N2Growth Blog

NOVEMBER 10, 2010

It was Andy Grove the former Chairman and CEO of Intel and Time Magazine’s 1997 Man of the Year who said “You have to take action; you can’t hesitate or hedge your bets. A close examination of truly great leaders will reveal that, to the one, they all have a strong bias toward action.

Blog 387

Blog Learning-by-Doing CEO Strategy 387

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 7, 2017

But with the departures of a number of high-level HR leaders in late 2016, head of operations Ryan Graves largely took on the head HR role in addition to his other duties. As Pete Ramstad and I note in Beyond HR , leaders often have far better developed frameworks for the value proposition of the finance function than for HR.

Compliance 12

Compliance Hedge Human Capital Finance 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 12, 2013

Everybody has been piling on to hedge fund manager Bill Ackman lately. Ackman''s short-selling campaign against vitamin distributor Herbalife has blown up in his face, with the company''s stock up more than 75% since he unveiled his position last December and some of his most prominent hedge fund competitors profiting from his misery.

Hedge 8

Hedge Short-term Long-term Finance 8

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

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 7, 2011

I've had a few encounters with Gene through the years, and he's always struck me as an endearing (and rare) combination of policy wonk, political operator, and genuine mensch. million in one year from the hedge fund D.E. Meaning that this appointment would seem to be good for Gene, good for America. So now there's a controversy.

Shaw 14

Shaw Decisionmaking Hedge Finance 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 18, 2016

LTCM was founded, in 1994, by some of the best minds in finance theory, including two Nobel Prize winners. It comprises a range of conceptual and analytical operations, including problem definition, signal processing, pattern recognition, abstraction and conceptualization, analysis, and prediction.

Strategy 8

Strategy Supply Chain Technology Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 9, 2012

This is a concept fundamental to finance but that, for some reason, has not migrated into supply chain risk management. This lack of comfort with both the quantitative aspects of risk and the more sophisticated options available to operational executives is (in some industries literally) dangerous.

Supply Chain 9

Supply Chain Chief Procurement Officer Risk Management Management 9

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 12, 2018

Companies are both operators and investors. Companies in every industry can benefit from making more data and algorithm-based decisions in areas of internal operations and finance. Shift to providing advice on business models, not just strategy and operations. Analytics are growing in every business function and industry.

Consultative 8

Consultative Strategy Advice McKinsey 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

” Senior executives hedge their plans because they don’t trust the numbers from finance. 75% — an estimate of the fraction of total cost associated with hidden data factories in simple operations, based on two simple tools, the so-called Friday Afternoon Measurement and the “rule-of ten.”

Cost 8

Cost Hedge Quality Finance 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 27, 2014

After using borrowed money in the 1980s and 1990s, then opening up a hedge fund in 2004, he has since 2011 basically just been managing his own money. His response: “While I think using 13Fs to track hedge fund stock-pickers works great, in my mind it works less so for the activist guys.” Apple Finance Skill vs. luck'

Hedge 8

Hedge Venture Capitalist Letter Reputation 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 26, 2017

By comparison, online lenders face capital costs that can be higher than 10%, sourced from potentially fickle institutional investors like hedge funds. This amounts to putting a toe in the water, while keeping current operations relatively separate and pristine.

Banking 12

Banking Stage-Gate Credit Scoring Competitive Advantage 12

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 24, 2017

What traditional investors don’t like about any of this is the regulatory uncertainty; the high valuations and over-capitalization; the lack of control over financials, strategy, and operations; and the lack of business use-cases. ICOs are the Wild West of financing — they sit in a grey zone where the U.S.

Venture Capitalist 12

Venture Capitalist Due Diligence Finance Long-term 12

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 15, 2014

It has spurred the growth of an entire industry that exists only to exploit volatility: the hedge fund business. Meanwhile, there are all sorts of good folks operating in use-driven markets, producing goods and services that we use on a daily basis. Economy Finance' That dark side has not gone unnoticed.

Efficiency 8

Efficiency Marketing Real Estate Price 8

Harvard Business Review

MAY 15, 2012

Institutional banking businesses — including trading operations — typically don't have high barriers to entry. financial institution has pulled back or failed, there has almost always been a European bank or a Japanese bank or some other player willing to take over its trading operations or enter the market in its place.

Banking 10

Banking Hedge Constraint Operations 10

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. From the same letter: [N]o company operates in a vacuum. Why did M&T make such out-of-character investments?

Banking 15

Banking Crisis Letter Hedge 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 3, 2014

While the rest of the stock market world was still operating in terms of minutes and seconds, the HFTers (led by two Chicago-based firms, hedge-fund giant Citadel and upstart GETCO, now called KCG ) found a whole new world of profit in the milliseconds and microseconds between when orders were placed and filled.

Long-term 8

Long-term Open-book Marketing Hedge 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 30, 2013

In fact, Amazon was only operating at such a high burn rate because it could. Well, he's a hedge fund veteran who has always taken a skeptical view of Wall Street, treating it more as a loopy rich uncle than the efficient information processor of standard finance theory. How has Bezos done this?

Training 10

Training Bond Christensen Long-term 10

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 27, 2017

In reality, “handoffs” and transitions prove to be significant operational problems. Autonomy is both the organizational and the operational center of gravity for innovation and growth. In theory, the organizational challenges of algorithmic autonomy map perfectly to which processes or systems are being made autonomous.

Outsourcing 8

Outsourcing Software CAPEX Competitive Advantage 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 20, 2013

They may not be like the big conglomerates of the 1960s — you can see how their portfolio of somewhat related business came about — but, in reality, the various divisions and business units do operate completely independently from one another. First, corporate C-suite executives are portfolio managers.

Strategy 8

Strategy P&L Engineering Cooper 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 1, 2017

After managing a sleeve of a successful hedge fund in London for five years, and building ample savings, Colin was ready for his own shop. They were both naïve to think that creating a high-expense, polished operation would automatically enhance their business. The first is Colin. This would have helped them avoid a cash crunch.

Strategy 9

Strategy Budgeting Cost Price 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 23, 2012

Managing risks — especially the hard-to-pin-down, moving-target risks that any financial trading operation has to cope with — inevitably involves arguing. Whether this really was the main reason for JP Morgan's $3 billion (and growing) trading loss or not, it does at least sound like it could be true.

Management 12

Management Risk Management Competitive Intelligence Hedge 12

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Or you could participate in projects financed in part by conventional investors and in part by non-profits. Even in the most hard-nosed of private equity firms or hedge funds you will find that people align with strategies that mean something to them, that they’re passionate about.

Insurance 9

Insurance Bond Hedge Bottom-up 9

Harvard Business Review

MAY 31, 2012

Some news stories say Dimon generally approved the specific strategy at issue here and perhaps the broader risk-taking by this risk management office (beyond more cautious hedging of risk).

CIO 9

CIO Committee Risk Management Banking 9

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2016

Some institutions, such as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board , are stand-alone legal entities with an independent board and a requirement to operate at arm’s length from government. We pay competitively but no hedge fund-size packages.” Autonomy for pension institutions starts with a strong governance framework.

Politics 8

Politics Hedge Constraint Committee 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 17, 2011

After all, HSBC is not proposing to close its British operations. That, though, is a largely technical issue, because your nominal headquarters need not be your operational one. It probably wouldn't matter much if your operations were really evenly distributed across the world.

Banking 13

Banking Hedge Globalization Operations 13

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 1, 2017

After all, most financial intermediaries themselves rely on a dizzying, complex, and costly array of intermediaries to run their own operations. This industry supports a number of intermediaries, such as investment bankers, exchange operators, auditors, lawyers, and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo).

Finance 8

Finance IPO Banking Venture Capitalist 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 14, 2014

The hedge fund founded and run by billionaire Paul Singer just announced that it now owns 6.2% Most activist hedge funds are simply pushing a less extreme version of the same basic idea. The activist approach is clearly good business for hedge funds; activist funds have dramatically outperformed their hedge-fund peers in recent years.

Hedge 8

Hedge Chief Technology Officer Maturity IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 8, 2018

Third, as a result of strong performances by worker- and employee-owned companies, it is becoming easier for workers to overcome arguably the biggest hurdle to worker buyouts: financing. Already, U.S. Already, U.S. And companion bills developed to enable the U.S. To encourage worker buyouts, more awareness-raising initiatives are required.

ESOP 13

ESOP Company Cooper IAM 13

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 20, 2011

DuPont sent Donaldson Brown, a promising engineer-turned-finance staffer, to Detroit to sort things out, and sort them out he did. That only makes sense if you are operating in a state of equilibrium—which might have been close enough to the truth in some sepia-toned time.

ROE 14

ROE Debt to Equity Ratio Innovation Incentives 14

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 8, 2018

They did not spend as much time thinking about local events that have implications for their emerging market operations. This would come at a delicate time for the European economy, making it more difficult for leaders to assemble coalitions to back complex EU reforms to put European finance on sound long-term footing.

Market Risk 9

Market Risk Marketing Supply Chain Company 9

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 17, 2012

If the auguries of "strategic due diligence" suggest a favorable outcome and bankers are willing to lend lots to help finance the deal, the PE masters of the universe acquire the property and put in place a "performance improvement plan" to make their new asset more profitable. They don't appear to be in it for the long haul.

Due Diligence 14

Due Diligence Incentives Hedge Collins 14