While managers of both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations often focus on their area of specific expertise, true success comes only from taking a complete enterprise perspective. Organizations must focus on global, not local, optimization across all functional areas, not just one. In this note, we present a model based on nine interrelated areas that when jointly considered will increase t
While there are a number of courses focused on helping students create and perfect innovative new products, there remains a gap regarding how to create and perfect the idea?or the positioning behind the product. The reality is that it is significantly more difficult than most people think to create a superior positioning concept. In addition, most sophisticated marketing organizations begin with a
This note replaces "Valuation of Late-Stage Companies and Buyouts" (UVA-F-1639).
This note focuses on the valuation of late-stage companies with a particular emphasis on leveraged buyouts (LBOs). In contrast to venture capital, where firms are typically at an early stage of development, late-stage investments involve more-established businesses that have an ability to take on higher levels of deb
This technical note explores the many different forms of equity compensation. Equity compensation, defined as compensation that provides for the delivery of equity securities, aligns employees' incentives with shareholder value driven by a company's stock price. Equity compensation is used extensively to attract and retain key employees. However, the types of equity compensation differ in their ef
Literature in food marketing provides many examples of implicit associations and tensions of which marketers should be aware. For example, a brand that positions its product as healthy and tasty may struggle to gain traction in the market because consumers tend to associate good-tasting food with low health value, and therefore assume healthy food tastes bad. Often, consumers make purchases based
This note reviews seven recurrent factors in financial crises (runnable debt, rising leverage, financial innovation, complexity, contagion, cognitive bias, incompetence, and ethical violations) and some 17 responses aimed at preventing or mitigating crises.
This note shapes a framework of competing policy priorities for governments in responding to a financial crisis: rescue, relief, recovery, and reform. The dominant considerations are where, when, how, and why governments should choose the order of these policy priorities. The second part of the note highlights six hurdles to policy making: ideologies, interests, incentives, institutions, innovati
Business has become increasingly globalized, interconnected, and disrupted by the unceasing progress of technology. As markets span ever-larger geographical areas, the war for talent among companies continues to heat up. As businesspeople enter the workforce, they seek not only challenging and stimulating roles with competitive compensation, but also organizations dedicated to people development.
This technical note offers students a definition of brand activism (as contrasted to corporate social responsibility) along with an explanation of the different forms that this corporate practice can take. Specifically, students are introduced to the concepts of both progressive and regressive brand activism, in addition to the different causes the activist efforts may champion, whether social, le
Program- and project-management best practices are typically implemented when a corporation aims to work efficiently and effectively to deliver its projects to the customers on time and to maximize shareholder value. In comparison, when looking at either the public or government sector, projects are typically funded primarily by taxpayer dollars, and reporting requirements and overall level oversi
Master limited partnerships (MLPs) are limited partnerships that trade on public exchanges in the form of units, similar to common stock. MLPs have several advantages relative to traditional C corporations (C-corps) that have resulted in their frequent use to finance energy-infrastructure assets. The general partners (GPs) retain control of the assets placed in the MLP, can drop down assets to the
Individuals' judgement of probabilities—the likelihood of different events to occur, or the attribution of likely causes to what has occurred—is plagued by numerous biases and errors. This note focuses on Bayesian updating and the base rate neglect, and also provides a brief overview of other biases, including overconfidence, reversion to the mean, the law of small numbers, the conjunction fallacy
