The Week That Was — Sort Of

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a new weekly column from CFO.com. It’s called “Good Week/Bad Week,” and it’s a real simple concept. Each and every Friday, we’ll present our picks of the winners and losers in finance during the previous five days. Who had a good week, and who had a...

By John Goff • May 31, 2002

Business Mapping: Brain Gain

“What a waste it is to lose one’s mind,” Dan Quayle once famously intoned. He meant to say, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” and in botching the quote actually proved his point. But could he have communicated his idea more effectively?A small software firm called Mindjet LLC says yes. Minds...

By Scott Leibs • May 28, 2002

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

Is Greed Good?

“The chairman of your [board’s] compensation committee should be richer than you and older than you,” one of America’s most admired bosses advised a private gathering of 50 chief executives in New York last November. “That way, he won’t get jealous when you make your fortune. In fact, he should b...

By Matthew Bishop • May 24, 2002

Terrorism: The Ultimate Wild Card

Worried. CFOs are very worried.Eight months after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, finance chiefs say they are still concerned about the prospect of another assault on American soil. This pervasive fear was underscored by a recent survey of 200 chief financial officers, treasurers, and...

By Jennifer Caplan • May 10, 2002

To These, the Spoils

Not only has America’s productivity wonder survived its first recession; it has positively thrived. Output per man-hour in the non-farm business sector rose at an annual rate of 8.6% in the first quarter of this year, its fastest growth in 19 years. Quarterly figures are volatile, yet the year-on...

By Economist Staff • May 10, 2002

Details, Details

Managing data can be a real pain (your Brent Spiner joke here).In fact, Alan Yong, a veteran technology analyst at Aberdeen Group in Boston, says he was shocked to discover that users still list data integration as one of the biggest hurdles in implementing budgeting and planning (B&P) softwa...

By Marie Leone • May 7, 2002

A B&P Camelot?

Like many managers, Linda Lindsay uses a table for budgeting and planning (B&P). But unlike most, Lindsay’s table isn’t imbedded in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s in a conference room.That’s right — Linda Lindsay’s table really is a table. Every other month, 16 financial liaisons, representing mo...

By Marie Leone • May 6, 2002

Major Miners

Budgeting and planning software has gotten a whole lot better over the past few years. Most B&P applications are now Web-enabled, which means finance executives can access the programs from practically any location. Almost all the programs slot seamlessly with ERP systems. The latest crop of ...

By Marie Leone • May 6, 2002

CFOs: Sanguine About the Economy

Are things looking up? U.S. finance chiefs think so. Fewer CFOs are fretting about the short-term domestic and global economies compared with a year ago, and more are registering a vote of confidence than was the case last quarter, according to our quarterly Global Confidence Survey. Furthermore,...

By Marie Leone • March 12, 2002

Bend and Stretch: Our Eighth Annual Cost Management Survey

To say that corporate America has its eyes on costs these days is a bit of an understatement. Hardly a day goes by without some announcement of a layoff, stalled capital investment, or acquisition put on hold. In January alone, Ford Motor Co. announced the closing of five plants in North America;...

By Lori Calabro • Feb. 1, 2002

CFOs See Slower Turnaround, Says Survey

On the whole, economists seem confident that the economy will begin to turn around by the second quarter of next year. The corporate officers who actually make budgets based on future revenues are slightly less sanguine, however. In fact, many CFOs expect the recession to continue into the second...

By Stephen Taub • Dec. 18, 2001

Global Confidence Survey

It’s no surprise that confidence in the short-term economy is low. The economic uncertainty that followed the September 11 terrorist attacks still looms over the domestic and global business landscape, casting its shadow on an already sluggish economy. Unemployment figures continue to creep up, w...

By Marie Leone • Dec. 1, 2001

The Plane, Boss, the Plane!

Is this what flight attendants mean by de-planing?Recently, Granada, the $8 billion media giant, revealed that a $90 million cost-cutting drive would include the sale of its BAe 125 jet. Meanwhile, management at BAT, the $36 billion-in-revenues tobacco giant, put the company’s eight-seater Hawker...

By Ben McLannahan • Dec. 1, 2001

An Acquired Taste

No one will deny that the latest generation of budgeting and planning (B&P) software is capable of doing great things. These Web-enabled systems are designed to help companies radically speed up the planning process, even as they allow many more people to participate. They import data points ...

By Kris Frieswick • Dec. 1, 2001

Fudge Budgets

As a recent CFO survey shows, getting employees to actually use budgeting and planning software can be tricky. Indeed, in some cases, up to half of B&P software seats go unused. Even if workers do embrace a whiz-bang B&P application, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make good budgeting...

By Kris Frieswick • Nov. 30, 2001

I Love IR

When Adidas-Salomon, the $5 billion German sports goods maker, announced it was to pay $67 million for a stake in Bayern Munich, Germany’s top soccer club, shareholders quickly reached for their red cards. Concerned about the deal’s timing and price, investors sent shares tumbling more than 8 per...

By Ben McLannahan • Nov. 14, 2001

Survey: The Near Future

The Next SocietyTomorrow is closer than you thinkThe new economy may or may not materialise, but there is no doubt that the next society will be with us shortly. In the developed world, and probably in the emerging countries as well, this new society will be a good deal more important than the ne...

By Peter Drucker • Nov. 2, 2001

New Brand Day

Companies have generally slashed advertising spending when tough times loom, and these tough times are no different: One recent report predicts spending in 2001 will be down 6 percent from 2000 levels. Advertising is a particularly easy target for cost cutting, because few companies have develope...

By Kris Frieswick • Nov. 1, 2001

Corporate Travel

Like many executives, James McDevitt is reevaluating his company’s travel policy in light of the events of September 11. “The fewer employees we have traveling, the safer everyone will be,” says McDevitt, CFO of software maker Clarus Corp. At sneaker and sporting-apparel company Saucony, CFO Mich...

By Jennifer Caplan • Nov. 1, 2001

Going for Break: Our Third Annual Tax Efficiency Scorecard

Earlier this year, Procter & Gamble announced that it would buy the Clairol hair-care business of Bristol-Myers Squibb for $4.95 billion in cash, a significant premium over Bristol-Myers’s cost basis for the assets. In response, Standard & Poor’s and Dominion Bond Rating Service soon down...

By Ronald Fink • Nov. 1, 2001

Contract Automation: Digitizing the Party of the First Part

Over the past decade, software designers have spent a good deal of time developing Web-based applications that automate just about every aspect of the buyer-seller relationship. But the creation of the agreements that bind those relationships — contracts — has largely been ignored by application ...

By Jennifer Caplan • Oct. 17, 2001

A Different Way of Working

For all the hullabaloo over new business models and dotcom startups, the benefits of the fixed-line Internet have accrued mostly to existing firms that reinvented themselves around it, rather than new firms that started from scratch. By adopting e-mail, intranets, extranets, customer-relationship...

By Economist Staff • Oct. 13, 2001

Pretzel Logistics? Global Trade Getting Complicated

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Had globalization preceded the Old Testament, the Book of Job might have said the same about governments and cross-border trade. It seems that for every trade minister willing to slash tariffs in the name of free trade, there is an equally willing envir...

By Anthony Sibillin • Oct. 1, 2001

The Dragon Dance

When the fate of a U.S. spy plane touched off tense negotiations between Washington and Beijing earlier this year, American companies felt the reverberations. Fearing that the situation might devolve into “Cuban missile crisis proportions,” for example, executives at running-shoe and athletic-app...

By Scott Leibs and Tom Leander • Sept. 27, 2001

Search Technology: Get the Picture?

Webmap Server Finance, developed by Boston-based WebMap Technologies, transforms any Internet, intranet, database, or extranet information repository into an interactive visual map. “The amount of information available to financial decision makers continues to grow exponentially,” says Pattie Mae...

By John Edwards • Sept. 15, 2001