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CEOs Don’t Care Enough About Capital Allocation

Harvard Business Review

” A quarter century later, not much seems to have changed: fewer than five out of the 100 CEOs on HBR’s 2014 list of best-performing CEOs even mention “return on capital” on their official biography — and none of those five lead companies listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or in the EuroStoxx50.

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Even for Companies, the U.S. Is Split Between Haves and Have-Nots

Harvard Business Review

Companies in the top one-fifth of profitability earn, in aggregate, about 70 times more economic profit (accounting profit less cost of capital) than those in the middle three-fifths combined, according to McKinsey’s database of 3,000 large, publicly listed, nonfinancial U.S. Consider what’s happening among corporations.

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What If Companies Managed People as Carefully as They Manage Money?

Harvard Business Review

But today’s great CEOs need to be equally great at managing human capital. How can we manage human capital better? A veritable alphabet soup (ROA, RONA, ROIC, ROCE, IRR, MVA, APV, and the like) exists to measure our financial capital. Invest human capital just like you invest financial capital.

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Untangling Skill and Luck

Harvard Business Review

Take, for instance, a group of companies that currently have high returns on invested capital (ROIC). If you follow that group over time, you would see their ROICs revert back toward the cost of capital. As important, the rate of reversion to the mean is a function of the relative contribution of luck.

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