Finance

Finance

A vast portion of the world’s population and growth opportunities are located in ‘emerging markets’ (i.e. nations with rapid economic growth but commercial infrastructure that is not fully developed). Can you use what you leaned in your Core Strategy class to design strategies for companies operating in these environments? However, there are other important elements that need to be considered, which are at the center of this elective. Namely, this course is about how to design strategies to deal with ‘non-market’ actors, such as governments and other entities that are part of the ‘informal’ economy. We discuss a wide range of issues, ranging from corruption to how to deal with volatility and uncertainty.

While some academics and many in the financial community continue to hold that the purpose of the corporation is to maximize the wealth of its shareholders, and should be governed to that end, others call for a more robust definition of corporate purpose. The corporation is one of society’s most important institutions and its dominant form of business organization. Yet the nature and purpose of the corporation—and, by extension, the purpose of corporate governance—has long been a matter of debate.

He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He is a regular visitor at the Vienna Graduate School of Finance and University of Paris-Dauphine. He has been appointed (jointly with PwC) by the UK Government to conduct an analysis on the link between executive pay and stock buybacks, and stock buybacks and investment.

We will include guest speakers who are or have been CEOs or senior executives at portfolio companies and private equity firms. The assignments will include several short presentations modeled on those given to an investment committee.

The nature of shareholding and ownership concentration has also seen significant change especially in U.S. and European capital markets. One secular trend is the growth of index funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), and other such passive investment funds. Over the same period, the holdings of the top 10 shareholders in the largest 500 U.S. companies that comprise the S&P 500 index rose from 21% to about 30%, a change driven largely by greater ownership of the passive investors. This shift in ownership raises questions about the role of passive index investors in the stewardship of companies where they hold very significant stakes. The large passive owners and others, especially pension funds, are exhibiting greater engagement with companies.

Taking this course will expose you to a leadership development tool that you may otherwise encounter five to ten years after the Tuck MBA. When a company’s activities and interests’ cross national borders, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) increases exponentially. Managers and leaders often struggle to make balanced and informed strategic choices as they encounter new stakeholders and multifarious issues and influences. Each factor has profound implications, both for the type of competitive advantage or scope economy that justifies geographical expansion, and for critical decisions concerning how the company is configured and positioned to compete internationally. The crux of this elective is to understand how the foreign market entry strategies of companies can anticipate and respond to these overarching influences.

Topics will include causality, panel and time series data, instrumental variables and quasi-experiments, semi- and non-parametric methods, and treatment evaluation. This course examines important contemporary and historical issues from an economic perspective. It enables students to think about the world "like an economist." Possible topics of current interest include the transformation of Eastern Europe; ethnic and racial strife; environmental policy and sustainable development; and professional sports.

The use of Project Status Reports and Root Cause Analysis help identify and resolve problems during project execution. Upon project completion, the Project Closing Process group consists of the processes to formally closeout the project. Once the closing process is completed the project manager receives acceptance from the project sponsor, conducts a post project review, documents the lessons learned and archives all project related documents.

His most recent innovation has been the creation of FinTech and the Financial Services Industry Transformation elective. This course examines innovative technology-driven transformation of old business models in the financial services sector. Indeed, boards today are expected to oversee an extensive and ever-expanding menu of risks. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the boards of banks and financial institutions were taken to task for paying insufficient attention to excessive financial risk.

• The minicourse is designed as an introduction to economic, social, and psychology-based strategic principles, concepts, and frameworks that are relevant to businesses provided via the Internet and mobile technology.
• Note that the readings and situations discussed in class will focus on venture capital investing, but many of the concepts covered are also relevant to private equity investing in private companies.
• Can you use what you leaned in your Core Strategy class to design strategies for companies operating in these environments?
• His work has been published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
• Yet the nature and purpose of the corporation—and, by extension, the purpose of corporate governance—has long been a matter of debate.

A potent leader co-creates with his or her people to push the company ahead of the competition. But before a leader can assume this role and responsibility, they must be willing to engage in their own developmental journey. In this course, we take leadership out of the box by studying the lives of extraordinary leaders while engaging in our own self-exploration.

The company had to build new capabilities while confronting strong opposition from many employees who didn’t buy into the change in direction. Painful as it was, it proved to be a positive development, since the company could not have forged ahead with people who didn’t believe in its new purpose. It’s common for major oil companies to nod to sustainability in some way, but Lievonen quickly proved that Neste meant business, launching a bold transformation that would become a seven-year journey. Employees, customers, and investors all initially resisted the change, but Lievonen and his team were undaunted.

We focus, in particular, on how financial accounting systems are designed to capture the underlying economics of an organization’s business strategy and operations as well as the roles of accounting principles, rules, and institutions in improving the quality of financial reporting. In practice, however, resource allocation is extremely difficult, especially when it involves comparing businesses with different strategic characteristics, investments with long time horizons, or innovative projects with uncertain pay-offs—to name a few of the common challenges. The difficulty is compounded by pressures from shareholders with differing objectives, time horizons, and tolerance for risk. As a consequence many managers give short shrift to strategic and human complexities when making resource allocation decisions and instead rely on standard financial tools such as discounted cash flow analysis.

Financial Strategies for Value Creation

Building on the first-year curriculum, it covers, in greater detail, the changing environment for business, media relations, financial communications, corporate advertising, reputation management, social media and crisis communication. Students also work on further developing their communications skills through case analyses, experiential exercises, and presentations. We will use financial statements as a window to peer into a firm in order to determine where value creation occurs and how managers may be using financial statements to guide value creating behavior and how investors use financial statements to identify value-creating opportunities. We will try to make the window easy to look through by considering the effects of the economic industry in which the firm operates, its business strategy, and, most importantly, its portfolio of accounting choices.

Design/methodology/approach

Its purpose is to describe some of today’s key debates and to identify the main areas in which changes are being called for. We hope this distillation will be helpful to corporate directors and other readers who may be grappling with the issues presented either now or in the near future. How these debates are resolved will have profound effects on how business operates across the globe.

So Neste engineered a major reorganization and created a matrix structure, in the process rotating about 25% of senior managers and about 50% of upper professionals into new positions. Targets and incentive plans became cross-functional, designed to build capabilities both within and across businesses. In 2018 the company decided to go a step further and reshape its value proposition from reactive to predictive security, a plan that once again built on the company’s core purpose. That allowed Securitas to offer bundled, customized security solutions—encompassing physical guarding, electronic security, and risk management—that provided a much-enhanced level of protection at an optimized cost.

This shift, Göransson understood, was not a threat to the existing business but an opportunity to grow—as indeed it has proved to be. When confronted with eroding margins in a rapidly commodifying world, companies often enhance their value propositions by innovating products, services, or business models. That can bring some quick wins, but it’s a transactional approach geared toward prevailing in the current arena.