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HBR IdeaCast

How to Stop Corporate Inversions

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Management, Business/marketing, Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Business/management, Hbr, Finance, Marketing, Communication, Innovation, Teams, Business, Business/entrepreneurship, Economics, Harvard, Leadership

4.31.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2014

⏱️ 15 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bill George and Mihir Desai, professors at Harvard Business School, explain why our corporate tax code is driving American business overseas.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.

0:05.9

HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous

0:11.9

leaders through raw honest career questions

0:14.6

that we all face.

0:15.9

Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free

0:18.3

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HPR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

0:33.6

I'm Justin Fox, and I'm talking today with Bill George,

0:36.6

a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School

0:39.2

and the former CEO of Medtronic,

0:41.4

and me here Desai, a finance professor at HBS and also a professor of law, I guess, at

0:46.7

Harvard Law School.

0:48.6

What we're going to talk about is the currently very controversial, if maybe a little arcane topic of corporate

0:55.8

inversions but first bill welcome to idea cast please be with you Justin

1:01.6

and mahir welcome to Ideacast.

1:05.0

Great to be here Justin.

1:06.0

I'm going to start with a very basic question for Mehere.

1:10.0

What is a corporate inversion?

1:12.0

So the simplest way to think about an inversion is that the usual structure of a company is there's a parent company on top,

1:20.0

usually in this case a US multinational, and then they have a foreign subsidiary often

1:24.4

let's say low tax jurisdiction and that subsidiary is below the parent and an

1:29.1

inversion is an inversion of that corporate structure so you you turn it upside down. So that subsidiary

1:34.6

in a low tax jurisdiction becomes the parent and the US company is now the subsidiary of that

...

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