Faculty & Research

• HBS Book

In nearly every business segment and corner of the world economy, the most successful companies dramatically outperform their rivals. What is their secret? In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee shows how these companies achieve more by doing less. At a time when rapid technological change and global competition conspire to upend traditional ways of doing business, these companies pursue radically simplified strategies. At a time when many managers struggle not to drown in vast seas of projects and initiatives, these businesses follow simple rules that help select the few ideas that truly make a difference.

• Strategic Management Journal 43, no. 1 (January 2022): 3-29.

This paper exploits a natural experiment involving self-regulation in the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast cereal industry to evaluate the performance impact of product repositioning. It then examines how a product's brand equity value declines with repositioning distance and explores various nonprice responses of firms to increased own and rival competition. Self-regulation led to a crowding of the product space by forcing differentiated products to become more similar. We find that products constrained by regulation performed relatively worse than unconstrained products.

• Health Care Initiative

Most hospitals and managed care organizations have financial assistance programs that aim to reduce financial burdens and improve health care access for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an income threshold for program eligibility, we find that financial assistance significantly increases health care utilization initially, though effects dissipate three quarters after program receipt. Financial assistance also increases the detection of and medication refills for treatment-sensitive conditions, suggesting financial assistance may increase receipt of high-value care.

• Featured Case

MAYA Capital co-founders Lara Lemann and Monica Saggioro raised $41.5 million through a series of closings for their early-stage Latin American venture capital fund. The two women had met for the first time in mid-2016 when Lemann was contemplating scaling her angel investing experience by structuring a fund, and Saggioro was about to start her MBA program at Harvard Business School. After founding MAYA in 2018, the pair built an investment portfolio in sector-agnostic investments across the region, providing startup founders with an on-demand, hands-on management support approach. MAYA also initiated a series of creative efforts to help develop its venture ecosystem and to source opportunities. By 2021, Lemann and Saggioro had invested approximately $21 million in 28 companies, with several completing subsequent follow-on rounds of financing to support their growth.

• Featured Case

Bodega Aurrera, serving the base of the pyramid and Walmart’s main Mexican format, is considering launching a full eCommerce channel as Covid-19 has erupted in the country. In 2019, Bodega Aurrera accounted for 45% of revenues and 2,748 of Walmex’s 3,416 stores. Having introduced eCommerce with the high-income segments served by its Walmart and Superama formats, Walmart Mexico (Walmex) had slated an online channel for Bodega Aurrera in the next three or four years, considering that its core clients belonged to the C and D socioeconomic segments. However, with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, retail store sales plummeted and analysts around the world began to note that sales on digital channels were surging. In late April 2020, Lilia Jaime, the CEO of Bodega Aurrera, wondered if this was an opportunity she had to seize.

• HBS Working Paper

Psychological safety is a hallmark of effective team functioning. Although prior work shows that characteristics of the leader influence employee judgments of psychological safety (and subsequent decisions to speak up), we know very little about “the specific behaviors leaders employ to lead employees to assess an interaction as safe to speak” (Morrison, 2011). In this paper, we shift scholarly focus from gestalt evaluations of leader traits to focus instead on moment-to-moment leader behavior. We examine how a specific nonverbal behavior—eye gaze, especially eye gaze received from a leader—affects group members’ feelings of psychological safety.

• HBS Working Paper

Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. In this paper we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy use. In an incentivized trust game (Study 1), we demonstrate that individuals are less likely to trust people who use a commitment strategy than those who use willpower to achieve their goals. In Study 2, across four domains we show that people judge commitment strategy users less favorably than willpower users in pursuit of the same goals, particularly when it comes to integrity-based trust.