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How Marketers Can Avoid Big Data Blind Spots

Harvard Business Review

If you were looking for a theme song that captures marketing today, you could do worse than pick Queen’s anthem “Under Pressure.” Marketing is under pressure to show results, cut costs, and drive growth. Marketers should welcome it. In our experience, marketing can increase marketing ROI (MROI) by 15 – 20 percent.

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Will You Be Writing Off Your Investment in Egypt?

Harvard Business Review

For decades multinational corporations have poured hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign investments into emerging markets , sometimes preferring the investment climate of "stable" authoritarian regimes over "messy" democracies. Certainly the money at stake is substantial.

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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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What If Investors Who Held Their Shares Longer Got More Voting Power?

Harvard Business Review

But I long for actions that go beyond admonitions to managers and boards to do better, that give both parties a better chance to stand up to capital markets players, like activist hedge funds, pressuring them to become too short-term focused. The Refresher: Net Present Value. Related Video.

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Is Your Business Biased Against Innovation?

Strategy Driven

Many conventional metrics we use to estimate value are based on faulty assumptions. Net present value [NPV] is a case in point. The logic of NPV is to project cash flows into the future and then discount those flows back into today’s dollars at a given cost of capital.