Office Productivity in Computerized Settings: The Role of Machine Statistics, Performance Feedback and Job Experience

This paper develops and tests a model of the determinants of productivity in twenty computerized offices of the Internal Revenue Service. The results suggest first, that management's focus on machine monitoring statistics is misguided; second, that performance feedback has a significant effect on productivity; and third, that job experience plays a central role in productivity even in entry-level positions

What Factors Drive Analyst Forecasts?

A firm's competitive environment, its strategic choices, and its internal capabilities are considered important determinants of its future performance. Yet there is little evidence on whether analysts' forecasts of firm performance actually reflect any of these factors and which are considered most important. We use survey data from 967 analysts ranking 837 companies to judge how their forecasts are related to evaluations of firms' industry competitiveness, strategic choices, and internal capabilities. Forecasts are generally associated with many of the factors that money managers rate as important in their assessments of analyst contributions, including industry growth and competitiveness, low-price strategy, strategy execution, top management quality, innovation, and performance-driven culture. We also find wide variation across variables for ratings consistency among analysts covering the same firm. On average, consistency is higher for sell-side than buy-side analysts, consistent with sell-side analysts facing greater incentives to herd

The Risky Business of Hiring Stars

An in-depth study of 1,052 star stock analysts who worked for 78 investment banks in the United States from 1988 to 1996 finds that when a company hires a star, the star’s performance plunges, there is a sharp decline in the functioning of the group or team she works with, and the company’s market value falls. Moreover, stars don’t stay with the organizations for long. For all those reasons, we conclude that companies cannot gain a competitive advantage by hiring stars from outside the business. Instead, they should focus on growing talent within the organization and retain the stars they develop

Measuring personal networks and their relationship with scientific production

The analysis of social networks has remained a crucial and yet understudied aspect of the efforts to measure Triple Helix linkages. The Triple Helix model aims to explain, among other aspects of knowledge-based societies, ¿the current research system in its social context. This paper develops a novel approach to study the research system from the perspective of the individual, through the analysis of the relationships among researchers, and between them and other social actors. We develop a new set of techniques and show how they can be applied to the study of a specific case (a group of academics within a university department). We analyse their informal social networks and show how a relationship exists between the characteristics of an individual¿s network of social links and his or her research output

Creating new business ventures : network organization in market and corporate contexts

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

Harvard Business Review on Turnarounds

vii. 180 hal.;21 c