Finance and investing

It's not the only startup to make that mistake.

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, […]

John Campbell explains modern asset pricing theory and the links between Fama, Hansen, and Shiller.

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 […]

Five of the 10 most valuable companies in the world today--Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft--derive much of their worth from their multisided...

(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 […]

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work. Last week I arrived home from work to see my 8th grade son toiling away on a science...

Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of potentially valuable innovations flop because the companies sponsoring them were using the fundamentally wrong logic in managing them. For instance, as Clayton Christensen recently described in the Harvard Business Review, they insist on valuing projects in terms of Net Present Value. A different approach, we’ve argued, is […]

To succeed in the world’s poorest markets, aim for much higher margins and prices than you thought were necessary—or possible.

Several years ago, my colleague Dave Ulrich and I looked at how leaders build value by building employee confidence in the future. Our findings bear revisiting...

Social ventures earn their stripes the same way private enterprises do.

Providing earnings guidance-publicly releasing managerial forecasts of a company's profits-has become a highly controversial practice, with critics ranging...

An intermediate step can help make the transition to outcomes-based payment for health care.

Economist Tyler Cowen argues complacency is on the rise.

Rigid plans just won't work anymore.

It's been only four years since First Rangeway Consulting went public, but to CEO Kenneth Charles, it seems like a lifetime. In the grand old days of...