Credit: the fuel behind every bubble
Most damaging bubbles are financed with borrowed money. How lending, new lenders, low real interest rates and rising debt turn a boom into a bubble, and why credit makes the bust worse.
10 min read
Insights topic
Operations
67 articles on this topic.
Articles tagged Operations
Depreciation, capital spending and the weight of heavy assets
Why businesses that constantly replace plant and equipment struggle to build wealth, how depreciation and capital spending reveal this, and what it means for manufacturing ventures.
10 min read
Focusing business resources without losing flexibility
Learn how a small business can concentrate effort on a valuable customer problem, test uncertain choices and expand carefully without committing every resource.
13 min read
Institution or people? Where the profits of a service business end up
In some service businesses customers trust the organisation; in others they trust individuals. That difference decides who captures the profit, and it shapes how service businesses should be built.
10 min read
Involving the people who will deliver your strategy
Build a planning process that includes decision-makers and implementers, surfaces practical constraints and turns shared discussion into clear, supported commitments.
13 min read
Learning from experts: imitation learning and its limits
Systems can learn by copying expert demonstrations. How behavioural cloning, cascading errors, expert correction and inverse reinforcement learning work, and what they teach about know-how.
10 min read
Overheads, research and the cost of standing still
How overheads and research spending reveal whether a business must keep running just to stay in place, and what product businesses can learn from that.
10 min read
Pre-call planning: be prepared, then be present
Most sales conversations are won or lost before they start. A practical guide to planning a customer meeting, and to conducting it with attention, purpose and respect.
10 min read
Reading an income statement like an owner
A plain-English walk down the income statement, line by line, asking at each step what an owner would want to know about the strength of the business.
10 min read
What the balance sheet says about cash, stock and customers who owe you
How to read cash, inventory, receivables and the current ratio, and why some of the strongest businesses look weak on traditional liquidity measures.
10 min read
Running a business through a boom and bust
Booms tempt businesses to over-expand, borrow and extrapolate demand; busts punish them for it. A practical guide to building a business that benefits from good times and survives bad ones.
10 min read
Sales self-management: planning your time, pipeline and energy
Selling well depends on how you manage yourself. A practical system for planning your week, keeping your pipeline honest and sustaining the effort sales requires.
10 min read
