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For Some Platforms, Network Effects Are No Match for Local Know-How

Harvard Business

Any platform still needs to achieve a product-market fit to succeed in the long run. What works well in one country may fare badly in another, especially when the product being sold is a physical rather than a digital one. In 2015 AirPAYMENT went live, eliminating the small-business headache of processing payments and managing cash.

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How to Get Your Team to Use Their Vacation Time

Harvard Business

Not only does taking vacation contribute to enhanced productivity but it also immunizes our teams against the toxic negative attitudes that can be contagious in the workplace. In one study, researchers found that employees fear that their manager will think less of them for taking vacation. Photo by Vicko Mozara.

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Research: When Retail Workers Have Stable Schedules, Sales and Productivity Go Up

Harvard Business

Once the full experiment was launched in November 2015, 28 stores in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago were randomly assigned to control and intervention groups. More-stable scheduling increased sales and labor productivity. Labor productivity increased by 5%, in an industry where productivity grew by only 2.5%

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Help Your Team Achieve Work-Life Balance — Even When You Can’t

Harvard Business

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris in 1997 to become Finance Manager for Disney Consumer Products Europe, Middle East, and Africa that I experienced someone setting a non-negotiable boundary for herself. But so did my peers, whether or not they had children, partners, or aging parents. It was just the industry and firm norm.