Cold Call
232 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 179 ratingsCold Call distills Harvard Business School's legendary case studies into podcast form. Hosted by Brian Kenny, the podcast airs every two weeks and features Harvard Business School faculty discussing cases they've written and the lessons they impart.
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Episodes
Amazon in Seattle: The Role of Business in Causing and Solving a Housing Crisis
April 23, 2024 13:22 - 24 minutes - 22.5 MBIn 2020, Amazon built a shelter for women and families experiencing houselessness on its campus in Seattle, Washington. The shelter was operated in partnership with a nonprofit organization known as Mary’s Place and was designed to address what had become an urgent problem for Seattle and many other wealthy American cities, where communities were being displaced by a lack of affordable housing. Amazon’s partnership with Mary’s Place was an experiment in addressing this problem at its core, us...
Sustaining a Legacy of Giving in Turkey
April 09, 2024 13:22 - 28 minutes - 26.3 MBÖzyeğin Social Investments was founded by Hüsnü Özyeğin, one of Turkey's most successful entrepreneurs, with a focus on education, health, gender equality, rural development, and disaster relief in Turkey. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wing and Murat Özyeğin (MBA 2003) discuss how the company is a model for making a significant impact across multiple sectors of society through giving and how that legacy can be sustained in the future.
How One Leader Overcame Career-Ending Adversity
March 26, 2024 13:22 - 25 minutes - 23.9 MBIn the spring of 2021, Raymond Jefferson (MBA 2000) applied for a job in President Joseph Biden’s administration. Ten years earlier, false allegations had been used to force him to resign from his prior U.S. government position as assistant secretary of labor for veterans’ employment and training in the U.S. Department of Labor. Jefferson filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government to clear his name and used his entire life savings to pursue the case for eight years. Why, after such a...
How to Bring Good Ideas to Life: The Paul English Story
March 12, 2024 13:22 - 28 minutes - 25.9 MBHarvard Business School professor Frances Frei and Paul English, one of the most imaginative and successful innovators of his generation, discuss how to tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one, the importance of iteration, and taking a systematic (but fast) approach to developing new ideas.
How Could Harvard Decarbonize Its Supply Chain?
February 27, 2024 13:17 - 26 minutes - 24.1 MBHarvard University aims to be fossil-fuel neutral by 2026 and totally free of fossil fuels by 2050. As part of this goal, the university is trying to decarbonize its supply chain and considers replacing cement with a low-carbon substitute called Pozzotive®, made with post-consumer recycled glass. Harvard Business School professor emeritus Robert Kaplan and assistant professor Shirley Lu discuss the flow of emissions along the supply chain of Harvard University’s construction projects, the dif...
Apple’s Dilemma: Balancing Privacy and Safety Responsibilities
February 13, 2024 13:17 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBIn 2015, Apple debuted the iPhone 6S, which employed a default encryption system preventing both Apple and government authorities from accessing data stored on the device. But since then, global governments have questioned whether Apple’s desire to protect customer privacy interferes with public health and safety. Harvard Business School senior lecturer Henry McGee and professor Nien-hê Hsieh discuss how Apple CEO Tim Cook manages this tension.
Can Second-Generation Ethanol Production Help Decarbonize the World?
January 30, 2024 13:22 - 26 minutes - 24.9 MBEthanol had already transformed Brazil, where flex-fuel vehicles dominated the streets. Raízen, a bioenergy company headquartered in São Paulo, sought to prove that second-generation ethanol (E2G) could do the same for the world – especially in hard to decarbonize sectors, such as aviation and shipping. E2G is made from a byproduct of sugarcane that doesn’t compete with food production, Paula Kovarsky, Raízen’s chief strategy and sustainability officer, was confident the company could become ...
How SolarWinds Responded to the 2020 SUNBURST Cyberattack
January 16, 2024 13:22 - 28 minutes - 26.7 MBIn December of 2020, SolarWinds learned that they had fallen victim to a widespread malware supply chain attack. This attack granted hackers access to thousands of it customers’ data, including military and government agencies across the globe. General Counsel Jason Bliss needed to orchestrate the company’s response without knowing how many of its 300,000 customers had been affected, or how severely. What’s more, the existing CEO was scheduled to step down and incoming CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishn...
Should Businesses Take a Stand on Societal Issues?
January 02, 2024 13:22 - 23 minutes - 21.6 MBShould businesses take a stand for or against particular societal issues? And how should leaders determine when and how to engage on these sensitive matters? Harvard Business School senior lecturer Hubert Joly, who led the electronics retailer Best Buy for almost a decade, discusses examples of corporate leaders who had to determine whether and how to engage with humanitarian crises, geopolitical conflict, racial justice, climate change, and more in the case, “Deciding When to Engage on Soci...
Can Sustainability Drive Innovation at Ferrari?
December 12, 2023 13:22 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBWhen Ferrari, the Italian luxury sports car manufacturer, committed to achieving carbon neutrality and to electrifying a large part of its car fleet, investors and employees applauded the new strategy. But among the company’s suppliers, the reaction was mixed. Many were nervous about how this shift would affect their bottom lines. Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun and Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna discuss how Ferrari collaborated with suppliers to work toward achieving the compa...
What Founders Get Wrong about Sales and Marketing
December 05, 2023 13:22 - 19 minutes - 18.4 MBWhich sales candidate is a startup’s ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align sales with customer success? Harvard Business School senior lecturer Mark Roberge discusses how early-stage founders, sales leaders, and marketing executives can address these challenges as they grow their ventures in the case, “Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing Vignettes.”
Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive
November 28, 2023 13:22 - 19 minutes - 18.2 MBIn 2017, Tommy Hilfiger launched its adaptive fashion line to provide fashion apparel that aims to make dressing easier. By 2020, it was still a relatively unknown line in the U.S. and the Tommy Hilfiger team was continuing to learn more about how to serve these new customers. Should the team make adaptive clothing available beyond the U.S., or is a global expansion premature?
Building a More Equitable Culture at Delta Air Lines
November 21, 2023 13:22 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBIn December 2020, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian and his leadership team were reviewing the decision to join the OneTen coalition, where he and 36 other CEOs committed to recruiting, hiring, training, and advancing one million Black Americans over the next ten years into family-sustaining jobs. But, how do you ensure everyone has equal access to opportunity within an organization?
How Should Meta Be Governed for the Good of Society?
November 07, 2023 13:22 - 24 minutes - 23 MBJulie Owono is executive director of Internet Sans Frontières and a member of the Oversight Board, an outside entity with the authority to make binding decisions on tricky moderation questions for Meta’s companies, including Facebook and Instagram. Harvard Business School visiting professor Jesse Shapiro and Owono break down how the Board governs Meta’s social and political power, and discuss the Board’s impact as an alternative to government regulation.
How the United States Air Force Accelerated AI Adoption
October 24, 2023 13:22 - 27 minutes - 25.1 MBIn August 2022, the Pentagon tasked Victor Lopez, then a captain in the U.S. Air Force, with launching a new Air Force innovation unit that leveraged commercial developers and military talent to acquire advanced technologies. It’s often believed that only small start-up organizations can innovate, but a lot of innovation happens in big organizations, including government. Harvard Business School assistant professor Maria Roche is joined by Major Lopez to discuss the challenges of digital tran...
Scaling Two Businesses Against the Odds: Wendy Estrella’s Founder Journey
October 10, 2023 13:22 - 25 minutes - 23.2 MBEntrepreneur Wendy Estrella is attempting to simultaneously scale her law practice, as well as her property management and development company. What strategy will benefit both businesses, and is there a downside to scaling them together, rather than focusing on each one separately?
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger: Competition Vs. Cooperation
September 26, 2023 13:33 - 25 minutes - 23.7 MBOn June 9, 2022, the first LIV Golf event teed off outside of London. The new tour offered players larger prizes, more flexibility, and ambitions to attract new fans to the sport. Immediately following the official start of that tournament, the PGA Tour announced that all 17 PGA Tour players participating in the LIV Golf event were suspended and ineligible to compete in PGA Tour events. Eventually, LIV Golf filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing the PGA Tour of anticompetitive practices, and the...
Can Remote Surgeries Digitally Transform Operating Rooms?
September 12, 2023 13:22 - 19 minutes - 17.6 MBLaunched in 2016, Proximie was a platform that enabled clinicians, proctors, and medical device company personnel to be virtually present in operating rooms, where they would use mixed reality and digital audio and visual tools to communicate with, mentor, assist, and observe those performing medical procedures. The goal was to improve patient outcomes. The company had grown quickly, and was now entering strategic partnerships to broaden its reach. Founder and CEO Nadine Hachach-Haram aspired...
As Social Networks Get More Competitive, Which Ones Will Survive?
August 29, 2023 13:22 - 32 minutes - 30.8 MBIn early 2023, the entertainment app TikTok reached close to one billion users globally, placing it fourth behind the leading social networks: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Can all four of these networks continue to attract audiences and creators -- or will growing social media competition eliminate one or more of these big players?
Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness
August 15, 2023 13:22 - 28 minutes - 26.7 MBIn 2020, just a few months after the US began to shut down in order to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus, Serhant had time to reflect on his career as a real estate broker in New York City. He considered whether he should stay at his current real estate brokerage or launch his own brokerage during a pandemic. Each option had very different implications for his time and flexibility.
Can Business Transform Primary Health Care Across Africa?
August 01, 2023 13:22 - 31 minutes - 29.8 MBmPharma, headquartered in Ghana, is trying to create the largest pan-African health care company. Their mission is to provide primary care and a reliable and fairly priced supply of drugs in the nine African countries where they operate. Co-founder and CEO Greg Rockson needs to decide which component of strategy to prioritize in the next three years. His options include launching a telemedicine program, expanding his pharmacies across the continent, and creating a new payment program to cover...
Diversity and Inclusion at Mars Petcare: Translating Awareness into Action
July 18, 2023 13:22 - 34 minutes - 32.3 MBIn 2020, the Mars Petcare leadership team found themselves facing critically important inclusion and diversity issues. Unprecedented protests for racial justice in the U.S. and across the globe generated demand for substantive change, and Mars Petcare's 100,000 employees across six continents were ready for visible signs of progress. How should Mars’ leadership build on their existing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and effectively capitalize on the new energy for change?
How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work
July 04, 2023 13:22 - 29 minutes - 27.7 MBLaunched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work initiative aimed to accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization and prepare its workforce for a digitalized and highly automated era. But despite its success over the last three years, the program still faces significant challenges in its implementation. How should Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, best prepare and upscale its workforce for the future? And is it even possible to lead a systematic, agile wo...
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover: Lessons in Strategic Change
June 20, 2023 13:22 - 31 minutes - 29.5 MBIn late October 2022, Elon Musk officially took Twitter private and became the company’s majority shareholder. He needed to take decisive steps to succeed against the major opposition to his leadership from both inside and outside the company. What short-term actions should Musk take to stabilize the situation, and how should he approach long-term strategy to turn around Twitter?
The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism
June 06, 2023 13:22 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBIn 2020, AmerisourceBergen Corporation agreed to settle thousands of lawsuits filed nationwide against the company for its opioid distribution practices, which critics alleged had contributed to the opioid crisis. AmerisourceBergen’s legal and financial troubles were accompanied by shareholder demands aimed at holding the company’s leadership accountable for their role in the addiction crisis. Should the board reduce the executives’ pay, or would that ignore the larger issue of a business’s r...
The Entrepreneurial Journey of China’s First Private Mental Health Hospital
May 23, 2023 13:15 - 26 minutes - 25.2 MBThe city of Wenzhou in southeastern China is home to the country’s largest privately owned mental health hospital group, the Wenzhou Kangning Hospital Co, Ltd. It’s an example of the extraordinary entrepreneurship happening in China’s healthcare space. But after its successful initial public offering (IPO), how will the hospital grow in the future?
Can Robin Williams’ Son Help Other Families Heal Addiction and Depression?
May 09, 2023 13:20 - 21 minutes - 20.8 MBZak Pym Williams, son of comedian and actor Robin Williams, had seen how mental health challenges, such as addiction and depression, had affected past generations of his family. He began considering proactive strategies that could help his family’s mental health, and he wanted to share that knowledge with other families. But how can Pym Williams help people actually embrace those mental health strategies and services?
Sweden’s Northvolt Electric Battery Maker: A Startup with a Mission
April 28, 2023 13:20 - 30 minutes - 29.5 MBIn Stockholm, Sweden an upstart battery maker, Northvolt, is trying to recreate the value chain for European car manufacturers making the switch to EVs. With two founders from Tesla and two experienced financiers at the helm, the company seems bound for success. But can they partner with government, scale fast enough, and truly be part of the climate solution?
Equity Bank CEO James Mwangi: Transforming Lives with Access to Credit
April 27, 2023 13:20 - 22 minutes - 22.3 MBJames Mwangi, CEO of Equity Bank, has transformed lives and livelihoods throughout East and Central Africa by giving impoverished people access to banking accounts and micro loans. He’s been so successful that in 2020 Forbes coined the term “the Mwangi Model.” But can we really have both purpose and profit in a firm?
How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter
April 26, 2023 13:20 - 20 minutes - 20.2 MBWhen serial entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM) received her seven-year-old daughter’s diagnosis of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH), she created United Therapeutics and developed a drug to save her life. When her daughter later needed a lung transplant, Rothblatt decided to take what she saw as the logical next step: manufacturing organs for transplantation. Rothblatt’s entrepreneurial career exemplifies a larger debate around the role of the firm in creating solutions...
Using Design Thinking to Invent a Low-Cost Prosthesis for Land Mine Victims
April 25, 2023 13:20 - 24 minutes - 23.5 MBBhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS) is an Indian nonprofit famous for creating low-cost prosthetics, like the Jaipur Foot and the Stanford-Jaipur Knee. Known for its patient-centric culture and its focus on innovation, BMVSS has assisted more than one million people, including many land mine survivors. How can founder D.R. Mehta devise a strategy that will ensure the financial sustainability of BMVSS while sustaining its human impact well into the future?
Our All-Time Favorite Episodes of Cold Call
April 24, 2023 13:20 - 26 minutes - 24.6 MBCold Call is celebrating 200 episodes with a special five-part series during the week of April 24, 2023. Each day that week, Cold Call will release a new episode. To kick off the week-long celebration, the show’s producers have each picked their three favorite episodes from the archives for listeners to revisit.
A Rose by Any Other Name: Supply Chains and Carbon Emissions in the Flower Industry
April 11, 2023 13:00 - 23 minutes - 22.3 MBHeadquartered in Kitengela, Kenya, Sian Flowers exports roses to Europe. Because cut flowers have a limited shelf life and consumers want them to retain their appearance for as long as possible, Sian and its distributors used international air cargo to transport them to Amsterdam, where they were sold at auction and trucked to markets across Europe. But when the Covid-19 pandemic caused huge increases in shipping costs, Sian launched experiments to ship roses by ocean using refrigerated conta...
BMW’s Decarbonization Strategy: Sustainable for the Environment and the Bottom Line
March 28, 2023 13:00 - 22 minutes - 21.8 MBIn mid-2022, many automakers were announcing deadlines by which they would stop selling ICE vehicles altogether, buoyed by investment analysts and favorable press. While this would reduce tail-pipe emissions, it ignored the fact that the production of EVs—and especially their batteries—increases emissions in the supply chain. BMW decided to focus on lifecycle emissions and pursued a flexible powertrain strategy by offering vehicles with several options: gasoline and diesel-fueled ICE, plug-in...
Can AI and Machine Learning Help Park Rangers Prevent Poaching?
March 14, 2023 13:00 - 21 minutes - 20.7 MBThe Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) was created by a coalition of conservation organizations to take historical data and create geospatial mapping tools that enable more efficient deployment of park rangers to prevent poaching. SMART had demonstrated significant improvements in patrol coverage, with some observed reductions in poaching. Then a new analytic tool, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS), was created to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine lea...
Muhammad Ali: A Case Study in Purpose-Driven Decision Making
February 28, 2023 13:00 - 25 minutes - 25 MBMuhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, rose from a poor family in segregated Louisville, Kentucky to international fame, winning three heavyweight boxing titles and becoming a civil rights leader and role model for millions of people around the world. How did he do it? Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons discusses how Ali made decisions throughout his life and career to leave a lasting impact on the world.
Does It Pay to Be a Whistleblower?
February 14, 2023 13:00 - 27 minutes - 27 MBIn 2013, soon after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had started a massive whistleblowing program with the potential for large monetary rewards, two employees of a U.S. bank’s asset management business debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Should they escalate the issue internally or report their findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission? Harvard Business School ...
Addressing Racial Discrimination on Airbnb
January 31, 2023 13:00 - 20 minutes - 20.4 MBFor years, Airbnb gave hosts discretion to accept or reject a guest after seeing little more than a name and a picture, believing that eliminating anonymity was the best way for the company to build trust. But after research provided evidence that Black hosts received less in rent than hosts of other races and showed signs of discrimination against guests with African American sounding names, the company had to decide what changes to make. Should they change the design of the platform to redu...
Nestlé’s KitKat Diplomacy: Neutrality vs. Shared Value
January 17, 2023 13:00 - 23 minutes - 22.4 MBIn February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and multinational companies began pulling out of Russia, in response. At Switzerland-based Nestlé, chief executive Mark Schneider had a difficult decision to make. Nestlé had a long tradition of neutrality that enabled it to operate in countries regardless of their political systems and human rights policies. But more recently the company had embraced Michael Porter’s “shared value” paradigm, which argues that companies have a responsibility to improv...
Wordle: Can a Pandemic Phenomenon Sustain in the Long Term?
January 03, 2023 13:00 - 22 minutes - 20.7 MBWordle went from a personal game, created by a developer for his girlfriend, to a global phenomenon with two million users in just a few months. Then The New York Times made an unexpected bid to acquire it. But will Wordle outlast other pandemic pastimes?
Metaverse Seoul: How One City Used Citizen Input to Pilot a Government-Run Metaverse
December 13, 2022 13:00 - 24 minutes - 23.6 MBIn May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government in Seoul, South Korea, launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a virtual version of Seoul’s mayor’s office. As they worked towards building a broad, immersive, online government platform, they hoped to gain insights from citizens about everything from popular local tourist sites that could be experienced virtually to government services that could be delivered in the metaverse. But to do that, the team had to figure out how to solicit ideas from c...
How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?
November 29, 2022 13:00 - 18 minutes - 18.6 MBIn January 2022, Microsoft announced its acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. The deal would make Microsoft the world’s third largest video game company, but it also exposes the company to several risks. First, the all-cash deal would require Microsoft to use a large portion of its cash reserves. Second, the acquisition was announced as Activision Blizzard faced gender pay disparity and sexual harassment allegations. That opened Microsoft up to potenti...
Planning the Future for Harlem’s Beloved Sylvia’s Restaurant
November 15, 2022 13:00 - 27 minutes - 26.4 MBSylvia’s Restaurant, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in August 2022, is a testament to the values instilled by the founder and matriarch, Sylvia Woods. She cultivated a strong community around her soul food restaurant in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood that has continued to thrive, even after her passing a decade ago. Amid business expansions and succession planning, the legacy of Sylvia Woods continues to live on. But as Sylvia’s grandson takes over the business, a new challenge fa...
Marie Curie: A Case Study in Breaking Barriers
November 01, 2022 13:00 - 23 minutes - 23 MBMarie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska from a poor family in Poland, rose to the pinnacle of scientific fame in the early years of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Prize twice in the fields of physics and chemistry. At the time, women were simply not accepted in scientific fields. So Curie had to overcome enormous obstacles in order to earn a doctorate at the Sorbonne and perform her pathbreaking research on radioactive materials. How did she plan her time and navigate her life choices to...
Chewy.com’s Make-or-Break Logistics Dilemma
October 18, 2022 13:00 - 29 minutes - 28.1 MBIn late 2013, Ryan Cohen, cofounder and then-CEO of online pet products retailer Chewy.com, was facing a decision that could determine his company’s future. Cohen was convinced that achieving scale would be essential to making the business work and he worried that the company’s third-party logistics provider (3PL) may not be able to scale with Chewy.com’s projected growth or maintain the company’s performance standards for service quality and fulfillment. But neither he nor his cofounders had...
Corporate Governance and Growth Strategy at Capital SAFI
October 04, 2022 13:00 - 28 minutes - 27.3 MBAsset management firm Capital SAFI wanted to attract new strategic investors and expand to other countries beyond Bolivia. Founder, chairman and CEO Jorge Quintanilla Nielsen knew that having the right corporate governance in place was critical to achieve this goal. The firm’s board had evolved over time, but would new investors be impressed by those measures or were additional improvements needed?
Larry Fink at BlackRock: Linking Purpose to Profit
September 20, 2022 13:00 - 30 minutes - 28.9 MBIn 2014, Larry Fink started writing letters to the leaders of some of the largest publicly listed companies, urging them to consider the importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Fink is the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, one of the largest asset management houses in the world. The firm’s success was rooted in its cost-effective, passive investment products that rely on tracking indices and funds. But Fink wanted his firm to engage with the companies in which they inve...
Reinventing an Iconic Independent Bookstore
September 06, 2022 13:00 - 28 minutes - 26.1 MBIn 2020, Kwame Spearman made the career-shifting decision to leave a New York City-based consulting job to return to his hometown of Denver, Colorado, and take over an iconic independent bookstore, The Tattered Cover. Spearman saw an opportunity to reinvent the local business to build a sense of community after the pandemic. But he also had to find a way to meet the big challenges facing independent booksellers amid technological change and shifting business models.
Management Lessons from the Sinking of the SS El Faro
August 23, 2022 13:00 - 36 minutes - 34 MBCaptain Michael Davidson, of the container ship SS El Faro, was determined to make his planned shipping trip on time—but a hurricane was approaching his intended path. To succeed, Davidson and his fellow officers had to plot a course to avoid the storm in the face of conflicting weather reports from multiple sources and differing opinions among the officers about what to do. Over the 36-hour voyage, tensions rose as the ship got closer and closer to the storm. When the ship ultimately sunk o...
A Lesson from Google: Can AI Bias be Monitored Internally?
August 09, 2022 13:00 - 25 minutes - 23.8 MBDr. Timnit Gebru was the co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI research team –until she raised concerns about bias in the company’s large language models and was forced out in 2020. Her departure sent shockwaves through the AI and tech community ad raised fundamental questions about how companies safeguard against bias in their own AI. Should in-house ethics research continue to be led by researchers who best understand the technology, or must ethics and bias be monitored by more objective researche...