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Technology is advancing at a rapid rate, changing various aspects of our everyday lives. Businesses and governments are trying to adapt to this change by embracing positive aspects, while remaining attentive to negative aspects. This note focuses on technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data, considering the ethical issues that these technologies create within our society and also how these ethical issues are being addressed.

Construction of buildings and infrastructure is one of the largest industries in the world in terms of volume. It is also one of the most physically risky, financially uncertain, and politically impacted. The industry is highly fragmented since there are few economies of scale, substantial location advantages, and almost all of the work is site built from unique plans. In order to achieve long term above average returns on effort and on invested capital, it's crucial that firms plan with intent with respect to markets and clients served, services provided, roles played in the industry value added system, and the matching of skills and assets to opportunities. The longest lived firms also determine which markets, products, customer types, and roles to avoid even when there might be attractive short term opportunistic contracts to be pursued. This note covers both the idiosyncratic nature of this industry that makes many classic strategic planning tools unhelpful, and also details the specific steps strategists should follow to gain the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of competition in this industry.

Many people early in their careers find self-advocacy awkward or may even perceive it as impossible. They don't know what is reasonable for them to request or propose, they are unsure how to go about it, who their negotiating counterparts should be, or what they care about. Often for good reason, they hold back out of fear that speaking up will undermine important relationships. However, there are meaningful downsides to letting opportunities to self-advocate pass, even if only to learn more about what is possible. Negotiation attempts can backfire, but there are ways to prepare strategically to reduce that risk. This note was crafted to help people in early career or junior positions to analyze potential negotiation opportunities and to prepare for those opportunities in ways that make a clear case that what they are proposing makes good sense for others, as well as for themselves.

The Jobs to Be Done methodology is both a theory and a practical approach for understanding customer behavior and why people make the choices they make. Many practitioners, whether they work for startups or incumbent businesses, find Jobs to Be Done useful because it provides an uncommon solution to a common problem - understanding your customers as you start a new enterprise or losing touch with customers as your business grows. The theory of Jobs to Be Done is taught at Harvard Business School in the course "Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise ("BSSE," in HBS shorthand), which was created by the late Professor Clayton Christensen. It is practiced by many alumni of the course, as well as by numerous industry practitioners. Beyond them, there is a wider circle of professionals who are familiar with the theory or curious about it, and who are interested in converting that curiosity into practice. This multimedia toolbox walks through all of the stages of understanding and implementing Jobs to Be Done, including the foundational theory and its benefits to businesses; how to recruit customers, interview them, and analyze results; and feed that analysis into product development and marketing. The toolbox is a collection of original content as well as existing resources aggregated from across the web. To illustrate the theory the authors conducted a Jobs to Be Done research project to understand why our students "hire" Harvard Business School.

This note describes a collection of 26 teaching case studies and 5 expository notes on the history of financial crises from 1720 to 2008. The note also summarizes a semester-length course design based on these materials. The purpose of this collection is to advance pedagogy and research in the field of financial crises.

This note, written to accompany "The NBA, China, and Social Media: What Are the Rules of the Game?" (UVA-E-0459) but useful in tandem with other cases, charts the history of freedom of speech in the United States. The US Constitution did not originally include the Bill of Rights (which contains the 1st through 10th Amendments), but after more than 200 years of legal and philosophical shifts, expression rights receive legal protection on a tiered system, with political speech enjoying the least abridgment, commercial and sexually explicit expression subject to some government censorship, and obscenity and fighting words enjoying no protection. This note focuses on political speech, summed up in the 1st Amendment: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." This protection had its challenges over the years, with the most notable blow being the 1798 Sedition Act, which criminalized any questioning of the authority or laws of the US President or Congress. (Congress eventually allowed this act to expire), as well as some 20th century cases (for example, Schenck v. United States, 1919). The note touches on John Stuart Mill's 1859 On Liberty, which made philosophical arguments for the value of free expression that would come to undergird liberal legal interpretations of the 1st Amendment some hundred years later, as well as the repeated infringements of constitutional rights, including free expression during the US Civil War, the Espionage Act of 1917, and the Sedition Act of 1918, and other attempts to suppress free speech. Also referenced is theorist Alexander Meiklejohn, who, in 1949, outlined a highly influential philosophy on the limits of free expression.

A government's impact on the economy is not limited to taxes, spending, and monetary policy. As any manager can attest, regulations dramatically impact the way managers think about production. An effective regulatory environment will allow both new and existing firms to grow and innovate. Burdensome regulations can lower economic productivity and employment, and are associated with higher levels of informal economic activity and employment. This technical note addresses the annual Doing Business report published by the World Bank, which aims to capture the differences in regulations between countries. Doing Business summarizes these finding in an absolute score and a relative ranking. The doing business score measures how a given country's regulatory environment compares to the global best practice. Scores can range between 0 to 100, with 100 corresponding to the best performance. Those scores are then sorted to give the final ease of doing business ranking, in which countries are ranked from 1 (best score) to 190 (worst).

Managing intellectual property (IP) in information technology-digital technologies like software or computing hardware-requires a distinct strategic approach. This note summarizes the high-level strategic considerations for managers of information technology businesses where IP may be relevant and provides selected examples of how strategy may be implemented.

This technical note introduces students to the concept of random variables, and from there the normal and binomial distributions. After a brief introduction to random variables, the note describes the standard properties of the normal distribution: a single peak, and a symmetric, bell-shaped curve. Students observe the 68-95-99.7 rule, and see how the distribution changes with different values of the mean and standard deviation parameters. Finally, the note demonstrates how probability calculations based on the normal distribution can be done in the R programming language, and how random data can be simulated from a normal curve in R. The note then describes the standard properties of the binomial distribution, and similarly shows how binomial calculations can be performed in R.

This notes provides information about the eGrocery industry and how traditional CPG companies handle this channel and potential data. It is recommended to use together with a series of exercises entitled: "E-Commerce Analytics for CPG Firms (A), (B), and (C)."

In 2019, the global airline industry generated revenues of over US$880 billion. One year later, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, demand had fallen to half of its previous level and airlines faced tough challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic was a new and severe crisis. The responses of airlines and their alliances depended on the fundamental economics and structure of the industry. To devise new strategies for their futures, global airlines had to consider the economics and market structure of their industry. Would the fundamental economics of the airline industry be forever affected? Would the industry return to a “new normal” at some point?

In 2019, the global airline industry generated revenues of over US$880 billion. One year later, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, demand had fallen to half of its previous level and airlines faced tough challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic was a new and severe crisis. The responses of airlines and their alliances depended on the fundamental economics and structure of the industry. To devise new strategies for their futures, global airlines had to consider the economics and market structure of their industry. Would the fundamental economics of the airline industry be forever affected? Would the industry return to a "new normal" at some point?

Despite the important role that assumptions about intentions play in our judgments of others' actions and how we respond to these actions, most of us haven't thought much about the accuracy of the inferences we make, the ways our decisions about "what he meant to do" or "why she did that" might be unintentionally biased, or the potential negative effects that result when inferences about intentions affect how we judge a behavior. Nor have we thought about steps we might take to question or correct our initial inferences, or whether we should aim to set aside inferences altogether in judging and determining the consequences of a behavior. The goal of this note is to help you think about exactly these things.

This note describes how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), founded in 1949, has attempted to create and maintain an official narrative of the country and regime that tilts toward the favorable and minimizes any negative. A key component of the historical narrative has been China's so-called Century of Humiliation, in which China suffered exploitation at the hands of various other nations. Mistreatment by foreigners resulted in China's being disadvantaged in unequal treaties, being impoverished by outrageous indemnity payments, and suffering territorial losses (e.g., Hong Kong and Macau) and violations of its sovereignty (e.g., foreign concessions). In announcing the founding of the PRC in 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong said, ""Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up."" Reference to the Century of Humiliation and China's refusal to be controlled any longer was meant to inspire and motivate national pride in the Chinese people. In recent years, the influence of the national humiliation narrative has become increasingly apparent in China's international actions. The CCP has aggressively responded to perceived offenses by foreign entities, be they governments or companies, with public criticism and mobilization of Chinese netizens. This note was written to accompany ""The NBA, China, and Social Media: What Are the Rules of the Game?"" (UVA-E-0459), which outlines the Chinese reaction to 2019 social media posts sympathetic to protestors in Hong Kong. It gives background on the national humiliation narrative and its ongoing influence on China's relationship with its own people and with other nations.

Using the fictional situation of two brothers facing the challenge of managing a commodity business in central Africa, this note explores different metrics for risk and related considerations for investors. The note considers measures of volatility, including the difference between systematic risk and idiosyncratic risk, and how diversification reduces idiosyncratic risk. The note uses these concepts to motivate the foundations of portfolio risk assessment by rational investors and the theory of the capital asset pricing model.

This tech note is designed to introduce general management students to the body of work associated with agile and its current state of practice. While anchored in a simple 68-word manifesto, agile now offers guidance on applied practice across ideation, design, development, and deployment of working products. This note describes how teams use agile to focus their work and apply current practice across disciplines like design thinking, Lean Startup, and DevOps.

This note gives managers a concrete perspective on what 'a strategy' really is, what makes a decision 'strategic,' and what 'strategic thinking' means. It also gives them practical frameworks to assess whether some set of decisions is really a strategy and how to assess a strategy's effectiveness. It finally also gives managers a starting point for developing strategy in the form of the '4+3 Elements.' The note builds on the theory of 'strategy as core guidance.' (This is an in-depth rewrite of "Strategy and Strategic Decisions" HBS 712-500.)