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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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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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Desperately Seeking Simplicity

Harvard Business Review

Today, only 9% of businesses in the world have achieved even a modest level of sustained, profitable growth over the past decade on average (5.5%, earning cost of capital) and that is declining — even though virtually all the businesses aspire to something like this or more.

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Get the Strategy You Need — Now

Harvard Business Review

Good analysis in the hands of smart managers does not automatically yield great strategy. Managers appear to be most at risk of doing too little, not too much. Companies run by decisive CEOs rack up more economic profit — what’s left of operating profit after the cost of capital is subtracted – than competitors do.