupted: How Managers Can Avoid Another Enron
The train wreck that was Enron provides key insights for improving corporate governance and financial incentives as well as organizational processes that strengthen ethical discipline, says HBS professor emeritus Malcolm S. Salter. His new book, Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron's Collapse, is a deep reflection on the present and future of business. Key concepts include: Enron's stated purpose was too general to permit disciplined and responsible decision-making in the face of difficulty. The lessons of Enron relate to strengthening board oversight, avoiding perverse financial incentives for executives, and instilling ethical discipline throughout business organizations. Directors of public companies can adapt key aspects of the private-equity governance model to ensure that they fulfill their oversight responsibilities. Incentive systems should reward accomplishments other than economic performance, and penalize failures. Companies can take steps to help senior executives avoid the two sources of leadership failure at Enron: personal opportunism and flights to utopianism. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 17 Mar 2008
- Research & Ideas
The Lessons of Business History: A Handbook
Compiling a handbook on the current thinking in any area of study seems daunting enough, but the just-published Oxford Handbook of Business History carries an even larger mission: bring the lessons of business history to current research in other disciplines and to the practice of business management itself. A Q&A with coeditor Geoffrey Jones. Key concepts include: Business historians over recent decades have generated rich empirical data on firms and business systems that can confirm or challenge many of today's fashionable theories and assumptions by other disciplines. Business history has broadened its scope in the last two decades by including research on corporate governance, industrial districts, business groups, business culture, business education, skills training, accounting and information systems, design, and engineering. Historical knowledge helps us to truly understand business, but the growing ahistorical nature of much management and economics literature has seriously compromised its legitimacy. The business history literature is extremely weak in Africa, and not much better in Latin America, many Asian countries, and the Middle East. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 25 Jun 2007
- Research & Ideas
HBS Cases: Beauty Entrepreneur Madam Walker
She may have been the first self-made African American millionaire. Born of emancipated slaves, Madam C.J. Walker traveled from the cotton fields to business fame as a purveyor of hair-care products that offered beauty and dignity. Harvard Business School's Nancy F. Koehn and Katherine Miller explain what motivated her triumph. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
Overcoming Institutional Voids: A Reputation-Based View of Long Run Survival
Why are some firms able to persistently survive challenging, uncertain, and underdeveloped business environments? To address this question, the authors utilize the HBS Creating Emerging Markets project―a novel collection of in-depth, publicly available video interviews conducted by HBS researchers with leaders of emerging market firms that have survived over decades and even centuries. Analyzing these interviews for the first time, the authors theorize that firm reputation is a key strategic driver, and outline how a favorable reputation allows a firm to more fully utilize its existing resources by decreasing uncertainty. They also show that reputation has offensive and defensive properties that make it valuable during both positive and negative economic cycles. Finally, the authors propose new ideas about how reputation facilitates survival and discuss why a reputation-based source of competitive advantage is hard to imitate.