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Why Some Digital Companies Should Delay Profitability for as Long as They Can

Harvard Business Review

When Patrick Collison, CEO of electronic payments company Stripe, helped kick off our second-year strategy course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business this year, he observed that this has created one of the most profound differences in decision criteria between leaders in industrial-era and internet-era companies. So is Facebook.

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Lafley’s P&G Brand Cull and the 80/20 Rule

Harvard Business Review

Declaring he’d cull up to 100 brands — many of which he’d acquired and developed — P&G CEO A.G. Instead of focusing on innovation, as he did during his first tour as CEO of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods firm, Lafley is now innovating on focus.

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Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth

Harvard Business Review

Next time you're deciding about a big investment, NPV can help you make a more informed decision. In our experience, companies still focus more on cutting costs than on developing and executing new growth strategies. Related Video. The Refresher: Net Present Value.

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Reflecting on David Garvin’s Imprint on Management

Harvard Business Review

Garvin was a generalist more than a specialist, perhaps because he came of age at HBS during the 1980s, when the school’s primary focus was the development of skilled general managers. One of the many articles circling back to this topic of late revisited the still-common use of NPV hurdles in investment decisions.)

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Is Your Business Biased Against Innovation?

Strategy Driven

Net present value [NPV] is a case in point. The logic of NPV is to project cash flows into the future and then discount those flows back into today’s dollars at a given cost of capital. One problem is that NPV calculations tend to compare today with some future state.