The Team Sport of Scaling a Business

Before “House of Cards” was an internationally-renowned and critically acclaimed hit series, it was a total shot in the dark. Luckily for the small film studio behind it, Netflix saw it as a shot worth taking. Professor Anita Elberse discusses how the Emmy-winning show flipped the script on standard television series production, brought binge-watching into the mainstream, and ushered in a whole new era of must-see programming.

The European Union this week hit Apple with a $14.5 billion tax bill, but that’s hardly the first or worst financial challenge the technology giant has faced. In 1997, the company suffered a near-death experience that caused it to completely reimagine itself. The result was a new line of products and an unprecedented financial model. Mihir Desai explains the financial wiring behind the inventors of the iPhone.

It’s a good bet that winning a gameshow isn’t often on the list of top priorities at large companies. So how was it that building a robot to do just that became a prime focus at IBM? Professor Willy Shih discusses how building Watson, a deep question answering machine, reinvigorated a stalled Research & Development team, taught IBM a ton about communication and product development, and led to a hotly-contested “Jeopardy!” match on the Harvard Business School campus.

College represents one of the biggest decisions and investments many consumers will ever make. But can they really trust the rankings available to help them choose? Professor Bill Kirby unpacks the complex world of university rankings, including what “world-class” actually means, what rankings don’t take into account, and how schools are learning to game an imperfect system.

Though Google has become the U.S. face of the driverless car movement, other global companies have been developing similar technology for more than a decade. Mobileye is one of them, with a $10 billion valuation and a huge head start in a potentially enormous market. Professor David Yoffie discusses why a company many have never heard of will be a lynchpin in the future of self-driving automobiles.

A novel idea: give loyal customers a chance to buy shares in a company they love. That’s the premise behind LOYAL3, which uses the democratizing power of technology to give average investors better access to IPOs. Professor Luis Viceira discusses this novel mission, the huge new market it creates, and the delicate balance of being disruptive but only when necessary.

Increasingly, almost every team is a global team in some capacity. This presents a difficult challenge for managers everywhere, and especially for high-potential leaders who want to take their careers to the next level: how do you bring together a team whose members are geographically and culturally dispersed? Professor Tsedal Neeley discusses her case of a real-life executive charged with corralling a hugely diverse, underperforming group and leading it back to success on a global scale.

Carla Ann Harris has blazed trails through and excelled at institutions like Harvard and Morgan Stanley. But doing so has required her to strike a careful balance between her professional image and her personal passions. Professor Lakshmi Ramarajan discusses Harris’ inspiring success and the importance of managing perceptions to achieve greatness.

Since brewing is a marketing-driven business, finding ways to differentiate a beverage from its competition is crucial. Heineken’s chief marketing officer took a novel approach: take the complicated processes of production and distribution and make them interesting and important to the consumer. Professor Forest Reinhardt explains how a big, sophisticated company used small details, from trucking routes to the color of refrigerators, to put its commitment to the environment to work on its behalf.

Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are tapping into their vast personal wealth to make commercial space travel a reality. In the process, they're revitalizing a listless national space program. Professor Matthew Weinzierl discusses his new case on New Space, and how public-private partnerships are becoming the building blocks for the hottest new startup sector.