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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

But we recognize that, in many businesses, resources are often allocated according to short-term, bottom-line pressures. Specifically, our analysis found that the net benefits to ranchers ranged from $18 million to $34 million (12% to 23% of revenues) in net present value projected over 10 years.

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Will You Be Writing Off Your Investment in Egypt?

Harvard Business Review

In both places, we know the instability will worsen macroeconomic performance in the short term. If that is the case, and the faster growth generates higher profits for them over the long term, that might well compensate for any short-term losses from the disruption. Tunisia and Egypt are cases in point.

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Match Your Innovation Process to the Results You Want

Harvard Business Review

It tends to be short-term, uses familiar (traditional) metrics and development systems like Stage Gate. Incremental innovations can be managed at the operating levels where the people know the customers/consumers best and decisions can be made in a more consensus-driven way with input and agreement between all stakeholder functions.

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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

To date, however, the reality of marketing analytics has fallen short of the promise. Just 36 percent of CMOs, for example, have quantitatively proven the short-term impact of marketing spend, according to the 2013 CMO Survey (and for demonstrating long-term impact, that figure drops to 32 percent).

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Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth

Harvard Business Review

Today, the average cost of equity capital sits at close to half that: just 8% for the roughly 1600 companies comprising the Value Line Index. So, in real terms, debt financing is essentially free. In these circumstances, strategies that generate faster growth create more value for most companies than those that improve profit margins.

ROE 14
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How to Choose the Ideas Your Company Should Invest In

Harvard Business Review

After exploration, there are lots of ways to plan, but at the very least a good plan details the target customer, crucial stakeholders, the essence of the idea, key economics, the commercialization path, proposed operations, the team, financial requirements, and the action plan. What are the assumptions in which you are least confident?

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