Techs and the City

It is the nature—and, one should add, the responsibility—of the C-level executive to think conceptually, to deal in strategic visions and grand designs. Niggling details may fall to others, but, by God, real leaders revel in Big Ideas.Why am I overselling this? Because the particular Big Idea up ...

By Scott Leibs • May 26, 2004

Deep Six for Six Sigma?

The relevance of Six Sigma, the corporate efficiency program made famous by General Electric, is being questioned by none other than one of its creators.Jay Desai, who helped implement Six Sigma at the conglomerate, said in a recent Reuters story that when companies must demonstrate change throug...

By Stephen Taub • May 18, 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

Managing for Improved Corporate Performance

What does it mean for a company to perform well? Any definition must revolve around the notion of results that meet or exceed the expectations of shareholders. Yet when top managers speak with us privately, they often suggest that the gap between these expectations and management’s baseline earni...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • May 17, 2004

CFOs Still See Room to Cut Costs

Despite three years of downsizing and belt-tightening throughout Corporate America, 85 percent of CFOs reported that cutting costs is still their highest priority, according to a new Booz Allen Hamilton report.In fact, just 3 percent of the 156 finance executives surveyed by the consultancy belie...

By Stephen Taub • May 11, 2004

Don’t Laugh at Gilded Butterflies

The Gillette company’s website flashes out a message to the e-visitor: “Innovation is Gillette”, it claims. There are few big companies that would not like to make a similar claim; for they think innovation is a bit like Botox — inject it in the right corporate places and improvements are bound t...

By Economist Staff • April 23, 2004

The Great Divide

A CIO recently complained to an executive recruiter that his company’s CFO was making his life a living hell. “The CIO came on board to effect change,” says Kevin M. Rosenberg, a managing partner with BridgeGate, an executive recruitment firm in Irvine, California, “but he is constantly being pum...

By Laton McCartney • April 21, 2004

So, Why Be Public?

It has been over two years since the Enron scandal broke and well over a year since Congress passed its sweeping reform legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Enough time, perhaps, to gain some perspective on a series of scandals that continue to shock the senses of even the most jaded business obs...

By CEO and Joseph Fuller • April 14, 2004

Corporate Pension Aid Approved by Bush

On Saturday, President Bush signed into law a bill that will save U.S. companies more than $80 billion in pension contributions through the end of 2005.The new law applies to traditional “defined benefit” pension plans, many of which have become underfunded in the past few years due to a weak sto...

By Dave Cook • April 12, 2004

Job Growth Stronger than Expected

Unexpected good news on the jobs front: Non-farm payrolls climbed 308,000 in March, the strongest month since April 2000. Job growth increased across all sectors, with construction and retail sales seeing the largest gains, according to the government report.The March expansion was about triple t...

By Stephen Taub • April 5, 2004

Herculean Labours

The metaphor was all too apt. In August last year a crowd of spectators, press and athletes gathered at a sparkling new rowing and canoeing venue northeast of Athens to watch the World Rowing Junior Championships and test out one of several new venues built specially for the 2004 summer Olympic G...

By Jason Karaian • March 25, 2004

Hold That Golden Spike

Rarely has a topic engendered so much agreement yet so little progress as IT/business “alignment.” Last year it topped the priority list among members of the Society for Information Management (SIM), a professional organization of CIOs that has been actively studying the issue for three years and...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 17, 2004

Will IT Be a Bonus Baby?

While capital spending has been recovering for the past two years, it still lags the levels seen in 1999 and early 2000. A tax break that expires at the end of this year may help alleviate that.Written into the Jobs and Growth Tax Act of 2003 (HR 2), it piles “bonus” depreciation onto the normal ...

By CFO Editorial Staff • March 16, 2004

More CEOs Forecast More Hiring

Chief executive officers of many of the largest companies are upbeat about their hiring plans.According to the latest quarterly survey from The Business Roundtable, 33 percent of CEOs expect to hire more people over the next six months, compared with 25 percent of CEOs who were surveyed in Decemb...

By Stephen Taub • March 4, 2004

Good, but Not Great

Things are looking up in America’s boardrooms , but only minor relief is in sight for job seekers. According to this quarter’s survey of CFO expectations, 72 percent of U.S. finance executives say they have a positive outlook on the domestic economy over the next year. They also expect strong rev...

By Joseph McCafferty • March 1, 2004

Best Practice Doesn’t Equal Best Strategy

Best practice. It may be the most readily recognized and widely used of all business management tools. And why shouldn’t it be? To executives, modeling a company’s performance on its best-in-class competitor is an ambitious but attainable aspiration. To investors, the strategy is a guarantee of t...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Feb. 24, 2004

Greenspan: Prospects Good for Expansion

This year the United States could rack up its strongest growth since 1984, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified Wednesday in prepared remarks before the House Banking and Financial Services Committee.While this growth would knock down the unemployment rate even further, added Greensp...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 12, 2004

Never Mind the Music

It was pop-music history in the making. Last summer, as Europe melted in a heat wave, crooner Robbie Williams scorched all records with his three-day sell-out concert at Knebworth, a 15th-century Tudor estate in the English countryside. As part of a 21-date European tour, 375,000 fans packed the ...

By Janet Kersnar • Feb. 12, 2004

Everything in Moderation: Our 10th Annual Cost Management Survey

Anyone worried that cost-conscious companies have eliminated muscle as well as fat should take heart from the findings of our latest Cost Management Survey. Ever since the New Economy bubble burst, companies have diligently and methodically pruned budgets. Head counts have been reduced. Offices h...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 12, 2004

Conference Board Predicts Best Year Since 1984

The latest economic forecast from The Conference Board predicts that in 2004, the U.S. and world economies will record their best years since 1984.The board forecasts U.S. growth of 5.9 percent and global growth of about 5 percent.“Rapid top-line growth and bottom-line productivity benefits mean ...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 5, 2004

Do Women Deliver Better Financial Performance?

According to a new survey from Catalyst, a research and advisory organization that promotes the advancement of women in business, companies with a higher representation of women in senior management positions financially outperform companies with proportionally fewer women at the top.In the study...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 30, 2004

Compensation and Cash Flow

Jeffery Immelt doesn’t believe that General Electric Co. should offer stock options and similar incentives to retain its chief executive. That’s one reason the CEO worked with his company’s compensation committee to connect his paycheck more directly to cash-flow performance metrics.Starting in J...

By Marie Leone • Jan. 21, 2004

XBRL

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) has been described as the universal business language, but so far, it’s about as oft-spoken as Latin. In essence, XBRL brings context to numbers by tagging financial data points with information about that data, in effect standardizing it. The idea: t...

By John Goff • Jan. 6, 2004

And a Happy New Year?

CFOs feel a groove coming on. They finally see enough signs of economic recovery to be confident that the new year will be brighter. Positive employment numbers released in November and CFOs’ own intentions to increase hiring contributed to expectations for improvement in 2004. In fact, finance c...

By Joseph McCafferty • Dec. 1, 2003

See It Now

When Marc Krens joined John I. Haas Inc. 12 years ago, the privately held company was hardly a font of technological sophistication. The 10 businesses that constituted Haas, the world’s largest supplier of hops for brewing, all used different accounting and financial-reporting software. Worse, th...

By John Goff • Dec. 1, 2003

IT Budgets and ROI

After several years of doom and gloom, IT budgets will, depending on whom you talk to, (a) increase slightly, (b) increase very slightly, or (c) stay flat. Even the most optimistic predictions give little cause for celebration because, as Gartner research director Barbara Gomolski notes, “Most co...

By John McPartlin • Nov. 17, 2003