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Performance Measurement

Strategy Driven

Supplementing profits with ROIC and revenue growth is a step in the right direction to ensure that the profits a business earns are actually creating value, not simply over-consuming capital that another company could better deploy. However, profits, ROIC, and revenue growth are backward looking.

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Even for Companies, the U.S. Is Split Between Haves and Have-Nots

Harvard Business Review

companies’ return on invested capital (ROIC), and compare it with economy-wide ROIC estimates constructed by Deloitte. Economywide ROIC has trended downward since the 1980s, falling from above 6% in the mid-1960s to 5% in 1980, then to 3% in 1990, and to only a bit more than 1% by 2010. There are many.

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CEOs Don’t Care Enough About Capital Allocation

Harvard Business Review

” A quarter century later, not much seems to have changed: fewer than five out of the 100 CEOs on HBR’s 2014 list of best-performing CEOs even mention “return on capital” on their official biography — and none of those five lead companies listed in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) or in the EuroStoxx50. .”

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Five Common Strategy Mistakes

Harvard Business Review

Confusing marketing with strategy. But as important as it is to have insight into customers' needs, don't confuse marketing with strategy. What the marketing-only approach misses is that a robust strategy also requires a tailored value chain, a unique configuration of activities that best delivers that kind of value. Mistake #1.

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How Companies Can Use Investors to Their Advantage

Harvard Business Review

Then a new CFO joined the company: Masashi Oka, a financial industry veteran who had played a key role in transforming Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group-owned Union Bank in the US. It would implement targets linked to shareholder value, including ROE and ROIC. This time it was to investors that Oka looked. What he heard was uncomfortable.

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Don’t Turn Your Sales Team Loose Without a Strategy

Harvard Business Review

When formulating a strategy, markets and segments are important categories to consider. But a market never buys anything. To borrow a telecom industry metaphor, a deal with a customer is the “last mile” in connecting any strategy with business development efforts and marketplace results. Only customers buy.