Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

For example] the longer term payback on solar helps us get to scale down the road.". We worship internal rates of return (IRR) to our detriment. The typical (but evolving) view is that all sustainability initiatives are either an expense and/or should only happen if they meet the strictest hurdle rate.

ROI 13

ROI IRR Power Payback Period 13

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 9, 2015

For example, “revenue” isn’t a cash-based number: A company can record revenue whenever it ships a good or delivers a service to a customer, whether or not the customer has paid the bill. Let’s look at an example: A midsize manufacturing company wants to know whether to invest in a new $10 million facility.

ROI 8

ROI Analysis Rate of Return Net Present Value 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 25, 2017

Nine months after program completion, we calculated the net rate of return to the company’s investment in PACE training for workers at roughly 250%. For example, Prabha, a 43-year-old widow from Bihar, was psychologically distressed and economically constrained after the death of her husband.

Company 9

Company Training Bottom-up Rate of Return 9

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

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

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

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

JULY 31, 2014

Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach For America , and Linda Rottenberg, who founded Endeavor are just two well-known examples. A relatively new instrument called a social impact bond is a powerful example of how this might be done. If not, the investors receive a lower return and risk losing their capital.

Bond 9

Bond Education Finance Video 9

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 16, 2012

For example, a market downturn is a great time to repurchase stock or to introduce a new marketing campaign against weakened competitors. Strategic cash provides protection against downsides (such as disruptive technologies, economic recessions, and market turmoil) and also offers the opportunity to capture upsides.

Company 13

Company Cost of Capital Finance Long-term 13

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 8, 2018

One school of thought held that, for microfinance to scale and attract and maintain commercial capital, it needed to show that it could achieve market rates of return. For example, LendStreet helps highly indebted consumers pay off their loans such that the majority of the economic savings is passed to consumers.

Microfinance 8

Microfinance IPO Real Estate Industry 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). Bill Ackman's hedge fund Pershing Square, for example, has $9 billion in assets under management and fewer than ten investment professionals.

Disruptive Innovation 14

Disruptive Innovation Hedge Venture Capitalist Venture Funding 14

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 21, 2012

The difference between 0% and 1%, for example, is much more salient than that between 10% and 11%, and the difference between 99% and 100% looms much larger than that between 89% and 90%. It is only when punters bet on favorites (with odds shorter than 4/1) or long shots (with odds longer than 9/1) that they get into difficulties.

Tversky 11

Tversky Kahneman Rate of Return Sports 11

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 14, 2011

That is, allowing more failure should increase the overall rate of return. The problem Capecchi faced, for example, was that he was innovating in an area that people were unconvinced was a solution for anything. The difficulty with this argument is that it does not tell us what mechanism we should use to tolerate more failure.

Rate of Return 14

Rate of Return Innovation Diversity Learning-by-Doing 14

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 13, 2013

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. For example, the MCC awarded $547 million to the Government of Ghana to build roads and ferries to get farm goods to market.

Long-term 8

Long-term Due Diligence Metrics Cost-Benefit Analysis 8

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

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

But what much of the VC world might not realize, is that female-led firms may have a higher rate of return on average than male-led firms. First Round Capital, for example, touts its success at funding more women entrepreneurs than the national average.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur Sample Rate of Return 8

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

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 21, 2016

Hoping to alleviate their concerns, this article also provides concrete examples of how sustainability benefits the bottom line. For example, Bunge, an agribusiness firm, reported a $56 million quarterly loss in its sugar and bioenergy segments due to drought in 2010. ” Improving risk management. Fostering innovation.

Supply Chain 8

Supply Chain Price Loyalty Efficiency 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 22, 2015

. “It’s one of the more popular ways that managers calculate marketing ROI,” says Avery, pointing out that other common ones include calculating the investment payback period, calculating an internal rate of return, and using net present value analysis. ” The company sells each pair of flip flops for $24.00.

Payback Period 8

Payback Period Fixed Costs Analysis Price 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 28, 2018

For 401(k)s to be effective, for example, contributions must be made consistently throughout a worker’s career. Even when contributions are made, 401(k)s tend to earn subpar returns on average due to limited investment strategies and high administrative expenses. In practice, people tend to make contributions sporadically.

Asset Management 8

Asset Management Crisis Cost Planning 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 9, 2015

Regular attendance at a weekly study group, for example, is scored higher than signing a petition. Jeremy Langill, All Saints’ Director of Youth Ministry, offered the example of an All Saints kid who was consistently engaged in one youth program, but uninvolved in all others. But these two objectives are undoubtedly aligned.

Drucker 8

Drucker Objective Self-aware Rate of Return 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 21, 2018

One next-generation example already available today is YieldStreet, which offers a wide variety of debt investments—including real estate, marine finance, and litigation finance–that have generated an internal rate of return in excess of 12.5% on half a billion dollars invested on the platform to date.

Real Estate 9

Real Estate Rate of Return Finance Innovation 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 11, 2016

The second is to continue demonstrating that the case for reducing energy use is often very strong – that the rates of return for building green buildings, retrofitting buildings, and recommissioning HVAC systems is often in the double digits. Business seeking to take these steps don’t have to do so alone.

Policies 10

Policies Rate of Return Cooper Delegation 10

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%. Consider an investment strategy where you short stocks in the food sector during times of drought and purchase food stocks during times of heavy rain.

Company 8

Company Porter Forrester Simon 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 8, 2018

We believe that business-friendly candidates could win, but companies should make sure that their Mexico investments have an acceptable rate of return even under this populist scenario. When it comes to Brazil, the economy is picking up.

Market Risk 8

Market Risk Marketing Supply Chain Company 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

If we conclude that an industry is a natural monopoly, so competition in that industry just cannot work, we need to resort to price or rate-of-return regulation; we do this for utilities. Turning to today’s tech firms, one example is requiring disclosure of political ads and who paid for them. Take Facebook, for example.

Policies 8

Policies Airlines Politics Proposal 8