10 Reasons Why Every Manager Should take a Finance Course

Great Leadership By Dan

We just finished a “ Finance and Accounting for the Non-Financial Manager ” program this week for a large client. You’ll understand that the people or companies that buy your products are not your only customers; the shareholders that buy your stock are customers too. Finance and accounting is very sexy! finance leadership business acumen finance and accounting for leaders finance

How to Launch a Product Like a Rock Star

Strategy Driven

Here’s a quick one-question quiz: What is the most important requirement for a successful product launch? A great product. A market that wants a great product (Product-Market Fit). It’s the complete plan to drive sales of a new product.

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Could Your Business Survive a Downturn? Here’s How to Bolster the Finances of Your Company

Strategy Driven

There are plenty of ways in which your business can invest in order to improve its finances. This will make your business more financial stable because it will allow you to get to appeal to more customers and, hopefully, sell more products or services.

How to Host a Productive Generational Conversation

Nathan Magnuson

Here are some ways to make the conversation a productive one. Finance doesn’t want to pay for “unproductive” time. Invest the time and planning now to hold productive, meaningful and engaging generational discussions.

How Big Data Brings Marketing and Finance Together

Harvard Business Review

Rajamannar involved finance early. To spearhead analytic efforts, he assigned a finance person – who was already embedded in marketing – to create an ROI evaluation framework and integrated her deeper into the marketing function. Advertising Finance Marketing

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The Future of Cities Depends on Innovative Financing

Harvard Business Review

In traditional financing models, it’s just not possible for investors to see their way to a financial return based on some abstract added value of the integrated whole. This is where a new financial product, social impact bonds (also known as pay-for-success contracts), can play a role.

Financing our Foodshed

CEO Blog

While there, I met a friend who stopped by his house - Carol Peppe Hewitt who had just written a book - Financing Our Foodshed - Growing Local Food with Slow Money. It was the 4th of July here. I suppose it was in Canada too but it just had no meaning there.

Activity doesn’t always equal productivity

Reiter Thinks

Filed under: Inspiration , mentor , Money Matters , Success Tagged: mentor , news , Personal Finance , personal success , Success. Inspiration mentor Money Matters Success news Personal Finance personal successPeople often say things like, “She’s such a hard worker&#.

Financial Fluency and A Leadership Opportunity

Great Leadership By Dan

In most companies it is easy to create a model of revenues and production. It had categories like geographical, product type, channel etc. finance leadership Alan E. Shelton finance and accounting for leaders financeGuest post by Alan E.

How to Boost Your Team’s Productivity

Harvard Business Review

In today’s complex and collaborative workplace, the real challenge is to manage not just your personal workload but the collective one, says Jordan Cohen , a productivity expert and the Senior Director of Organizational Effectiveness, Learning & Development at Weight Watchers.

Turning The Tables On Your Failing Business

Strategy Driven

To make determining what the problem is easier, here are some areas to focus on: strategy, customers, team members, products/services, and finance. Focus on finance. Have you lost the motivation and passion that you had for your business and products or services?

Ken Rees (Think Finance) in “The Corner Office”

First Friday Book Synopsis

Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Ken Rees, president and chief executive of Think Finance, a developer of financial products. Bob's blog entries Adam Bryant Corner Office column Ken Rees SundayBusiness section The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed The New York Times Think Finance Times Books

“Increasing Productivity From an Employee Who Has Struggled For Years”

Create Learning

Because they will see the increase in production and on-time completion of projects. Largely in part to our 1:1 meetings, Michael was able to assist me in increasing the productivity of an employee who has struggled for years.

Prototype Your Product, Protect Your Brand

Harvard Business Review

Designers and entrepreneurs have been experimenting with live prototyping — putting unfinished product ideas in the context of real markets and real customer situations — for years, and now bigger businesses have begun to catch on. Many executives, eager to avoid over-investing in the wrong ideas, are intrigued by this approach, but they’re leery of putting unpolished products and services out in the market. Innovation Product development Risk management Tech industry

The Internet of Things Will Change Your Company, Not Just Your Products

Harvard Business Review

Here are some of the challenges that I’ve observed: Product management. Successful IoT plays require more than simply adding connectivity to a product and charging for service — something many companies don’t immediately understand. Finance. Finance teams, which are not known for their flexibility to begin with, often have trouble changing their traditional planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes to accommodate radically new IoT business models.

Keeping It Simple

N2Growth Blog

Rather simplification makes for a more productive and efficient effort that is often more savvy than other more complex alternatives. Another benefit of simplicity is that it serves as a key driver of focus, which enables greater efficiency, productivity, and better overall performance.

Social Media's Productivity Payoff

Harvard Business Review

On the contrary, they may become the most powerful tools yet developed to raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers — the kind of workers who help drive innovation and growth, and who are going to be in increasingly short supply. This assumes, of course, that time saved by communicating and collaborating via social technology is not used for viewing videos of cute kittens, but is dedicated to the most productive uses. Communication Productivity Social media

A Quiet Revolution in Clean-Energy Finance

Harvard Business Review

In the last year, however, early-stage investments in clean energy production technologies have fallen substantially (see the table at the end of this piece for more detail). Solyndra's example has been particularly stark: it raised over $1 billion in equity finance in addition to receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, all prior to a cancelled IPO and the recent FBI investigation upon its bankruptcy.

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Unlocking the Full Potential of Your Business Software

Strategy Driven

Despite Google Docs being a free-to-use cloud application, many people fail to realise the full potential of a cloud-based office productivity suite: collaboration. You might think about hiring a new employee because it seems like your finance department isn’t being productive enough.

Sometimes “Small Data” Is Enough to Create Smart Products

Harvard Business Review

If you build a team that brings in operations, sales, finance, and the executive suite, you are more likely to figure out where the real bottlenecks and opportunities are, and you are more likely to come up with practical solutions that actually start solving them. When thinking about practical applications for artificial intelligence in your business, it’s easy to assume that you need vast amounts of data to get started.

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How Sleep Became the Enemy of Productivity

Harvard Business Review

While these firms are located, at least in part, in Detroit, The Guardian''s Rose Hackman argues that they problematically use the city to advertise products only people in other cities can afford: "They present a romantic, nostalgic take on grit – a highly effective spin, which presents poverty and urban decay as cool." But for anyone who has pioneered an art form or product, then tried to make a business out of it, the rise and fall of Will Vinton will be heartbreaking.

In Product Development, Let Your Customers Define Perfection

Harvard Business Review

In an era of high-stakes innovation, there is no clearer illustration of how to develop new products the right way (and the wrong way) than a tale of two car companies. How Porsche got the product right. That was heartening to the company’s executives and product designers.

Big Data In Your Shampoo?

Mills Scofield

In the case of the former, they typically would want to know why and how could they innovate their current product to regain their position as number one. Product Intelligence: What Is It? Product Intelligence makes the stars align, ensuring that the relevant signals (i.e.:

M&A; Without Buying the Company

N2Growth Blog

Other companies are in need of cash and are willing to sell certain contracts as a financing vehicle. Financing - M&A Operations & Strategy Acquisitions Creative Acquisitions M&A Mergers mergers and acquisitions Mike Myatt N2growth

Leadership and Product Management

Lead on Purpose

Product managers hold a unique position in the company: they depend on people from other groups, but they do not have managerial authority over those people (in most cases). Product management — at every level — is a leadership role within the organization.

Capital vs. Influence

N2Growth Blog

Financing - M&A Capital vs. Influence Mike Myatt N2growth Private Equity venture capitalBy Mike Myatt , Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth . I have watched entrepreneurs and executives initially trivialize the value of influence in a capital transaction, only to regret it down the road.

How IBM, Intuit, and Rich Products Became More Customer-Centric

Harvard Business Review

Now, every company of any scale and in any sector wants to be closer to its customers, to understand them more deeply, and to tailor their products and services to serve them more precisely. They followed a sequence that resulted in new products or major updates to products every year or two.

Stop Trying to Predict Which New Products Will Succeed

Harvard Business Review

When is it possible to predict a product’s success? How you answer this question may be the most important factor in how you design your product development process — and, ultimately, in whether your business succeeds or fails. Is market performance predictable for a specific product or class of products? Outcomes will usually be much worse than predicted, and we will waste design, production, and distribution resources. Product development

80% of Companies Don’t Know If Their Products Contain Conflict Minerals

Harvard Business Review

In 2010 Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which included a provision, Section 1502, mandating that companies listed on American stock markets disclose whether their products contain conflict minerals: tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold originating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or adjoining countries. Firms could also admit that their products contained DRC conflict minerals, but thus far none have done so.

The Silent Killer of New Products: Lazy Pricing

Harvard Business Review

72% of all new products don’t meet their revenue targets. HBR: Is new products’ high rate of failure really a pricing problem, or does it reflect a more fundamental innovation problem? However, our experience has been that [when a product fails] it’s not a technology problem or a pure R&D problem — it is really around marketing, customer segments, and of course pricing. They build a product hoping to monetize, but not knowing whether they will be able to.

Start-ups: Before You Launch Your Product, Start With a Service

Harvard Business Review

Most industry observers take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. But from where I sit, bootstrapping products with services is a tried and true method. Today, AgilOne’s product is a software-as-a-service platform. Much of what the company learned about its customers in the services mode has been developed into its product, although a good percentage of revenues still comes from services.

Monday’s Preparation Brings Friday’s Success

Ron Edmondson

Sermon, write quarterly newsletter, prepare for staff meeting, prepare for finance meeting, etc.) I find the more deliberate I am to pre-plan my day and week the more productive I feel at the end of the week.

Increase Your Company's Productivity With Social Media

Harvard Business Review

She set up an advisory council with senior leaders from across the company — business units, HR, IT, legal, finance, marketing, and more — to create a shared vision on how "going social" would improve employee and organizational productivity. Once your program is up and running, be sure to profile early successes in using social media to increase productivity. A growing number of companies talk about the benefits of adopting web 2.0

Are They Contractors or Staff?

Women on Business

For the IRS to deem the person an independent contractor you tell them the scope of work and what the end product needs to be and the contractor decides how to complete it. One of the more complicated tasks for a business owner is being able to correctly classify the people working for you. As a one man shop. it it’s fairly easy, when you pull someone in it is a temporary arrangement. As a larger operation, it gets a bit tougher.

If You Don???t Lead Innovation, You Aren???t a Leader. (And you won???t stay in business very long.)

Engaging Leader

Conventional wisdom says creativity is the realm of advertising, and innovation the job of product development. We wouldnt expect to find the IT or Finance departments bursting with innovation.

Prevent Spreadsheets from Strangling Your Startup

Harvard Business Review

Building a new product or service in itself is not adequate, even if it’s a brilliant innovation. Second, who will be willing to pay a premium for your product or service? Is the thing that differentiates your product critical to the customer?

The Right Way to Prepare Your Budget

Harvard Business Review

This advice, adapted from the book Finance Basics , will help you better understand how to create a useful budget. Perhaps it would make sense to increase your sales projections for those products, particularly if your sales reps are optimistic about the prospects for more sales.

What Angel Investors Value Most When Choosing What to Fund

Harvard Business Review

So Shai Bernstein, an assistant professor of finance at Stanford’s GSB, and Arthur Korteweg of USC’s Marshall School of Business devised an experiment to identify what characteristics do distinguish startups. ” Founders Entrepreneurial finance ArticleSteven Moore.

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Community Financing Breathes Life into a New U.S. Manufacturing Firm

Harvard Business Review

It would be unrealistic to imagine a return to low-value-add, low-skill, low-wage production in the commodity industries that employed millions of Americans a century ago. Seed-stage financing for technology start-ups fell from 16% of total annual private equity investment in 1995 to just 1% in 2002 and recovered to only 4% in 2011, according to data compiled by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Competition Finance Manufacturing

SAP's product side is the problem « Crossderry Blog

Crossderry Blog

Hasso stalks the product halls? There’s one more challenge: SAP hasn’t been honest about what is working on the product side. And the leadership let them… Hasso’s right: Leo couldn’t call BS on the product side effectively enough. Share this: StumbleUpon Digg Reddit Filed under: PMO Tagged: | Hasso Plattner , Innovation , Jim Hagemann Snabe , Leadership , Leo Apotheker , Product Development.