Happy Holidays or Bah Humbug?

When this quarter’s CFO Global Confidence Survey was conducted, just before the November elections, respondents’ optimism about the U.S. and global economies had dampened somewhat. Their jitters most likely reflected uncertainty about the election as well as concerns about hiring, fuel prices, an...

By Joseph McCafferty • Dec. 1, 2004

Capital Choices: The 2004 Capital-Spending Scorecard

See the capital-spending scorecardIt’s no secret that the economy’s anemic recovery from the recent recession reflects weak spending on the part of corporations. While the Federal Reserve Board has kept interest rates low to keep borrowing costs down, the confidence of consumers — whose spending ...

By Ronald Fink • Dec. 1, 2004

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Wood for the Trees

Co-operative Financial Services (CFS) is a medium-size banking and insurance business with its roots firmly in the north of England and the 19th century. But in one respect at least it is a 21st century world leader. In a ranking of firms’ non-financial reports, CFS came out top, ahead of second-...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 26, 2004

Key Drivers of Organic Growth

Two-thirds of executives in a new survey agreed that “having the right information and insights to tell us what customers/consumers really want” is very important — yet just 16 percent said that their companies are doing a top-notch job of it.As a result, many companies are having trouble generat...

By Stephen Taub • Nov. 17, 2004

One Way, or Another?

See the survey results“It’s one thing for a CFO to demand a solid approach to ROI, and another for a CIO to deliver it. We have to solve this problem, but there’s been little progress.”“At some point, it all comes back to ROI — in theory. But ROI is just one tool for setting priorities.”“Every ye...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 17, 2004

Swamped

It’s been well over ten years since companies first began using balanced scorecards to improve performance measurement and management, but are they better off? Not if you look at some recent research from The Hackett Group. In its latest analysis of over 2,400 companies, the Ohio-based business a...

By Janet Kersnar • Nov. 16, 2004

Improvement Plans Need Improvement: Study

When it comes to performance improvement, there’s a significant disconnect between intentions and execution. That’s the finding of a new study, “Strategic Execution: Achieving Operational Excellence,” conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Celerant Consulting. Forty-five of...

By Lisa Yoon • Nov. 15, 2004

Metaphorically Speaking

The two biggest consumer-technology successes of recent times are awhite page and a wheel. The white page belongs to Google, the world’smost popular search engine; the wheel to Apple’s iPod, the world’s mostpopular portable music player with a hard disk. Both form part ofso-called “interfaces” — ...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 9, 2004

In the Journals: Customers Before Brands

An old saying tells us that “the customer is always right.” In the marketing department, however, dollars have traditionally been directed less at customers and more at brands, which allowed the company to promise benefits, differentiate itself from competitors, and lay claim to aggregations of c...

By Lisa Yoon • Nov. 5, 2004

Occidental Petroleum CFO Stephen Chazen

Oil. This year it has truly meant black gold for both producers and refiners of crude. With prices nearing $50 a barrel over the summer, the industry has reaped the benefits of record high profits — and taken lots of criticism for the same.Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., which in 20...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Oct. 22, 2004

The Trouble with IRR

Practitioners often interpret internal rate of return as the annual equivalent return on a given investment; this easy analogy is the source of its intuitive appeal. But in fact, IRR is a true indication of a project’s annual return on investment only when the project generates no interim cash fl...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Oct. 20, 2004

Internal Rate of Return: A Cautionary Tale

Maybe finance managers just enjoy living on the edge. What else would explain their weakness for using the internal rate of return (IRR) to assess capital projects? For decades, finance textbooks and academics have warned that typical IRR calculations build in reinvestment assumptions that make b...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Oct. 20, 2004

Measuring the Business Benefit of IT

If few companies have formal constructs in place to ensure that their IT and corporatestrategies are aligned, it is also true that few have developed rigorous systems formeasuring the value that IT contributes to the business. Given that IT is typicallyone of the top five expenditures at most org...

By Randy Myers • Oct. 20, 2004

Nonfinancial Measurements Fall Short

While the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory efforts are aimed squarely at fighting fraud and fostering better internal controls, they miss the mark on nonfinancial measures that could have an equally large impact on a company’s success or failure.This is one of the main conclusions from a n...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 19, 2004

How Green Is My Company?

Suncor Energy Inc. has come clean. The Calgary-based integrated energy company, which reported $6.3 billion (Canadian) in revenues last year, also reported its environmental, social, and economic performance in a 78-page confessional that bares all — from greenhouse gas emissions to workforce div...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 18, 2004

Thoughts on ”Being Green”

We asked a number of notable individuals and organizations to share their thoughts on the question, “Can companies still afford to be green?”CFO.com welcomes your thoughts, too. Send your letters to: The Editor, CFO.com, 111 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019, or email us at [email protected]. Please...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Oct. 15, 2004

Corporate America, Save This Recovery

This is what the economy has been waiting for…sort of.In the past week, at least three software companies — Siebel Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc., and VeriSign Inc. — announced stronger-than-expected third-quarter results.Those announcements have strong implications for the overall economy, which ...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 6, 2004

The Dragon and the Eagle

Over the past year the world economy has grown by almost 5 percent, its fastest pace in two decades. Growth has been powered by two high-octane fuels: America’s exceptionally loose monetary policy, which has encouraged consumers to keep spending; and an unprecedented investment boom in China. Ame...

By Pam Woodall • Oct. 1, 2004

Are Oil Prices Headed for a Fall?

How high will the price of oil go? That’s a critical question for many finance executives are likely to ask as they budget their companies’ costs.With the cost of crude oil now at about $50 a barrel, almost every day another dire report portends a further surge in prices.Yet, despite the prevail...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 30, 2004

When It Rains…

For an operation that has fallen short of expectations and been a consistent money-loser, Microsoft’s business-applications unit certainly gets a lot of attention.As part of its seemingly endless effort to acquire PeopleSoft Inc., Oracle Corp. responded to federal antitrust charges this summer by...

By Norm Alster • Sept. 28, 2004

Monetary Policy: The Next Four Years

How would four years of a John Kerry Administration differ from a second term under George W. Bush? Finance executives must soon wrestle with that question, and they must do so as corporate managers as well as individual citizens.Their current inclinations are clear enough. According to a recent ...

By Ronald Fink • Sept. 27, 2004

Look Who’s Talking

When Bobby Lie, now a senior vice president for enterprise architecture at Fidelity Investments, was in charge of usage-based billing, he had the largely thankless task of hitting up the financial-services company’s many business units for their respective shares of network expenditures. With net...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Sept. 16, 2004

Watch for Those Late-Summer ”Delayoffs”

Is the nation’s employment picture really getting any brighter?Earlier this month we learned that the August unemployment rate held steady at 5.4 percent, down from its recent high of 6.3 percent in June 2003. That same week the Business Roundtable reported that 88 percent of the CEOs it surveyed...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 15, 2004

Stand by Me

Two years ago, at a panel discussion on the sometimes contentious relationship between CFOs and CIOs, one finance executive drew a hearty laugh from the crowd when he said, “My relationship with our CIO poses no problem at all — because the position is currently vacant.”At about the same time, an...

By Scott Leibs • Sept. 15, 2004

Rolling Along

Not many people have heard of European Metal Recycling. But since the early 1990s, UK-based EMR has been building a formidable empire, and is now one of the largest metal recyclers in the world. Its international network of 65 processing sites handles more than 8.5m tonnes of scrap metal a year, ...

By Janet Kersnar • Sept. 14, 2004