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The Dell Deal Explained: What a Successful Turnaround Looks Like

Harvard Business Review

How Dell went from dorm room startup in 1984, to the world''s largest PC maker in 2005, and then saw its stock plummet precipitously the next year, is the subject of a lengthy Harvard Business School case study by HBS professor Jan Rivkin. There are two basic patterns to a successful turnaround, Rivkin told me in a recent interview.

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Strategy Lessons From Jean Tirole

Harvard Business Review

“Many of us who have wound up teaching strategy and doing research in strategy grew up learning game theory from Tirole’s textbook,” says Jan Rivkin, the chair of the strategy unit at HBS. As an example, Rivkin cites the notion of commitment, which Ghemawat wrote a book on.