Investment management

With private equity buyouts and acquisitions on the rise, we turned to Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, a longtime observer and researcher...

When getting a company ready to sell in the short term, it turns out, PE firms employ many of the best strategy practices--use debt aggressively, focus...

Being clear on what it means is not just an academic exercise.

Intangible assets--patents and know-how, brands, a skilled workforce, strong customer relationships, software, unique processes and organizational designs,...

Venture capital is ignoring the region for all the wrong reasons.

Here's what the best-performing ones do differently.

Most entrepreneurs understand that if the fundamentals of a business idea—the management team, the market opportunities, the operating systems and controls—are sound, chances are there’s money out there. The challenge of landing that capital to grow a company can be exhilarating. But as exciting as the money search may be, it is equally threatening. Built […]

Some experts argue that corporate leaders are starving their firms of investment capital by making excessive payouts to shareholders, thereby undermining...

The more rivals you outbid, the more likely you are to have paid too much.

In Silicon Valley, exciting new business ideas rapidly attract capital and talent away from less worthy ventures. But in big companies, ideas, capital, and talent are stagnant—prisoners of traditional bureaucratic ways of allocating resources. To capture the Valley’s entrepreneurial magic, your company needs to move from resource allocation to resource attraction.

Reports of the “eclipse of the public corporation” underestimate its institutional staying power and unique capacity for renewal. In his recent HBR article, Michael C. Jensen, a distinguished scholar of corporate finance and governance, argues for a revolution in the structure of ownership and control in the U.S. economy.1 I share many of his criticisms […]

Six years ago, Google's IPO was the most hotly anticipated public offering of the year. But in classic Google style, the offering was neither typical...

Climate change is so urgent we need to separate it from the rest of the sustainability agenda.

In one of my posts last year, I shared a framework for more effective negotiations. The first step of the framework described the need for pre-negotiation...

In the book we're working on right now, we make the argument that capitalism is evolving because the environment in which it is situated is changing in...

They spend less on R&D but get higher returns.

I am not pessimistic about Facebook’s future. I have used the social network for eight years and continue to be impressed with Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on product and his vision for the internet. When I logged into the site for the first time in the spring of 2004, I was prepared to hate the service. […]

One study found that people were willing to pay about 21% more for a product when they were told it was crowdfunded.

Initial public offerings are expensive, and many owners turn to M&A instead. But a little-understood mechanism known as a tax receivable agreement can...

As the dust settles on the recent frenzy of private equity deals (including transactions topping $20 billion), what lessons can companies glean? Directors...