Management
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Overconfident CEOs who overestimate their ability to generate value within their company systematically make distorted decisions about when, how, and how much to invest in new projects according to research.
Ulrike Malmendier, assistant professor of finance at...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—It's a problem that plagues nearly all companies that sell goods: the dual questions of how many items to produce, and how much to charge for them. In a world where customer demand is unpredictable and buying behavior can be tweaked in strange ways - even in...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Offering financial incentives to motivate employees and executives has been a common management practice for decades. Car salesmen get higher commissions for selling more automobiles. Teachers get bonuses when their students score higher on standardized tests...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Start-up firms should pay as much attention to creating a pattern for managing their employees as they do to developing the vision for their product. A decade-long study of Silicon Valley (California) technology startups finds that companies were three times...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Venture capitalists and other investors routinely gamble on which start-up companies warrant their investment. Complex models and detailed algorithms can be used to evaluate an organization's financial position, market potential, and level of quantifiable risk...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Getting all the senior leaders on board in advance is the most effective way to be successful in introducing change to an organization, according to research co-authored by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Charles O'Reilly.
The research found that...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Some widely practiced management techniques can actually hamper company efforts to innovate and encourage creativity. Practices such as emphasizing individual accountability, encouraging internal competition, practicing goal setting, and emphasizing budgets may...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Good managers know that the proverbial "yes man" isn't much of an asset. But when it comes time to build work teams, many business managers, either by design or through inattention, staff them with people who are prone to think alike. In effect, they've built "...
The Story of Change in the Life Cycle of the American Beer Industry
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—TWENTY YEARS AGO, the number of brewing firms in the United States was only around 40. It looked like an open-and-shut case of industry concentration. Management guru Michael Porter, in his...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—When I upgraded my car from a Geo Prizm to a Toyota Corolla, I felt that I had upgraded my life. Here I was in a higher-quality vehicle that was more attractive—and no doubt safer. Wasn't I surprised, then, to find out that the Corolla was exactly the same car...