article thumbnail

Providing Earnings Guidance? Think Again

Harvard Business Review

Investors reward companies (such as Apple and Kimberly-Clark ) whose current performance or guidance for the future exceeds market expectations, and they punish companies (as they did Starbucks and Procter & Gamble ) whose performance or guidance fails to meet expectations. FD) constraints.

CFO 11
article thumbnail

Why Europe's Carbon Woes Matter to the Whole World

Harvard Business Review

Europe''s $100 billion carbon market, an innovative force in the powerful carbon-reduction approach known as cap and trade, has ceased to function the way it''s supposed to. And it''s all because of a failure of political will in Europe to override the market''s built-in lack of flexibility and fix the imbalance between supply and demand.

Price 8
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Desperately Seeking Simplicity

Harvard Business Review

An example was a discussion session of tired-looking European finance ministers, defensive and elusive about the speed of acting on the Euro crisis. I heard it in a session led by Professor Michael Porter and Dean Nitin Nohria of the Harvard Business School who were sharing a research project on declining American Competitiveness.

article thumbnail

Even for Companies, the U.S. Is Split Between Haves and Have-Nots

Harvard Business Review

Companies in the top one-fifth of profitability earn, in aggregate, about 70 times more economic profit (accounting profit less cost of capital) than those in the middle three-fifths combined, according to McKinsey’s database of 3,000 large, publicly listed, nonfinancial U.S. Consider what’s happening among corporations.

ROIC 8
article thumbnail

Finally, Proof That Managing for the Long Term Pays Off

Harvard Business Review

Among the firms we identified as focused on the long term, average revenue and earnings growth were 47% and 36% higher, respectively, by 2014, and market capitalization grew faster as well. public market capitalization over this period. In this case its capital charge is $800 times 8%, or $64.