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Why Data Breaches Don’t Hurt Stock Prices

Harvard Business Review

During the 2013 holiday season shopping period, Target was the object of then the biggest cyber attack on a retailer. The company later announced loss in sales, but this has been tied more to a pattern of low profits in the last few years since the company’s merging with Kmart, than to the October data breach.

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The Three Reforms China Must Enact: Land, Social Services, and Taxes

Harvard Business Review

These factors have led to questions over the quality of banks’ balance sheets and whether many of the loans extended in recent years can actually be repaid, raising further doubts over the sustainability of the debt-fueled model. The third is the tax system. If the party leaders do tackle these reforms, success is far from assured.

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Research Shows That Smaller M&A Deals Work Out Better

Harvard Business Review

Walter Thompson Company for $566 million in 1987 and Ogilvy for $864 million in 1989 — big acquisitions that stretched the company’s balance sheet. You meet the bar on this lever if you are among the top 20% in your industry in your ratio of capital spending to sales. So WPP acquired the ad agencies J.

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How CMOs Can Get CFOs on Their Side

Harvard Business Review

Just 36 percent of CMOs, for example, have quantitatively proven the short-term impact of marketing spend, according to the 2013 CMO Survey (and for demonstrating long-term impact, that figure drops to 32 percent). Financial metrics would typically include obvious numbers such as sales, return on investment, and cost per customer.

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4 Types of Activist Investors and How to Spot Them

Harvard Business Review

According to Schulte, Roth & Zabel’s Activist Investing 2015 Annual Review, a total of 344 companies worldwide were subjected to activist demands in 2014, up 18% from the 291 recorded in 2013. With two separate balance sheets, management could plan around the risk variables (i.e. Example: Jolly Inc. more efficiently.

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Why Strong Customer Relationships Trump Powerful Brands

Harvard Business Review

To find out which school of thought is more accurate, we looked at the value of brands and customer relationships as revealed by M&A data covering over 6,000 mergers and acquisitions worldwide between 2003 and 2013. This trend is powerfully reinforced by digital technologies.