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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What Founders Get Wrong abo...

12.05.2023

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 ...

Cold Call episodes:

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 ...
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, ...

Older episodes

Cold Call

What's Cold Call about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Cold Call episodes:

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?

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