Nitin Nohria

• Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Harvard University

The dean of Columbia Business School is joined by the deans of Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton in discussing the challenges and opportunities facing today's graduate business schools. Most business schools aim to provide students with a certain body of knowledge—in disciplines such as marketing, finance, and accounting—as well as some general manage...

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Americans may not realize this, writes the dean of Harvard Business School in an introduction to this special report, but the world wants the United States to be competitive. For more than a century, global observers have considered the U.S. economy to be an exemplar and America a country to envy and imitate. Unfortunately, America's reign as the g...

When I graduated from IIT Bombay in 1984, like almost everyone else in my class, I applied to go to graduate school in America. Indeed, more than two-thirds of my graduating IIT class went to America, and most of us have stayed on to work. We were attracted to America because it was the land of opportunity. It was where the action was—where the bes...

Despite high unemployment, the war for talent rages on. Only 15% of companies in North America and Asia feel they have enough qualified potential successors to fill their top jobs, and the picture is only slightly better in Europe. The best weapon companies can wield are programs that develop their "high potentials"-the people they hope to develop...

Using survey data to judge how analyst forecasts are related to evaluations of companies’ industry competitiveness, strategic choices, and internal capabilities, the authors found that analyst forecasts are associated with many of the factors that money managers rate as important in their assessments of analyst contributions. They also found wide v...

Ed Haldeman has recently become Chief Executive Officer of Freddie Mac, one of three major government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) charged with supporting U.S. residential mortgage finance. The company was placed into conservatorship by the US treasury on September 7, 2008. Conservatorship places various restrictions on Haldeman and the organizatio...

CEO Aaron Feuerstein of Malden Mills decided to pay idled workers after a massive fire at his mill in 1995. Focuses on the decisions made post-fire and the rebuilding process and eventual bankruptcy of the company. Also outlines creditors' struggle to decide whether to lend Feuerstein additional funds to enable him to regain control of the company...

Bertelsmann's EVP HR Immanuel Hermreck and his team were focused on four key HR issues. Three of these were somewhat discreet: improving Bertelsmann's employer brand; managing Bertelsmann talent across the firm's decentralized businesses; and ensuring early identification and appropriate development of Bertelsmann's top 100 high potential managers...

This case tells the story of Ralph Nader's leadership, from his success as a crusader for consumer interests and active public participation in the political process to his controversial campaigns for the US presidency.Learning Objective:This case enables a discussion of a leader with a strong sense of values and principles -- many of which are opp...

Alain Deronde, the CEO of a French personal care company has to choose a successor to head global product development from a diverse set of candidates with different backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses. The candidates include Elise Bernier, Vice President of Marketing for Skin Care Products , Antoine Lambert, General Manager of Coeur Tendre (an...

Michael Fernandes, the Director of Custom Manufacturing Operations at the pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal India Limited (NPIL), schedules a meeting with three of his reports, whose interpersonal conflicts with one another are causing his business development function to falter. He struggles to know how to handle these conflicts and bring th...

Barbara Norris struggles to address the many problems facing her as a recently promoted nurse manager in the General Surgery Unit (GSU) at Eastern Massachusetts University Hospital (EMU). She has inherited a unit with the lowest employee satisfaction scores and highest employee turnover rate among all of the departments at EMU. Furthermore, her new...

This article employs rhetorical theory to reconceptualize institutionalization as change in argument structure. As a state, institutionalization is embodied in the structure of argument used to justify a practice at a given point in time. As a process, institutionalization is modeled as changes in the structure of arguments used to justify a practi...

Yang Jianguo was recently promoted from country manager for China to global head of product development at a staid French perfume maker. He was chosen for his technical smarts and his knowledge of emerging markets -a critical avenue for growth, given that sales in the company's core markets have stalled. Eager to succeed in his new role in Paris, J...

Wearing satin shorts and a bathrobe, Herb Kelleher prepared to enter Dallas’s seedy Sportatorium during a winter morning in 1992. Kelleher’s “athletic” look, topped off with a sweatband pushing back his hair, was deliberately undercut by a cigarette dangling defiantly from his lips. Surrounded by an entourage rented from the world of professional w...

Less than 10 years after Pan Am had to charter a plane to save itself from potential ruin by almost failing to fulfill its contract to deliver mail to Cuba, the company was playing a starring role in a major Hollywood movie.1China Clipper (1936)—starring, among others, Humphrey Bogart—portrayed the hard-driving Dave Logan, a pilot inspired to start...

In October 1929 the American press, both large publications and small, began to bid farewell to the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, which had just made an announcement that it would soon cease the operations it had inaugurated three years earlier. The New York Times began its tribute by proclaiming that aviation itself had...

As the U.S. government stepped in to formally regulate the airline industry in the late 1930s, a massive consolidation effort ensued that resulted in a streamlining of operations, a standardization of equipment and processes, and a relatively stable playing field. In addition, these efforts by the government to control the airline industry created...

When Gordon Bethune took over Continental Airlines in October 1994, he and his close associate Greg Brenneman had little time to overhaul the airline.1 Net income had plummeted from a loss of $113 million in 1993 to a staggering $613 million deficit in 1994.2 Bankruptcy and liquidation were not just on Continental’s horizon; they were pounding on t...

The survival and eventual growth of Delta Air Lines during the tumultuous early days of the airline industry in the 1920s and 1930s was due in large part to the character of its director, Collett Everman (C. E.) Woolman. Simultaneously visionary and practical, risk-taking and fiscally prudent, a university-educated cosmopolitan who naturally blende...

In 1953, Selig Altschul, a prominent writer and consultant on aviation, cited one main reason for the persistent strength of United Air Lines in the airline industry since the early 1930s: “United was probably the first company to bring full-scale business methods and organization to air transportation.”1 Some observers of the aviation industry hav...

It was October 18, 1927, and Juan “Terry” Trippe, the new president of Pan American Airways, was just days from becoming a failure in the nascent airline industry. Trippe had already begun two airline projects that had ended almost as quickly as they had begun. Now, embarking on his third, Trippe ran into a pressing problem. Pan Am’s head pilot, Ed...

In the face of the recent institutional breakdown of trust in business, managers are losing legitimacy. To regain public trust, management needs to become a true profession in much the way medicine and law have, argue Khurana and Nohria of Harvard Business School. True professions have codes, and the meaning and consequences of those codes are taug...

Motivating employees begins with recognizing that to do their best work, people must be in an environment that meets their basic emotional drives to acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend. So say Nohria and Groysberg, of Harvard Business School, and Lee, of the Center for Research on Corporate Performance. Using the results of surveys they conducted...

A theoretical framework is proposed to understand the structure of networks of strategic linkages in global industries. It is argued that global industry structure should be understood in terms of firm membership in ‘strategic groups’ and ‘strategic blocks’. Strategic groups are based on similarities in the strategic capabilities of firms. Strategi...

Does management talent transfer from one company to another? The market certainly seems to think so. Stock prices spike when companies announce new CEOs from a talent generator like General Electric. But how do these executives perform over the long term? The authors studied the careers of 20 former GE executives who went on to lead other major org...

This paper introduces the important role of networks of interfirm ties in examining fundamental issues in strategy research. Prior research has primarily viewed firms as autonomous entities striving for competitive advantage from either external industry sources or from internal resources and capabilities. However, the networks of relationships in...

We conceptualize downsizing as an attempt to reduce organizational slack. We suggest that the degree to which downsizing will improve firm performance will be contingent on conditions under which the downsizing occurs. We emphasize the level of organizational slack as an important contingency, and also examine two other contingencies: (1) whether t...

Companies and leaders don't succeed or fail in a vacuum. When it comes to longterm success, the ability to understand and adapt to changing business conditions is at least as important as any particular personality trait or competency. A clear picture of how powerful the zeitgeist can be emerges from the authors' comprehensive study of the way the...

Supervised by D. Eleanor Westney. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1988. Includes bibliographical references.

From a converted muffler-repair shop, Ray Keiner launched RLK Media in 1985, selling its radical audio speakers to affluent connoisseurs for $20,000 a pop. By the 1990s, RLK had grown into a billion-dollar business through its single-minded focus on pricey, highly branded, handcrafted consumer electronics. But things are no longer going so well, an...

Recent business scandals point to a disturbing breakdown of values in corporate America. This book responds to the crisis by examining the responsibilities of "gatekeepers"—corporate directors, regulators, auditors, lawyers, investment bankers, and business journalists—who stand between corporate misconduct and the public. The essays, by prominent...

As a newly minted CEO, you may think you finally have the power to set strategy, the authority to make things happen, and full access to the finer points of your business. But if you expect the job to be as simple as that, you're in for an awakening. Even though you bear full responsibility for your company's well-being, you are a few steps removed...

For many years, multinational corporations could compete successfully by exploiting scale and scope economies or by taking advantage of imperfections in the world's goods, labor and capital markets. But these ways of competing are no longer as profitable as they once were. In most industries, multinationals no longer compete primarily with companie...

With the battle for the best and brightest people heating up again, you're most likely out there looking for first-rate talent in the ranks of your competitors. Chances are, you're sold on the idea of recruiting from outside your organization, since developing people within the firm takes time and money. But the authors, who have tracked the career...

Learning alliances, associations in which the primary objective of the partners is to learn from each other, constitute an important class of interfirm alliances (Hamel, Doz, and Prahalad, 1989; Hamel, 1991). We introduce a general theoretical framework to advance the study of such learning alliances in two major ways. First, the framework explicit...

When it comes to improving business performance, managers have no shortage of tools and techniques to choose from. But what really works? What's critical, and what's optional? Two business professors and a former McKinsey consultant set out to answer those questions. In a ground-breaking, five-year study that involved more than 50 academics and con...

Hay que separar las realidades de las modas. Un revolucionario estudio, que duró cinco años, pone de manifiesto las prácticas imprescindibles de gestión que verdaderamente dan lugar a resultados superiores

The alliance dynamics among the 35 largest firms in the worldwide automobile industry indicates that the likelihood of an alliance between any two firms depends on the local density of alliances among the members of their strategic groups, rather than on the global density of alliances in the industry. These results suggest that firms most closely...

The mid-1990s saw the rise of an important movement: a recognition that organizational knowledge, in its various forms and attributes, could be an important source of competitive advantage in the marketplace. Knowledge management has become one of the core competencies in today's competitive environment, where so much value in companies resides in...

Despite the large literature on leadership, previous studies have diverged in their assessments of the impact of CEOs on company performance. The debate has focused on the question of "Does leadership matter?" The "leadership" proponents state that leadership is a critical factor in organizational performance. On the other side of the debate, "cons...

The assumption today is that new value in a company can be created only when people shed their suits, don khakis and Hawaiian shirts, and think and act like the most passionate entrepreneurs. The problem is, they're rarely told when it makes sense to do those things--or how to do them. With help from a team of ethnographers and senior organization...

Business incubators such as Hotbank, CMGI, and Idealab! are a booming industry. Offering office space, funding, and basic services to start-ups, these organizations have become the hottest way to nurture and grow fledgling businesses. But are incubators a fleeting phenomenon born of an overheated stock market, or are they an important and lasting w...

We argue that our model of learning in alliances (Khanna, Gulati and Nohria, 1998) is an economic model of strategy process. We discuss implications of this view for the strategy process vs. content debate, for the appropriate testing of models of strategy process, and for the role of economics in helping understand strategy process. We propose tha...

We argue that our model of learning in alliances (Khanna, Gulati and Nohria, 1998) is an economic model of strategy process. We discuss implications of this view for the strategy process vs. content debate, for the appropriate testing of models of strategy process, and for the role of economics in helping understand strategy process. We propose tha...

Previous research on executive turnover treats the departures of predecessors and the origin of successors as independent events. This approach has led to mixed empirical findings with respect to measuring the effects of executive turnover on firm performance. Using a longitudinal data set, we show that the conditions under which the predecessor de...

This paper introduces the important role of networks of interfirm ties in examining fundamental issues in strategy research. Prior research has primarily viewed firms as autonomous entities striving for competitive advantage from either external industry sources or from internal resources and capabilities. However, the networks of relationships in...

Today's fast-paced economy demands that businesses change or die. But few companies manage corporate transformations as well as they would like. The brutal fact is that about 70% of all change initiatives fail. In this article, authors Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria describe two archetypes--or theories--of corporate transformation that may help exec...

The rise of the computer and the increasing importance of intellectual assets have compelled executives to examine the knowledge underlying their businesses and how it is used. Because knowledge management as a conscious practice is so young, however, executives have lacked models to use as guides. To help fill that gap, the authors recently studie...

This chapter examines the benefits and pitfalls of mentoring relationships with respect to a protégé’s ability to develop social capital, measured here as ties across multinational subsidiary boundaries that might produce access to information and resources. The results indicate that early mentoring relationships are negatively related to a protégé...

We show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances. ‘Private benefits’ and ‘common benefits’ differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning. The competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm's ratio of private to common benefits is high. We introduce a measure,...

We show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances. 'Private benefits' and 'common benefits' differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning. The competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm's ratio of private to common benefits is high. We introduce a measure,...

We show how the tension between cooperation and competition affects the dynamics of learning alliances. ‘Private benefits’ and ‘common benefits’ differ in the incentives that they create for investment in learning. The competitive aspects of alliances are most severe when a firm's ratio of private to common benefits is high. We introduce a measure,...

The relationship between organizational slack and innovation has remained an unanswered empirical question for decades and theorists continue to argue over the basic issue of whether slack facilitates or inhibits innovation. Opponents of slack claim that slack relaxes incentives to innovate and encourages wasteful investment in R&D activities, whil...

A dramatic restructuring is under way in the North American electric utility industry. The structure of vertically integrated utilities operating in protected territories will be replaced by one of “value networks.” We examine the regulatory, market and technological forces leading to the new industry structure. We describe five major changes that...

This article suggests that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between slack and innovation in organizations: both too much and too little slack may be detrimental to innovation. Two related mechanisms governing this relationship are proposed: Slack fosters greater experimentation but also diminishing discipline over innovative projects, resu...

This paper elaborates and provides empirical support for two different approaches to managing the nexus of headquarters subsidiary relations in a multinational corporation (MNC). The first approach is that of Differentiated Fit. We show that the extent to which an MNC differentiates the formal structure of its headquarters subsidiary relations to f...

A study of human resource management practices in 249 U.S. affiliates of foreign-based multinational corporations (MNCs) shows that in general affiliate HRM practices closely follow local practices, with differences among specific practices. The degree of similarity of local practices is significantly influenced by the method of founding, dependenc...

Sumario: El papel desempeñado por el "gestor de casos" supone una ruptura con los principios tradicionales de la división del trabajo. Determinada persona o un equipo pequeño llevan a cabo una serie de tareas, como por ejemplo el procesamiento de un pedido, desde el principio hasta el final, contando, por lo general, con la ayuda de los sistemas de...

Sumario: One of the most enduring ideas of organization theory is that an organization's structure and management process must "fit" its environment, in the same way that a particular horse might be more suited to one course than another. Ghoshal and Nohria show the continued relevance of this classic insight for the organization of multinational c...

In many contemporary alliances partners can obtain higher payoffs by cooperating with each other than by behaving opportunistically. These reciprocally interdependent alliances then, are better viewed as mutual assurance games than as prisoner's dilemmas. The key to ensuring cooperation in a mutually assured alliance lies in systematically managing...

This paper argues that the internal structure in complex, multi-unit organizations such as a multinational corporation (MNC) is not homogeneous throughout the organization, but is systematically differentiated so as to ‘fit’ the different environmental and resource contingencies faced by the different national subsidiaries. Based on a survey of 66...

Recessions bring cuts in the size of the labour force, in capital expenditures, in advertising budgets, in travel, even in the loss of coffee and donuts from our meetings. Sadly, investments in research and development and innovation, the seed-corns of our future, are not insulated from these realities either. Over the past four quarters, the total...