Finance and investing

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...

Times change and markets transform themselves overnight. The half-life of common wisdom is shorter than ever. But top private equity firms have distilled a set of institutional habits that boost the likelihood of their success. What’s critical to this success? Attitude. PE leaders take pains to foster a “results-oriented mind-set”. In short, that means creating […]

Managers should make environmental investments for the same reason they make other investments: because they expect them to deliver positive returns or to reduce risks.

Risk heat maps can miss critical weaknesses.

Product companies often try to differentiate themselves by offering ancillary services. Many struggle to make money at it.

I recently sat down with Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures. He writes one of my favorite VC blogs, Thinking about Thinking, named after a course that both of us had the chance to take many years back at Harvard College. As part of my ongoing interview series investigating what lies at the center […]

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.

Is the diversity created by mass migration a good thing for economic growth? To find out, a pair of researchers mobilized a large-scale dataset on international...

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, […]

A few years ago, while I was a first-year Ph.D. student in the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University, I had a business idea. I had taken two excellent courses on microelectronics, and decided that I could build a business around them in my native Nigeria. As a college student in Nigeria, I had wanted […]

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

For visionary CEOs in the for-profit finance sector, a giant business opportunity is emerging: connecting entrepreneurs and their organizations with the resources they need to create lasting social change. Since the late 1980s, the citizen sector has taken off and experienced rapid growth in terms of productivity and impact. The financial industry has not kept […]

For the first 40-plus years of their existence, the federal securities laws did not require or prohibit specific managerial practices in the operation of business, other than a business in one of a handful of closely regulated industries. But with the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, the SEC is equipped to […]

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

Six years ago, Google's IPO was the most hotly anticipated public offering of the year. But in classic Google style, the offering was neither typical...

It's about knowing how to reallocate - and deallocate - resources.

Dear Google, Eric Schmidt recently said, "CIOs are trapped in a 1980's architecture." Actually, the world is trapped in a 1970's architecture: a financial...

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

Visits to the toy store were a lot different for Jim Clayton since he took the job as president of Playto Industries. Long lines at the checkout counter used to infuriate him. Now they delighted him because they signaled a boom in sales for Playto. Trips up and down the aisles used to be part […]