Going from Global Trends to Corporate Strategy

An executive’s ability to read trends accurately in a rapidly changing business environment can make all the difference between riding the currents of opportunity and paddling upstream against them. But even when you have a good feel for broad emerging macroeconomic, social, environmental, and bu...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Oct. 18, 2006

Finance Execs: Energy Prices Not a Worry

Finance professionals are confident the energy crisis has passed.According to a new survey of treasury and finance professionals conducted earlier this week at the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) Annual Conference, just 12 percent expect significant increases in the price of electri...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 17, 2006

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

CEO Confidence Sinks to Five-Year Low

Chief executive officers are more pessimistic now than they have been in five years, according to the Conference Board. For the first time in half a decade, organization’s CEO Confidence Measure has dipped below 50, falling to 44 in the third quarter. That approaches the nadir hit in the final q...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 12, 2006

Growing Pains

On December 11th last year, a huge explosion ripped through the Buncefield fuel depot in Hertfordshire, 56 kilometres northeast of London. The local fire chief described the blast at the depot, the main fuel hub for Heathrow and other airports around the city, as the largest of its kind in peacet...

By Tony McAuley • Oct. 10, 2006

CFOs: Kerry’s Sarbox Relief Bill Not Enough

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) has introduced legislation to ease the concerns small companies have about the cost of complying with section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But amid Congress’s month-long break until the Nov. 7 elections, followed by a year-end, lame-duck session, the bill isn’t expecte...

By Sarah Johnson • Oct. 3, 2006

Rush to Judgment

Was Carly Fiorina embracing a disastrous “bigger is better” strategy when she engineered the 2002 merger of Hewlett-Packard Co. with Compaq Computer Corp.? Many at the time, both on Wall Street and within HP, saw the deal as Fiorina’s Folly. And some still do. HP’s board seemed to validate such c...

By Roy Harris • Oct. 1, 2006

A Chance to Direct

When Patriot Federal Bank, a community bank based in Canajoharie, New York, went looking for start-up capital last year, CFO Vince Fazio tapped into an unlikely source: individual retirement accounts. While the humble IRA will never be confused with a hedge fund, it turns out that in the right ha...

By Lori Calabro • Oct. 1, 2006

View from Asia

This summer I was on hand to help shoot a documentary in Qinghai province. The film chronicled the efforts of a Hong Kong charity to bring eye surgery to this forgotten part of China on the Northern Tibetan plateau. Because the land of parched mountains, dusty towns, and ancient temples is rugged...

By Tom Leander • Oct. 1, 2006

Business Outlook Survey

Optimism among CFOs has hit its lowest point since the last recession, according to the latest Duke University/CFO Business Outlook Survey. Just 20 percent of finance chiefs are more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. economy, down from last quarter, when 24 percent had a positive outlook...

By Joseph McCafferty • Oct. 1, 2006

Small Biz: Regulation a Roadblock to Capital

Regulation is the biggest challenge to small businesses that want to raise capital, investment bankers and attorneys told the Securities and Exchange Commission at an SEC government-business forum on small business capital formation on Friday.One such challenge is the inefficiency of registration...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 29, 2006

Small Business Fights Borrowing Squeeze

Unless the playing field is kept level to enable small banks to compete with big ones, corporate borrowers in the United States will face a market where there’s less competition for their business, a former top banking regulator on told Congress on Tuesday.In testimony before the Senate Committee...

By Rob Garver • Sept. 27, 2006

Managing Your Organization by the Evidence

When it comes to simple remedies, few are more seductive than those claiming to help companies create a healthy organization. One-dimensional messages about how to achieve sustainable organizational excellence remain in circulation even though most CEOs and other senior executives instinctively k...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • Sept. 21, 2006

Small Business Owners’ Outlook Declines

The malaise about the economy continues. Small business owners’ optimism is the lowest it’s been since March 2003, says a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business. This rise in pessimism nearly mirrors the rising negativity CFOs feel about the U.S. economy, a pessimism tha...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 20, 2006

Booking Trips the Old-fashioned Way

Not long ago, Randy Royer, the treasurer of Mesirow Financial Holdings, got caught in an ice storm in Portland, Ore. Because he had booked his trip online, he spent hours on the phone with airlines, trying to get back home to Chicago. In the end, he drove to Seattle (a two-hour trip that took six...

By Laura DeMars • Sept. 18, 2006

CFOs’ Optimism at 5-Year Low

Financial executives’ attitude on the U.S. economy has gone downhill. In the midst of weakening housing prices and consumer demand, plus concern about fuel costs, labor costs, and interest rates, nearly 50 percent of CFOs are more pessimistic about the economy than they were three months ago. Thi...

By Sarah Johnson and Don Durfee • Sept. 13, 2006

What Lies Behind Those “Rational” Decisions?

Once a fringe subject, behavioral finance is now taught in business schools across the land. The notion that psychological factors can distort financial decision-making is widely accepted, although the effects of such distortions on markets continue to be debated. Most research in the field has f...

By Edward Teach • Sept. 1, 2006

Sowing the Seeds of Your Legacy

When Warren Buffett announced his plan to channel billions of dollars worth of his personal fortune through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in an effort to eradicate major diseases, philanthropy became headline news. Few can rival the size of Buffett’s donation — approximately $37 billion, ...

By Chuck Jaffe • Sept. 1, 2006

Here Comes the Son

Aditya Mittal launched the largest merger in steel industry history late last January, a few daysafter his 30th birthday. Following a bruising eight-month battle, which featured protectionist rumblingsfrom various European governments and a vigorous (some said racist) defence by the seniormanagem...

By Tony McAuley • Aug. 30, 2006

Overseas Gigs Shorter, But Not Cheaper

As global companies increasingly get a better handle on how much their international assignment programs truly cost, they’re looking for ways to cut back, according to Achim Mossmann of KPMG.Some are decreasing the amount of time employees spend away from their main office. KPMG’s Global Assignme...

By Sarah Johnson • Aug. 28, 2006

Price Fixers Hit with Stiffer Fines

Not only may companies implicated in price-fixing schemes have to pay hefty fines, they may have to pay them twice, if not more.In May, the European Court of Justice, an appeals court for the European Union, upheld a fine of €43.9 million ($55.5 million) imposed on Decatur, Ill.-based Archer Dani...

By Karen M. Kroll • Aug. 24, 2006

Energy Costs Top Small Biz Worries

Increasing energy and fuel costs have become the main concern for small businesses, according to a nationwide study sponsored by the International Profit Associates Small Business Research Board.Of the 358 small business owners polled in July, 15 percent named energy and fuel prices as the primar...

By Helen Shaw • Aug. 17, 2006

Setting a Gold Standard

Candente Resource Corp. no longer calculates currency-exchange rates. It doesn’t wait for international wire transfers to clear either. It doesn’t have to: the gold- and copper-drilling company, based in Vancouver, converted some of its corporate dollars and cents to gold grams and mils.“When I d...

By Laura DeMars • Aug. 10, 2006

View from China

In the rush to gain a foothold in a market of 1.3 billion people, multinationals are pursuing mergers and acquisitions in China more religiously than ever. Foreign companies have so far this year bought stakes in 248 Chinese assets, many of them state-owned, worth $14 billion, according to data p...

By Wu Chen • Aug. 1, 2006

Cabin Fever

If in springtime thoughts turn to love, by late summer hearts yearn for real estate. After a week watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico or red-tail hawks soar over Big Sur, it’s only natural to dream of doing it all again next year. And over the holidays. And long weekends. Heck, why not e...

By Scott Leibs • Aug. 1, 2006

Learning to Love Dividends

This is the age of the share buyback. With record amounts of cash swelling corporate bank accounts, companies are increasingly giving money back to shareholders by buying their own stock. Over the past year and a half, companies in the S&P 500 have spent a staggering $515 billion repurchasing...

By Don Durfee • Aug. 1, 2006