HBSP (USA)
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The Surprising Power of Online Experiments (Spanish version)
Kohavi, Ron; Thomke, StefanArticle HBS-R1705EService and Operations ManagementAt Bing a small headline change an employee proposed was deemed a low priority and shelved for months until one engineer decided to do a quick online controlled experiment--an A/B test--to try it out. The test showed that the change increased revenue by an astonishing 12%. It ended up being the best revenue-generating idea Bing ever had, worth $100 million. That experience illustrates why it's critical to adopt an "experiment with everything" ap...Starting at €8.20
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Six Myths of Product Development
Thomke, Stefan; Reinertsen, DonaldArticle HBS-R1205E-EMany companies approach product development as if it were manufacturing, trying to control costs and improve quality by applying zero-defect, efficiency-focused techniques. While this tactic can boost the performance of factories, it generally backfires with product development. The process of designing products is profoundly different from the process of making them, and the failure of executives to appreciate the differences leads to several ...Starting at €8.20
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Mumbai's Models of Service Excellence
Thomke, StefanArticle HBS-R1211K-EService and Operations ManagementThink you need exceptional employees, advanced IT, or rigid controls to build a high-performance organization? The dabbawalas of Mumbai prove otherwise. Six days a week, these 5,000 self-managed, semiliterate workers deliver upwards of 130,000 lunches from customers' homes to their offices with astonishing precision--negotiating the crowded city by train, bicycle, and handcart, without the aid of any technology or even cell phones. The 100-year-o...Starting at €8.20
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The Discipline of Business Experimentation
Thomke, Stefan; Manzi, JimArticle HBS-R1412D-EThe data you already have can't tell you how customers will react to innovations. To discover if a truly novel concept will succeed, you must subject it to a rigorous experiment. In most companies, tests do not adhere to scientific and statistical principles. As a result, managers often end up interpreting statistical noise as causation--and making bad decisions. To conduct experiments that are worth the expense and effort, companies need to ask ...Starting at €8.20
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R&D Comes to Services: Bank of America's Pathbreaking Experiments (Spanish version)
Thomke, StefanArticle HBS-R0304EAt the heart of business today lies a dilemma: Our economy is increasingly dependent on services, yet our innovation processes remain oriented toward products. In this article, Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke points out the challenges of applying the discipline of formal R&D processes to services. Most service companies have not established rigorous, ongoing R&D processes, Thomke says. But the author provides an in-depth look at a...Starting at €8.20
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Leadership Is a Conversation
Groysberg, Boris; Slind, MichaelArticle HBS-R1206D-EGlobalization and new technologies have sharply reduced the efficacy of command-and-control management and its accompanying forms of corporate communication. In the course of a recent research project, the authors concluded that by talking with employees, rather than simply issuing orders, leaders can promote operational flexibility, employee engagement, and tight strategic alignment. Groysberg and Slind have identified four elements of organizat...Starting at €8.20
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Productive Innovation
Thomke, Stefan; Bojinov, Iavor; Saint-Jacques, Guillaume; Tingley, Martin; King, Jeremy; McGinn, DanielArticle HBS-R2002B-EEntrepreneurshipfocusing on the average, instead of looking at how a change impacts different customer segments; forgetting that customers are connected and that their interactions can affect test outcomes; and running tests for too short a time frame. Firms can avoid these pitfalls, however, by applying techniques that have worked at LinkedIn and Netflix. In "The Power of These Techniques Is Only Getting Stronger," HBR interviews Jeremy King, who has spent thr...Starting at €8.20
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Leadership Is a Conversation (Spanish version)
Groysberg, Boris; Slind, MichaelArticle HBS-R1206DStrategyintimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. Intimacy shifts the focus from a top-down distribution of information to a bottom-up exchange of ideas. Organizational conversation is less corporate in tone and more casual. And it's less about issuing and taking orders than about asking and answering questions. Interactivity entails shunning the simplicity of monologue and embracing the unpredictable vitality of dialogue. Traditional one-...Starting at €8.20
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The Surprising Power of Online Experiments
Kohavi, Ron; Thomke, StefanArticle HBS-R1705E-EService and Operations ManagementIn the fast-moving digital world, even experts have a hard time assessing new ideas. Case in point: At Bing a small headline change an employee proposed was deemed a low priority and shelved for months until one engineer decided to do a quick online controlled experiment--an A/B test--to try it out. The test showed that the change increased revenue by an astonishing 12%. It ended up being the best revenue-generating idea Bing ever had, worth $100...Starting at €8.20