The FINANCIAL — Harvard Business Review has announced the winners of the 2014 HBR McKinsey Awards, which commend outstanding articles published each year in the magazine.
This year’s finalists include three Harvard Business School faculty members:
Assistant Professor Ethan Bernstein of the School’s Organizational Behavior Unit for his article “The Transparency Trap (Oct. 2014 issue), where he argues that too much openness can make employees feel exposed. To increase creativity and efficiency, he writes, companies need to create zones of privacy.
Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor in the Strategy Unit, for “Contextual Intelligence” (Sept. 2014), who says that despite thirty years of study and experimentation, we are only beginning to understand what managerial knowledge travels well across borders and what is specific to a market or culture.
Stefan Thomke, the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit, for “The Discipline of Business Experimentation” (coauthored with Jim Manzi, chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, in the Dec. 2014 issue), which provides a conceptual—and practical—guide to running rigorous market tests before launching new products.
First place went to William Lazonick, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, for “Profits without Prosperity” (Sept. 2014), which suggests that executives are using huge stock buybacks to manipulate share prices and boost their own pay—at great cost to innovation and employment.
Established in 1959, the HBR McKinsey Awards recognize practical and groundbreaking management thinking by determining the best articles published each year in Harvard Business Review. Among past HBS faculty winners are Clayton M. Christensen, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael E. Porter, and John Kotter.
Articles are judged by an independent panel of business and academic leaders. The 2014 winners were chosen by Scott Anthony, managing partner, Innosight; Cathy Benko, vice chairman and managing principal, Deloitte LLP; Beth Comstock, chief marketing officer, GE; Kurt Kuehn, chief financial officer, UPS; Roger Martin, Premier’s Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness and academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management; Rita Gunther McGrath, professor, Columbia Business School; Chris Meyer, CEO, Nerve LLC; Vineet Nayar, cofounder, Sampark Foundation; Alex “Sandy” Pentland, professor and director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, MIT; Kevin Sharer, senior lecturer, Harvard Business School; and Don Sull, senior lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management.
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