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The Big Trends Changing Community Development

Harvard Business Review

This is what is going on now in community development. Three lines of progress are crossing, and rapidly reshaping how businesses and nonprofits together strengthen the locales in which they operate. Child sponsorships have been operating since 1953, and all of them share the high-level objective of breaking the cycle of poverty.

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Why We Need to Update Financial Reporting for the Digital Era

Harvard Business Review

Business students have traditionally considered net present value, payback period, and hurdle rates as necessary tools to determine which project to select. Digital companies, however, consider scientists’ and software workers’ and product development teams’ time to be the company’s most valuable resource.

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Match Your Innovation Process to the Results You Want

Harvard Business Review

It tends to be short-term, uses familiar (traditional) metrics and development systems like Stage Gate. Incremental innovations can be managed at the operating levels where the people know the customers/consumers best and decisions can be made in a more consensus-driven way with input and agreement between all stakeholder functions.

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Beware of Short-term Management, Not the Short-term Investor

Harvard Business Review

Moreover, I fail to see any argument why such short-term traders, by themselves, destroy value for the economy as a whole. Clearly, some of these traders could get very rich even while others lose money, but these trades — unless they influence operators within companies — amount to little more than robbing Peter to pay Paul.

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A Blueprint for Digital Companies’ Financial Reporting

Harvard Business Review

Investors, therefore, look not just for reported revenues but for drivers behind the revenues, especially because digital companies’ operating activities often differ from their revenue-generating activities. The first category should describe the amount spent on supporting current operations.

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How to Improve Your Finance Skills (Even If You Hate Numbers)

Harvard Business Review

But having a grasp of terms like EBITDA and net present value are important no matter where you sit on the org chart. The most important concepts to grasp are “how to measure profitability, EBITDA, operating income, revenue, and operating expenses,” he says. The Refresher: Net Present Value.

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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

” PE firms typically take three types of value increasing actions — financial engineering, governance engineering, and operational engineering. These value-increasing actions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is likely that certain firms emphasize some of the actions more than others. (We