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How Google Has Changed Management, 10 Years After its IPO

Harvard Business Review

To do so, it had to come up with a brand of management all its own, centered around “people analytics,” a quantitative approach to hiring and operations. Earlier this year, Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, wrote about its latest “people analytics” experiment. What Google could do better.

IPO 14
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Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing

Harvard Business Review

This is the essence of Groupon's declaration last week that it will remove the controversial accounting metric called Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income (ACSOI) from its financial statements. In the first quarter of 2011, Groupon posted a net loss of $113.9 In fact, we are really losing a lot of money.".

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Some of the Most Successful Platforms Are Ones You’ve Never Heard Of

Harvard Business Review

Then the banks decided to turn the associations into for-profit companies, IPO them, and cash out. MasterCard IPO’d in 2006, and Visa followed two years later. Around the world, though, many countries still have domestic payment networks that operate as not-for-profit platforms. Now they are very focused on making money.

IPO 8
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Midsized Firms Can’t Afford Bad Bets

Harvard Business Review

However, cash flow from operations had shifted from positive to negative, the company’s cash pile was dwindling, and the new product would demand R&D investment. Then it cut general and administrative expenses and sales staff to contain operating losses. That helped BlueArc raise another $28 million in VC funds.

CFO 8
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An Insider’s Account of the Yahoo-Alibaba Deal

Harvard Business Review

By mid-2004, however, the operation was mired in conflict over control and differences in management style. Zhou reportedly felt that the original Yahoos were overpaid and lazy, whereas the Yahoo team felt bullied and believed Zhou wasn’t focused on the Yahoo operations. We were ready to give Ma the keys to Yahoo’s operations in China.

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What Zipcar Can Teach the S&P 500

Harvard Business Review

Consider Zipcar, whose recent IPO valued the 11-year old company at over $1 billion. Unfortunately, Microsoft tied its tablet concepts to its Windows operating system and made them merely pen-enabled personal computers, so these products remained a tiny niche of the computing industry.

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A Story from Google Shows You Don’t Need Power to Drive Strategy

Harvard Business Review

Brian Fitzpatrick joined Google as a senior software engineer in 2005, shortly after the company’s IPO. Their crowning achievement was a service launched in 2011 called Google Takeout, a unified site for exporting user data from multiple services like Gmail and Google Photos.