Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 5, 2016

Under this financing structure, the company contracts to buy kilowatts, not the turbines and panels. They had framing conversations with the CEO and CFO early on to discuss any financial or operational challenges. While PPAs are the dominant model for financing corporate renewables, signing 15- or 20-year agreements can be tricky.

Energy 8

Energy Industry Finance CFO 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 11, 2017

Don’t let your engineers hack together workarounds that will need to be maintained down the road; provide real engineering solutions to the types of problems new software has. Your customer feedback is coming in through a variety of channels: phone calls to founders, emails to engineers, even the occasional text message.

Metrics 14

Metrics Engineering Efficiency Learning-by-Doing 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 22, 2014

With a background in both strategy and finance, Sheila was an up-and-coming manager at a well-known consumer products company. So, the real challenge for career success is not just how to “win” the next promotion, but also how to rebound from the next defeat , as we explain in our article in this month’s HBR. Here’s a case example.

Career 10

Career Examples Supply Chain CFO 10

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 25, 2014

in January 1968 as a young 22-year old with $8 in his pocket and an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay. I had an unlikely journey to the top. Born in India, I arrived in the U.S. Thirty-one years later, I became Chairman and CEO of a global Fortune 300 company. How did this happen? I was fortunate, to be sure.

Team 12

Team Diversity CFO TSR 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 15, 2013

They resist getting their hands dirty alongside the CIO, even though many of them will readily get down into the mud of a balance sheet with the CFO or strategize the details of global brand issues with the CMO. Boards should require that CEO candidates demonstrate not just knowledge of finance and marketing but also a technology aptitude.

CEO 8

CEO CIO Technology CFO 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 27, 2012

The potential customer's VP of finance contacted Bill and asked him to prepare a proposal for a multimillion-dollar initiative. Throughout the process, Bill was never allowed to meet with the decision maker, the CFO. Consider a sales engineer I'll call Martha Williams, who worked for a process-control design firm.

Price 14

Price Chemicals Tactics CFO 14

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 28, 2012

The world's biggest and fastest search engine can't help but generate terabytes and petabytes of actionable investment intelligence. In fact, Google chief economist Hal Varian (and other economists and forecasters) already use the search engine's data and analytics to predict economic futures.

Hedge 15

Hedge Core Competence CFO ROI 15

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

Klara Eberhart, the head of engineering, interrupted. She proposed hiring 15 to 20 new engineers. She explained that BrainGame’s current backers had been asking about growth plans, and Lena was pitching new groups for a new round of financing in two weeks. Later that day Guy Renou, BrainGame’s CFO, sat down in Lena’s office.

Company 9

Company CFO Proposal Engineering 9

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 25, 2015

You produce growth engines with calculated bets, not “wild-ass gambles.” Communication will be key to this partnership because the CEO is the person who can help finance your future experiments. You do not work for the CEO, or alongside the CTO, CIO, and CFO. ” You believe anything is possible. You persevere.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur CTO Business Model CEO 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2012

But according to Dina Dublon, former CFO at JPMorgan Chase and currently HBS professor of management practice, the empowerment and deployment of embedded risk managers was part of formal risk management at the bank well before the financial crisis. But was it?

Risk Management 9

Risk Management CIO Management Banking 9

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 11, 2013

He renamed his company and put a team of engineers to work solving the product’s mechanical, food safety, cost, and design flaws. Densmor, Terranola’s CFO, saw those words on Twitter about one minute after Hughes had uttered them. As CFO, A.J. When the Express finally emerged, it was a peach: simple, speedy, and elegant.

Case Study 8

Case Study CFO Hedge PR 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 7, 2017

Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer at Uber, recently wrote about her “very, very strange year at Uber,” characterized by a pervasive culture of alleged sexual harassment. That is like setting up a finance organization to do exotic risk hedging before putting in place basic reporting and compliance.

Compliance 12

Compliance Hedge Human Capital Finance 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 8, 2014

A similar proposal to Split Finance would likely have been rejected out of hand by organization leaders (and Harvard Business Review editors), because its obvious that the Finance function must fit the organization strategy and leader capabilities. Yet this evidence is apparently not well-known.

Charan 14

Charan Finance Human Resources Supply Chain 14