Harvard Business Review

JUNE 22, 2015

Marketers often have to make the call on whether a certain marketing investment is worth the cost. Can you justify the price tag of the ad you want to buy or the marketing campaign you’re hoping to launch next quarter? The above is a simplified example but most companies use BEQ in a similar way.

Payback Period 8

Payback Period Fixed Costs Analysis Price 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 16, 2017

A recent NBER working paper documents that from 1985 to 2014 this trading strategy would have yielded a large annualized average rate of return of 9.2%. The food sector’s profitability is negatively correlated with drought because agricultural output hinges on climate conditions.

Company 8

Company Porter Forrester Simon 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2012

Since then, numerous studies have found evidence of the bias at racetracks and other sports betting markets all around the world. Indeed, it is probably the most discussed empirical regularity in sports gambling markets, and the literature documenting it now runs to well over a hundred scientific papers.

Tversky 11

Tversky Kahneman Rate of Return Sports 11

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 30, 2015

Then the management team takes that number and decides on the discount rate, or hurdle rate, that you have to exceed to justify an investment,” he says. In many businesses, the cost of capital is lower than the discount rate or the required rate of return. or 11% as the discount rate.

Cost of Capital 8

Cost of Capital Cost Finance Discount 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

We use market concentration as a proxy or a signal about whether a market is competitive. markets have in fact become significantly more concentrated over the past 20 or 30 years. One interpretation is that when a market gets more concentrated, that means it’s less competitive, so we have a problem. That seems fine.

Policies 8

Policies Airlines Politics Proposal 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 30, 2016

Microsoft’s recent Tay debacle is a perfect example of what happens when you don’t take machine learning “training” seriously enough. For example, just as with human drivers, impatient passengers in Uber autonomous vehicles might want their car driving faster and more aggressively than ordinary.

Review 8

Review Kaplan Kaizen Performance Review 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 13, 2013

Its primary social metric is the number of lives reached in base-of-pyramid markets. For grants focused on education, for example, its staff first identifies a set of results that can be immediately observed — such as school attendance, standardized test scores, and high school graduation.

Long-term 8

Long-term Due Diligence Metrics Cost-Benefit Analysis 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 21, 2016

Today’s executives are dealing with a complex and unprecedented brew of social, environmental, market, and technological trends. Hoping to alleviate their concerns, this article also provides concrete examples of how sustainability benefits the bottom line. These require sophisticated, sustainability-based management.

Supply Chain 8

Supply Chain Price Loyalty Efficiency 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 16, 2016

An examination of the telecom industry , for example, shows that the analytics leaders have posted three to five times higher returns on their big data investment than the typical telecom company. Lower returns cannot be simply chalked up to the fact that companies are not investing at scale.

Industry 8

Industry McKinsey Early Adopters Rate of Return 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 28, 2016

Engaging with your users on a regular basis — through reporting tools built into your product, online surveys, or focus groups, for example — is a necessary step for understanding, rather than assuming you know, their challenges and needs.

Tools 8

Tools Engineering Rate of Return Focus Group 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 31, 2014

Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach For America , and Linda Rottenberg, who founded Endeavor are just two well-known examples. Finally, innovation in the financial markets are funding novel approaches to address these problems. A relatively new instrument called a social impact bond is a powerful example of how this might be done.

Bond 10

Bond Education Finance Video 10

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 15, 2017

They particularly overpay when the interest rate – the rate of return required by the bank – is high, just as firms particularly repurchase when the stock price is low and thus the rate of return required by shareholders is high.

Short-term 8

Short-term Long-term Intangible Assets Rate of Return 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 26, 2012

Large pools of capital have been funding risky ventures since antiquity (for example, when the wealthy Marcus Crassus backed an upstart Roman general named Julius Caesar). Hedge fund investors who deploy capital in large and liquid markets can scale their time well.

Disruptive Innovation 14

Disruptive Innovation Hedge Venture Capitalist Venture Funding 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 14, 2011

That is, allowing more failure should increase the overall rate of return. While some policies, such as removing the ability of incumbent firms to use market power to harm entrepreneurial entry, do just that, there is only so much reward available. One mechanism involves directly lowering the costs of experiments.

Rate of Return 15

Rate of Return Innovation Diversity Learning-by-Doing 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 1, 2015

I believe similar strategies could dramatically increase the enrollment rate for retirement plans among employees by suggesting, for example, secure passwords. Technology can even impact how people feel about their investment returns. That’s a huge improvement from a simple digital fix.

Planning 8

Planning Short-term Long-term Policies 8