In April 2016, Mark Parker, an experienced private-equity investor, is considering an investment in MedMetric, LLC (MedMetric), a seed-stage health care information technology company. The company has a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product that facilitated reimbursement for Medicare Advantage companies (MAs), private firms that provided an alternative way for senior citizens in the United States t
A primary requirement for managing water effectively and sustainably is an accounting framework that registers the water that is available for use (supply) and the water that is being used (demand). A common accounting analogy is a water budget, or a water account. This note focuses on the water budgets of individual countries, defining concepts including renewable water, watershed, water withdraw
When left unattended, natural resources tend to inch toward depletion, overuse, spoilage, or pollution. Common pastures get overgrazed; lakes are overfished; rivers are polluted, and so on. In the case of water, some may wonder how overuse or depletion is possible, as water is a renewable natural resource. In spite of this, depletion and overuse can occur in a practical sense and on a local level.
Convertible notes are often used to raise early-stage financing for start-up companies, frequently due to their advantages related to delayed valuation, greater speed, and lower cost of completion compared to venture capital financing. As a result, there has been a large increase in the number of early-stage companies raising capital through convertible notes over the past decade. Investors have m
The first (or "Great") Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe from roughly 1760 to 1860, and marked the end of the centuries-long feudal era and the rise of modern capitalism. To understand the modern industrial economy, it is necessary to consider the profound structural changes that produced it in the 18th and 19th centuries. New industries replaced old systems or businesses with new technolog
The searchable internet contains almost 2 billion websites. And new, text-rich sites are being added at a rapid pace: more than 700 million popped up from 2016 to 2017, according to the International Real Time Statistics Project. A lot of this web-based text is relevant to marketers: online product reviews, information about purchasing behavior, customer-to-customer interactions, and transcribed t
Managers need to be comfortable with financial statement forecasting. Forecasts allow managers to plan properly by weighing consequences and preparing for outcomes. A less-recognized but equally important benefit is that the act of forecasting forces managers to make explicit the many links that exist between decisions, possibly drawing attention to constraints that otherwise might have been overl
Iconoclasts with strongly held beliefs and a willingness to buck orthodoxy, Apple's Steve Jobs and the Chicago Bulls' Phil Jackson shared similarities in character, leadership style, and life experience that extended beyond the extraordinary successes they achieved in their chosen fields. Both came of age in the United States of the mid-20th century, a time and place characterized by Americans' gr
Debates on issues about the economy, growth, inequality, fiscal responsibility, and financial crises frequently reduce to debates about money. Moreover, debates about money often reduce to the soundness of money, meaning the ability of a unit of currency to retain its value. Eventually, discussions about soundness touch on the classic era of the gold standard. The aims of this note are to (1) desc
Market lore recounts a host of fabled asset price bubbles: the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles of 1720, the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, and the global real estate bubble of the mid-2000s. One survey reported the occurrence of some 60 bubbles since the 17th century. Despite their apparent prevalence, asset price bubbles are a challenging theoretical and
Go (or Wei-ch'i, as it is known in China) is a centuries-old board game popular across Asia. Many have drawn parallels between military successes and the game's complex methods, in which a player encircles, isolates, and captures enemy pieces and geography, but Go also offers lessons for business.
This technical note offers a basic description of Go, followed by a collection of business-strategy
This note describes the most common financial ratios and how they provide insight into firm performance. The emphasis is on how ratios summarize operating behaviors and results in ways that facilitate interpretation and highlight decisions. There are three broad categories of ratios covered in the note: profitability, operating efficiency, and leverage (the use of debt financing). The note defines
