Cold Call

By HBR Presents / Brian Kenny

Business

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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Addressing Racial Discrimin...

01.31.2023

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 ...

Cold Call episodes:

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 ...
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 ...
07.12.2022 Can the Foodservice Distribution Industry Recover from the Pandemic? At the height of the pandemic in 2020, US Foods struggled, as restaurant and school closures reduced demand for foodservice distribution. The situation improved after the return of indoor dining and in-person learning, but an industry-wide shortage of truck drivers ...
06.28.2022 Scaling a Fintech Startup for the Greater Good Esusu launched in 2018 with a rotational savings product and continued growing their fintech startup in late 2019 with Esusu Rent, a rent reporting tool that enables renters to improve their credit scores. In March 2020, co-founders Abbey Wemimo and ...
06.14.2022 What Does It Take to Close the Opportunity Gap in America’s Labor Market? In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and widespread protests for social justice in the United States, OneTen was formed by a coalition of 40 large companies to address the disparity in job opportunities for African-Americans without four-year college degrees. ...
05.31.2022 Corruption: New Insights for Fighting an Age-Old Business Problem Corruption is as old as humanity, with cases documented as far back as the Egyptian dynasties. While the World Bank estimates that international bribery exceeds $1.5 trillion annually, the larger and more subtle effects of corruption on economies and populations ...
05.17.2022 Delivering a Personalized Shopping Experience with AI THE YES, a shopping app for fashion brands, uses a sophisticated algorithm to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on her style preferences, size, and budget. After launching the app in 2020, the founders must decide ...
05.03.2022 Can a Social Entrepreneur End Homelessness in the U.S.? Community Solutions is a nonprofit founded in 2011 by Rosanne Haggerty, with the ambitious goal of ending chronic homelessness in America. After they were awarded a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation, Haggerty and her team had to decide ...
04.19.2022 What Role Do Individual Leaders Play in Corporate Governance? From 1997 to 2012, Scott Tucker built a nationwide network of payday lending businesses, becoming a pioneer in online lending along the way. But in 2012 federal prosecutors indicted Tucker on several criminal charges that he violated disclosure requirements. Harvard ...
04.05.2022 Transforming Deloitte’s Approach to Consulting Pixel helps facilitate open talent and crowdsourcing for Deloitte Consulting client engagements. But while some of Deloitte’s principals are avid users of Pixel’s services, uptake across the organization has been slow, and in some pockets has met with deep resistance. ...
03.22.2022 How Etsy Found Its Purpose and Crafted a Turnaround Etsy, the online seller of handmade goods, grew substantially but remained unprofitable in its first decade. But after it was almost bought out by private equity firms, a new CEO arrived with a mission to save the company financially and, ...
03.08.2022 France Telecom: Corporate Restructuring and Employee Wellbeing The France Telecom case series follows the evolution of the organization from a national telephone monopoly to a private company facing severe challenges. As increasing pressure mounted internally to make changes and 22,000 jobs were lost between 2006 and 2009, ...
02.22.2022 How to Scale a Startup Marketplace for Used Furniture AptDeco, a peer-to-peer marketplace for used furniture in the New York City area, was growing rapidly in the massive $120 billion furniture market, despite its complexity and high costs. Co-founders Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis were considering different options to ...
02.15.2022 How to Make Venture Capital Accessible for Black Founders: An Entrepreneur’s Dilemma In May of 2021, Kevin D. Johnson had just graduated from a rigorous Executive MBA program, and he needed to decide on his next career move. Johnson was the founder and CEO of a successful media company, but his career ...
02.08.2022 What’s Next for Nigerian Production Studio EbonyLife Media? After more than 20 years in the media industry in the UK and Nigeria, EbonyLife Media CEO Mo Abudu is considering several strategic changes for her media company’s future. Will her mission to tell authentic African stories to the world ...
02.01.2022 Making Diverse Leadership a Priority at Whittier College In 2018, Linda Oubré was selected as the president of Whittier College in Los Angeles County – the first Black woman to serve in that role. The student body had been slowly evolving to represent the growing diversity of the ...
01.25.2022 How Footwear Startup Allbirds Is Decarbonizing Fashion In 2021, the footwear startup Allbirds was extending its product range into apparel and expanding beyond its online store to open more retail stores around the world. Harvard Business School professor Mike Toffel and Allbirds co-founder and co-CEO Joey Zwillinger ...
01.11.2022 Can Entrepreneurs and Governments Team Up to Solve Big Problems? Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss and Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s CGO and co-founder, discuss the challenges entrepreneurs face when working with the public sector, and how investing in new ideas can enable entrepreneurs and governments to join forces to ...
12.14.2021 How Japan’s Recruit Holdings Regained Trust after a Scandal Recruit Holdings, an advertising media, staffing, and business support conglomerate was founded in Japan in 1960 by Hiromasa Ezoe. The company was built on the principle that the company should add value to society. But in 1988, Recruit hit rough ...
11.30.2021 TikTok: Super App or Supernova? TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was launched in 2012 around the simple idea of helping users entertain themselves on their smartphones while on the Beijing Subway. By May 2020, TikTok operated in 155 countries and had roughly one billion monthly active ...
11.16.2021 Can Mass General Brigham Diversify Its Community of Innovators? In November 2019, Mass General Brigham (MGB) was the largest recipient of National Institutes of Health funding in the world. The Innovation Office, led by Chief Innovation Officer Chris Coburn, sought to capitalize on that funding – with the goal ...
11.02.2021 Innovating in the Feminine Care Market Founded in 2014, Thinx, Inc. makes absorbent underwear that can be worn during menstruation. But the feminine care market had seen virtually no innovation in half a century because of the taboo against discussing the topic of menstruation. As a ...
10.19.2021 Should Global Beer Company Molson Coors Enter the Cannabis Beverages Business? In early 2019, global beer company Molson Coors was exploring how to enter the cannabis beverages business. At the time, cannabis had not yet been legalized in Canada. Initially the company had planned to test a few products in a ...
10.05.2021 How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition The Chinese telecom giant Huawei and other Chinese telecom firms, like ZTE, had been poised to lead the globe in 5G technology—until the U.S. State Department embarked on a global campaign to challenge the market dominance of Chinese firms with ...
09.21.2021 Why JPMorgan Chase Is Committed to Improving Racial Equity in Banking In 2020, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced a $30 billion “Commitment to Advance Racial Equity.” This included investments in housing, small businesses, and financial literacy across the U.S., as well as in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within the bank. ...
09.07.2021 How to Lead through a Merger: US Airways and American Airlines In February 2013, US Airways announced that it would merge with American Airlines to create the world’s largest airline. During the acquisition integration process, CEO Doug Parker had to determine how best to combine the two airlines’ core systems, operating ...
08.24.2021 Why Did Pet Concierge Startup Baroo Fail? In August 2017, Baroo Pet Care founder and CEO Lindsay Hyde wanted to continue expanding her pet services startup to new cities. In addition to raising venture capital, she needed to consider her growth strategy. Should she continue focusing on ...
08.10.2021 The Science of Sales Conversations with Gong’s Amit Bendov Gong’s business proposition is simple: provide software that automatically captures, understands, and analyzes written and spoken sales conversations to help sales teams sell more effectively. But can technology that leverages conversational insights make a measurable impact on a company's bottom ...
07.27.2021 Mixing Sports and Money: Adidas and the Commercialization of the Olympics Horst Dassler, the son of the founder of Adidas, cultivated relationships with athletes and national associations – with the aim of expanding his family’s sports apparel business. In doing so, he created the first sports sponsorships for the Olympics, and ...
07.13.2021 Strategies for Underdogs: How Alibaba’s Taobao Beat eBay in China In 2007, Alibaba’s Taobao became China’s leading consumer e-commerce marketplace, displacing the once dominant eBay. How did underdog Taobao do it? And will it be able to find a way to monetize its marketplace and ensure future success? Harvard Business ...
06.29.2021 Procter & Gamble’s Lean Innovation Transformation When Kathy Fish became Procter & Gamble’s Chief Research, Development & Innovation Officer in 2014, she was concerned that the world’s leading consumer packaged goods company had lost its capability to produce a steady stream of disruptive innovations. In addition, ...
06.15.2021 IKEA Navigates the Future While Staying True to Its Culture After years of success in providing quality furniture at affordable prices, Swedish furniture maker IKEA is challenged by the rise of online shopping and changing consumer behavior, plus the arrival of a new leader. The company's top executives know they ...
06.01.2021 Running a Consumer Fintech Startup within Goldman Sachs Marcus by Goldman Sachs marked a dramatic shift for the 150-year-old financial institution, which historically had served only businesses and the wealthiest people. The fintech startup operated within Goldman Sachs, offering unsecured personal loans for the mass market, high-yield deposits, ...
05.18.2021 How Georgia State University Increased Graduation Rates Georgia State University was facing a growing "summer melt" problem, where nearly 20 percent of incoming students never actually enrolled. The university used a data-based approach to retain students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and help them graduate. ...
05.04.2021 Reversing Brain Drain: Moving Talent to Middle America After decades of brain drain in rural America, Tulsa Remote is working to attract a diverse group of remote workers to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj “Raj” Choudhury discusses how the program gives workers the flexibility ...
04.20.2021 What Went Wrong with the Boeing 737 Max? How did the evolution of Boeing’s organization and management lead to two tragic plane crashes within six months, in which a total of 346 people died? Harvard Business School professor Bill George discusses the long roots that ultimately led to ...
04.06.2021 Disrupting the Waste Management Industry with Technology Rubicon began with a bold idea: create a cloud-based, full-service waste management platform providing efficient service anywhere in the U.S. Their mobile app did for waste management what Uber had done for taxi service. Five years after the case’s publication, ...
03.23.2021 Managing Future Growth at an Innovative Workforce Education Start-up Guild Education is an education marketplace that connects employers and universities to provide employees with “education as a benefit.” The Denver-based company is transforming traditional tuition-assistance programs by facilitating direct payment by the employer to the academic institution and by ...

Older episodes

Cold Call

What's Cold Call about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Cold Call episodes:

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?

Can the Foodservice Distribution Industry Recover from the Pandemic?

Scaling a Fintech Startup for the Greater Good

What Does It Take to Close the Opportunity Gap in America’s Labor Market?

Corruption: New Insights for Fighting an Age-Old Business Problem

Delivering a Personalized Shopping Experience with AI

Can a Social Entrepreneur End Homelessness in the U.S.?

What Role Do Individual Leaders Play in Corporate Governance?

Transforming Deloitte’s Approach to Consulting

How Etsy Found Its Purpose and Crafted a Turnaround

France Telecom: Corporate Restructuring and Employee Wellbeing

How to Scale a Startup Marketplace for Used Furniture

How to Make Venture Capital Accessible for Black Founders: An Entrepreneur’s Dilemma

What’s Next for Nigerian Production Studio EbonyLife Media?

Making Diverse Leadership a Priority at Whittier College

How Footwear Startup Allbirds Is Decarbonizing Fashion

Can Entrepreneurs and Governments Team Up to Solve Big Problems?

How Japan’s Recruit Holdings Regained Trust after a Scandal

TikTok: Super App or Supernova?

Can Mass General Brigham Diversify Its Community of Innovators?

Innovating in the Feminine Care Market

Should Global Beer Company Molson Coors Enter the Cannabis Beverages Business?

How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition

Why JPMorgan Chase Is Committed to Improving Racial Equity in Banking

How to Lead through a Merger: US Airways and American Airlines

Why Did Pet Concierge Startup Baroo Fail?

The Science of Sales Conversations with Gong’s Amit Bendov

Mixing Sports and Money: Adidas and the Commercialization of the Olympics

Strategies for Underdogs: How Alibaba’s Taobao Beat eBay in China

Procter & Gamble’s Lean Innovation Transformation

IKEA Navigates the Future While Staying True to Its Culture

Running a Consumer Fintech Startup within Goldman Sachs

How Georgia State University Increased Graduation Rates

Reversing Brain Drain: Moving Talent to Middle America

What Went Wrong with the Boeing 737 Max?

Disrupting the Waste Management Industry with Technology

Managing Future Growth at an Innovative Workforce Education Start-up