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Boards Should Take Responsibility for Cybersecurity. Here’s How to Do It

Harvard Business Review

Directors should make sure that OpEx and CapEx are aligned with risk reduction priorities and projects; security is not done for security’s sake. Clique Images/Getty Images. With news of data breaches, ransomware attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities making headlines, cybersecurity is likely appearing even more frequently on the agenda in many board meetings.

CAPEX 10
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Big Data Doesn't Work if You Ignore the Small Things that Matter

Harvard Business Review

To avoid being caught spending vast sums on half-vast results, CXOs would be wise to link a big-data project to the development of a rigorous metrics program — something like the Balanced Scorecard, which is more likely than CapEx or financial ROI to capture the full results of big-data applications downstream and across multiple process groups. Ever waited hours, in vain, for a repair service to arrive at your home? Of course you have. We all have.

CAPEX 15
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Only Half of Companies Actually Use the Competitive Intelligence They Collect

Harvard Business Review

They were evenly distributed between pursuing opportunities (46%) and reducing risks (44%), and ran the gamut from product pricing and features, capex investments, manufacturing processes, market expansion, joint ventures, M&A, and more. For more than 30 years, most large corporations worldwide have adopted competitive intelligence (CI) as a way to expedite good decisions.

CAPEX 9
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Business Resilience Comes from Working with Nature

Harvard Business Review

The report includes case studies for Dow, which also utilized a constructed wetland at one of its facilities, reducing capex expense by a factor of 10. Hurricane Sandy, the superstorm that pummeled the U.S. northeast in October 2012, ranks as the second-costliest hurricane in American history, causing an estimated $68 billion in damages. One year later, the most powerful storm ever recorded to hit land devastated the Philippines.

CAPEX 9
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Why Corporate Social Responsibility Doesn’t Work

Harvard Business Review

Savor of Temple found that firms led by single CEOs engage in much more aggressive investment behavior, in terms of capex, innovation activity, R&D, and acquisitions, than companies led by married chief executives.

CAPEX 8
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Is Your Company Actually Set Up to Support Your Strategy?

Harvard Business Review

Are you focusing opex and capex on these priorities in order to build competitively differentiated capabilities? sweetvenom/Getty Images. How do banks switch customer relationships from branch offices to mobile phone screens? Why is one multinational consumer goods company organized by category, while another organizes by region? Why is one insurance company deep into an agile transformation while another is experimenting with it only at the edges of its business?

CAPEX 9
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IT Cannot Be Only the CIO's Responsibility

Harvard Business Review

It may make costs more predictable and shift investments from CapEx to OpEx. IT is not something that can be managed from a box on the organizational chart. Unfortunately, this is not the view in most C-suites. Just look at what most do: They appoint a CIO and give him or her a budget and a mandate to get on with it! As one CEO said to us: "I just want to forget about IT and concentrate on my core business.".

CAPEX 8
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Finally, Proof That Managing for the Long Term Pays Off

Harvard Business Review

These indicators and hypotheses were: Investment: The ratio of capex to depreciation. Companies deliver superior results when executives manage for long-term value creation and resist pressure from analysts and investors to focus excessively on meeting Wall Street’s quarterly earnings expectations. This has long seemed intuitively true to us. We’ve seen companies such as Unilever, AT&T, and Amazon succeed by sticking resolutely to a long-term view.

EPS 11
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You, Too, Can Move Your Company Into the Cloud

Harvard Business Review

If asked about cost savings, be ready to deliver your pitch on how you intend to reduce or eliminate capex spending, reduce personnel resources, move services to a pay by month model eliminating long term contracts and ultimately reduce your annual budget by a modest percentage year over year over a 3-5 year period of time. On April 1 of this year, the Department of Defense announced that the US Navy would embark on a strategy to migrate its services to the cloud.

IAM 8
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Don’t Play with Dead Snakes, and Other Management Advice

Harvard Business Review

These companies have effectively no capex. “If you see a snake, kill it. Don’t play with dead snakes. And everything looks like a snake at first.” This sounds like it might be advice from a paranoid outdoorsman. But its author, Jim Barksdale, meant it as a guide to the business world — that dangerous environment where, famously, only the paranoid survive.

CAPEX 8
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What You Should Know About Dodd-Frank and What Happens If It’s Rolled Back

Harvard Business Review

And not very much capex , not very much innovation. On February 3 President Trump issued an executive order directing the Treasury Department to conduct a sweeping review of financial regulation, including Dodd-Frank , the financial reform bill passed, in 2010, as part of the Obama administration’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession.