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Why Some Digital Companies Should Delay Profitability for as Long as They Can

Harvard Business Review

When your product can become more valuable to your customers over time, the way you prioritize building features and harvesting profits within a business needs to change. How can you continuously defer short term profitability to grow your network effect? The Refresher: Net Present Value. The list goes on.

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How to Quantify Sustainability’s Impact on Your Bottom Line

Harvard Business Review

But we recognize that, in many businesses, resources are often allocated according to short-term, bottom-line pressures. We found that sustainable and deforestation-free practices created significant financial benefits for all players in the industry’s value chain. of revenues). per kg of beef per hectare.

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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

To date, however, the reality of marketing analytics has fallen short of the promise. Just 36 percent of CMOs, for example, have quantitatively proven the short-term impact of marketing spend, according to the 2013 CMO Survey (and for demonstrating long-term impact, that figure drops to 32 percent).

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Will You Be Writing Off Your Investment in Egypt?

Harvard Business Review

In both places, we know the instability will worsen macroeconomic performance in the short term. If that is the case, and the faster growth generates higher profits for them over the long term, that might well compensate for any short-term losses from the disruption. Tunisia and Egypt are cases in point.

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What Xerox PARC Learned About Executing on Open Innovation

Harvard Business Review

By encouraging innovators to define and demonstrate their concepts concretely, the options approach provides both parties in an open innovation partnership with enough information to assess value, determine additional product development requirements, and reach a mutually beneficial agreement, efficiently. Net Present Value ).

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An HBR Refresher on Breakeven Quantity

Harvard Business Review

. “It’s one of the more popular ways that managers calculate marketing ROI,” says Avery, pointing out that other common ones include calculating the investment payback period, calculating an internal rate of return, and using net present value analysis. The fixed costs to advertise the flip flops are $2,000.

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

Harvard Business Review

” Laying out their data, they find that long-term oriented companies create more financial value and more jobs. I agree with their vision of a future in which more companies focus on the long term and become more productive for the world (their findings accord with my own work on the dangers of short-termism ).

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