Cold Call

Cold Call

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.

Episodes

August 4, 2026 24 mins
Founded in 2021, AI generative video company Metaphysic first rose to fame through viral deepfake videos. It achieved a significant milestone with "Here," the first major film to use AI for de-aging actors, including Tom Hanks. The company had two revenue streams: high-end content creation for Hollywood studios and a platform allowing individuals to own and control their digital likeness thanks to the entertainment industry’s...
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In 2025, Harvard Art Museums considered using generative AI in a marketing campaign to increase visitor engagement and membership. Looking to boost attendance and appeal to a younger audience base, and facing intensified competition for leisure time, the Museums’ marketing team explored animating a canonical artwork using AI-generated avatars as part of a digital campaign. While the approach promised novelty and attention, it...
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In March 2024, The Atlantic announced a strategic content and product partnership with artificial intelligence giant OpenAI. OpenAI would license The Atlantic’s content to train its models and respond to user queries, while The Atlantic would receive a fee, privileged access to OpenAI’s technology, and “premium” positioning within the tech giant. The Atlantic’s journalists, however, were incensed, conc...
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In the summer of 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before Rob Price became CEO in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist culture led to variability in teaching styles, educational outcomes, and risks for copyright violations. One of Price’s major initiatives to aid better standardization was the Method App which provided a structure to...
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What does it take to be a founder? In this episode of The Founder Mindset, produced by Harvard Business School Foundry and hosted by Senior Lecturer Reza Satchu, Satchu sits down with writer, podcaster, and investor Tim Ferriss to discuss his blueprint for nimble decision-making and actionable success.
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Harvard Business School Professor Len Schlesinger and TypeCoach President Rob Toomey join Brian Kenny to discuss the two mini cases, Night Two in Hanoi: Team Dynamics Under Pressure and Day 6 in Buenos Aires: Fatto Bene. They explore MBA students’ journeys through the first-year FIELD Global Capstone course and how the TypeCoach personality classications taught them how to recognize and work across cognitive differences, ulti...
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In early 2024, six months after the highly anticipated launch of Microsoft Copilot across the 62,000-person Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) organization—one of the world’s largest sales organizations—the initial excitement had not yet materialized into widespread adoption and transformation. But, two years after initiating their AI transformation journey, the organization’s daily active usag...
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Over 26 years at the helm, Dimitri Papalexopoulos, fourth-generation CEO of TITAN Cement, has turned the company from a domestic player into an internationally diversified group and championed an AI-driven productivity leap, even while steering the company through multiple economic crises. As TITAN prepared for its next phase of growth, Papalexopoulos faced the consequential decision of whether to continue leading the company, prom...
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In 2021, a breakthrough in sanitation technology – developed under the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet” challenge – stood ready for commercialization. The Single User Reinvented Toilet (SURT) offered an off-grid, self-contained system capable of processing waste, generating water, and reducing environmental impact. Turning this technical success into a viable product, however, meant confronting...
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After launching Wasabi Technologies, a successful cloud storage company, founder and CEO David Friend was ready to scale the venture rapidly. The company had focused primarily on direct sales, but an opportunity to pivot toward channel sales was on the horizon. However, making this pivot would mean changing its sales, marketing, and staffing strategies dramatically, and effectively veering the company away from its already successf...
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Software startup InsightSquared had recently hit $2 million in revenue and secured an $8 million round of venture capital. However, the founders disagreed on the path ahead, specifically on the sales and marketing plan. Should they focus on a sales-centric approach to growth or a marketing-centric one? Which strategy was optimal for their venture’s next phase of growth? Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Mark Roberge joi...
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A bank’s decision to experiment with being more transparent with about credit card drawbacks might help customers make better choices, but would those choices come at the expense of bank performance? Harvard Business School Professor Leslie John joins Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation” and ideas related to her new book, Revealing: The Underrated Power of O...
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The U.S. Men’s Olympic speed skating team devised a new approach to the team pursuit event following their disappointing performance in the 2018 Winter Olympics. The team saw promising initial results from their innovations, but they faced a decision about whether to reveal their new techniques. The U.S. Team’s strategy was easily imitated if competitors witnessed it in a race, but it was a risk not to test it in compet...
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February 3, 2026 42 mins
By 2025, the business podcast Acquired was getting one million listeners per episode, having doubled the audience year over since Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal started it in 2015. And they’d grown without a strict release schedule or relentless optimization. Still, they felt pressure to scale—without throwing off their work-life balance. How did they determine a way forward? They join Harvard Business School Professor...
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In 2025, Golden Goose, the Italian brand known for its handcrafted, distressed sneakers, was at a crossroads. CEO Silvio Campara had grown the label from a cult favorite into a $650 million global force, but sustaining that growth raised tough questions: Should the company double down on sneakers, expand into ready-to-wear and accessories, or push into emerging international markets? Harvard Business School Professor Juan Alcacer a...
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In 2019, Equitable’s CEO, Mark Pearson, set out to change how the 163-year-old financial services firm gets work done. He wanted the firm to speed up decision-making and empower employees through a flatter hierarchy, agile teams, and more opportunities to lead. Most divisions thrived under the new model. Others clung to old habits. Several years in, the effort sheds light on core questions: What does true cultural change look...
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In this special holiday crossover episode from Harvard Business School’s Climate Rising podcast, Professor Mike Toffel talks with ThredUp CEO James Reinhart about the company’s mission to extend the life of apparel and reduce waste through resale. As thrifting becomes more popular and circular business models gain traction, Reinhart explains why ThredUp built a national logistics and tech platform, how it collaborates w...
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In 2020, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase made two bold organizational moves: going fully remote and banning political discussion at work. These decisions, aimed at reinforcing a mission-first culture, were supported by a written, codified approach to company values and a hiring philosophy designed to attract talent aligned with that mission. In this episode, Chief People Officer L.J. Brock joins case author and HBS professor Charl...
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Jenny Wolfram founded BrandBastion to help companies manage the risks of social media by combining AI with human moderation. She joins HBS professor Julian De Freitas and BrandBastion’s Head of Operations and Finance, Vesa Rikkinen, to discuss how this hybrid model builds trust without ballooning costs.
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Apollo Global Management has transformed itself from a traditional private equity giant into an insurance-fueled credit powerhouse—thanks to its acquisition of life annuity issuer Athene. CEO Marc Rowan makes a bold bet that an asset-heavy model, which is backed by hundreds of billions in long-term insurance liabilities, can drive repeatable, superior returns and propel Apollo’s assets under management to $1.5 trillion....
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