Greenspan Sees Improving Trade Deficit

The growth in the U.S. trade deficit — “and its attendant financing requirement” — may soon begin to see improvement, according to the text of a speech delivered Friday by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.Addressing a business conference in London, Greenspan said that market pressures “app...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 4, 2005

Controlling the Flow: The 11th Annual Cost Management Survey

See the 11th Annual Cost Management SurveyThe good news for cost-conscious companies is that revenues are rising. That’s also the bad news.According to our 11th annual Cost Management Survey, a joint effort of CFO magazine and Stamford, Connecticut-based Archstone Consulting LLC, revenue growth o...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 1, 2005

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

The Long Haul

The nation’s air-service net-work is still reeling from 9/11, economic doldrums, its own bloated capacity, waves of defensive fare-slashing, and expensive fuel. But along with the daunting challenges has come an opportunity for CFOs: to reshape their airlines to fly profitably in the industry tha...

By Roy Harris • Feb. 1, 2005

Big City Blues

Pittsburgh doesn’t look like a city that almost didn’t pay its bills last year. Its streets are clean. Crime rates are low. A gleaming new convention center and two stadiums rise along the banks of the Allegheny and the Ohio, two of the city’s three rivers. Pittsburgh’s nonprofit sector, which in...

By Don Durfee • Feb. 1, 2005

Ernestine, Meet Julie

Try to book a train ticket on Amtrak’s home page and you might just swear off train travel. For sure, you’ll swear. A recent attempt to book a journey from New York to Boston, for example, required toggling between windows, looking up obscure station codes, and waiting for slow page repaints. Whe...

By Karen Bannan • Jan. 4, 2005

New Highs Expected for Q4 Earnings

Most stock indices surged to multiyear highs as 2004 wound down, and one driving force may have been the impact of strong corporate earnings.When the companies that make up the Standard & Poor’s 500 start reporting their December quarterly results next week, they are expected to set a collect...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 4, 2005

Growth Mode

“We’ve become obsessed with the notion of double-digit growth,” says CFO Kristen Onken. That’s an understatement. Since Logitech brought her on board as finance chief in 1999, the Swiss computer-accessory company has been in pure growth mode. Through some of the worst market conditions that techn...

By Jason Karaian • Dec. 30, 2004

At Year-End, Mixed Signals on Hiring

Is the employment picture improving or deteriorating? It all depends on which data you look at.In the past few days, Merck & Co. Inc., Cardinal Health Inc., and Delphi Corp. have announced combined jobs cuts of more than 13,000 in advance of the holiday season.Merck, whose share price and ope...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 15, 2004

Travelin’ On(line)

At the peak of the dot-com boom, network-equipment vendor Extreme Networks became frustrated with the high booking fees and inflexibility of its travel-management company and began to explore online alternatives. Initial experiences with a new service from Sabre called GetThere worked out so well...

By John McPartlin • Dec. 14, 2004

Too Many Chiefs?

Under pressure to deliver organic growth, a number of U.S. companies — Heinz, Interpublic, and Honeywell among them — have recently appointed chief growth officers, executives whose main purpose is to find value-enhancing revenue opportunities. Will this new, vaunted post be the growth elixir tha...

By Ben McLannahan • Dec. 10, 2004

CFOs to Bush: Clean Up Iraq, Deficit

Will 2005 be the year that the U.S. economy finally stages a full recovery? Don’t hold your breath, the findings of a new survey of CFOs suggest.Indeed, chief financial officers of U.S. corporations are less bullish about the economy in 2005 and are particularly concerned about health-care costs ...

By Don Durfee • Dec. 9, 2004

In the Fast Lane

(Editor’s note: On October 24, several top employees of Hendrick Motorsports, including members of the Hendrick family, were killed in a plane crash. Hendrick CFO Scott Lampe was interviewed for this article before the accident. He subsequently told us that despite the tragedy. it might be helpfu...

By John Goff • Dec. 7, 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

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

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

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

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

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