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

Harvard Business Review

If you’re not a numbers person, finance is daunting. But having a grasp of terms like EBITDA and net present value are important no matter where you sit on the org chart. Stop avoiding finance because you’re afraid of numbers. Think of it this way, “Finance is the way businesses keep score.

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When It Pays to Think Like a Finance Manager

Harvard Business Review

If you want approval for a new project — purchasing new equipment or computer systems, applying for a patent, building a new store — chances are you need your company’s finance department on board. To get the green light, it helps to understand how finance people think. Finance & Accounting Tool.

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Still Many Ways to Skin a Capital Cost

Harvard Business Review

To make sure they're comparing apples to apples, they discount those future cash flows to arrive at their net present value. That's the finding of a new survey on how financial professionals determine their cost of capital, presented in a separate post on HBR.org today.

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Hospital Budget Systems Are Holding Back Innovation

Harvard Business Review

These barriers, however, can be overcome by changing how hospitals acquire new technology and by providing incentives to units to use digital innovations to provide more effective and efficient care. Barrier 1: Unaligned budgeting units. Hospitals are typically organized by clinical departments (e.g., pharmacy, radiology, pathology).

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Shape Strategy With Simple Rules, Not Complex Frameworks

Harvard Business Review

That system was efficient, but the new management team decided that, at this moment in its history, the company needed adaptability more than efficiency. The Brazilian railway authority had issued detailed investment guidelines that left local employees with little scope to exercise their creativity or judgment. Fostering coordination.

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A Blueprint for Digital Companies’ Financial Reporting

Harvard Business Review

Based on disclosures following this blueprint, a smart analyst can project a firm’s future revenues, estimate outlays required to sustain the firm’s business model, and calculate the present value of future cash flows. The analyst can then top that valuation with the option values of moonshot projects.

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Why Those Guys Won the Economics Nobels

Harvard Business Review

He got his PhD at Yale under Shiller’s supervision in 1984, but since then he has also done a lot of work expanding on Fama’s ideas about risk and return, some of it co-authored with Fama’s son-in-law and University of Chicago finance colleague, John Cochrane. When the Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences (a.k.a. It goes back to the 1970s.

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