N2Growth Blog

AUGUST 12, 2010

Decisioning by consensus usually results in no decision being made, or an intellectually dishonest, watered-down decision that is so full of compromises, hedges and caveats that a non-decision might have been preferable.

Consensus 388

Consensus Team Building Blog Team 388

Eric Jacobson

FEBRUARY 13, 2023

You throw away your backup plans and your push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.” Embrace crisis : What initially seems unendurable may turn out to be the catalyst that takes you to the next level and unlocks your full potential.

How To 115

How To Commitment Hedge Resistance 115

Strategy Driven

NOVEMBER 11, 2021

Public companies can have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual and institutional shareholders, like mutual fund companies, pension funds, or hedge funds. And, this can be a bit hard when you’re down in the dumps, going through a business crisis. But, managing them can give business founders a tough time.

Management 83

Management Hedge Finance Efficiency 83

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 24, 2011

It's the burning question many of you have been hurling at me recently: "So instead of idly waiting around for the so-called mysteriously reluctant non-recovering recovery, what should we do to survive this never-ending raging crisis?". What's this never-ending crisis really about? Here's a tiny suggestion.

Crisis 22

Crisis Bond Depreciation Hedge 22

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 15, 2012

Update: Politico's Ben White did have a brief testimonial from hedge fund manager and Goldman client Whitney Tilson this morning.) And Goldman's behavior before and during the financial crisis just wasn't what any neutral observer could call client-centric.

Hedge 17

Hedge Long-term Banking Short-term 17

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 3, 2011

There's a beguiling little moment in the financial-crisis documentary Inside Job where hedge fund billionaire George Soros describes the principles of oil tanker design. It is good, and it piqued my interest in what Wilmers had been writing over the course of the financial crisis. Financial markets are like that, Soros goes on.

Banking 17

Banking Crisis Letter Hedge 17

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 7, 2017

But must employees, investors, and other constituents accept harmful employment cultures in fast-growth organizations until a crisis occurs? But this focus on a single element of the HR value proposition can perpetuate a crisis. This is a laudable response. Are these acceptable growing pains? In one word: No.

Compliance 15

Compliance Hedge Human Capital Finance 15

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

At a recent dinner party, I was speaking with a friend who had just been promoted to vice president at a well-known New York hedge fund. After the financial crisis, the large-scale, immediate layoffs at financial institutions and large corporations shattered prevailing expectations of job stability.

Career 22

Career Christensen Hedge Short-term 22

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 14, 2012

The successful CEOs in our study were hyper-vigilant about threats around them (the paranoia part) and also took action to mitigate those threats, whether in the form of building buffers or hedging (the productive part). When a crisis strikes, in business or in government, the flow and speed of information go way up, and now more than ever.

Management 16

Management Licensing Crisis Hedge 16

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

While the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks have unleashed a flood of indignation, condemnation, and protest upon Wall Street, the crisis has exposed a deeper distrust and implacable resentment of capitalism itself. How do we stretch management timeframes and perspectives?

Short-term 17

Short-term Long-term Ethics Incentives 17

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 25, 2012

Contrarian Number 1 is George Elliott, founder of a hedge fund (Naftilia Asset Management) that plans to buy nothing but stocks from – wait for it – Greece. Bloomberg reports that he’s already raised 50 million euros.

Hedge 13

Hedge Advertising Asset Management Download 13

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs dumped terabytes of information on government investigators looking into the causes of the financial crisis. It is a risk to business operations and profitability. But competitors would surely invest much more effort.

Gordon 15

Gordon Hedge Public Relations Document 15

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 20, 2011

Yep — for just one example, see then-Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson tipping off his hedge fund buddies about Fannie and Freddie. Mounting demographic pressures, including slum creation? Just tour Baltimore. Widespread corruption and kleptocracy? Delegitimization of the state? Progressive deterioration of public services?

Politics 19

Politics Hedge GDP Banking 19

Harvard Business Review

JULY 26, 2013

Five years after a financial crisis that, as best anybody can tell, had almost nothing to do with insider trading by hedge funds, the two biggest post-crisis criminal crackdowns on the financial sector in the U.S. insider trading by hedge funds. have centered on.

Hedge 10

Hedge Handbook Crisis Price 10

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 7, 2011

million in one year from the hedge fund D.E. This gap between what employees of Goldman and its Wall Street peers (including hedge funds, private equity firms, etc.) After the crisis of 2007 and 2008, though, that became a pretty tough argument to make. Summers had reaped even bigger Wall Street paydays — $5.2

Shaw 14

Shaw Decisionmaking Hedge Finance 14

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2012

Which is why managing those arguments, as Ina Drew appears to have done brilliantly during the financial crisis but wasn't around to do for the past couple of years, is so important. This is one reason why the standard risk-management set up at Wall Street firms proved such a bust in the financial crisis.

Management 13

Management Risk Management Competitive Intelligence Hedge 13

Harvard Business Review

JULY 14, 2017

It piled up on streets and in vacant lots, and in 1898 urban planners convened from around the world to brainstorm solutions to the impending crisis. Rising sea levels flood Manhattan in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 , prompting hedge fund managers and real estate investors to create a new intertidal market index.

Stephenson 15

Stephenson White Paper Real Estate Hedge 15

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 15, 2011

The "Asian Contagion" currency crisis that depressed Thailand, Indonesian, South Korean and other currencies by as much as 70% was not yet over. And by the late 1990's investment banks and hedge funds were in the business of betting for and against currencies. One of the incidents that made it clear to us started way back in 1999.

Banking 13

Banking ROE Self-aware Proposal 13

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2012

The bank's chief investment office, where the losses occurred, was charged with protecting JP Morgan from financial market volatility by trying to hedge bets made by other parts of the bank. It performed well during the financial crisis, and continued to deliver big returns in subsequent years.

Banking 11

Banking Hedge Constraint Operations 11

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 24, 2014

I spent a dozen years there — a tenure that overlapped with Dudley’s — went on to work at several other firms, and then, after the financial crisis, decided to go back to school. Then I went to work at Goldman Sachs, in mergers and acquisitions first, proprietary trading later. I now have a Ph.D.

Banking 13

Banking Ethics Long-term Hedge 13

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 11, 2011

This was apparent in the role the big investment banks played in bringing on the 2007/2008 financial crisis: were they advisers? hedge funds? Without such rules and bounds, in fact, capitalism doesn't seem to work very well. scam artists? The answer: a mix of all five. And that turned out to be a problem.

PR 10

PR Public Relations Porter Hedge 10

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 19, 2017

This is partly due to the tendency to grow more than needed as a hedge against weather and disease and fluctuating wholesale and retail orders. Food waste starts at farms in the value chain. In the U.S., it is estimated that about 7% of produce is left unharvested in fields every year.

Retail 8

Retail Supply Chain Crisis Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 19, 2012

That's the in-case-of-emergency sign that might as well hover over the desk of any communications manager, as the latest social media crisis reminds us. In the event of uproar, please invoke social media policy.

Risk Management 10

Risk Management Media Price Management 10

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2014

That’s why rich people can invest in hedge funds while, for the most part, regular folks can’t. Maybe there were some incriminating details behind the Goldman executive’s statement that alarmed Segarra and were left out of the story, but on the face of it there’s nothing to see here.

Banking 12

Banking Conflict of Interest Hedge Policies 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Stuart Roden, Co Fund Manager of Lansdowne Partners'' flagship fund, one of the world''s largest hedge funds, tells me he sees one of his primary roles as being the person who challenges his staff to consider how they could be wrong, and then assess how this might impact on their decision-making.

Consensus 12

Consensus Hedge Diversity Stress 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Stuart Roden, Co Fund Manager of Lansdowne Partners’ flagship fund, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, tells me he sees one of his primary roles as being the person who challenges his staff to consider how they could be wrong, and then assess how this might impact on their decision-making.

Consensus 12

Consensus Hedge Diversity Stress 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

Researchers find echoes of this story in other contexts all the time — circumstances where adding safety-enhancements to systems actually makes crisis situations more dangerous, not less so. By reintroducing simplicity and modularity back into the system, a crisis somewhere doesn't always have to become a crisis everywhere.

Banking 8

Banking Crisis Hedge System 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 30, 2013

What''s more, the asset management industry — in particular the alternative-asset subset of hedge funds and private equity — has exported many of its pay practices into the corporate sector. So paying bank CEOs mostly in stock is a recipe for a financial crisis.

Hedge 8

Hedge Asset Management Incentives Outsourcing 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2014

hedge funds. The consequences of failing to do so are starkly illustrated by the Co-operative Bank’s crisis. Sir Christopher Kelly, a former British senior civil servant, recently produced a damning report , which reviewed the events that led to the £1.5 billion capital shortfall announced by the U.K.’s

Banking 10

Banking Project Enterprise Architecture CIO 10

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 26, 2015

I know firsthand how challenging it can be to take a holistic approach, especially when your organization is in crisis. When Paul Polman became the CEO of Unilever, for example, he stopped giving analysts earnings guidance, dispensed with quarterly profit reports, and said there’d be no special treatment for hedge funds.

Metrics 8

Metrics Long-term Short-term Hedge 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 14, 2014

Herbalife After Big Bet, Hedge Fund Pulls the Levers of Power The New York Times If you’re looking for the corporate-governance version of House of Cards, this is probably the closest you''ll get (though there''s no strategic murdering here, as far as I know). Crisis management Information & technology Technology'

McGregor 9

McGregor Information Technology Crisis Management COO 9

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

But three years after the financial crisis broke, I remain more convinced than ever that the fundamental cure for restoring economic growth and repairing societal trust in business is to deepen our ability to manage companies for the long term. Countries, too, but that's a topic for another day.)

Long-term 9

Long-term CEO Short-term McKinsey 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 12, 2013

Sheelah Kolhatkar, in a cover story (and what a classy cover it is) in the new Bloomberg Businessweek , argues that the great alternative to plain-vanilla equity and debt investing — the hedge fund — is more or less over, too. Still, where there are losers, there are winners.

Bond 8

Bond Finance Hedge Download 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

They''re the commitment equivalent of the hedge funder who uses LED light bulbs on his private jet to be ''environmental.''" Even our outrage is boring — we become insipidly incensed about "some guy who had his phone up in the air for, like, 20 seconds during the glockenspiel solo" of an Arcade Fire concert. Crisis management'

Armstrong 8

Armstrong Bond Entrepreneur Crisis Management 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

Bertolini observed that many of his peers had been promising 15% earnings per share (EPS), even during the financial crisis of 2009. As Masonite regained financial health, the company’s hedge fund investors pushed for a short-term approach, urging the board to load the company up with debt and approve a dividend recapitalization.

CEO 12

CEO Short-term Long-term EPS 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 20, 2017

CEOs live in fear of activist hedge funds, and politicians worry about their effects on workers. Since the global financial crisis, a new wave of “constructive,” or friendly, activists (typically referred to as engagement funds) has tackled the same corporate governance issues, but with an explicitly low-key, humbler approach.

ROE 8

ROE Construction Hedge Policies 8

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 13, 2017

One of my students at London Business School joined a hedge fund and was bummed when he was laid off at the start of the financial crisis. See More Videos > See More Videos > Most of us can recall many such instances. But he received a healthy severance.

Telecommunications 8

Telecommunications Hedge Video Stress 8