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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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The Complexity of Business Communication

CoachStation

These points are reinforced in a recent article written by Gabrielle published in The Age newspaper: TWO CEOs went walking in the woods and came across an attacking grizzly bear. For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. (2)

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What U.S. CEOs Should Do with the Money from Corporate Tax Cuts

Harvard Business Review

As we approach earnings season, investors should listen carefully to what CEOs plan to do with the money. At a recent investor conference, one of us heard a CEO proudly state that the new law would have no effect at all on how his company views investments. The cost of capital is at historic lows, averaging below 6% for most large U.S.

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The Three Decisions You Need to Own

Harvard Business Review

CEOs face countless decisions. While the obvious decisions that CEOs need to get right involve strategy and competitive advantage, too many executives delegate away three critical decisions that they need to own: decisions about goals, resource allocation, and people. The brilliant decision-makers look at the runway ahead.

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How Passion Can Revolutionize Digital Technology, AND Change The.

Terry Starbucker

Its CEO at the time was great at cutting costs and preserving capital, but investors weren’t buying it. And change it did, because the new CEO had a vision that went beyond product, and costs, and overhead, and costs of capital. And that CEO is Steve Jobs. It was about passion.

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What Shareholder Value is Really About

Harvard Business Review

This blog post is part of the HBR Online Forum The CEO's Role in Fixing the System. Most CEOs, as well as some of the other contributors to this forum, appear to have a false sense of what creating shareholder value means. It is now in vogue to dismiss the idea that creating shareholder value should be a CEO's guiding objective.

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Activist Hedge Funds Aren’t Good for Companies or Investors, So Why Do They Exist?

Harvard Business Review

The Economist famously called them “capitalism’s unlikely heroes” in a cover story, and the FT published an article saying we “should welcome” them. But they are utterly reviled by CEOs. And at best, their performance is ambiguous. companies for an eight-year period (2005–2013).

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