Finance and investing

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 […]

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, […]

One study found that people were willing to pay about 21% more for a product when they were told it was crowdfunded.

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

In my last post, I talked about the ways you can use green data — footprinting information on your products and services up and down the value chain — to create enormous value for your company. As they say, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. And those with the best information can cut costs, […]

There may be fewer, but they'll be more useful.

In the wake of a series of gross corporate abuses around the turn of the century, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley, which was intended to make corporate...

In this article, Bob Zider, president of the Beta Group, a California-based firm that invests in commercializing new technologies, presents an analysis...

Citigroup’s appointment of Lloyd TSB’s Terri Dial to head its consumer banking operations is being heralded as part of “widespread changes” being implemented by CEO Vakrim Pandit. To this, I say: “Really?” Dial’s entire professional career has been in retail banking. How much of a change does she really represent? The banking industry is moribund. […]

For the last decade, the Gallup Organization has surveyed the people of China, as both consumers of goods and employees of the companies that produce those goods. The data provide a unique picture of changing consumer attitudes, market opportunities, and management challenges.

His strategy looks so easy. Almost too easy.

Strategies for ensuring stakeholder voices are heard and ESG goals are met.

Our relationship with money is just as personal as any other big relationship in our lives.

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 […]

Five critical decisions to set it up for long-term success.

There's considerable waste in the system.

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.

One can fuel the other.

Hope Barrows, a partner at the national accounting firm Fuller Fenton, drove to the office on Sunday and swiped her access card to enter the parking garage....