The 2001 HBR list. Breakthrough ideas for today's business agenda

Business is shaped by ideas. But how do you separate enduring ideas from passing fancies? In this, the first edition of the annual HBR List, our editors spotlight five break-through ideas that are truly shaping the future of business. EVEN A GREAT BUSINESS MODEL IS NOT ENOUGH: The rise and fall of dot-coms left markets reeling and CEOs scratching their heads. The most important lesson of the debacle: squishy thinking about "business models" is no substitute for a distinctive strategy. CHANGE IS CHANGING: In recent years, pundits have urged executives to incite revolutions within their companies. But a growing group of experts now suggests that the best companies actually evolve through incremental change--change that builds on rather than subverts their heritage. EGO MAKES THE LEADER: By looking deeply into executives' psyches, we are beginning to unlock the enigma of leadership. While there will never be a single recipe for successful corporate stewardship, an understanding of the human ego can shed light on leadership's most fundamental components. ONLY CONNECT: In business organizations, what's really important about people is not their individual skills but the relationships they form with one another. By investing in "social capital," companies can often push their performance to a whole new level. THE BIOLOGY CENTURY DAWNS: In the twentieth century, product innovations tended to spring from physics. But in the new century, biology may be the central source of innovation. From genomics to biomimicry, the study of life promises to change what companies sell and even how they operate.     

商业银行理财产品的模式变迁、发展瓶颈与突破之路

本文从商业银行理财产品的模式变迁入手,提出了制约其进一步发展的两个瓶颈因素:一是理财产品进入资本市场的合规性问题尚未根本解决;二是理财产品的创新生产平台亟待建立。从长期看,政策制约因素只是阶段性和外生性的,产品开发和生产能力上的不足才是根本性和内生性的。在借鉴国际经验的基础上,文章从组织形式和平台建设两个方面提出了建议,并指出国内商业银行理财产品的发展目标是成为人民币产品的生产商和做市商。     

国库新业务的有效监管

财政国库管理制度、非税收入征缴及政府收支分类改革的逐步深入为国库会计管理和核算内容赋予了新的内涵。国库新业务的发展,加大了防范国库会计业务风险和国库资金风险的难度。加强国库监管是有效防范和化解国库资金风险的主要手段之一,因此国库监管的有效性显得甚为重要。本文结合国库新业务实际,就如何进行有效监管进行了较为深入的探讨,并提出了相关建议。     

Capital versus talent. The battle that's reshaping business

For much of the twentieth century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. The roots of the current conflict lie in the twentieth-century shift from industrial to managerial capitalism and the creation of a new class of professional talent, the authors explain. Since the arrival of the information-based economy in the past decade, tensions have escalated. The dramatic rise of CEO pay--and the public fire it has drawn--is a telling symptom. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, is there no end to it? Increasingly, it's human capital that is the basis of value, and financial capital has become far more generic than shareholders would like to believe. The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.     

The social mastery of technology : An agenda for research and action

This article reports on the symposium on the ‘Social Mastery of Technology’ (MASTECH) organized by the CNRS Industrial Economics Research Group and the Maison Rhône-Alpes des Sciences de l'Homme in Lyon, France, 9–12 September 1991, under the patronage of UNESCO, which was a major innovation among scientific communities in the area of human sciences.     

Future space. A new blueprint for business architecture

Although the Internet is an essential conduit for many business activities, it isn't rendering the physical world any less important, as the failures of many Web merchants demonstrate. People need social and sensual contact. The companies that succeed will be those best able to integrate the physical and the virtual. But that requires a new kind of business architecture--a new approach to designing stores, offices, factories, and other spaces where business is conducted. The author, a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Design, provides practical guidelines to help managers and entrepreneurs think creatively about the structures in which their businesses operate. He outlines four challenges facing designers of such "convergent" structures, so-called because they function in both physical and virtual space: matching form to function, allowing visitors to visualize the presence of others, personalizing spaces, and choreographing connectivity. Using numerous examples, from a fashion retailer that wants to sell in stores as well as through a Web site to a radically new kind of consulate, the author shows how businesses can meet each challenge. For instance, allowing customers to visualize the presence of others means that visitors to a Web site should be given a sense of other site visitors. Personalizing physical and virtual spaces involves using databases to enable those spaces to adapt quickly to user preferences. The success of companies attempting to merge on-line and traditional operations will depend on many factors. But without a well-designed convergent architecture, no company will fully reap the synergies of physical space and Internet technology.     

城商行国际业务的发展与未来走向

国际业务对于城商行补充和完善服务功能,增强整体竞争能力具有重要意义。城商行应利用和开发现行诸方面的优势,大力开办国际业务,寻求自身本外币一体化发展的路子,本文作者在对现有城商行的几种国际业务发展模式进行分析之后认为,组建银行集团是适合我国城市商业银行发展壮大国际业务的有效之路。     

个人金融业务经营观念的创新

观念的转变既是向商业银行转变的前提和动力，又是真正实现向商业银行转变的重要标志。观念的转变滞后，势必影响经营机制、管理方式转变的进程和效果。     

当前票据市场业务快速发展的特点、成因及规范建议

2012年年初以来,大连市票据市场交易活跃,银行承兑汇票签发量增加较多,贴现、转贴现业务同比增长较快,票据融资占各项贷款的比重同比明显提升。票据业务近期发展较快,既有该项业务本身具有比较优势的原因,也是当前流动性充裕和银企双方经营调整与博弈的结果。在市场快速发展的同时,如何从统计角度体现票据融资对实体经济支持的有效性、不放松票据真实性审核力度,以及完善银行票据业务内控机制等问题仍不容忽视,为此,文章就进一步规范和推动票据市场健康发展提出相关政策建议。     

The business case for regulation of corporate social responsibility and accountability

This paper develops an alternative (or supplementary) theoretical justification for the regulation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and social and environmental accounting and reporting (SEAR) to the justification contained in the extant academic literature. It does this by demonstrating how, contrary to the dominant business discourse, increased regulation designed to protect the social and environmental interests of a range of stakeholders can also serve to enhance corporate economic performance and shareholder value.

The theoretical perspectives developed in this paper are drawn from Beck's and Giddens’ theories on reflexive modernity, and indicate that reflexively appropriated knowledge can be a key factor in developing socially constructed understandings of the social and environmental risks to a range of stakeholders inherent in business operations.

In situations where voluntary self-regulation of CSR and SEAR has been ineffective in preventing corporate actions and decisions that have resulted in damaging social and environmental consequences, processes of reflexivity can substantially increase public awareness of the level of risk they face from corporate operations. Such increased perceptions of risk can lead to a loss of trust in an individual corporation or a whole industrial sector, and this can be exacerbated where stakeholders begin to actively seek out alternative risk discourses to inform themselves about possible risks of which they were previously unaware. We argue that effective statutory regulation could avoid these outcomes, and the loss of shareholder economic value that can flow from these outcomes.     

新旧企业会计准则比较(二)

二、企业会计准则--债务重组 (一)内容比较 1.债务重组方式 修订前: (1)以资产清偿债务; (2)债务转为资本; (3)修改不包括上述(1)和(2)两种方式在内的债务条件,如减少债务本金、减少债务利息等(以下简称"修改其他债务条件"; (4)以上两种或两种以上方式的组合(以下简称"混合重组方式").     

湖南保险代理公司业务转型趋势及风险探析

随着寿险业务经营理念的不断深入,加之资本市场运作的推动以及公司持续发展的需要,湖南的部分保险代理公司已经逐渐向代理寿险业务转型。尽管湖南寿险专业代理机构采取了精英模式、华康模式、泛华模式等不同的经营管理模式,但都呈现出资金实力相对比较强,分支机构建设力度较大,盈利周期普遍较长,合作模式和渠道单一,从业人员素质不高等共同特点。监管机构必须高度关注寿险专业代理机构发展过程中存在的风险,及时采取应对措施,以促进湖南保险业持续健康发展。     

2003年海南省货币政策效应分析

2003年,海南省金融机构继续执行稳健的货币政策,金融运行平稳,经济发展驶入较快的轨道,但信贷资金分配不均及信贷沉淀等问题仍是下阶段货币政策重点关注的焦点。     

A reading list for Bill Gates--and you. A conversation with literary critic Harold Bloom. Interview by Diane L. Coutu

In today's technology-driven world, who has time to pick up a 400-page novel? Most executives don't--they have urgent e-mails to answer, training seminars to attend, meetings to lead, and trade publications to scan. But according to Harold Bloom, one of America's most influential scholars, they should make time in their hectic schedules to read great works. In a wide-ranging conversation with HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, Bloom discusses the importance of literature: every individual--regardless of profession--needs to stretch his or her mind and reflect now and again on the human condition. "By reading great imaginative literature, you can prepare yourself for surprise and even get a kind of strength that welcomes and exploits the unexpected," he says. Because there are so many great works and there is so little time, Bloom presents a reading list for busy executives. Shakespeare's King Lear can teach businesspeople about change. Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays capture the ethos of the American spirit--individualism and inventiveness. Bloom says Sigmund Freud's conceptions "form the only Western mythology that contemporary intellectuals have in common." And people will never fully understand some aspects of themselves until they read Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. In short, Bloom believes the humanities have much to offer businesspeople: great books broaden their awareness and their range of sensibility, he says. But reading literature will not make businesspeople more moral, he cautions. Bloom also discusses other topics such as how to read well, the state of popular fiction, the role of irony, and the subject of change.     

Aiming to connect: the business case for diversity in public organizations in The Netherlands

This paper examines the effectiveness of diversity policy and interventions in the Dutch public sector and shows that business case interventions can affect employees’ commitment to their organization, contributing to staff retention rates and improving overall performance. Leadership style, as well as organizational culture, are shown to play a crucial role in the effectiveness of the interventions that were analysed.     

Disharmony in international accounting standards setting: The Chinese approach to accounting for business combinations

The paper addresses two distinct aspects of disharmony in international accounting standards setting. The first aspect relates to the political economic context of financial accounting standards. This is illustrated by the Chinese standards setters’ decision to allow the pooling of interests method of accounting for business combinations despite the prohibition of this method by both the FASB and the IASB. This decision by the Chinese standards setters appears to have been based on political economic factors related to the need for industrial reorganization in China rather than a desire to serve the needs of global capital markets. The second aspect of disharmony relates to the role played by differential understandings of the fundamental objectives of financial reporting in an international context. The IASB's goal of producing one set of global accounting standards to serve the needs of global capital markets has led to a reduction in the number of permissible accounting methods and a move towards the fair value accounting model. In particular, the IASB concluded that the acquisition method of accounting for business combinations should be the only method allowed for business combinations. In contrast, the Chinese standards setters have recognized the existence of both mergers and acquisitions, and in response they created two different methods of accounting for business combinations. Effectively, the Chinese standards setters developed an alternative approach to accounting for business combinations which challenges the IASB's goal of achieving international accounting convergence through the fair value model.