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The Best Companies Know How to Balance Strategy and Purpose

Harvard Business Review

Seeking to extend its technological edge (particularly in miniaturization), it acquired more than 100 startup companies while pursuing a vast portfolio of research and product development projects. In 2006 alone, Nokia introduced 39 new mobile-device models. Your purpose — preserving food — had been co-opted.

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Is the Next Karl Marx a Management Consultant?

Harvard Business Review

A brief sampling: Michael Porter and Mark Kramer's " Creating Shared Value ;" Christoper Meyer and Julia Kirby's " Runaway Capitalism ;" Dominic Barton's " Capitalism for the Long Term ;" the collected works of Umair Haque. And in that he sounds a lot like Michael Porter, Dominic Barton, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, etc.

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Business Competition Has Not Gotten Fiercer

Harvard Business Review

As Michael Porter argued a long time ago , the simplest measure of competition is profitability. Another is that short-term oriented companies are so desperate for margins that they’re hollowing out their operations or eating their R&D seed-corn. The macro numbers tell a very different story.

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Getting Real About Health Care Value

Harvard Business Review

What seems special about the term is that, seemingly simple, it is actually complex and subtle. As Thomas Lee noted in the New England Journal of Medicine, “no one can oppose this goal and expect long-term success.”. Michael Porter has defined value as “health outcomes achieved per dollar spent.”

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The Research is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies

Harvard Business Review

There’s another that says all of us, including senior managers, are basically flotsam buffeted about by the eddies of economic incentive, corporate culture, and technologies that keep the office just a tap away. But there are other explanations out there. Then there’s the version that looks at our psychology. It still held true.

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A Playbook for Making America More Entrepreneurial

Harvard Business Review

In an economy where traditional manufacturing jobs have gone offshore, and globalization and technology have put pressure on U.S. A Main Street small business might require a term loan from a bank to buy a piece of equipment. But the economic toolbox that works for big companies isn’t the same one that works for small ones.

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How Companies Can Help Rebuild America’s Common Resources

Harvard Business Review

Every company needs infrastructure – roads, bridges, ports – and every company benefits from the new technologies made possible by basic scientific research. In short, every company benefits from “the commons,” the set of communal resources that allow firms and workers to be productive. Competitiveness Project.