article thumbnail

Better Management Will Help Drive Productivity Improvements

The Horizons Tracker

Weak management Bloom’s World Management Survey was established in 2004 to measure management practices across hundreds of medium-sized firms in the likes of the U.K., It’s less common for poor management to be targeted to explain lackluster productivity, but research from Stanford’s Nick Bloom suggests that is a mistake.

article thumbnail

Brilliant Boutique: 10 Keys To Lasting Small Business Success

Terry Starbucker

You can do it without outside financing. We financed it with personal loans – just a little credit and a little faith. On June 2 nd , 2004, we opened. We were scrappy, bought a lot of used pictures, did the build-out ourselves, and saved a lot of money – we only grew as our profits allowed. She’s still a customer.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How to Finance the Scale-Up of Your Company

Harvard Business Review

Tom Szaky knows well the meaning of the saying “ Beware your dreams, for they may come true. ” With the 2004 Christmas retail season rapidly approaching, he was trying everything he could to scale up TerraCycle , a two year old venture selling liquid worm poop as fertilizer in used PET bottles. Use multiple sources of finance.

article thumbnail

Can Your Company Survive a Bubble?

Harvard Business Review

The trio (respectively, a finance professor at Cornell, an applied-math Ph.D This is the kind of thing that can drive people outside of quantitative finance a little crazy ; there's no reference to company fundamentals, just "sophisticated volatility estimation techniques combined with the method of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces."

Company 13
article thumbnail

Do Commodities Speculators Make Things Cost More?

Harvard Business Review

The involvement of banks such as Goldman and J.P. Markets that existed mainly for the convenience of industry have become dominated by exchange-traded funds, hedge funds, and investment banks. Ethics Finance Global business' cent per aluminum can. The article is less clear about what brought this on. Morgan in the metals trade?

Cost 8
article thumbnail

You Can Be a Great Leader and Also Have a Life

Harvard Business Review

In 2004, Hickox was a certified public accountant in Texas and at a crossroads in her career. “I’m not sure when I first asked if I thought it would be successful,” said Hickox, now CFO of Independent Bank in McKinney Texas. This was also true for Michelle Hickox. “I didn’t want that,” she told me.

Banking 15
article thumbnail

Should HSBC Stay or Should It Go?

Harvard Business Review

London-based HSBC, arguably the world's most global bank, recently described speculation that it was planning to shift its headquarters from London to Hong Kong as "presumptuous." He notes that as recently as 2004, less than one percent of all U.S. Its full name is, after all, The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.

Banking 11