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Why We Need to Update Financial Reporting for the Digital Era

Harvard Business Review

The market caps of just four companies, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, now exceed $3 trillion. Their combined assets of $944 billion are an order of magnitude lower than the combined assets of $7,700 billion of the largest 3,177 companies in 1986, when the aggregate market capitalization reached $3 trillion for the first time.

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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

Specifically, our analysis found that the net benefits to ranchers ranged from $18 million to $34 million (12% to 23% of revenues) in net present value projected over 10 years. For slaughterhouses and retailers (Brazilian operations), we also projected positive benefits: $20 million to $120 million (0.01% to 0.1%

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Only the CEO Can Make the Big Bets

Harvard Business Review

But instead of trusting our "educated gut" and making the bet, we used traditional market research to ask customers in those segments what they thought about the idea right now! And using net-present-value estimates for "beginning" ideas is nuts. Skating to where the puck is now is not being customer-driven.

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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

Marketing is in the midst of an ROI revolution. The arrival of advanced analytics and plentiful data have allowed marketers to demonstrate return on investment with a degree of precision that’s never been possible before. To date, however, the reality of marketing analytics has fallen short of the promise.

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What Private Equity Investors Think They Do for the Companies They Buy

Harvard Business Review

We also know that private equity funds have outperformed public equity markets over the last three decades , even after the fees they charge are accounted for. ” PE firms typically take three types of value increasing actions — financial engineering, governance engineering, and operational engineering.

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The Big Trends Changing Community Development

Harvard Business Review

Three lines of progress are crossing, and rapidly reshaping how businesses and nonprofits together strengthen the locales in which they operate. Take the example of child sponsorships, highly popular as a marketing tool for many NGOs. This is what is going on now in community development.

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Why Is an App Worth as Much as a Small Oil Field?

Harvard Business Review

While on the surface, the dirty business of fossil fuels is nothing like Silicon Valley, many in the oil business have moved beyond the standard net present value (NPV) model for assessing the merit of investments. Consider the rapid progress Facebook has made on mobile, not only domestically, but in emerging markets.

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