Cold Call

By HBR Presents / Brian Kenny

What's Cold Call about?

Cold 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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Cold Call episodes:

04.09.2024
Sustaining a Legacy of Giving in Turkey
Özyeğin 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...
03.26.2024
How One Leader Overcame Career-Ending Adversity
In 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...
03.12.2024
How to Bring Good Ideas to Life: The Paul English Story
Harvard 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...
02.27.2024
How Could Harvard Decarbonize Its Supply Chain?
Harvard 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®,...
02.13.2024
Apple’s Dilemma: Balancing Privacy and Safety Responsibilities
In 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...
01.30.2024
Can Second-Generation Ethanol Production Help Decarbonize the World?
Ethanol 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,...
01.16.2024
How SolarWinds Responded to the 2020 SUNBURST Cyberattack
In 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...
01.02.2024
Should Businesses Take a Stand on Societal Issues?
Should 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...
12.12.2023
Can Sustainability Drive Innovation at Ferrari?
When 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...
12.05.2023
What Founders Get Wrong about Sales and Marketing
Which 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...
11.28.2023
Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive
In 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...
11.21.2023
Building a More Equitable Culture at Delta Air Lines
In 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...
11.07.2023
How Should Meta Be Governed for the Good of Society?
Julie 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...
10.24.2023
How the United States Air Force Accelerated AI Adoption
In 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...
10.10.2023
Scaling Two Businesses Against the Odds: Wendy Estrella’s Founder Journey
Entrepreneur 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...
09.26.2023
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger: Competition Vs. Cooperation
On 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,...
09.12.2023
Can Remote Surgeries Digitally Transform Operating Rooms?
Launched 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,...
08.29.2023
As Social Networks Get More Competitive, Which Ones Will Survive?
In 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...
08.15.2023
Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness
In 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....
08.01.2023
Can Business Transform Primary Health Care Across Africa?
mPharma, 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...
07.18.2023
Diversity and Inclusion at Mars Petcare: Translating Awareness into Action
In 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...
07.04.2023
How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work
Launched 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...
06.20.2023
Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover: Lessons in Strategic Change
In 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...
06.06.2023
The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism
In 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...
05.23.2023
The Entrepreneurial Journey of China’s First Private Mental Health Hospital
The 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...
05.09.2023
Can Robin Williams’ Son Help Other Families Heal Addiction and Depression?
Zak 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,...
04.28.2023
Sweden’s Northvolt Electric Battery Maker: A Startup with a Mission
In 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...
04.27.2023
Equity Bank CEO James Mwangi: Transforming Lives with Access to Credit
James 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...
04.26.2023
How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter
When 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...
04.25.2023
Using Design Thinking to Invent a Low-Cost Prosthesis for Land Mine Victims
Bhagwan 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...
04.24.2023
Our All-Time Favorite Episodes of Cold Call
Cold 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...
04.11.2023
A Rose by Any Other Name: Supply Chains and Carbon Emissions in the Flower Industry
Headquartered 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...
03.28.2023
BMW’s Decarbonization Strategy: Sustainable for the Environment and the Bottom Line
In 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...
03.14.2023
Can AI and Machine Learning Help Park Rangers Prevent Poaching?
The 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...
02.28.2023
Muhammad Ali: A Case Study in Purpose-Driven Decision Making
Muhammad 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....
02.14.2023
Does It Pay to Be a Whistleblower?
In 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...
01.31.2023
Addressing Racial Discrimination on Airbnb
For 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...
01.17.2023
Nestlé’s KitKat Diplomacy: Neutrality vs. Shared Value
In 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...
01.03.2023
Wordle: Can a Pandemic Phenomenon Sustain in the Long Term?
Wordle 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...
12.13.2022
Metaverse Seoul: How One City Used Citizen Input to Pilot a Government-Run Metaverse
In 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...
11.29.2022
How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?
In 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...
11.15.2022
Planning the Future for Harlem’s Beloved Sylvia’s Restaurant
Sylvia’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...
11.01.2022
Marie Curie: A Case Study in Breaking Barriers
Marie 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...
10.18.2022
Chewy.com’s Make-or-Break Logistics Dilemma
In 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...
10.04.2022
Corporate Governance and Growth Strategy at Capital SAFI
Asset 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....
09.20.2022
Larry Fink at BlackRock: Linking Purpose to Profit
In 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...
09.06.2022
Reinventing an Iconic Independent Bookstore
In 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...
08.23.2022
Management Lessons from the Sinking of the SS El Faro
Captain 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...
08.09.2022
A Lesson from Google: Can AI Bias be Monitored Internally?
Dr. 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...
07.26.2022
Can Bombas Reach New Customers while Maintaining Its Social Mission?
Bombas was started in 2013 with a dual mission: to deliver quality socks and donate much-needed footwear to people living in shelters. By 2021, it had become one of America's most visible buy-one-give-one companies, with over $250 million in annual...

What's Cold Call about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Cold Call episodes:

Sustaining a Legacy of Giving in Turkey

How One Leader Overcame Career-Ending Adversity

How to Bring Good Ideas to Life: The Paul English Story

How Could Harvard Decarbonize Its Supply Chain?

Apple’s Dilemma: Balancing Privacy and Safety Responsibilities

Can Second-Generation Ethanol Production Help Decarbonize the World?

How SolarWinds Responded to the 2020 SUNBURST Cyberattack

Should Businesses Take a Stand on Societal Issues?

Can Sustainability Drive Innovation at Ferrari?

What Founders Get Wrong about Sales and Marketing

Tommy Hilfiger’s Adaptive Clothing Line: Making Fashion Inclusive

Building a More Equitable Culture at Delta Air Lines

How Should Meta Be Governed for the Good of Society?

How the United States Air Force Accelerated AI Adoption

Scaling Two Businesses Against the Odds: Wendy Estrella’s Founder Journey

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger: Competition Vs. Cooperation

Can Remote Surgeries Digitally Transform Operating Rooms?

As Social Networks Get More Competitive, Which Ones Will Survive?

Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness

Can Business Transform Primary Health Care Across Africa?

Diversity and Inclusion at Mars Petcare: Translating Awareness into Action

How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work

Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover: Lessons in Strategic Change

The Opioid Crisis, CEO Pay, and Shareholder Activism

The Entrepreneurial Journey of China’s First Private Mental Health Hospital

Can Robin Williams’ Son Help Other Families Heal Addiction and Depression?

Sweden’s Northvolt Electric Battery Maker: A Startup with a Mission

Equity Bank CEO James Mwangi: Transforming Lives with Access to Credit

How Martine Rothblatt Started a Company to Save Her Daughter

Using Design Thinking to Invent a Low-Cost Prosthesis for Land Mine Victims

Our All-Time Favorite Episodes of Cold Call

A Rose by Any Other Name: Supply Chains and Carbon Emissions in the Flower Industry

BMW’s Decarbonization Strategy: Sustainable for the Environment and the Bottom Line

Can AI and Machine Learning Help Park Rangers Prevent Poaching?

Muhammad Ali: A Case Study in Purpose-Driven Decision Making

Does It Pay to Be a Whistleblower?

Addressing Racial Discrimination on Airbnb

Nestlé’s KitKat Diplomacy: Neutrality vs. Shared Value

Wordle: Can a Pandemic Phenomenon Sustain in the Long Term?

Metaverse Seoul: How One City Used Citizen Input to Pilot a Government-Run Metaverse

How Will Gamers and Investors Respond to Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard?

Planning the Future for Harlem’s Beloved Sylvia’s Restaurant

Marie Curie: A Case Study in Breaking Barriers

Chewy.com’s Make-or-Break Logistics Dilemma

Corporate Governance and Growth Strategy at Capital SAFI

Larry Fink at BlackRock: Linking Purpose to Profit

Reinventing an Iconic Independent Bookstore

Management Lessons from the Sinking of the SS El Faro

A Lesson from Google: Can AI Bias be Monitored Internally?

Can Bombas Reach New Customers while Maintaining Its Social Mission?