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Why Leaders Are Still So Hesitant to Invest in New Business Models

Harvard Business Review

As technology continues to change and challenge even the most successful incumbent organizations in every industry, the cost of inertia is growing. Consider the dramatic shift in the types of assets that create market value. Despite the shift to intangible assets, executives and their strategists are sticking to the status quo.

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What’s Driving Superstar Companies, Industries, and Cities

Harvard Business Review

Often when superstar cities fall, they tend to be advanced economy cities, replaced by a developing economy city. Acquisitions, bold investment in intangible assets, and attracting talent can ultimately make the difference. The churn rate of superstar cities is half that of superstar firms.

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What VW Didn’t Understand About Trust

Harvard Business Review

Though the story is still developing, there are a few big, interconnected lessons to be drawn from what we know so far. Decades ago, a company’s market value was nearly equivalent to its tangible assets—buildings, machinery, materials, financial capital, and so on. Being clean and green has real, bottom-line value.

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Why Financial Statements Don’t Work for Digital Companies

Harvard Business Review

In contrast, industrial giant GE’s stock price has declined by 44 % over the last year, as news emerged about its first losses in last 50 years. Why do investors react negatively to financial statement losses for an industrial firm but disregard such losses for a digital firm?

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How Software Is Helping Big Companies Dominate

Harvard Business Review

But the rise of big companies — and the resulting concentration of industries, profits, and wages — goes well beyond tech firms and is about far more than antitrust policy. What’s Driving Industry Concentration. Most industries in the U.S. ” Its appetizer seems to have been smaller companies.

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Investors Today Prefer Companies with Fewer Physical Assets

Harvard Business Review

Since the industrial revolution, companies have raced to accumulate the most raw materials, properties, plants, and equipment, believing that owning and having more was the equivalent of being worth more. that companies own compared to other assets. that companies own compared to other assets. This is quite a shift.

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GDP Is a Wildly Flawed Measure for the Digital Age

Harvard Business Review

As the economy has evolved from one age to another (from industrial to services to information to network), our basic measurement systems have not kept pace. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), our core measure of prosperity, was developed during the industrial age.

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