Any action that shows a consistent correlation to high profits would probably be of interest to companies struggling to swim against the tide of these perilous economic times. But one corporate policy seems to address both diversity and profitability issues in a single blow: Over the past several years, my colleagues and I at Pepperdine University have tracked the performance of Fortune 500 companies with a strong record of promoting women to the executive suite and compared their performance to that of other firms in the same industries. The correlation between high-level female executives ... Read More
Profit, Thy Name Is … Woman?
More like this: Business & Economics, March-April 2009, Miller-McCune Research Essay Tags: Business, Economics, Gender Equity, Women
Counting on the Middle Class
For a company intent on going global, one of the most difficult problems in determining the market potential for Westernized goods and services is knowing the number of potential buyers in any specific country. Population numbers are easy to get, but, for most countries, those numbers can be misleading. Buyers of Westernized goods are likely to be in the middle class or above, but — until now — there has been no reliable measure of the size of the middle-class market in various countries. It is easy to get gross domestic product data for most countries, but when one divides by the ... Read More
More like this: Business & Economics, News and Options, November-December 2008 Tags: Economics, Entrepreneurs, GDP, Goods, Middle Class, News and Options, Services