Finance and investing

Lessons from one organization's digital transformation.

Recent news coverage of the cosmetic name change from AIG to AIU at the failed company's New York headquarters reminds us that a brand is a precious asset....

When we give voice to our setbacks, we can rebuild confidence and take back control of our journeys.

The key is knowing what your top price is—and having the discipline to stick to it.

A spate of articles and books about return on investment has appeared during the past two or three years. Improving company earnings in relation to the capital used to generate those earnings has become a matter of great concern to many top financial and general managers. Their concern is not surprising. About three years ago, […]

Figure out if you’ll make your money back.

And how technology is changing it now.

By now it’s well publicized—if not obvious—that many companies’ cost accounting systems are falling down on the job. They give managers incorrect product costing information, or they inundate managers with irrelevant cost information, or they fail to measure the things that really count. Strategies may be conceptually brilliant, but if they are based on faulty […]

Quarterly earnings numbers dominate the decisions of executives, analysts, investors, and auditors. Yet for all the attention paid to these numbers, they're...

And investors aren't always enthusiastic about it.

Venture capital hasn’t worked for a decade and must be radically restructured if it’s going to influence innovation—and make solid returns to investors.

By pooling the resources of the poor and by sharing information, religious and financial institutions can work together to change inner-city economies.

Everyone in business should understand how financial success is measured and how they, individually, make an impact. A Fortune 100 company we work with held a two-day class recently to teach various mid-level managers the foundational elements of finance. The class focused on how to read financial statements and then, using their own public GAAP […]

Four budgeting hacks from a financial advisor.

(Editor’s note: This post forms part of the month-long HBR Debate, “Finance: The Way Forward.” It is the third post on this week’s topic: “Who is regulation for — the individual or society?”) Who is regulation for? This is a question that always intrigued me ever since I got involved in my research passion: share […]

Something strange is happening in the debate about the U.S. federal budget deficit. Across the land, in books and on editorial pages, the message seems to be changing. In October 1987, Peter Peterson wrote in the Atlantic Monthly that the federal deficit is the centerpiece of many grim scenarios, including global depression, severe inflation, a […]

If you want to be successful, you have to harness the talent. The top private equity firms have a genius for hiring superior talent. All organizations need great people, but PE measures talent with one test only: performance. It’s not that private equity firms are heartless. Rather, their three- to five-year time horizon doesn’t allow […]

Five steps to ensure higher-quality data.