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When Cost-Plus Pricing Is a Good Idea

Harvard Business Review

Cost-plus pricing is a lot like the romance novel genre, in that it’s widely ridiculed yet tremendously popular. Almost every manager I know will claim they hate pricing based only on costs. The markup is stipulated by the buyer, as is often the case with government contracts, or it can be chosen by the manager. (I

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Why HR Really Does Add Value

Harvard Business Review

Adding legitimacy to this skepticism are new technologies that enable automation of routine transactions, offshoring and shared service organizations that specialize in managing many tactical elements of HR. Within the first year of our effort net sales increased 27 percent while fixed costs were reduced by 40 percent.

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Why Tesco’s Strengths Are No Longer Good Enough

Harvard Business Review

Successful companies are notoriously prone to pursuing tactical fixes rather than confronting strategic problems. They exhort their people to try harder, introduce overhead cost reduction programs, and reorganize – anything rather than admit that their strategy needs an overhaul. How did this happen?

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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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