Financial performance measurement

What you measure is what you get. Senior executives understand that their organization’s measurement system strongly affects the behavior of managers and employees. Executives also understand that traditional financial accounting measures like return-on-investment and earnings-per-share can give misleading signals for continuous improvement and innovation—activities today’s competitive environment demands. The traditional financial performance measures worked well […]

What every manager ought to know about the different kinds of forecasting and the times when they should be used.

Lately companies have come to recognize the limitations of the view that they must create value only for shareholders. Recognizing that every stakeholder...

The March–April 1974 issue of HBR carried an article that reported on Phases I and II of a project sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the Harvard Business School. The basic purpose of the project is to determine the profit impact of market strategies (PIMS). The earlier article established a link between strategic planning […]

Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers. Because strategy is abstract, employees often mentally replace it with the...

A recent analysis of 35,000 manufacturing plants found that those with more-structured management practices were more likely to acquire ones with less-structured practices.

Start-ups seem to be getting bigger faster than ever--Uber is just one example of today's "unicorns," or private, venture-backed companies valued at a...

Digital financial companies are making big claims about financial inclusion - but are failing to disclose data that backs up their efforts.

Today's fast-paced economy demands that businesses change or die. But few companies manage corporate transformations as well as they would like. The brutal...

In this issue's Spotlight we examine how a focus on maximizing shareholder value--which leads to short-termism for management and boards--can threaten...

More than 15 years ago Jim Collins, the author of the management best seller "Good to Great," introduced the flywheel as a metaphor for the enduring power...

A tale of two cars.

I didn't anticipate that I would leave the country of Iceland with a renewed awareness of the different governance challenges faced by private and public...

In "The CEO View: Defending a Good Company from Bad Investors," David Pyott, former chief of Allergan, describes how he fended off a hostile takeover...

Your legacy depends on a good succession plan.

This is a challenging time to be a CEO. Around the world, economic growth is slow, political uncertainty undermines attempts to develop long-term plans,...

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

Investors have a quantitative understanding of how the market values a company. Management teams should too.

Executives know that a company's measurement systems strongly affect employee behavior. But the traditional financial performance measures that worked...

Don't get trapped in your P&L.