Remove Cost of Capital Remove Innovation Remove Management Remove Productivity
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4 Ways Leaders Can Get More from Their Company’s Innovation Efforts

Harvard Business Review

A recent McKinsey report found that while 84% of corporate executives think innovation is key to achieving growth objectives, only 6% are satisfied with the innovation performance of their firm. Even if executives try to prioritize it, innovation often gets crowded out by more “urgent” short-term pressures.

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The Case for Investing More in People

Harvard Business Review

Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything,” wrote Paul Krugman more than 20 years ago. Productivity in most developed economies has been anemic. During much of this time, it has been shareholders, not workers, who have reaped the benefits of higher productivity.

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

Harvard Business Review

The cost of capital is at historic lows, averaging below 6% for most large U.S. Indeed, for most companies, the value of accelerating growth greatly exceeds the value of returning capital to shareholders. Indeed, for most companies, the value of accelerating growth greatly exceeds the value of returning capital to shareholders.

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Shutting Down Stores Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Business

Harvard Business Review

A major challenge for all retailers is managing the closures in a way that maximizes revenues and profits. In retailing, most products, stores, business units, and even firms go through a life cycle of birth, midlife, and death. Over time, retailers have identified and adopted many innovative ideas to manage these complex tasks.

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What’s Driving Superstar Companies, Industries, and Cities

Harvard Business Review

To analyze the superstar dynamics of firms, our metric was economic profit, a measure of a firm’s profit above and beyond opportunity cost. (To To do this, we take the firm’s returns, deduct the cost of capital, and multiply by the firm’s total invested capital.)

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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

Our research has found that embedded sustainability drives financial performance through mediating factors such as innovation, operational efficiency, risk reduction, employee recruitment, engagement and retention, customer and supplier loyalty, competitive advantage, reduced cost of capital, and improved marketing and sales.

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We Can’t Study Short-Termism Without the Right Metrics

Harvard Business Review

For instance, McKinsey considered a smaller ratio of capital expenditure to depreciation to indicate short-term thinking, because it’s assumed that short-term companies will invest less, and less consistently, than other companies. Incentivizing managers for growth routinely leads to expansion through overvalued acquisitions.

EPS 9