Remove EPS Remove Innovation Remove Operations
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We Can’t Study Short-Termism Without the Right Metrics

Harvard Business Review

While a laudable effort in principle, measuring a company’s tendency to make myopic operating and investing decisions is fiendishly complex. But the other indicators probably pick up legitimate differences in how companies in the sample operate, as opposed to whether they are myopic. On the surface, this measure looks reasonable.

EPS 9
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Business Needs to Do What Government Can't

Harvard Business Review

Our research with members of the global C-suite, and with leading sustainability and innovation experts, has identified seven vectors of breakthrough change. Companies like Unilever are on an open innovation drive, while GSK and Novartis are focusing on access to medicines in poorer markets. Business would change the rules of the game.

EPS 8
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You Can't Impress Stock Analysts.and Shouldn't Try

Harvard Business Review

Who declared 7 or 10 or 15 percent growth in earnings a sacrosanct pursuit, above all other corporate goals — like the innovation that leads to novel solutions that address customer needs? Nobody writes a paean to the search for 9 percent EPS growth. It's a strategic and operational straight-jacket.

GAAP 9
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Managing in an Age of Winner-Take-All

Harvard Business Review

Consider management actions such as cutting jobs and investment as a response to currency fluctuations and the resulting accounting impact of those cuts on earnings per share (EPS). Share buybacks are preferred to investment in innovation, entrepreneurship, and value creation. This is a situation that cannot endure.

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Why I'm Glad I Got Fired

Harvard Business Review

A friend of mine, Godfrey Sullivan , asked me to consider running the operations for the Americas unit at Autodesk. I was being asked to be the complementary half: the internal candidate would be the outward-facing VP running the Americas, but I would run the internal operations of the $200M+ business, owning the title "revenues manager."

EPS 15
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How Amazon Trained Its Investors to Behave

Harvard Business Review

In fact, Amazon was only operating at such a high burn rate because it could. Clayton Christensen has long complained that standard financial metrics can be enemies of innovation and growth. With Amazon, though, nobody emphasizes EPS.