Top 50 Bestselling Case Authors 2022/23: No. 21

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No. 21 - Youngme Moon

Youngme Moon
Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business School

Youngme Moon is the Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Youngme has launched a number of strategic innovations at HBS, including the MBA FIELD curriculum and the HBX Learning Platform. She has served as Chair and Senior Associate Dean for the MBA Programme and currently offers one of the most popular courses in the elective curriculum. Most recently, she has co-hosted a weekly podcast, After Hours, presented by Harvard Business Review.

She has received the HBS Student Association Faculty Award for teaching excellence on multiple occasions and is also the inaugural recipient of the Hellman Faculty Fellowship, awarded for distinction in research. Her ideas have been published in a variety of journals, including the Harvard Business Review, and she has published and sold more than two million cases on companies ranging from Starbucks to IKEA to Uber.

Youngme serves on the Board of Directors of Unilever and Mastercard; she also sits on the board of several early-stage startups.

Youngme's top bestselling cases

Browse Youngme's top three bestselling cases during the last year.

Uber: Changing the Way the World Moves

Reference no. 9-316-101

Despite its remarkable early success, Uber is an extremely polarising company and its business model is highly disruptive. While disruptive innovation can be a positive thing, Uber's business model is outpacing many of the transport industry’s laws and it doesn't appear to be willing to wait for the regulatory system to catch up.

Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service

Reference no. 9-504-016

Starbucks, the dominant specialty-coffee brand in North America, must respond to recent market research indicating that the company is not meeting customer service expectations. The company is considering employing more staff to increase service speed. However, the impact of the plan (which would cost $40 million annually) on the company's bottom line is unclear.

Burberry

Reference no. 9-504-048

In 2003, Rose Marie Bravo, Burberry's CEO is debating how to maintain the currency and cachet of the brand across its broad customer base, while entering new product categories and expanding distribution. In the past five years, the brand has become one of the hottest luxury brands in the world. But Bravo now faces a number of key decisions, including: (1) which new product categories to enter; (2) how to deal with the appropriation of the brand by nontarget customers; and (3) how prominent the company's famed 'check' pattern should be in its advertising and clothing.

View all Youngme's cases

Bestselling case author in...

21st - 2022/23 35 - 2021/22 14 - 2020/21 12 - 2019/20 12 - 2018/19 11 - 2017/18 6 - 2016/17 8 - 2015/16

“In my experience, case studies are meaningful to students because they so vividly simulate the messiness of real life – with all of its richness, ambiguity, and complexity. In some cases, the objective of a case is to acclimate students to this messiness, to demystify the complex, to get students to feel comfortable making decisions in the context of so much ambiguity. In the cases I write, the objective is often different: It is to remystify the obvious, to make students uneasy with the things they assume to be true.

“The resulting dissonance can be uncomfortable for students, but I believe that students learn most when they are uncomfortable – not necessarily because the material is so difficult to digest, but because the experience can be so psychologically tumultuous to navigate. When their heads are spinning, when they are forced to let go of their paradigmatic centers of gravity and view the world from different angles – this is when overturned assumptions can render startling insights. This is when learning occurs.”

~ Youngme Moon