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这是周五的作业，因为spence有点事儿，所以提早发了，希望童鞋们能够谅解。谢谢！！
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Understanding Financial Leverage
by Karen Firestone
"Leverage" is one of the more interesting and difficult concepts to fully grasp in all of finance, but it's important for anyone that borrows or plans to borrow money to understand. Much of the confusion stems from the contrasting meanings embedded in the same word. Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes two very different definitions. The first suggests strength: "power, effectiveness." The other, on face value, has little to do with control: "the use of credit to enhance one's speculative capacity." Combining the two suggests that the party which borrows has the leverage — they have the power and advantage over others. Does that mean that the borrower is dominant over the lender? Somehow, that flies in the face of what many of us learned at an early age. The gambler who can't pay his bookie ends up with a right hook to the gut. Yet many people jump into risky financial situations without considering the potential consequences.
The most intimate relationship most of us have with leverage is our home mortgage. In the vast majority of cases, over many decades, this structure has been positive and transformative to the buyer. However, there are two conditions necessary for financial leverage to actually become power. The first is that the borrower must be able to make his payments, or he risks repossession. The second is that the asset underlying the leverage holds its value. As leverage accentuates the profit when asset values rise, it decimates return when values fall. Without these conditions, the music stops, and the benefit of leverage becomes a huge liability.
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Leverage went through a gilded period in the mid- to late-1980s when buyout king Mike Milken heralded the use of debt for companies trying to grow quickly. The interest rates were attractive to investors — well in the high single digits and even above that level — and company managements were anxious to access capital for expansion and acquisitions. As the manager of the Leisure & Entertainment Fund at Fidelity Investments in the mid-1980s, I witnessed up close and personal many deals funded with substantial leverage.
One example was Orion Pictures, a small studio created by well-regarded, disgruntled United Artists executives in the late 1970s. They raised money for a slate of films and, remarkably, produced four Oscar winners for Best Picture between 1978 and 1992: Amadeus, Platoon, Dances with Wolves, and The Silence of the Lambs. Despite that critical success, Orion was ultimately undone by the combination of movie misses that far outnumbered the hits and debt that ballooned to over $500M. Unable to meet its interest payments, the company filed for bankruptcy in 1991. Orion wasn't the only one. Overzealous borrowing habits contributed to the rise and fall of many other entertainment companies during the 1980s and 1990s, such as New World Pictures, Carolco, Cannon Group, De Laurentis Films, and Live Entertainment.
What could have saved these companies? Orion and other film studios needed level-headed projections about projects before jumping in with both feet. Debt comes with payments that don't stop even if a film tanks. They needed reasonable budgets with spending caps per movie and an honest appreciation of the overwhelming odds against producing a hit in Hollywood. These same tenets apply to every leverage decision, far beyond the movie world.
Most of us have an optimistic bias and prefer to think that leverage will expand our existing abilities rather than saddle us with a persistent burden of heavy cash outflows. No one buys a house or invests in a business thinking that it will go down in value. During periods of strong asset growth, the common association of "leverage" becomes too one-sidedly positive (although the fallout from the recent recession may have moved popular bias too far in the other direction). The key to using leverage successfully is common sense, realistic assumptions, and a clear-eyed understanding of the risks.
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Consider a new business: I recently spoke to a young woman who showed me her proposal for opening an exercise studio, specializing in biking or "spinning" classes. She had carefully prepared a business plan based on expected participants per class, price, available classes per week, and all her anticipated costs. She also needed money, either from investors or a loan.
New businesses either have strong openings, such as new restaurants, which then trail off as the next hot spot grabs the limelight, or slow starts, when, hopefully, word spreads and revenues build. Regardless, a financing component adds another fixed cost. The key to borrowing effectively is to have a keen understanding of what might go wrong. How long will her business survive if members sign up at half the pace? What if a competitor slashes membership prices by 25%? I urged her to prepare for the likely deviation from the outline in front of me. A loan might turn her dream into a reality, but it would also raise the break-even level, something all borrowers must remember.
Leverage can be positive, thanks to the countless individuals and businesses in existence who have relied on a loan to get started. Leverage can and does work under the right circumstances. Lending would not still be in existence after thousands of years if it wasn't a useful tool in careful hands. But careful analysis and preparation by the borrower of several possible scenarios — good and bad — for the business, project, or investment are necessary to really know what you're getting into. Otherwise, debt will be your worst enemy.
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Capitalism and the Kids
By NANCY FOLBRE
Now that the birthrate in the United States has fallen below replacement level (by at least one measure), more journalists are reporting on the costs of children. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat laments the “cultural decadence” of such economic considerations even as he acknowledges their relevance.
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Cultural change – what Mr. Douthat refers to as modernity and others refer to as post-familialism – is surely a part of the story. But the growth of capitalism itself – the expansion of wage employment at the expense of family-based enterprise – accounts for most of the pressures driving a process of fertility decline that has been under way for more than 200 years.
Public policies intended to buffer the impact of capitalist labor markets on family life are a central feature of our social history.
Capitalism is not the villain of some simple morality tale. It did not intrude into an idyllic world of reciprocity and commitment. The traditional family-based economy was based on distinctly patriarchal principles. Male heads of household wielded legal and economic power over their wives and children. More children meant more labor for the family enterprise.
The growth of wage employment gradually disrupted that patriarchal regime, giving women and youth more opportunities outside the home and more bargaining power within it. The growing demand for skilled labor helped induce a shift toward smaller families, with better-educated, more costly offspring. This shift began long before modern contraceptive technologies could be had.
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Women mobilized a collective effort to demand the same rights that men enjoyed and gradually began to prevail against those who claimed that feminism would destroy family life. Both women’s empowerment and fertility decline accelerated the process of capitalist development that had set them into motion.
But the very structure of a new system based on competitive labor markets imposed penalties on parents, who lost the ability to capture many of the potential economic benefits of their child-rearing efforts. Prolonged school attendance raised the age at which young people began to work and the search for jobs often took them away from home.
As more single men and women flooded into the labor market, willing to work for lower wages than those with children to support, working-class advocates began to insist on the need for a “family wage” sufficient to care for dependents. Early campaigns for minimum-wage legislation warned that, without it, working-class families would not be able to successfully raise the next generation.
The movement to provide old-age pensions (first on the state, then on the federal level) emphasized the benefits of taxing the younger generation as a whole to support the elderly rather than expecting parents to recoup expenses from their own children.
The expansion of public health and education services represented a form of social investment in which taxpayer investments in children would be repaid by the future revenues that a more productive labor force would generate.
Policies offering many parents tax deductions and credits, the protections of a social safety net and the right to unpaid leaves from employment all represent explicit efforts to revalorize family commitments.
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In short, many programs of the so-called welfare state, often derogated by conservatives as undermining family life, have rather proved a substantial – if not always successful – source of support for child-rearing.
Unfortunately, we have socialized the benefits of child-rearing more thoroughly than we have socialized the costs, taxing the working-age population to provide benefits to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare but providing uneven and somewhat unpredictable public support to parents. Single mothers in particular remain far more susceptible to poverty in the United States than in similarly affluent countries.
As a result, public policies have had the effect of slowing but not halting fertility decline in the United States. The resulting aging of our population is contributing to both fiscal and political stress.
A more serious problem is our failure to adequately improve our children’s capabilities, cramping their hopes for upward mobility. In a report echoing the family-wage advocates of the early 1900s, Lisa Dodson and Randy Albelda document the negative impact of parents’ low-wage employment on child outcomes.
Today, in an era of serious economic stress, in which the best promises of capitalism have been broken, low-income mothers and children are threatened with major cuts to public assistance. Yet conservatives staunchly defend the unprecedented riches of the top 1 percent, resisting even small increases in marginal tax rates.
Yes, Mr. Douthat, cultural decadence is definitely in evidence.
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Top 10 Sales Trends for 2013
by Steve W. Martin
[attachimg=580,215]111443[/attachimg]
What are the top business-to-business sales trends for 2013? Here's my list based upon my experience of studying some of the world's best sales organizations this past year.
1. Sales Force Behavior "Modeling"
Models are verbal descriptions and visual representations of how systems work and processes flow. Models enable repeatable and predictable experiences. More organizations will study their top salespeople in 2013 to understand how they formulate their winning account strategies based upon customer politics, evaluator psychology, and the human nature of executive decision makers that are unique to winning every account.
2. Win-Loss Analysis Studies
All companies and their salespeople are well versed on the logical arguments for selecting their product. However, the decision to make a major purchase is also influenced by internal politics, how the decision-makers receive information along with individual biases and personal desires. Unfortunately many companies don't perform any type of win-loss analysis so they don't understand their customers in these regards. Because of the economy and relentless competition, 2013 will be the year that many companies have to re-discover the lost art of win-loss analysis.
3. Emphasis on Language-Based Interactions
While proponents of the consultative, relationship, and challenger-based sales approaches will continue to argue the merits of their respective philosophies, there is one thing everyone can agree on. For 2013, it's not only what you say, but equally important, how you say it. Sales linguistics is the new field of study about how customers and salespeople use and interpret language during the decision making process. If you are in sales, you make your living by talking. You need to study language and perfect your use of words because your most important competitive weapon is your mouth.
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4. Sales Force Verticalization
A "specialist" beats a "generalist" every time. Closely related to Sales Linguistics is the accelerated trend of sales force language specialization based upon the following strategies:
?Industry verticalization focus (finance, government, retail, etc.) to promote domain expertise.
?Technical application segmented by the different solutions the company offers to promote extremely deep technical knowledge.
?Business process improvement as opposed to the recitation of standard "generic" product features and functions to customers.
5. Sales Process Ineffectiveness
Many companies have realized that their sales didn't increase even after spending a great deal of money and effort implementing a sales process methodology. The reason for this is because the "black hole" of the sales process is what happens during and at the close of sales calls. Today more than ever, it's the personal interactions with prospective customers that determines winners from losers, not the internal processes of the sales organization. In 2013 more companies will be studying and categorizing these customer interactions so they can improve sales force effectiveness.
6. Organizational Buying Psychology
If you are involved in selling enterprise solutions, you already know the importance of understanding the inner workings of the various departments within the prospective customer's company. Your solution might be purchased by the information technology department and used by accounting and human resources. Therefore, it's critical to map out the interrelationships of the departments within an organization. The essence of successful enterprise sales is understanding not only who to sell to, but how to craft a message that appeals to various departmental constituents. Understanding organizational buying psychology becomes an even more critical topic in 2013.
7. No Decision as the Main Competitor
For sales forces involved with large capital expenditure sales cycles, never before has the mantra "Call High or Die" been so true. Salespeople must reach C-level executive decision makers early in the sales process because the default for organizations today is to maintain the status quo and delay every major purchase.
8. "Intelligent" Territory Management
Salespeople who have to manage hundreds of accounts and vast geographic territories face the perennial problem of where to spend their most precious resource, which is their time. Perhaps the most important "Big Data" application within sales will be the analytics that predict which prospective net-new customers should be called upon and what installed base accounts are most likely to buy next. As opposed to salespeople creating their own action plan for the day's activities, more intelligent territory management systems will direct them to call on certain accounts and prospects in 2013.
9. Technology Fatigue
While technology has profoundly improved the effectiveness of salespeople, there is an interesting trend that has been growing over the past couple of years and will only get worse. Salespeople today are always available to customers via their cell phones, constantly receiving a gargantuan stream of e-mail information, and every account update they make in Salesforce.com is broadcast to sales management. Many long time salespeople are suffering from "Technology Fatigue" and complain they are burning themselves out.
10. Continued Migration from Field to Phone
One final trend that bears mentioning is the accelerated move from field-based sales to phone-based internet sales. Many companies have quickly transitioned the majority of their field reps to be almost exclusively phone based. Therefore, these reps must now be able to create winning relationships with their voices as opposed to how they sold in the past with their physical presence. Understanding and mastering the art of persuasion will become even more important for all salespeople in 2013.
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The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: Determinants of Success and Failure
by Ethan Mollick
Crowdfunding refers to a variety of different efforts by entrepreneurs – cultural, social, and for-profit – to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. In one of the few published overviews of the topic, Schwienbacher & Larralde (2010) define crowdfunding as “an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes”. Crowdfunding draws inspiration from concepts like micro-finance (Morduch, 1999) and crowd sourcing (Poetz & Schreier, 2012), but represents its own unique category of fundraising, facilitated by dozens of internet sites devoted to the topic.
Crowdfunding differs from traditional funding sources for new ventures, such as angel or venture capital investment, in a number of ways. One crucial distinction is that, unlike traditional ventures, projects engaging in “crowdfunding” have a wide variety of goals. Many crowdfunded projects seek to raise small amounts of capital, often under $1,000, to initiate a particular one-time project (an event, for example). In these cases, capital is often provided by friends and family. Increasingly, however, crowdfunding appears to be a viable source for entrepreneurial seed capital (Schwienbacher & Larralde, 2010), allowing entrepreneurs to raise the initial money required to start their new venture (Evans & Leighton, 1989). It is unclear, however, the degree to which crowdfunding will ultimately substitute for other forms of more formal venture funding, especially as the rules around crowdfunding for equity are evolving (see, for example, the JOBS Act, 112th Congress), and early stage investors typically offer much more to new ventures than simply funding – including advice, governance, and prestige (Gorman & Sahlman, 1989; Hsu, 2004).
In addition to encompassing a wide range of potential projects, crowdfunding also differs from other methods of start-up funding because the relationship between funders and founders (as I will refer to all individuals raising crowdfunding for a cultural, social, or forprofit venture) varies by context and the nature of the funding effort (Belleflamme, Lambert, & Schwienbacher, 2012). Some crowdfunding efforts, such as art or humanitarian projects, view their funders as patrons or philanthropists, who expect nothing in return. Many projects place their funders in the position of early customers, allowing them access to the products produced by funded projects at an earlier date, better price, or with some other special benefit. Finally, as legalized by the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, passed in April 2012, crowdfunding efforts may also view funders as investors, giving them equity stakes in return for their funding. In this paper, projects fit in either the first (“patron”) or second (“early customer”) views of the nature of crowdfunding. However, all three forms of crowdfunding are based on similar principles, in that funders are investing funds in a project, and thus are expecting a successful outcome. Changes in the way that individuals view the funding of not-for-profit ventures strongly suggest that all crowdfunding funders may be thought of as investors, making decisions about which projects to support based on their expectations for success and the underlying appeal of the project (Agrawal et al., 2010). Further, contributions to crowdfunding projects, even in markets where crowdfunding is driven by altruism, appear to predict the ultimate success of projects (Burtch et al., 2011), suggesting that crowdfunding investment is drawn to quality projects. In the analyses to follow, I find support for the contention that funders respond to signals about the quality of the project, regardless of their role.
Though the crowdfunding model overall has achieved remarkable success, and has emerged as a viable method of funding new ventures, there has been very little work to date on the topic. Three working papers draw on narrow case studies of crowdfunding, including studies drawn from a French startup (Schwienbacher & Larralde, 2010), the crowdfunding of a music group (Agrawal et al., 2010), and 100 pitches for story ideas (Burtch et al., 2011). An additional working paper offers a theoretical model of when individuals would chose to crowdfund (Belleflamme et al., 2012). While all four papers offer valuable contributions, no work to date has provided a large-scale understanding of the empirical dynamics of crowdfunding across a wide variety of projects. In the next part of this paper, I offer an attempt at such an analysis.
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发表于 2012-12-13 06:28:04
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