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We Can’t Study Short-Termism Without the Right Metrics

Harvard Business Review

If a company has beat or missed its EPS targets by less than two cents , that means the company has nipped and tucked its quarterly results just enough to meet the target EPS number it committed to analysts. So this measure may mislabel efficient companies as myopic. On the surface, this measure looks reasonable.

EPS 8
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Business Needs to Do What Government Can't

Harvard Business Review

Our research with members of the global C-suite, and with leading sustainability and innovation experts, has identified seven vectors of breakthrough change. Companies like Unilever are on an open innovation drive, while GSK and Novartis are focusing on access to medicines in poorer markets. Business would change the rules of the game.

EPS 8
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Managing in an Age of Winner-Take-All

Harvard Business Review

In the past, the effects of technological change were very much shaped by business leaders’ embrace of scientific management with its emphasis on efficient uniformity, and by simplifying assumptions about the behavior of economic man and the efficiency of bureaucratic organizations.

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How Amazon Trained Its Investors to Behave

Harvard Business Review

Well, he's a hedge fund veteran who has always taken a skeptical view of Wall Street, treating it more as a loopy rich uncle than the efficient information processor of standard finance theory. Clayton Christensen has long complained that standard financial metrics can be enemies of innovation and growth. How has Bezos done this?

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What Apple Should Do with Its Massive Piles of Money

Harvard Business Review

I know that finance professors at business schools throughout the nation teach MBAs and executives that, for the sake of economic efficiency, a company should “maximize shareholder value.” I agree and ask you to consider what public shareholders and stock buybacks have to do with innovation at Apple. Social innovation.

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The 6 Ways Business Leaders Talk About Sustainability

Harvard Business Review

The focus of people using a resources frame to understand sustainability is often on waste reduction and technological innovation. For example, in the 1990s, leading businesses like 3M adopted concepts like eco-efficiency, focusing on saving and making money through the better management of materials, energy and waste.

Morale 8
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Why I'm Glad I Got Fired

Harvard Business Review

I'm sure I asked this next question in the kind of holier-than-thou voice that only a 20-something can conjure: Why would I shift my career from Apple and GoLive (a hot web authoring software) to CAD, where innovation levels and growth were single digit? Nilofer Merchant is a corporate advisor and speaker on innovation methods.

EPS 15