Accounting

The key to selling well-designed, well-crafted products at high margins is the aesthetic coherence of the company and its goods. Embodying that ideal...

Few, if any, articles on finance that have appeared in HBR have enjoyed the influence of the 1962 article reprinted here as a “Classic.” Gordon Donaldson’s analysis of how many companies haphazardly established their debt capacity, and his careful explanation of what he considered a better way, seemed to strike a chord among corporate administrative […]

If we could better track the value of human capital, employees would be better off.

Less than a decade after the frantic merger activity of the late 1960s, we are again in the midst of a major wave of corporate acquisitions. In contrast to the 1960s, when acquirers were mainly freewheeling conglomerates, the merger movement in the 1970s includes such long-established giants of U.S. industry as General Electric, Gulf Oil, […]

E-liability accounting has helped a Singapore-based tire manufacturer and a German cement producer reduce their emissions.

Taking responsibility for something one is incapable of doing has never been a particularly good idea. Politicians get in trouble for promising their...

Even after a raft of reforms, corporate accounting remains murky. Here’s what you need to know to evaluate a company accurately.

You've been ordered to reduce overhead by 10%, 20%, or even (wince) 30%. How do you do it? First, don't expect to reach your target with a single big...

In recent years, the leaders of American companies have been barraged with attacks on their investment policies. Critics accuse American executives of shortsightedness and point out that managers in Japan and Europe often fix their vision on more distant horizons. Here, it is claimed, managers pay too much attention to quarterly earnings reports and not […]

The subject of transfer pricing doesn’t normally excite many people, but when your transfer pricing system is less than perfect, life gets interesting. We at Bellcore first got interested in transfer pricing in 1983. That’s the year before AT&T was broken up and Bellcore was being formed as the centralized organization supporting the seven regional […]

Employees are constantly in motion—making sales calls or taking service trips; visiting an international office for a few days or relocating there for a few years; soaring across oceans in the corporate jet or heading across town in the company car. Typically, these activities are administered by an assortment of departments and vendors. But we […]

Last week, the Healthsouth Corporation became one of the first companies to adopt a bylaw that allows a shareholder to claim reimbursement of reasonable...

Consultant Frank Rohde describes a system for evaluating frontline workers' interactions with customers.

They don't use the financial tools they learned in B-school.

Improved measurement methods show marketing is losing its magic, say consultants Kevin J. Clancy and Randy L. Stone.

Bean counters can save the day.

Valuation used to be the province of finance specialists. That’s no longer true.

This article presents the research findings of a leading U.S. corporation, AT&T, on a series of important economic questions and issues, with an interpretation of the material by one of the company’s top executives. The subject is corporate earnings patterns in different industries, investment trends, the relation of profits and investment to GNP, and other […]

A new initiative, the International Sustainability Standards Board, holds promise.

This post was coauthored by Chris Curran and Howard Rubin. Dr. John Gray’s book, Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, which has sold over forty million copies, argues that the two sexes speak different languages. The good doctor even includes his Martian-to-Venusian phrase dictionary as a support to better communication. Likewise, IT executives […]