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How to Improve Your Finance Skills (Even If You Hate Numbers)

Harvard Business

If you’re not a numbers person, finance is daunting. Stop avoiding finance because you’re afraid of numbers. Think of it this way, “Finance is the way businesses keep score. “Finance and accounting are very simple. .” “Finance and accounting are very simple. Overcome your fears.

Finance 70
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Blockchain Could Make the Insurance Industry Much More Transparent

Harvard Business

In effect, they all had skin in the game, which remains one of the most elusive elements of modern finance. Thus a trust and efficiency engine like blockchain technology has the potential to drive radical change in the insurance industry while improving transparency and outcomes across the entire value chain.

Insurance 131
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Why Apple Is Getting into the Energy Business

Harvard Business

Some of the energy saved and resold will come from traditional energy efficiency (EE) investments, which companies have been making for many years. However, the explosion of smart digital- and internet-connected devices has created a new form of energy efficiency that adds immediate control over equipment as a new EE strategy.

Energy 70
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How the Great Recession Changed Banking

Harvard Business

That strengthened investment banks’ balance sheets by forcing them to scale back and to change the nature of the risks they take. As a result, their balance sheets are half as large on a risk-adjusted basis, and the capital they hold against trading positions has doubled over the past decade, our research shows.

Banking 71
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Stop Focusing on Profitability and Go for Growth

Harvard Business

Bain & Company’s Macro Trends Group carefully analyzed the global balance sheet and found that the world is awash in money. Global capital balances more than doubled between 1990 and 2010 — from $220 trillion (about 6.5 So, in real terms, debt financing is essentially free. times global GDP).

Cash Flow 134
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M&A deals – benefits and drawbacks

Tom Spencer

Such transactions typically happen between two businesses that are about the same size and which recognize advantages the other offers in terms of increasing sales, efficiencies, and capabilities. If there are debts owed by each organization, then the M&A process may increase the total balance sheet debt of the combined company.

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The 3 Company Crises Boards Should Watch For

Harvard Business

Another CEO used prodigious management skills to successfully consolidate, grow, and dramatically increase the efficiency of a vertically integrated industrial company. To support a change in strategy from efficiency-driven to innovation-driven growth, the company acquired another company to be its innovation engine.

Company 70