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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.

ROIC 62
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CEOs Don’t Care Enough About Capital Allocation

Harvard Business Review

The results can be impressive: if your firm’s return on invested capital is 8% and you have an 8% cost of capital, a 1% improvement in ROIC will increase firm value by 19%. There are just two ways to increase ROIC: improve operating profit (by increasing revenues or cutting costs) or invest capital more wisely.

CEO 8
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Untangling Skill and Luck

Harvard Business Review

We will define skill as "the ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance" and luck as "events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual." Take, for instance, a group of companies that currently have high returns on invested capital (ROIC). The first is to define the terms.

Skills 15
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What If Companies Managed People as Carefully as They Manage Money?

Harvard Business Review

Today’s executives spend a lot of time managing the balance sheet, despite the fact that it doesn’t represent their company’s scarcest resource. Financial capital is abundant but carefully managed; human capital is scarce but not carefully managed. How can we manage human capital better? Measure it.