budget - Publications - Faculty & Research

06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

Profits for Nonprofits: Earning Your Own Way

address the issues that kept them from being employed well in the past." The bakery's challenges include limited financial resources—its budget is $200,000 a year—and learning to be profitable while training and employing people who... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

09 Mar 2016
Lessons from the Classroom

In This Classroom, Beer Can Improve Your Grade

up to 7 rounds, and all teams have the same baseline budget and number of beers to work with. Once play begins students can redesign or scuttle existing beers or create new ones. Rounds start off lasting two to three hours each, but... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Education; Food & Beverage

11 Nov 2013
Research & Ideas

A Smarter Way to Reduce Customer Defections

marketing priority—and they've been given bigger budgets to fight the battle. But as Gupta points out, identifying potential defectors to target is not as easy as it sounds. For years, companies have used churn management strategies that... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Retail; Service

29 Apr 2013
Research & Ideas

Are First-Time Buyers Left Out of Real Estate’s Rebound?

ownership. A tax subsidy like the mortgage interest deduction, which reduces the amount of money available to the federal government by $100 billion a year, is understandably at risk today because of our concern with deficit reduction. To put this huge number in... View Details

Keywords: Construction; Real Estate

01 Aug 2008
What Do You Think?

Has the Time Come for “Stretch” in Management?

stretch goal would be a turnover of 10 in five years, with improvements toward that goal recognized and rewarded on a year-to-year basis. One goal of this philosophy was to eliminate the time-wasting annual budgeting game in which middle... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

21 Jul 2015
First Look

First Look: July 21, 2015

2014. Based in Oakland, California, GCY was a five-year-old not-for-profit with a fiscal year (FY) 2015 budget of $3.5 million. Its mission was to make it much more the norm for graduating high school students in the U.S. to choose a... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

27 Dec 2010
Research & Ideas

HBS Faculty on 2010’s Biggest Business Developments

between government revenues and spending. “Every company and household here and abroad will ultimately be affected by the unabated and accelerating gap between government revenues and spending.” There is a great deal of confusion in the popular media about the level of... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

May 2004 (Revised April 2006)
Case

Ultra: The Quest for Leadership (A)

By: Dwight B. Crane and Ricardo Reisen de Pinho

Ultra is one of a small group of competing Brazilian petrochemical companies, each of which buys raw material and is a minority owner of Copene, a "cracking" company that provides ethylene and other materials. Because of an industry restructuring, an auction of shares... View Details

Keywords: Capital; Capital Budgeting; Investment; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Industry Structures; Cash Flow; Cost of Capital; Valuation; Bids and Bidding; Economy; Ownership Stake; Chemical Industry; Brazil

Citation

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14 Nov 2007
Research & Ideas

Growing CEOs from the Inside

whole business early in their career. It means managing budgeting and planning so that it is a learning experience, not a cynical game of "gotcha." It means the CEO investing his or her time, and that of the board, so that... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Employment

30 Oct 2005
Research & Ideas

Tuning Jobs to Fit Your Company

contracts, and accounting and finance. The span of accountability. The second span refers to the range of trade-offs affecting the measures used to evaluate a manager's achievements. For example, a person who is accountable for head count or specific expenses in an... View Details

Keywords: by Robert Simons

01 Nov 1999
Lessons from the Classroom

What’s Next & So What? Leading in the 21st Century

at the top are typically not close enough to the "voice of the future" to see new opportunities, creating a bias against doing new things. In addition, this process is tied to an annual calendar; obviously, opportunities don't present themselves only in... View Details

Keywords: by Staff

02 Feb 2010
First Look

First Look: Feb. 2

the long-established industry terms of contract between clients and managers change going forward? Was there an opportunity for clients to negotiate better terms? These issues all needed to be addressed in the context of protecting the University's operating View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

15 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Find Your Pragmatic Path through Radical Uncertainty

thing not to do is make long-term bets. In budgeting for operations, for example, lots of effort is wasted by thinking that we can project with any accuracy the timing for getting the answers to the important questions that will define... View Details

Keywords: by Howard Stevenson, Eugene B. Kogan, and Shirley Spence

31 May 2016
HBS Case

Who Owns Space?

decades of decreased funding, which the case notes peaked at 4.4 percent of the United States federal budget in 1966 and had shrunk to just 0.5 percent by 2014. To fulfill its vision for the exploration and study of space, NASA needed to... View Details

Keywords: Re: Matthew C. Weinzierl; Aerospace

22 Nov 2011
First Look

First Look: November 22

seeking to double her budget for social media and other digital marketing initiatives for 2011. A number of digital efforts implemented in the past two years seem to be bearing fruit, and there is a desire to intensify Sephora's social... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Shareholders Key to Corporate Reform

more balanced and comprehensive if management believes that directors might seek an independent opinion. It should be noted that there is a precedent for providing directors with independent funding: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires that audit committees have their own... View Details

Keywords: by Cynthia A. Montgomery & Rhonda Kaufman

04 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Predictions, Prophets, and Restarting Your Business

data and establish a process for keeping that front-line information flowing and timely. Otherwise, “customer focus” will remain a perennial slogan, not an organizational reality. Oversight over this activity is as important as it is in the capital View Details

Keywords: by Frank V. Cespedes

14 Oct 2008
Research & Ideas

Should You Bring Advertising Expertise In-House?

penalty. Thus, if the firm's advertising budget is not sufficiently large to allow its in-house unit to operate at or beyond minimum efficient scale, the advertiser may sacrifice size-related economies realized by an independent agency... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Advertising

16 Jul 2024
Research & Ideas

Weighing Digital Tradeoffs in Private Equity

answer that question, the researchers compared the performance of companies that had undergone some level of digital transformation with those that didn’t. They found that: Expanding IT budgets increased hiring by 11 percent and sales by... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Financial Services

07 Apr 2009
First Look

First Look: April 7, 2009

for tactical purposes, such as promotional campaigns. Its management team is thinking about how to incorporate that information to the budgeting (profit-planning) process. From an analytical standpoint the case looks at the surprising... View Details