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

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

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

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

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

The Fine Art of NIT-picking

Twice in this issue, we mention Moore’s Law, the well-known dictum that computer chips will double in power and halve in price every 18 months. Not only does the law pithily capture the essence of the digital innovation that has shaped society for several decades, it is that rarest of things: a p...

By Scott Leibs • Nov. 17, 2003

America’s Business Recovery

Evidence of a turn in the business cycle has been met with almost bewildered disbelief by many American executives. The evidence has been rolling in: profits are rising strongly; investment by non-farm, non-financial corporations has expanded briskly for two quarters in a row; and corporate spend...

By Economist Staff • Nov. 14, 2003

The Misery of Manufacturing

Rich-country manufacturing has supposedly been in decline for so long that it is surprising that the politicians, unions and journalists who leap so nobly to its defence find much left to save. But they do: after years of silence on this hoariest of economic fallacies — that manufacturing is some...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 26, 2003

Lessons Learned

Like many investors, Ed Goldfinger, CFO of Empirix Inc., in Waltham, Massachusetts, got “a bit overexcited” during the dot-com frenzy. And while he doesn’t consider himself to have been “burned very badly,” he says the experience taught him several lessons. The experience taught him several lesso...

By Lori Calabro • Sept. 19, 2003

Behind the Music

MTV, the television network built on cool, is feeling the heat.What was once a humble cable station known for airing music videos in endless rotation is now a programming powerhouse and media juggernaut. Fueled in part by a string of acquisitions, MTV has made forays into radio, movies, books, We...

By Peter Krass • Sept. 17, 2003

Barely Working: The 2003 Working Capital Survey

Maybe they were preoccupied with governance issues. But whatever the reason, U.S. companies blew some good chances last year to generate extra cash via working capital improvements. That’s the primary conclusion of CFO’s annual CFO’s annual working capital survey, conducted by REL Consultancy Gro...

By Tim Reason • Sept. 3, 2003

Are We There Yet?

Prepare the bulls: CFOs are feeling better about the outlook for the U.S. economy. While few are ready to declare the downturn over just yet, most are increasingly optimistic. In fact, finance chiefs are more hopeful about economic prospects over the next year than they have been since December 2...

By Joseph McCafferty • Sept. 1, 2003

MVPs of MVA

Like the wicked queen in the tale of Snow White, analysts are forever trying to identify the fairest of them all — the strongest, most innovative, and fastest-growing companies. Finance executives, in turn, are constantly seeking a metric that communicates a company’s financial condition in a way...

By Stephen Taub • July 1, 2003

Try, Try Again

At first glance, May’s merger between OM of Sweden and Hex of Finland wasn’t the most eye-catching deal. After all, even combined, the two Nordic stock exchanges will still be small fry relative to the trading volume that the heavyweights — Euronext, London Stock Exchange (LSE) and Deutsche Borse...

By Ian Rowley • July 1, 2003

Filling the Void

Who says lightning never strikes twice?When Bertelsmann, the 18 billion euros German media giant, accepted a 1.05 billion euros bid for BertelsmannSpringer from Candover and Cinven in May, it was the second time in four month the two private equity houses had joined forces to acquire a publishing...

By Ian Rowley • July 1, 2003

Rolling Budgets, with a Twist

From his office in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Bruce Borquist uses the Internet to collect daily budget changes tied to hyperinflation in El Salvador, on-again, off-again irrigation projects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and hospital reconstruction in Nepal. Borquist, the CFO of Intern...

By Marie Leone • June 3, 2003

Minority Revolt

NatSteel’s offer looks generous in the extreme. At a time when SARS-stricken companies in Asia have put a lid on spending, the Singapore engineering group plans to double its announced dividend payout. The sum its majority owners want to distribute to public shareholders is US$240 million, equal ...

By Abe De Ramos • June 1, 2003

Economy: Reloaded?

Now that the war in Iraq is over, will the economy bounce back soon? Plenty of finance chiefs think so. In fact, CFOs are generally more hopeful about the short-term prospects for the U.S. economy than they have been in a year.According to our quarterly Global Confidence Survey of finance executi...

By Joseph McCafferty • June 1, 2003