Finance and investing

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, […]

A dynamic scorecard can help you predict future performance too.

Figure out if you’ll make your money back.

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 […]

For years, small companies have experimented with forms of open-book management. Open-book systems have smoothed change efforts by giving workers the...

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.

Four years ago, Diane Ashton and Sundeep Lal were working together at MIT on a titanium extraction project. Durable and highly heat resistant, titanium...

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 […]

The strength of the American economy does not rest on its manufacturing prowess, its natural resources, or the size of its market. It turns on one factor--the...

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 […]

Vanguard, the mutual fund company known for its low-cost index funds, frequently shows up on lists of organizations with the most-loyal customers--and...

Recent Supreme Court decisions on regulatory powers will have a major impact on business investment - but not in the way most people think.

Investors have a big role to play in fostering the next generation of sustainable companies.

New research on how to identify investments that produce delayed but real profits — not just those that produce short-term accounting profits.