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Joint Ventures Reduce the Risk of Major Capital Investments

Harvard Business Review

Driven by economies of scale, container ship size has been increasing for decades, with the largest ships now costing roughly $200 million. The latest nuclear reactor designs, promising higher safety, longer operating life, and lower operating costs, cost up to $25 billion after factoring in the huge budget overruns.

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What the Nonprofit Sector Needs to Reach Its Full Potential

Harvard Business Review

It doesn’t have one center of organization and imagination looking out at the far horizon to inspire and guide all of the component parts to get to a place together that none operating independently could ever get to on its own. Imagine eliminating all of the redundancies in fixed costs.

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3D Printing Will Revive Conglomerates

Harvard Business Review

Hailed in the 1960s as bastions of sophisticated management, they used cheap financing to acquire, then rationalize, many family-owned firms. Wall Street began charging a “conglomerate discount,” saying that diverse operations were hard to analyze with confidence. GE might be first to capitalize on this.

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4 Types of Activist Investors and How to Spot Them

Harvard Business Review

The success of an activist strategy is contingent upon placing a management team in an extremely reactive, frenzied and compromising position. Because by the time the activist has engaged senior management, they have already performed extensive due diligence on the company and have a detailed strategy they intend to pursue.

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The End of Traditional Ad Agencies

Harvard Business Review

The app is one part ideation engine, one part social media platform, and one part ad agency. In every part of the industry, the open innovation model is changing the economics of advertising by switching significant fixed costs to variable costs and sourcing creative from more relevant and, many times, lower cost sources.

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The U.S. Media’s Problems Are Much Bigger than Fake News and Filter Bubbles

Harvard Business Review

Like marketers, politicians obsess over messaging (what journalists would call “content”) and a few key metrics that historically have determined success: amount of television advertising, number of “foot soldiers,” intensity of get-out-the-vote operations, and voter demographics. An advertising-based model.

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