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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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Five Common Strategy Mistakes

Harvard Business Review

Connecting the dots between his classic frameworks ( the five forces , for example) and his latest thinking (the five tests of strategy) gave me a new understanding of the most common mistakes that can derail a company's strategy. Understanding Porter's strategy fundamentals will help you to avoid them. Mistake #1. Mistake #4.

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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. 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. But a market never buys anything. Only customers buy.

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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

Take, for instance, a group of companies that currently have high returns on invested capital (ROIC). If you follow that group over time, you would see their ROICs revert back toward the cost of capital. This means that an extreme outcome, good or bad, will be followed by an outcome that has an expected value closer to the mean.

Skills 15
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How Companies Can Use Investors to Their Advantage

Harvard Business Review

It would implement targets linked to shareholder value, including ROE and ROIC. Thanks to this experience, strategy making at Nikon today has become a process of co-creation with investors.