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

Harvard Business Review

In particular, we are interested in how many of their responses correlate with what academic finance knows and what it teaches. ” PE firms typically take three types of value increasing actions — financial engineering, governance engineering, and operational engineering.

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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. This notion, that risk is a desirable feature, can seem like sacrilege to anyone who’s taken an introductory finance course.

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The Most Common Mistake People Make In Calculating ROI

Harvard Business Review

Sure, you may know this already, but people who haven’t studied finance often find this statement confusing. Finance & Accounting Tool. Once the plant starts operating, for instance, you might need to spend an additional $2 million on inventory. Excerpted from. HBR TOOLS: Return on Investment. Joe Knight. Add to Cart.

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Hospital Budget Systems Are Holding Back Innovation

Harvard Business Review

operating rooms, recovery floors, emergency department), and ancillary departments (e.g., Consider, for example, a surgical patient who starts in the pre-operative area, then moves to the operating room, the post-anesthesia care unit, and the inpatient floor, with occasional side trips for imaging, testing, and physical therapy.

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Why Quants Should Manage Your Supply Chain Risk

Harvard Business Review

Because the fact that value is not guaranteed in the future lessens value in the present. This reduction in value is present and represents a cost today , not tomorrow. This is a concept fundamental to finance but that, for some reason, has not migrated into supply chain risk management.