N2Growth Blog

NOVEMBER 10, 2010

It was Andy Grove the former Chairman and CEO of Intel and Time Magazine’s 1997 Man of the Year who said “You have to take action; you can’t hesitate or hedge your bets. A close examination of truly great leaders will reveal that, to the one, they all have a strong bias toward action.

Blog 387

Blog Learning-by-Doing CEO Strategy 387

Strategy Driven

MAY 12, 2018

Watching Dragon’s Den is great for getting tips on how to pitch, an insight into what kind of questions you may get asked and probably most importantly- what not to do. In Billions, he is taking on Axelrod, a (corrupt) hedge fun tycoon. That’s what the brave entrepreneurs on Dragons Den have to do. Think you can take on the dragons?

Entrepreneur 50

Entrepreneur Gordon Supply Chain Advertising 50

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 10, 2017

Many investment banks and hedge funds operate this way, as do some law firms, consulting outfits, and tech titans. The ethos is up-or-out, sink-or-swim, rank-and-yank. It’s a tough environment, but it’s the right environment for talented people who aspire to be superstars. “They are 100 times better.”

Health Care 15

Health Care How To Hedge Environment 15

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 21, 2018

Let’s say the chief security officer for an oil and gas company is deciding how to allocate their budget across multiple locations and assets. Beginning with Criticality, they might ask, “How critical is the oil pipeline in Abuja, Nigeria, to the company’s overall operations?” Here’s an example.

Tools 12

Tools Risk Management Budgeting SWOT 12

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 23, 2017

” People in industries as different as commercial real estate, pharma, biotech startups, hedge funds, and public school districts worried about how to transform a competitive, star-driven culture into a collaborative one when they had no power to juggle financial rewards and no influence over promotion decisions.

Payback Period 8

Payback Period How To Real Estate Hedge 8

N2Growth Blog

AUGUST 12, 2010

Decisioning by consensus usually results in no decision being made, or an intellectually dishonest, watered-down decision that is so full of compromises, hedges and caveats that a non-decision might have been preferable. Once a decision has been made, it's up to the team to figure out how to make it work. consensus kills teams [.]

Consensus 388

Consensus Team Building Blog Team 388

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

This article will show you how to reinvent your network, by managing these three critical dimensions. Burt asked the managers to write down their best ideas about how to improve business operations, and then he asked two ex­ecutives at the company to rate the quality of these ideas. Most-senior people in your company.

How To 8

How To Diversity Letter Learning-by-Doing 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 27, 2014

After using borrowed money in the 1980s and 1990s, then opening up a hedge fund in 2004, he has since 2011 basically just been managing his own money. His response: “While I think using 13Fs to track hedge fund stock-pickers works great, in my mind it works less so for the activist guys.” Why’s that? So he goads them, incessantly.

Hedge 8

Hedge Venture Capitalist Letter Reputation 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2017

By comparison, online lenders face capital costs that can be higher than 10%, sourced from potentially fickle institutional investors like hedge funds. This amounts to putting a toe in the water, while keeping current operations relatively separate and pristine.

Banking 12

Banking Stage-Gate Credit Scoring Competitive Advantage 12

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2012

Managing risks — especially the hard-to-pin-down, moving-target risks that any financial trading operation has to cope with — inevitably involves arguing. You probably do want to accord different weights to the arguments of different people, although deciding how to do so (past track record? clarity of argument?)

Management 11

Management Risk Management Competitive Intelligence Hedge 11

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 24, 2012

The Kahn Academy, founded by Salman Kahn (a former hedge fund manager), is a not-for-profit, online venture that is currently revolutionizing K-12 education. If you want to know how, here is the obligatory TED video. Hart does not quite do what the Kahn Academy does but she operates in the same space. Want to get a taste?

Video 15

Video Education Christensen Hedge 15

Harvard Business Review

JULY 12, 2013

And recent research found that people are happier when they have different options for where and how to work. It''s not because everyone really does agree; it''s because companies don''t know how to handle reasoned disagreement, says Aneel Karnani of the University of Michigan. How to Escape from Bad Decisions Huffington Post.

Decentralization 8

Decentralization Advertising Hedge CEO 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 10, 2014

Many universities will figure out how to thrive under a new world order, but there are not-so-quiet alarm bells that suggest many will not. Presidents and provosts will tell you: operating budgets are tight. See comments by Clayton Christensen and Mark Cuban ). There are examples of universities forging ahead.

Real Estate 8

Real Estate Education Disruptive Innovation Asset Management 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 4, 2014

But they also know that reputations can damaged by more than the operational risks that can be managed with functional redundancies, or the financial risks that can be countered by hedging, investing in futures markets, and global currency diversification.

Reputation 9

Reputation Risk Management Supply Chain Crisis 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 20, 2013

They may not be like the big conglomerates of the 1960s — you can see how their portfolio of somewhat related business came about — but, in reality, the various divisions and business units do operate completely independently from one another. First, corporate C-suite executives are portfolio managers.

Strategy 8

Strategy P&L Engineering Cooper 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Also see psychologist Maria Konnikova’s 2013 Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Yet how do you actually do it, when life and livelihood generally depend on operating inside a box? In fact, read Nate Silver’s 2012 book, The Signal and the Noise : Why Most Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t.

Groupthink 9

Groupthink Emotional Intelligence Learning-by-Doing Hedge 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2014

Herbalife After Big Bet, Hedge Fund Pulls the Levers of Power The New York Times If you’re looking for the corporate-governance version of House of Cards, this is probably the closest you''ll get (though there''s no strategic murdering here, as far as I know). Because the attack was spotted early, the whole mess could have been avoided.

McGregor 8

McGregor Information Technology Crisis Management COO 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 2, 2012

But with the coming of Big Data, we are going to be operating very much out of our old, familiar ballparks. How do we act on that? Managers have little concept of how to use big data analytics, what they mean, and what to believe. What If Google Had a Hedge Fund? How to Repair Your Data. Take the flu example.

Hedge 8

Hedge System Health Care Transportation 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 19, 2017

This is partly due to the tendency to grow more than needed as a hedge against weather and disease and fluctuating wholesale and retail orders. Free food magazines that supermarkets such as the Co-operative in UK use to share food stories can also feature waste reduction tips and recipes to utilize leftovers. In the U.S.,

Retail 8

Retail Supply Chain Crisis Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

What we continue to struggle with is how to build this essential managerial muscle. I'd advise CEOs to start where they can make an immediate difference: change how they communicate to and engage with their investor base. Acting and communicating in this fashion will also start to attract long-term investors.

Long-term 9

Long-term CEO Short-term McKinsey 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 25, 2015

Business leaders believe a strong organizational culture is critical to success, yet culture tends to feel like some magic force that few know how to control. We’ve found that answering three questions can help transform culture from a mystery to a science: 1) How does culture drive performance? Insight Center.

Motivation 8

Motivation Company Airlines Learning-by-Doing 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 11, 2013

But my youngest uncle worked behind the scenes to make sure that his sons, Fred, Roy, and Bill, were given executive positions in the operating units despite their obvious shortcomings. Fred, Roy, and Bill never rose as high in the company as Ricky, who is now the chief operating officer. He makes his own decisions," I hedged.

Case Study 8

Case Study CEO Chief Operating Officer Real Estate 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2018

How to Plan for Brexit. When it comes to planning, multinationals shouldn’t apply quick fixes to mitigate short-term operational risks (for instance, financial hedging to manage exchange rate fluctuations, or cursory assessment of distributors to evaluate their supply chains).

Planning 8

Planning Supply Chain Strategic Planning Workshop 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 20, 2011

Plural Investments*, a hedge fund started several years ago, had a problem. When Matt Grossman started Plural Investments, his intention was to harness the best efforts of many smart, creative people rather than just rely on the genius of a single founder, as so many other hedge funds do. How to choose? So Kate set up a contest.

Power 15

Power Hedge Chief Operating Officer Kaplan 15

CO2

NOVEMBER 26, 2023

It’s better to explore many possible outcomes, barriers, and opportunities, and pre-decide how to act should key assumptions come to pass. You’ll know how to act no matter what the future holds. Agree upon what data to collect, how to collect it, and how to use it. The more democratic the process, the better.

Strategic Planning 78

Strategic Planning Planning Balanced Scorecard Mission Statement 78

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 10, 2018

Those analyses rely on publicly available data sources, but software providers have accumulated growing amounts of private data on almost every aspect of their customers’ technology, operations, people, and strategies. Active investors such as hedge funds seek to outperform the market and index providers.

Benchmarking 8

Benchmarking Software B2B GAAP 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

Great stories are credible, simple, consistent, and use both financial and nonfinancial metrics to link a long-term vision and firm values with a distinctive business strategy and focused operational priorities. They operated with a both/and mindset, seeking to deliver on immediate goals in a way that also built a sustainable future.

CEO 9

CEO Short-term Long-term EPS 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 23, 2015

These aren’t mom and pop operations anymore. We now have entire conferences dedicated to the analytics of our business and our basketball operations. We have a global audience that has an unending thirst for mobile content, and a sophisticated CRM database that allows us to be a state-of-the-art marketing operation.

Price 8

Price Team Sports Franchising 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

We rightfully add safety systems to things like planes and oil rigs, and hedge the bets of major banks, in an effort to encourage them to run safely yet ever-more efficiently. The reasons are rooted partly in the pernicious nature of complexity, and partly in the way that human beings psychologically respond to risk.

Banking 8

Banking Crisis Hedge System 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 14, 2011

Leaders need to draw up a list of all the bad things that can happen, build cash reserves, hedge, and acquire options, to prepare for the worst. He went and lived with the Eskimos to learn how to run dog sledges in harsh conditions. Andy Grove of Intel went around "looking for the black cloud in the silver lining."

Hedge 15

Hedge Collins Open-book Teamwork 15

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 19, 2012

Suddenly, chief diversity officers in corporations around the US started inviting me to speak to their CEOs on how to drive innovation through diversity. In many cases it dramatically changed how a company thought about both diversity and innovation. That single conversation changed everything for me. Yahoo declined (as did others).

Succession 17

Succession Diversity Open-book Innovation 17

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 5, 2013

Fortunately, there's a rich source of lessons on how to thrive in an unpredictable world, and it has been cranking out success stories for 3.5 Adaptable systems make multiple copies of everything and modify the copies to hedge against uncertainty. Even the best of us are horrible at predicting the future. billion years. Redundancy.

Decentralization 9

Decentralization Real Estate Brand Uncertainty 9

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 11, 2015

The debate over how to reverse ever-increasing income inequality has moved front and center in the Democratic presidential campaign. This “limit” is another license to manipulate the stock market for the benefit of company executives and hedge-fund managers.

Proposal 8

Proposal Hedge Safe Harbor Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 16, 2018

The competition for talent will be especially intense for companies for whom advanced analytics forms a core part of their proposition — think e-commerce giants, hedge funds and complex system engineers. What they do need are analyses that solve key commercial and operational problems. So how to get started? Not so much.

Analysis 8

Analysis How To Tools Hedge 8