Strategy Driven

APRIL 17, 2023

Finance is at the very heart of every business! Venturing in Without a Clear Plan Starting a business without a clear plan for your finances is like walking blindfolded. Hence, it is highly advisable to develop a business plan that maps out your business finances, the business model and the nitty gritty involved in its implementation.

Finance 122

Finance Budgeting How To Credit Scoring 122

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 2, 2014

Military commanders know they can’t let the tooth-to-tail (or combat-to-support) ratio get too low, or they’ll wind up with a force that costs too much and can’t win the battle. You also have support staff, including the people in marketing, finance, HR, and other functions. It’s the same in a company. Trim your supervisory layers.

Cost 9

Cost Span of Control Management Bureaucracy 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 10, 2011

When executives evaluate a potential investment, whether it's to build a new plant, enter a new market, or acquire a company, they weigh its cost against the future cash flows they expect will spring from it. It's the opening paragraph of a Harvard Business Review article called "What's Your Real Cost of Capital?" by James J.

CAPM 13

CAPM Cost Discounted Cash Flow Cost of Capital 13

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 30, 2016

Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is elegantly logical: Expenses must be justified for each new budget period based on demonstrable needs and costs, as opposed to the more common method of using last year’s budget as your starting point, then adjusting up or down. Who would argue that a business should not eliminate unjustifiable costs?

Zero Based Budgeting 8

Zero Based Budgeting Budgeting Supply Chain Company 8

N2Growth Blog

DECEMBER 5, 2010

A goal is a specific target and the objectives are the attainment components/benchmarks/hurdles which will lead you toward achieving said goal. mikemyatt: RT @thinkBIG_blog: Cheap always costs you mo. Our Freedom. mikemyatt: The rigidity of a closed mind is the first s. mikemyatt: More thx @BradAustin1 @LeadershipWatch @GBSL.

Blog 395

Blog Mission Statement Tactics Objective 395

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

This lack of an analytical approach has traditionally formed a barrier between marketing and finance. It doesn’t need to be complicated; in one company, a marketing department saved 20 percent after simply benchmarking the money they were spending on external agencies. They’re going to make ads and do whatever it is they do.

CFO 8

CFO Short-term Long-term Benchmarking 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 23, 2013

Benchmark data isn''t sexy stuff, but occasionally the numbers reveal surprising findings. Who, for instance, would have guessed that global NGOs spend nearly 80% more to track their finances and employ nearly twice as many finance staff as comparable for-profit multinationals?

Globalization 8

Globalization NGO Benchmarking Decentralization 8

Strategy Driven

DECEMBER 23, 2019

You will need to be making enough money from your clients to cover the cost of your staff’s wages, plus compulsory insurance schemes such as employer liability and vehicle insurance if they are planning to drive. For an even better pointer, you may wish to pay for a salary benchmarking and comparison survey.

Incentives 17

Incentives Insurance Budgeting Benchmarking 17

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 21, 2016

A more industrialized approach is needed, one that will reduce cost and simplify the decision-making process for buyers. Fast (a project lasting less than a year), Capital-light (or better yet, funded by low-cost capital provided by a third party). To gain market traction, retrofits need to be: Relevant (appropriate to their building).

NPV 8

NPV Energy Efficiency Technology 8

N2Growth Blog

AUGUST 5, 2010

Rather they should benchmark their decisions against the question of “is it the right thing to do?” A generic thought, ambivalence, attempting to fly under the radar, and mediocre performance will place you squarely in my cross hairs and may cost you your job. mikemyatt: RT @thinkBIG_blog: Cheap always costs you mo. Our Freedom.

Politics 375

Politics Blog Leadership Diversity 375

Harvard Business Review

JULY 31, 2014

Second, changes in technology have dramatically lowered the cost of experimentation and create unprecedented transparency into problems, solutions, and results. How did Sal Khan finance his venture? First, Sal Khan could have continued in finance and made far more money than he does in a nonprofit.

Bond 8

Bond Education Finance Video 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 18, 2015

In particular, we are interested in how many of their responses correlate with what academic finance knows and what it teaches. Furthermore, few PE investors explicitly use the capital asset price model (CAPM) to determine a cost of capital. the notion that debt financing can be “cheap” at certain times).

CAPM 8

CAPM Discounted Cash Flow Company Rate of Return 8

HR Digest

NOVEMBER 9, 2023

Establish Benchmarks Make it a point to define industry and market benchmarks to compare your organization’s compensation practices. If our equitable compensation program guide is to be trusted, you need to identify relevant external benchmarks to understand prevailing salary ranges for similar roles in the market.

System 52

System How To Benchmarking Diversity 52

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

The number of salespeople affects profitably by impacting both revenues and costs. It's easy to estimate costs by looking at historical compensation, benefits, field support, and travel costs per salesperson. Keep Sales Force Costs at a Constant Percentage of Sales. But this is not the same as maximizing profits.

Company 8

Company Short-term Long-term Cost 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 11, 2014

Here’s an example of such a disclosure, which shows the high long-term cost of accumulating credit card debt (in red): But this disclosure policy and others like it are designed for a world that’s rapidly disappearing: that of paper statements and postal mailings. Sure, such efforts would come at a cost. Customers Finance Internet'

Credit Scoring 8

Credit Scoring Long-term Tools Benchmarking 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 10, 2017

One reason for the paltry performance is that while other business areas, like sales or finance, are considered to be core functions, innovation is often considered to be something that’s “nice to have” rather than essential. And there’s a fundamental conflict between innovation and optimizing an existing operation.

Innovation 8

Innovation P&L ROI Long-term 8

N2Growth Blog

JANUARY 13, 2011

Assess : Put the idea through a risk/reward and cost/benefit analysis. Deliverables, benchmarks, deadlines, and success metrics must be incorporated into the plan. mikemyatt: RT @thinkBIG_blog: Cheap always costs you mo. “ It is my hope to help dispel the myth that ideas are inherently good things. Our Freedom.

Blog 413

Blog Innovation Strategic Planning Brand 413

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 18, 2016

On average, common ownership concentration has almost doubled in the last 20 years in the construction, manufacturing, finance, and services sectors. Certainly, people have benefited from the low-cost, diversified exposure to the stock market that large asset managers offer.

CEO 8

CEO Asset Management Cooper Incentives 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

You’ll often find customer relationship management within marketing, budgeting within finance, supply-chain management within operations, outsourcing within procurement, training within HR, and new product development within R&D. Business units come and go, but finance, HR, marketing, IT, legal, and R&D seem to last forever.

Development 8

Development Supply Chain Incentives Outsourcing 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 8, 2011

For those of us not in operations, supply chain, or logistics, it's a vaguely familiar line item we learned about in finance class. As I learned at the conference, according to Terra Technology's benchmarking study , the error rate for CPG companies on estimated vs. actual sales is shockingly high. But inventory is not a minor issue.

Energy 10

Energy Supply Chain Operations Benchmarking 10

Harvard Business Review

MAY 5, 2016

This painful decision cost tens of thousands of jobs but proved strategically, organizationally, and culturally essential to the company’s future success. Cable companies enviously and despairingly benchmark Netflix and Amazon to learn how they quasi-autonomously cultivate subscribers and binge viewers.

Levitt 8

Levitt Disaggregation Kaizen Call Center 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2011

Buffett prefers to accept the visible costs of "a few bad decisions" than incur "the invisible costs of stifling bureaucracies." Create a corporate culture that admits problems and maximizes talent : Buffett allocates capital, monitors enterprise risk, chooses the managers, and sets their compensation.

Letter 14

Letter P&L Net Present Value Insurance 14

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Profits that are received at some future point are discounted by the real cost of finance and any appropriate risk premium.

NPV 12

NPV Short-term Discount Politics 12

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2012

What's worse, Facebook's efforts to bring transactions inside the walled garden - through Facebook Storefronts - seem to be decreasingly important to large e-commerce players as they discover the high costs and low returns of doing business on the site. For what it is — an uncertain bet — Facebook is going to be expensive.

IPO 11

IPO Advertising IRR Venture Funding 11

Harvard Business Review

MAY 8, 2017

The list includes a health care company that was once near bankruptcy (DaVita), a software firm whose stock price stagnated for a decade (Microsoft), a travel website that faced overwhelming competition (Priceline), a food giant that seemed to lose its focus (Danone), and a steel company that faced new pressure from lower-cost rivals (ThyssenKrupp).

Franchising 12

Franchising CEO Business Model Strategy 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 5, 2014

I see far too many data that don’t go anywhere and that’s just a cost.”. Point solutions, such as focusing on the call center, the store, or the website, no longer cut it in a multichannel environment, not when delivering excellent customer journeys can increase revenues up to 15 percent and cut costs by up to 20 percent.

P&L 8

P&L Banking Marketing Call Center 8

Leading with Trust

MARCH 20, 2022

I tend to follow the character standard of the great ethicist Michael Josephson who said, “The real test of character is if you are willing to do the right thing even though it may cost you more than you want to pay.” Doing the right thing can be seen as too broad. However, I have also seen someone lose all their trust credits at once.

Ethics 95

Ethics Servant Leader Execution Survey 95

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 10, 2011

Many are deeply uncertain about which initiatives they should fund — and one root of this indecision is a general lack of confidence in the cost of capital projections they are using to make the call. We find that 55 percent of respondents are convinced their cost of capital estimates are off by more than 50 basis points.

Cost of Capital 12

Cost of Capital CAPM Cost Discounted Cash Flow 12

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 22, 2015

In the last six years, a Harvard Business School team has worked with dozens of health care organizations to help them understand the true costs of their treatments for many medical conditions. One of the team’s central findings is that TDABC cannot be delegated to the finance function. Measuring Costs and Outcomes in Healthcare.

Mayo 8

Mayo Health Care Committee Project 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 25, 2018

Only a company that produces a TBL is taking account of the full cost involved in doing business.” Worse, we have conspicuously failed to benchmark progress across these options, on the basis of their real-world impact and performance. Fundamentally, we have a hard-wired cultural problem in business, finance and markets.

TBL 8

TBL Bottom-up Long-term Early Adopters 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 17, 2017

Today, we see growing interest in new business benchmarks and in potential breakthrough materials and forms of energy. Challenges of this frame: Be wary of pricing everything that moves in the environment and focusing too much on costs. Expand the focus from today’s business case for action to tomorrow’s business models.

Morale 8

Morale EPS Supply Chain Politics 8